Linus Torvald has trademarked the name Linux and has moved forward to ask companies using the name to pay a trademark fee.

Late last week, an Australian company started pursuing companies using the name with the demand that they pay a $5,000 fee to use it.

The problem is, trademarks are not designed to protect companies. Trademarks exist to protect consumers from confusion. In this way, they are different from patents. One cannot treat a trademark the same as a patent.

At this stage, Linux has an uphill battle as a mark because it's been so widely used for something that is, after all, advocated for its freeness. Instead, the strategy should be to look to those who have a vested interest in in Linux meaning something definitive to contribute to a legal defense fund for the mark. Trademark enforcement is very expensive and because of how long the name has been floating around in use, it could be expensive to protect it.

A Linux mark institute has been set up to try to coordinate efforts on the mark. The question is, is it too little too late or can Linux, as a name, be effectively protected at this stage?

Episode 3 of PowerUser.tv, the collaboratoin between Neowin.net and WinCustmize.com to create a cool podcast.  This week's episode talks about all kinds of stuff including CNN getting the latest Windows worm -- LIVE on the air, and Google losing to Geiko in court over trademarks and search terms.

So what the heck are we doing? Sure has been quiet on our part eh?

As the beta schedule indicates, beta 3 is due out soon.  In fact, it's due out this month.  So what sort of things can you expect? 

There's been a lot of changes over the past couple of months.  The ships look dramatically diifferent. The AI is starting to play the game - not well but is playing - and the first signs of basic play balance are going in.

We've had to make some...hard decisions in what we do and don't want to do.  Some good and some will be disappointing.

On the good side, the diplomacy, which won't be in beta 3, is going to be more sophisticated than in galCiv 2.  But probably not in the way one might think.  It's going to be sophisticated in the sense of the underlying AI in there.  We've developed a series of tools that allow us to have a lot more depth in how the player interacts with the AI players.

In GalCiv 1, you HAD to play as human. So all the text we precanned for dealing with humans.  But in GalCiv II, there's 10 civilizations and you can play as any one of them.  But we didn't want generic behavior from the AI.  So we made tools that lets each player have different reactions for each possible combination (10X10 grid X 3 for Good, Neutral, and Evil).  that means 300 different possible behaviors!  A LOT of work.  But what it means is that if you decide to play as the Torians and you are dealing with the Drengin, the Drengin will speak -- use different language -- than it would if you were a different race.

We felt this was important in giving the game an organic feel and increasing replayability.

..So what's the bad news? We had to jetison a feature that we just can't seem to get the playbalancing working out with -- space debris.  They may come back in some future expansion but the mining of asteroids and such was proving to be very difficult to balance with the rest of the game.  That is -- what's the player's focus? Improving planets or mining asteroids and other interstellar stuff?  This wasn't in GalCiv 1 so there wasn't any theoretical basis for balancing it well.  Worse, there's also the AI issue -- even once we did figure out a proper balance and context for asteroids and such, then the AI has to be developed to make use of them.

In GalCiv 1, the AI was IMO (and I wrote it) horrible at dealing with starbases because starbases weren't implemented until Beta 4 (the October 2002 beta) and there just wasn't enough time to develop proper strategies. 

I do still hope we can put some sort of space debris in there like asteroid fields and such.  But they won't be something you can get money and resources from.  The planets will remain the focus for that as well as the galactic resources from GalCiv I.

Another thing we're working on is improving the look of the ships.  We're almost done with the bump mapping of ships and we have specular lighting in.  We're pretty happy with how that's turned out but we'll learn qiuckly how compatible they are. 

We've made a lot of usability tweaks to the UI that we think you'll like.  Other places we're still struggling with.

Stability is much better than in beta 2 but as we add features, we inevitably run into other problems of course which we'll iron out.

One thing we think you'll be happy with is that all our output data is in XML.  NO BINARY files so if you want to change all the text or mess with the values, you will be able to do that all you want.  And unlike in galCiv 1, the metaverse games will use a different set of vlaues so you can customize your games for your single player games all you want and then when you play the metaverse it uses data from our servers.

If you have any specific questions, let us know.

Last year the family and I tried to go to Higgins Lake for vacation.  I can't find the blogs on it. Which reminds me, we need a calendar interface for accessing blogs as I know when I blogged about it.

Anyway, it was a bit of a disaster. The cabin we rented was supposed by be "by the beach" but I think they meant "by the beech" as in tree.  It was across a fairly busy street from a dirty wad of sand.

This year, we didn't even try to get something next to the beach.  We opted for a bit more comfort and we'd just drive to the state park.  That's worked well so far.  Now the only problem is that I can't turn off my brain.  Lots of interesting things going on at work that I want to work on.

For instance, the podcasting stuff is going well.  And we just released a beta of a program called StyleVista.  And of course, things with Galactic Civilizations II are reaching a climax as we start heading towards the final parts of development - only 4 months left to finish it!  And in between all this there's all kind of interesting things with Windows Vista, WindowBlinds and Object Desktop in general.

So anyway, I'm thinking about that stuff instead of relaxing.  Is that so bad?

I listened to a lot of podcasts on the way up north today and have some ideas I'd like to share.

The Podcsts

1) I like our segment based system but think when we get more episodes going we should redo the RSS to be by episode instead of by segment.

2) I think we should release our episodes on Monday morning EST.  So even if we finish everything on Friday, wait until Monday to actually launch it so that we aren't "end of week" stuff.  This would start once we have 5 episodes.

3) I think we should have a Sponsors section where the Neowin and WC BUTTONs should go on the right side of the page.  This way, we may be able to eventually pick up more sponsors.  Neowin and WC have a lot of friends who might be willing to help push Poweruser.tv in exchange for linkage.

4) To do good episodes, we couldn't just link the 3 segments together. The intro to each segment would have to be tweaked. I.e. right now segments have their own intro.

5) I think one of the segments should be called "Tech Round Table" in which Kristin and 3 guests basically "shoot the shit" about whatever they think is interesting to power users.  It could be tlak about the latest sci-fi movie, a good book we've read, a new computer case we'v emessed with, whatever. 

6) We would need to make use of the "bookmark" feature on iTunes so people could pick and choose which segments, etc.

7) Overlal format would thus be 3 9-12 min segments and 1 15 minute round-table segment.  

8) Once the channel system is up and running, one of the other team members could create a whole seperate sub-set of podcasts they want.  Then powerUser.tv could pick amongst several podcasts each week to include in the episode.

Example:

www.poweruser.tv would pick one or two of its segments from:

• powergamer.poweruser.tv
• hardware.poweruser.tv
• neocommunity.poweruser.tv
• underyourskin.poweruser.tv
• softwarethoughts.poweruser.tv
• TweakWin.poweruser.tv

Each of these channels would be its own show with its own unique RSS feed.  And www.poweruser.tv could syndicate some of these segments with the show.  With editing, Kristin would be the overall host of the show with other segments being hosted by panel leaders or something.

9) I think our round table thing should involve a IRC channel where people would know that we do our round table at a set time each week and that people could join an IRC question and suggest things to talk about, etc. and we could then say "Xirvon on our IRC channel is asking what we think about the Google/Microsoft hiring lawsuit.."  This in turn encourages people to want to participate and helps motivate our audience that they're part of the show.

From the first screenshots of Aero-Glass back awhile back, we knew that people would, after getting over the initial coolness of it, want to be able to have control over the color of active and inactive windows.

Moreover, as cool as the semi-transparent glass is, some people would want to tweak how transparent they are.  For example, maybe have the active window fully solid and inactive windows be a bit transparent.

And so was born the idea of StyleVista.  The name says it all -- it styles Windows Vista. 

And so here we are with the first beta.  Please let us know if you run into any problems.

Stardock has released the first beta of a new program called StyleVista.  StyleVista allows Windows Vista beta users to alter the existing "Aero glass" interface to have different opacity levels and different colors.

By default, Windows Vista's new user interface has semi-transparent title bars and borders. While it looks quite cool, it is not currently configurable.  StyleVista enables users to change both the color and opacity (how transparent the title bars and borders are) of the GUI for the active and inactive window.

StyleVista is not similar to Stardock WindowBlinds which can change the actual skin of the GUI.  It alters the existing GUI. Stardock may make some of the features in StyleVista part of WindowBlinds 5 which is due to go into beta next month.

StyleVista is a free and can be downloaded at www.stylevista.net.

Screenshots:

Download: http://www.stylevista.net

Stardock has released WindowBlinds 4.6.  WindowBlinds is a program that enables users to "skin" their entire Windows GUI to give it a totally different look & feel.  When installed, users apply "visual styles" that change title bars, push buttons, radio buttons, the Start bar, etc.  WindowBlinds also includes a number of usability enhancements such as supporting roll-up buttons, always-on top buttons, links, and other additions to the Windows title bar (or borders). 

System Performance can also be enhanced using WindowBlinds. The program supports a host of performance enhancing features such as Hypercache, a technology that uses the extra video memory in most modern video cards to increase performance along with features to change the way users interact with the GUI to match their needs.

Visual styles in WindowBlinds support a wide variety of features such as animation, sound, flexible button placement, alpha-blended Start menus, skinned menus, toolbar icon changing, and even replacing the copy, move, download animations in Windows.

The new version of WindowBlinds adds the ability to have alpha blended "glow" effects for title bar buttons, push buttons, and other controls. When a user mouse-overs a control in a visual style that makes use of this feature, a glow effect appears that can go outside the window (i.e. it's really cool looking). 4.6 also has a number of tweaks to further increase performance and reduce memory use.

WindowBlinds is available as shareware at www.windowblinds.net.  An enhanced version is available for $19.95 that adds a host of additional features. The enhanced version is also part of Stardock's Object Desktop (www.objectdesktop.com) suite of Windows extension utilities.

Download:
 WindowBlinds 4.6

Screenshots:

One of the things we're trying to go for is a bit more light-hearted podcasting.

When we were first starting up PowerUser.tv, we listened to a lot of podcasts and we noticed some trends:

• Nearly all are by men
• Nearly all are very dry
• Nearly all are very very serious

So how do we stand out?

First, we wanted a female host.  Kristin Hatcher was the logical choice because she has a lot of experience in both public speaking and sound editing (she's more than just the host, she's the producer).

Secondly, we wanted to keep it light and entertaining. That meant we needed to make sure our guests knew the topics so well that they could also have energy to try to be funny as well.

So that's what you've been seeing so far.  Each one we do I think we get a little better at.  But what do you want to see?

What sorts of topics would you like to see us cover in upcoming shows?