On Sun, 22 Apr 2012, Brian May <br...@microcomaustralia.com.au> wrote: > Also why is it called iOS? AFAIK it has nothing in common with IOS, > Cisco's OS, and to use the same acronym is confusing - especially when > doing Google searches.
There are many acronym/abbreviation collisions in the computer industry. Trademark law makes marks specific to uses to cater for this fact. For a customer there wouldn't be any confusion between the printed form of "iOS" referring to a mobile device and "IOS" referring to a router. So a reasonable human interpretation of trademark law suggests that iOS would not be considered an infringement on IOS (an actual court result might disagree). The problem here is Google being inadequate. Google also has traditionally had problems in searching for strings that contain punctuation characters and spaces. So searching for the exact text of an error message would often give hits on human readable text that contained the words in question but not the actual string, even using quotes didn't necessarily solve that. They seem to have improved and they have always been better than other search engines such as Bing (which only recently stopped making Bonnie Tyler one of the best hits for a "Bonnie++" search). As an aside, it would be really cool if there was a distributed web search engine that was free. It wouldn't be possible to give the <1s result time and the instant hints on searches with a distributed system. But it should be possible to get some reasonable results if you had lots of people on good net connections who each indexed ~100G of data per month. Not that the hints are such a great thing. I was once at a client site when someone typed in "how to do some IT stuff" but after "how to" his web browser suggested "find a prostitute". That's how to make your colleagues wonder whether Google knows something about you that everyone else doesn't. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb
