A Brief History of Avant Garde « Thinking for a Living™
Given the high volume of requests for the font, Lubalin formed Lubalin, Burns & Co. (which later became the International Typeface Corporation) and released ITC Avant Garde in 1970. Unfortunately, Lubalin quickly realized that Avant Garde was widely misunderstood and misused in poorly thought-out solutions, eventually becoming a stereotypical 1970s font due to overuse.

Tony DiSpigna, one of Lubalin’s partners and co-creator of ITC Lubalin Graph and ITC Serif Gothic, has been quoted as saying, “The first time Avant Garde was used was one of the few times it was used correctly. It’s become the most abused typeface in the world.” Ed Benguiat, one of type’s legends and a friend of Lubalin’s, commented, “The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde. Everybody ruins it. They lean the letters the wrong way.” Steven Heller also noted that the “excessive number of ligatures […] were misused by designers who had no understanding of how to employ these typographic forms,” further commenting that “Avant Garde was Lubalin’s signature, and in his hands it had character; in others’ it was a flawed Futura-esque face.”

The strength of the Avant Garde font is certainly in its all-cap ligatures and it should be used as it was originally intended – a display face whose ligatures can be carefully crafted into magnificent letterform combinations. There were two original designs of ITC Avant Garde Gothic: one for setting headlines and one for text copy. The display design contained ligatures and alternate characters and the text design did not. Unfortunately, when Avant Garde Gothic was turned into a digital font, only the text design was chosen, and the ligatures and alternate characters were not included leaving designers with the least interesting aspect of the font.

megfowler.com » About Meg
I might try to: write a novel; go kiteboarding; live in Prague, study for my Masters in Journalism; get hitched to a decent human being; and stop doing that weird thing with my toes. Or not. Anything is possible (though I don’t see my toes changing anytime soon.)

I’m better at laughing than crying. Logical, abstract, measured, and messy, all at once.

I probably like hockey more than you do.

I love my mom and dad.

This blog isn’t about anything; it just is.

As soon as it manages to be about something, I’ll let you know.

Amyloo: Tuesday, September 02, 2008
You can almost see the Twitter team sitting there, hugging themselves, clutching at their wonder feature, knowing they’re onto something, but thinking “Oh shit, what do we do with this monster of a success? All we know is we’re not looking at a traditional ad model. How do we sell this realtime market research? Better freeze it for now, not give it away, then figure it out.” Twitter did buy Summize, one way to search the stream for keywords, so that’s an indication they understand the value of the business intelligence gained by scanning the Twitterverse environment. It’s now called Twitter Search, and it’s very nearly an easter egg, not linked from the regular Twitter pages.

AIPPI 41st World Intellectual Property Congress
IP Protection for Software-related Inventions

In the software sector, the protection of software-implemented inventions has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. In the early days of computing, commercial software development was led by a handful of hardware manufacturers that catered primarily to large enterprises. In that era, firms viewed trade secret or confidential information protection as the best means of protecting innovative new software ideas against misappropriation. Given the rise during the 1970’s of both the volume of users as well as the ability to rapidly copy new software products, companies were increasingly concerned about piracy and turned to copyright law to protect and enforce their rights. While software innovators continue to rely on trade secret and copyright protection, patent protection has emerged in recent years as a tool that is widely used for the protection of software-implemented inventions. Patents on software-implemented inventions allow the sharing of technical information with others while retaining the ability to be compensated for investments in research and development that lead to new products and functionality.

The workshop will provide an overview of this parallel evolution of commercial software development and use of various tools for intellectual property protection. The intellectual property systems of various countries have taken different approaches regarding the direction and speed of this evolution. The speakers in the workshop will discuss these different approaches and, in this connection, the workshop will take particular advantage of the work of AIPPI Special Committee Q132 on Patent Protection for Computer Software Related Inventions.

Moderator: Richard Wilder, Microsoft Corp. Redmond, WA, USA

Speakers:
Gustavo de Freitas Morais, Danneman Siemsen Sao Paulo, Brazil
Pravin Arnand, Arnand & Arnand New Delhi, India
F. Scott Kieff, Washington University School of Law St. Louis, MI, USA
Karen Copenhaver, Choate Hall & Stewart LLP Boston, MA, USA
Leo Steenbeek, Philips Intellectual Property & Standards Eindhoven, Netherlands

You really have got to see the above. What a wonderful way to use RSS.  The RSS comes from the fire and rescue log.  The feed is in GeoRSS and also displays on Google Maps.  Very cool, and very useful.  Now it I can just get my small town west of Boston to put out an RSS feed from the dispatch station…

Op-Ed Columnist - The Biggest Issue - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
Between 1870 and 1950, the average American’s level of education rose by 0.8 years per decade. In 1890, the average adult had completed about 8 years of schooling. By 1900, the average American had 8.8 years. By 1910, it was 9.6 years, and by 1960, it was nearly 14 years.

As Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe in their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” America’s educational progress was amazingly steady over those decades, and the U.S. opened up a gigantic global lead. Educational levels were rising across the industrialized world, but the U.S. had at least a 35-year advantage on most of Europe. In 1950, no European country enrolled 30 percent of its older teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70 percent of older teens were in school.

America’s edge boosted productivity and growth. But the happy era ended around 1970 when America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl. Between 1975 and 1990, educational attainments stagnated completely. Since then, progress has been modest. America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited, with many nations surging ahead in school attainment.

Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Verizon and Ericsson have reportedly joined together to fund a snake-killing operation.   Smart technologists and small companies beware.

Here is the story, from the ever-observant Valleywag Silicon Valley blog:

Copyfight: Google, HP and others form League of Extraordinary Patent Holders
“Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Verizon and Ericsson are among the companies rumored to be behind the formation of the Allied Security Trust. Ponying up $250,000 down payments and $5 million in escrow to make purchases, the trust seeks to buy patents…”

The article above reports the development correctly, but incorrectly argues that the motivation behind this Alliance is to protect against a prior patent pool, Intellectual Ventures.  This despite the fact that several companies are reportedly members of both pools. Actually, both of the patent pools have exactly the same attraction to large companies:  Large companies use these pools to keep small, emerging companies out of their markets and/or to force small companies to sell out to large companies before becoming a threat.

How does this work?   Patents are a way for a small company to protect itself from predatory large firms while the small company remains small.  Company S has a new idea, but little financing, marketing, distribution, or manufacturing.  So it starts to grow with very little clout.  As it grows, if it grows, it attracts the interest of large companies it has the potential to threaten.  The large company’s first move is to clone the offer–think of Google Videos, which was a response to YouTube.  But if the small company has good patents, the large company must think twice about cloning.

The large company’s second move is to try to buy the small company on the cheap.  While the two firms negotiate, the large company will attempt to learn the small one’s secrets, and improve its clone.   Again, if the small company has good patents, the large company will be deterred from doing this, and/or punished for infringement later by the courts–think Microsoft in a number of cases.  Microsoft, by the way, is estimated by stock analysts to have more than twelve billion dollars in infringement liabilities moving through the legal process.

Eventually, the well-protected small company grows to the point that it can sustain market attacks from large ones.  This is the nightmare scenario for large firms.  Think of Google against YouTube (before it bought it) and Facebook (today).  Now the large firm must either pony up a billion-dollar-plus price and buy the upstart (Google buys YouTube) or suffer the effects (Google in the face of Facebook).

The motivation of both the Allied Security Trust and of Intellectual Ventures is to protect the oligopoly positions of their large member firms.  The largest firms in the IT space–Google, IBM, Microsoft, are not so much in competition with each other as with the future.  They are not in competition with existing firms so much as with “companies unborn” who may–and probably will–disrupt their markets as profoundly as they disrupted their predecessors’.

Large companies are not afraid of each other–in general
they have worked out relations that work to the benefit of
each other.  Rather, Google, for example, is most afraid of the likes of Facebook.  There are always new small innovative companies capable of growing large enough to
challenge the current behemoths.  Strong patents help small
companies stay independent while they grow. Small companies use their patents to help stave off crushing clone-based competition from the slower-moving but vastly more powerful giants.

What large companies are afraid of is innovation by small companies
and individual inventors. Both the Allied Security Trust and Intellectual Ventures
are mechanisms invented by large companies to make them safe from
small, disruptive newcomers.  Both enable large companies to buy up
patents that might pose potential threats, and get them out of the
hands of small firms and individuals.

These alliances are just one of the means large companies are using to
consolidate their power and protect themselves from competition from
smaller rivals.  Phony “patent reform” sponsored by large
companies is another.  Phony “reform” (called “Patent Deform” by Britt Blaser) is an attempt to secure market power by weakening patents. Note that all of the large IT companies file thousands of patents each year.  Do the large companies sue each other?  No. With each other they have “mutually assured deterence” where if one company sues that other can counter-sue, and their relations will melt down.  No large company does this.  But large companies do sue and punish unmercifully smaller  companies that challenge them.

The great fiction is that large companies mostly compete with each others.  Not true.  Large companies work out “arrangements” with each other.  Large companies compete against smaller companies that have the potential to grow large.

The most insidious campaign large companies are currently using to crush small ones involves PR.  Large companies have quite successful reframed “infringer” (themselves) to “victim,” and “small innovator without market power” to “troll.”  Give me a break. The term “patent troll” was coined by an Intel CFO.  Intel uses its patents unmercifully against small  companies.  For example, Intel sued AMD for years in order to keep AMD from growing into an effective challenger.

The future of American innovation depends on small companies.  Small companies, in turn, depend on patents.   Biotech and pharma companies know and accept this, which has made innovation in biology vibrant in the US.  Energy companies know it as well.  Energy innovation is thriving.

By contrast, innovation has slowed in information technology. As any investment analyst, and he or she will tell you that consolidation is the key to understanding high tech today.  Oracle, Google, Microsoft, IBM, HP and Intel are consolidating their respective parts of the market.  Only the social networking space remains contested, and the domination of MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube is increasing rapidly.

This consolidation seems surprising and ironic, given the amount of independent talent available in high tech, and given the educational value of the open source movement (free as in “free ideas” and “free education”).  What is happening?

What is happening is that large companies in the technology space use their market power to crush, control, and consolidate innovation by individuals and small companies.  How is this happening?  Why is this happening in high tech but not in biology and energy? In biology, the biotech sector is flourishing and big pharma, appropriately, is on the mat.  In energy small companies are the rage.  In automative, now seen as a segment of the energy business, small electric car companies are thriving as GM collapses.

What is different about high tech?  Simple, patents and other property rights are being systematically attacked by the large high tech companies, and pundits and scholars are going along with this.  The open source movement is terrific for education.  The free software movement, by contrast–”free as in beer”, not “free as in ideas”–is terrible for the property rights of individuals and small companies.  Idealistic innovators are being conned by large companies into giving up the rights to their ideas.  Free indeed, free for big companies to exploit.

The announcement of the Allied Security Trust is just another step toward the serfdom of the individual innovator in the high tech sector.   The Allied Security Trust is another way to ensure that the most talented members of this generation go to work for Google, IBM, and Microsoft, rather than competing with them.

James Baldwin

And this after her attempt last night to rain on the parade of Obama’s victory, a victory that is undoubtedly a milestone for race relations in this nation, and in the world.

This effort will be about as successful as the (failed) attempt by big Clinton donors to pressure  Nancy Pelosi by threatening to withhold contributions.

Obama Clinches Nomination; First Black Candidate to Lead a Major Party Ticket - NYTimes.com
Robert L. Johnson, a prominent Clinton-backer and the founder of Black Entertainment Television, said Wednesday on CNN’s “American Morning” that he planned to enlist members of the Congressional Black Caucus to push Mr. Obama to accept Mrs. Clinton as his vice presidential nominee, adding that Mrs. Clinton had not directed his efforts but was aware of them.

The study is based on dosing mice with resveratrol, an ingredient of some red wines. Some scientists are already taking resveratrol in capsule form, but others believe it is far too early to take the drug, especially using wine as its source, until there is better data on its safety and effectiveness.