Dr. Dobb's Journal March 1998
Dear DDJ,
We are writing on behalf of our client, Lockheed Martin Corp., to advise you that "skunk works" is not a generic term but is, rather, Lockheed Martin's federally registered service mark. In March, 1997, Dr. Dobb's Journal published an article by Michael Swaine entitled "It Was Not To Be; Apple Decides To Acquire Steve Jobs' NeXT Operating System Instead Of The Be System," which made a generic reference to the term "skunk works." Lockheed Martin requests that should any future article in Dr. Dobb's Journal refer to the term "skunk works," the article acknowledge that such term is a registered service mark of Lockheed Martin.
The Skunk Works mark was registered by Lockheed Martin on September 18, 1973, pursuant to Certificate of Registration No. 968,861 for "engineering, technical, consulting and military aircraft and related equipment." It was reregistered by Lockheed Martin on July 14, 1981, pursuant to Certificate of Registration No. 1,161,482. However, Lockheed Martin has made common law use of the Skunk Works mark for over 50 years.
Lockheed Martin's use of the mark traces to 1943. In June of that year, Lockheed Martin and its premier aircraft designer, Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson, promised the U.S. Air Force that in less than six months they would deliver a prototype jet fighter. Johnson then put together a highly skilled and closely guarded group of cutting edge engineers and production personnel. Their work was performed in absolute secrecy and, just 143 days later, they delivered the first American jet plane, the XP-80, to the Army Air Corps. By January 1944, the XP-80 had evolved into the P-80, which was America's first operational jet fighter.
The Lockheed Martin facility, which developed the XP-80 was soon given the colorful nickname "Skunk Works." The name was derived from the popular Li'l Abner comic strip, which used the name "skonk works" to refer to the place where "Kickapoo Joy Juice" was secretly manufactured. War-time secrecy precautions required that the Lockheed Martin engineers not identify their office when answering the telephone. This reminded one engineer of the isolation of "skonk works" in the Li'l Abner comic strip. When a group of Pentagon officers placed a call to the Lockheed Martin facility, the engineer answered the telephone by saying "Skonk Works." The Lockheed Martin "Skunk Works" facilities have consistently been creative and successful, and the "Skunk Works" name has become identified with Lockheed Martin's unincorporated division, which operates those facilities, now known as the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works.
In the half-century since they developed the XP-80, the talented Lockheed Martin "Skunk Works" personnel have developed a continuing series of aircraft which have made the United States the unquestioned leader in military aviation. Those aircraft whose existence is no longer classified include: the F-104 Starfighter -- the first Mach 2 fighter aircraft (1954); the U2 -- an advanced reconnaissance and research aircraft which is still being flown and which is the highest flying single engine airplane (1955); the SR-71 Blackbird -- the first plane to fly at Mach 3 and still the highest flying and fastest aircraft ever developed (1964); the F-117 Stealth Fighter -- the first operational aircraft designed for low observability, used extensively in Operation Desert Storm (1981); and the F-22 Advanced Tactical Fighter (1992). These and other achievements of Lockheed Martin's "Skunk Works" personnel are described more fully in a book entitled Lockheed's Skunk Works: The First Fifty Years, by Jay Miller (Aerofax, 1993).
Lockheed Martin cannot permit its valuable mark to become generic and intends to take whatever action necessary to enjoin misuses of its mark. Lockheed Martin must therefore request that should Dr. Dobb's Journal again refer to "skunk works," the reference reflect that the term is a registered service mark of Lockheed Martin.
Adam D. Samuels
Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart, & Oliver, LLP
Los Angeles, California
DDJ Responds: Thanks for your most interesting letter, Adam. By the way, as you probably know, like "Skunk Works," the term "Li'l Abner" is a registered trademark. Perhaps as a matter of courtesy to Capp Enterprises (the holder of the trademark), you should acknowledged that trademark in your correspondence.
Dear DDJ,
Readers who enjoyed Gavin Smyth's article "GNAT: The GNU New York University ADA Translator" (DDJ, December 1997) might be interested in knowing that the GNAT compiler for DOS comes with a free graphics package (ftp://cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat/ez2load/vgapck06), which includes an interface to the DJPP library and a keyboard interface.
An SVGA version of this package is freely available from http://www.pi.net/~dijklibo/. A similar package for the GNAT for the Windows 95/NT compiler (and also the Aonix ObjectAda Compiler) is also freely available through http://stad.dsl.nl/~jvandyk/.
Jerry van Dijk
jdijk@acm.org
Dear DDJ,
I agree with Jonathan Erickson's in his editorial "Giving it the Reboot" (DDJ, November 1997) that we need more options for electronics recycling than creating artwork and sculpture.
Readers might also be interested in the Electronic Product Recovery and Recycling (EPR2) Roundtable, which held its first meeting last fall in Washington, DC. A summary of the meeting can be found at http://www.nsc.org/ehc/epr2.htm.
Dawn Amore
Environmental Health Center
amored@nsc.org
Dear DDJ,
In "Server-Side Scripting in Visual Basic," (DDJ, September 1997), Al Williams covered Microsoft's ASPs and server-side VBScript. In his summary, Al claimed that ASP "certainly goes a long way toward making those tools [CGI & ISAPI] obsolete (under IIS, anyway)." The fact is that there are tools with the same functionality for other HTTP servers as well.
Netscape has a parallel technology called "LiveWire Pro," which is part of Netscape's Commerce Server, or a plug-in for it. Furthermore, there is a freely available tool for server-side scripting called PHP/FI that is accessible from any HTTP server that supports CGI scripts (basically all), and can also run as a module of the Apache web server. For more details, check Netscape's homepage (http://home.netscape.com/) or PHP/FI's: http://php.iquest.net/.
Shlomi Fish
shlomi@slink.co.il
Dear DDJ,
I really enjoyed the interview with Ron Rivest (DDJ, November, 1997). It just scratched the surface of the cryptographic issues we are now faced with. In today's world, a growing need for automatic encryption of data needs to be implemented. Many users will never learn that all of the information they are sending around on networks is not protected. We need encryption to become standardized such as data compression has in the communication field.
DES or even TRIPLE DES is not the way to go. It is long past its shelf life and needs to be retired. As soon as this is realized we can get on with a better method. Public key is great for e-mail systems, but it still has a weakness of key substitution. Bruce Schneier discussed this in detail in his Applied Cryptography -- the weakness in many routines in use today.
As computer power grows, the ability to crack the encryption routine becomes easier. Electronic voting is a long way in the future and it will need even longer for the public to believe in it.
Scott Schwendinger
sidewinder@sincomm.com
Dear DDJ,
Although I enjoyed (and agree with) Robert Bernecky's review of Rick Booth's book Inner Loops ("Programmer's Bookshelf," DDJ, December 1997), I believe he missed one of the strongest points Booth was trying to make.
Booth advocates structured assembly-language programming, which is, as he says, an excellent tool for revealing weaknesses in design as well as outright bugs in the code itself. I have not seen any other assembly-language text that encourages a reduction in the use of labels and the extensive use of MASM's C-like conditional statements.
I agree with Bernecky that the book was unusually well edited, but there are certainly more than two typos. One additional correction, at least, can be found at Booth's web site (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/rbooth/). Unfortunately, the publisher chose a cheap bindery method to print this otherwise excellently crafted manuscript, and my copy broke apart into three pieces on the second day of reading! I had to punch holes in it and find a three-ring binder for it.
I believe programmers in the trenches like me need more books of this quality (content-wise) instead of the many thousand-page, gizmo-infested wonderbooks that don't really say a damn thing.
Arvid R. Hand, Jr.
Willis, Texas
bhand@compuserve.com
Dear DDJ,
In his July 1997 DDJ "Editorial," Jonathan Erickson refers to Nodland and Ralston's research that "...brought into question Einstein's theories concerning the constant speed of light in a vacuum."
The constancy of the speed of light was not one of Einstein's theories. That is a fact about the nature of the universe that was demonstrated empirically by actual measurements, in the now-classic Michaelson-Morley experiments.
Einstein's genius was in determining, and his contribution lay in the results achieved by his demonstrating, the inevitable consequences of that fact. These are too numerous to mention in a brief letter, but include both the theoretical (explaining the precession of Mercury, and the gravitational bending of light) and the practical (the development of the atomic bomb) and everything in between.
Now, Nodland and Ralston may or may not have shown that light speed really is not constant, but that has nothing to do with Einstein's work. His Theory of Relativity still stands as one of the two most successful physical theories of all time (the other one is Quantum Mechanics).
Howard Mark
Suffern, New York
DDJ