What Data Center Designers Can Learn From Legos 210
1sockchuck writes "It takes most companies at least a year to build a new data center. Digital Realty Trust says it can build a new data center in just 20 weeks using standard designs and modular components that can be assembled on site. The company equates its 'building blocks' approach to data centers to building with Legos — albeit with customized parts (i.e. the Millennium Falcon Lego kit). Microsoft is taking a similar approach, packaging generators, switchgear and UPS units into pre-assembled components for rapid assembly. Is this the future of data center design?"
Legos (Score:5, Informative)
The plural of "lego" is "lego".
officially its an adjective (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at the website:
http://www.lego.com/eng/info/default.asp?page=fairplay [lego.com]
Of course if its an adjective then "legos" is nonsense.
In common usage it is in fact a noun: the OED defines "Lego" as a noun. The plural of a noun has an 's', with the handful of well-established exceptions.
Who decided that LEGO was an exception? Not the LEGO Group who say its only an adjective. So I think its the fact that the LEGO Group never says "LEGOs" (since they always uses it as an adjective) caused misguided pedantic people (or otherwise any lover of arbitrary rules) to decide that its a plural noun.
So put me in the legos camp. :)
Re:1 Lego brick, 2 Lego bricks (Score:3, Informative)
Proper adjective [wikipedia.org]:
A trademark is a distinctive sign used by a business to identify its products to consumers. When a trademark is a word used adjectivally, it is capitalized and hence is a proper adjective. Intellectual property lawyers sometimes advise corporations to use their trademarks only as proper adjectives, not as proper nouns. By this theory, a trademark is not the name of a product, but rather a signifier of the source of the product.
For example, in the sentence "I need to blow my nose; do you have any Kleenex?", the word Kleenex is a proper noun, used to name the product being discussed. This is perfectly acceptable English usage, from a grammatical perspective. It would also be acceptable to say, "I need to blow my nose; do you have any Kleenex facial tissue?", where the word Kleenex is a proper adjective. The Kimberly-Clark Corporation (which owns the trademark Kleenex) takes care to use the word only as a proper adjective. The legal risk is that a trademark used as a noun can become genericized, in which case other businesses could legally use the word to refer to their products. This happened to the word "elevator", for example, which used to be a trademark but is now a common noun.