Slashdot Mirror
Tablet PC Rorschach Inkblot Test
LPH writes "ESC Technologies just put up a funny series of images that they ran through the Tablet PC recognition software." Perhaps these tablets need a "doodle" setting.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
n/t
now your PDA can tell you if you are crazy or not... seems like eventually they will be able to manage our ENTIRE lives, mentally, physically, emotionally, digitally, socially, etc-ially.
must... resist... impulse... to... buy... one...
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
They fed the software, produced by Redmond titan Microsoft Corporation, a digital image of the Earth. The software interpreted this as "OURS"...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
The link to the company webpage still works. Coincidence?
Q: Can the Tablet PC store the value of Pi to 1.24 trillion digits?
A: No.
Q: Does the scribble recognition software in the Tablet PC work?
A: The short answer is 'no'. The long answer is 'just barely'.
Q: So does the Tablet PC increase productivity and make busy professionals more reliable at their work?
A: The short answer is 'no'. The long answer is "Does a 12 cylinder car get you from Philly to New York any faster than a 6 cylinder auto?". The answer to that query, of course, is 'no'; all drivers must obey the same speed limit.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
I know it's been said quite a few times, but this really isn't responsible. What if that host pays by the transfer of data? It's saturday, more than likely the admin is not working today and has no way to take the site down to alieviate the massive stress. If slashdot wants to continue this, they really need to find a cache system, this isn't responsible or fair, especially for a weekend.
Mod -1 OffTopic -1 OverRated -1 Troll ... you may mod me however you see fit, but realize that these moderations will not surprise me ....
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
The site's /.'ed so I haven't seen the pictures, but I tried out one of the tablet PC's at CompUSA yesterday and I was totally blown away by how good the handwriting recognition was. I scribbled down a few notes as I would on paper, and when I converted it to text it was perfect. I tried like 10 times and there was only 1 very understandable mistake (a humad transcribing what I had written probably would have thought the same thing.)
As far as "it needs a doodle setting", the apps that I used saved things as digital ink by default, and only converted to text when you specifically told it to.
maybe they're running their websever on one of those tablets...
Incidentally, they had a demo at my school (University of Michigan) last month, and I must say that the detail captured by the touchscreen is pretty amazing. Gabe from Penny-Arcade has been using it instead of a sketchbook, and the picture speaks for itself. Now, whether it's worth $2300 is a different story.
IMHO, this is yet another technology that could be very cool and convienant, and all it needs a killer app and a critical mass in the marketplace, but it doesn't look likely
Linking to a PHP forum right on the Slashdot main page isn't generally a good idea... :)
The article shows laptop computer image translating to "Oil It". Maybe that's why the keys on my laptop keep sticking, I keep forgetting to oil them?
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
So, does this mean the tablet will try to eat my face when I'm sleeping?
Notice the link to a commercial site to buy the tablet? The .com site just didn't have the foresight to tell the maker that they would be sending the slashdot crowd to DDoS them. Not a very bright way to sell tablets.
After a bit of trying, here's something rather amusing I've come up with using it...
http://guh.nu/temp/slashdot.html
Now does the abbreviation stand for F.irst P.ost or F.irst P.icture? Can anyone else come up with some neat translations? (I guess it would be easier if more people had access to the software...)
Slash Dotted already? They must be running windows NT!
because its been /.ed already. I can't wait to see the first Tablet PC Server. There is always someone out there with way too much time on their hands that will try to do domething like that.
Almost seems like a computer's version of hieroglyphics, but could conceivably also be used for hidden messages. Even a sheet of what could be considered as otherwise harmless doodles could be converted with this software into coherant communiques.
It's official, Microsoft supports terrorism! (muah-ha-ha)
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I hope they installed thoose hinges as its gonna be awfully hard to fold that sucker in half...
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
This is slightly o/t but too funny to pass up and the site is ./'ed anyway. Head over to The Register and read a story about Amazon's personalization gone bongers. I almost choked my morning coffee.
Help fight continental drift.
Does any page with images on it last more than 2 seconds on /.?
- Peter
that there's some pretty good reasons they wouldn't do something like that. /. not afford the bandwidth (they're barely scraping by as it is (see susbscription)), but also there's copyright issues to consider.
Not only could
Small minds are easily amused.
Perhaps these tablets need a "doodle" setting.
Do you really think they don't have one?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Not the article on ESC, which is actually a funny one but what is posted on Slashdot.
The TabletPC does have a "doodle setting". Rather, it will only recognize the portions that you want it to convert to text, leaving the rest as "digital ink".
First, if you don't know anything about a product, you should shut up rather than making snide remarks.
Second, exactly how stupid do you have to be to realize that the very motivation for a product like this is the ability to easily capture "doodles", etc as part of your notes?
This is not a Palm Pilot. Maybe you should spend some time playing with the product or reading about it to try and understand what it is before you talk about it.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Does anyone remember the bug in the thesarus for Word 6.0? You would type in "I'd like to see Bill Gates dead." and the thesarus would recommend "I'll drink to that." as an alternative. Am I the only one who remembers this?
No TiVo and no caffeine make me something something...
Thanks for the images.
:-)
:-)
For all the yappers. This link was a test to see if the servers could handle it. The test is a success because -- the servers couldn't handle the traffic !
OK. Back to networking 101
But seriously, the person who posted (aka ME) this wanted to see if PostNuke, MySQL, and Apache on a GNU/Linux server hosted by a company back east could handle the traffic. ESC Technologies didn't know that I submitted the link up there until last night. They were a bit concerned
And the company who submitted the story to whatisnew.com is inkwalker.com. So - go there and see what is all about !
LPH
Rorschach test? Well, somehow running on a typical computer, "Your responses show you have an unhealthy obsession with pornography..."
How long after something passes the Turing test do we start psychoanalyzing it?
Errr, so when Windows crashes and I lose thirty minutes of work that's not a data loss bug?
... let alone mock it ... you will be hunted down and found.
--YerSex
Sex - Find It
Handwriting recognizes YOU!
Err, he's talking about your filesystem randomly going belly-up and taking all your stuff with it. And Windows hasn't had common crashes since, like, uh, 1999. Get with the times buddy.
Wait, why is this even funny? I mean, it's non-text doodles, then you're telling the handwriting recognition engine to convert them to text. It's not even "ha, ha, look at the silly mistakes the computer made". It's exactly what you'd expect any handwriting recognition algorithm to do when given that image. So where's the humor?
Seriously, though, they had a demo of this thing at my school, and it was really impressive. They turned on the debug mode for us where the handwriting engine would show in realtime what it thought the words were, and which words were parts of which sentences, etc. I couldn't even read this guy's handwriting, and the Tablet was humming right along, perfectly matching what he was writing, even as he wrote at an angle or on a curve! My Palm can't do that...
"The Internet is comprised of logical peers. Why are we using a purely client/server model for web sites?
Once a packet has been downloaded, it's then available to be served to other systems. All you really need is a method of co-ordinating it all."
No, you'd need much more. Look at DNS. It is fairly decentralized via caches and lookups that move up a hierachy, rather than always directly connecting to a remote host. But that opens up the possibility of DNS highjacking. The DNSSec standard is still being constantly rewritten on top of this. It doesn't look good.
Who do you trust? Do you trust the internet at large? Do you trust your ISP? All good ISPs should already offer an optional proxy, probably Squid, which is linked to a set of other caching servers. This way the caching servers themselves are arranged in a hierarchy, where everyone configures their servers to only trust one or two upstream providers. But, as with DNS, this ends up with a centralized point for attackers to inject bad content for ALL websites, rather than just one or two.
Plus, if your ISP A trusts B, and B trusts C, is it true that ISP A trusts C? Implicitly maybe, but if you talked to the managers and marketting people, they might have something else to say about it.
This isn't as trivial a problem as you make it out to be. Decentralization leads to complexity of organization that hasn't been studied like typical client-server relationships have.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The handwriting recognition on the Tablet PC is better than the kinds of hacks that the Palm, Newton, and many other "commercial" systems have used before, but the technology isn't particularly new.
Much of what it does is by using a lot of dictionary constraints. Try writing some nonsense words, and you'll see that it will turn them into whatever word seems most similar.
As far as "it needs a doodle setting", the apps that I used saved things as digital ink by default,
Applications like Word, Excel, etc. running on Tablet PC don't use digital ink by default, and the integration of ink into those applications is pretty lousy in my opinion. That's particularly ironic given how much Microsoft has bragged about the supposedly good job they have been doing on integrating ink into applications.
If you give it anything, it picks whatever seems closest among a dictionary of known words. That is really an indication that the recognizer makes up for a lack of shape recognition performance through a limited vocabulary. And the problem with that is that it has a hard time with words it doesn't know.
A good recognizer should reject junk that is fed to it rather than hallucinating meaning into it in an effort to pretend that it's better than it actually is.
strapping bombs to yourself and blowing up women and children. real heroic
At least they have the conviction to do their own dirty work, the Israelis blow up women and children without even being there.
I have One of these devices, and I find it never lets me down at meetings. The handwriting recognition is really good too. Portable too.
Uh... He was lost...?
Since this one is slashdotted, I went searching and found another test that was thrown at the Tablet PCs:
Tablet PC Horshack Test
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
That's a heck of a hosting plan ya got there...I had to refuse four cookies just to look at some pictures...
Bumpersticker I saw yesterday:
The Arabs are willing to fight the Israelis to the last Palestinian
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Hi,
What exactly would you expect by running a recognizer on such drawings? Garbage in, garbage out...
The only thing that seems weird is that is would seem possible for the recognizer to know that the approximation he found was really far fetched.
When I wrote a C# grafitti application a couple months back, if the gesture didn't match any letter close enough, the recognizer would not try to match it at all. So if you write a non-sense letter you don't get any result back.
Maybe the Tablet recognizer could have had something similar. But on the other hand the user is given a chance to fix whatever the Tablet recognized, so the current model seems fine.
The Tablet seems like a great product, if only I could get the one that I want (it's backordered everywhere in the US). I just wonder why isn't there more reviews and comparisons and testimonials all over the web (like there is for the iPod for example).
Are users happy with them? What do they use them for (browsing, reading divx, playing mp3,...)?
See you,
Dumky
I want to be able to lay on my sofa and read slashdot, news.bbc.co.uk, msnbc.com, etc, etc, etc... I want to lay on my sofa reading the web just like I lay on my sofa reading a magazine. THAT is why I want a tablet. THAT is the TRUE value of a tablet: freedom from the chair. This chair holds me like a slave right now. The ability to escape this chair and read long articles from the sofa sounds like heaven to me.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
honestly, price is ALL I've paid any attention to at all after I heard the specs of the OS. So I noticed the $1699.xx model. That is still above and beyond what I will pay for a personal computer, so tablet PCs are still "beyond" me. But not for long. When they get HALF as smart as us, they'll be producing these for dimes on the dollar and we'll all have them. I hope.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
If you want to see a very funny rorschach test on AIM, add the buddy DrBenSobel to you buddy list. Ask him about the Thing with the Thing. :-D
I seem to remember their database software doing so. Does that count?
The White Rabbit put on his spectacles.
"Where shall I begin, please your Majesty ?" he asked.
"Begin at the beginning,", the King said, very gravely, "and go on
till you come to the end: then stop."
-- Lewis Carroll
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...