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Office Guardian Angel Worse Than Clippy
ZWilder writes "Remember 'Clippy', the annoying anthropomorphic paper clip foisted upon unsuspecting users of Office? Well Microsoft has taken the concept behind Clippy and 'turned the dial up to 11' with its new, even more intrusive animated life-coach, known as 'Guardian Angel.' Patented in 2006, Guardian Angel is 'an intelligent personalized agent' that 'monitors and evaluates a user's environment to assist in decision-making processes on behalf of the user.' Like a manlier Fairy Godmother. Or a similarly omniscient HAL from '2001: A Space Oddysey.'"
...an early April Fool's joke.
(User browsing some good porn.)
Guardian Angel: "It looks like you're breaking some commandments!"
Well, I guess it is April 1 already in some parts of the world. Sigh. Time to turn the computer off for a day.
My SIG is a P220.
In light of the story below, "Microsoft Claims Google Chrome Steals Your Privacy," I may not be the only one to find this funny.
Oh yeah -> Upside-down-ternet
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Slashdot: The only place where 4 year old patents are news!
It had some good AI actually built into it to understand my questions. I think they actually unified two branches of AI to create it.
"and more specifically, a breakdown of the types of people in the room accompanied by a warning for dangerous persons, based on sex offender registration, FBI most wanted, etc."
How useful is "You are in a room with Osama bin Laden and Charles Manson. It looks like youa re trying to write a letter..."
This isn't "Clippy 2.0". This is applied AI research that's more than ten years from making it into any real product, and it's a field a lot of companies are researching. From what I've read so far it's really far too vague and generic for anyone to deserve a patent on it, but the patent will probably expire before Microsoft has the opportunity to sue anyone over it.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
These types of technologies have been under development in many companies for several years to enable elderly people to live independently for longer (hence the pill reminder example in the article).
They are part of the so called "Ubiquitous Computing" movement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing
This is not intended to be an add-on for MS-Word.
Please don't pull my wings off, Dave!
Like a manlier Fairy Godmother.
I was sort of hoping for a dominatrix, leather gear, whips and all.
Have gnu, will travel.
Guardian Angles? Maybe somebody @ MS is a Bernhard Goetz kind of a guy. Clippy, and his two friends Smith & Wesson, are gonna teach you "a man gotta know his limits".
ideopath @ play
Rumor has it that "Guardian Angel" will invoke a new update in its package to silently check if your Wintel b0x3n is not genuine and force reboots every 30 minutes until authenticated (read as, pay for it). Look out folks, for your new guardian angel!
Need I say more?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Apparently vigor wasn't vile enough. vi need a text-editing abomination with more vim. Got to keep up with Microsoft. What shall we call this one? The names viper and elvis are already taken. How about vinegar? vice? violate? vitiate?
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Good lord, I hope this isn't an April Fool's joke. For years I've been waiting for Microsoft to take more control over my life. When the Great Decision Engine Bing first arrived on the scene, I hoped the glorious day had finally arrived, only to have my hopes dashed when I found that Bing will only 'suggest'. PLEASE, Microsoft, save me from myself!
"A guardian angel is an angel assigned to protect and guide a particular person."
So to be true to it's name, this program's first reaction would be:
Are you sure you want to click that "Agree" button?
Did you read it?
Are you sure you think that Windows is a good idea?
This sounds more and more like a mac commercial.
Yes, my friend, rest and heal; so that you are strong and able to face the perils before you.
Pleasant Dreams
Mwa ha ha ha ha
Patented in 2006
I don't use Microsoft software so I'm 100% safe. Thanks, Microsoft!
I distinctly recall a scene with Michael Douglas consulting a digital "angel" to get things done in an overblown VR world.
It appears you are trying to find Brazilian cake farts on bing, remember, the cake is a lie...
Orwell was an optimist.
At least I could figure out how to turn him off. The new help button in Office 2007 is like an idiot cousin or addled Aunt Ada. It's RIGHT below the "X" to close the program, and I hit it by accident at least once a day. Argh.
If you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right. (Adapted from Henry Ford)
Can't remember all the icons of the room but it was a Southern White Trash theme. The trash can was something like an outhouse looking out the window.
MacOS allowed you to set the error sound to whatever you wanted (do they still do that?), my favorite was always a sound clip from The Wizard of Oz: "...and what would you do if you had a brain?"
This sounds like an animated version of that.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It may not be as annoying as Microsoft's animated "clippy," but the smiling little light bulb that pops up in OpenOffice gave me flashbacks of Office 2003. It automatically closes after a few seconds, but given the backlash "clippy" caused, a cheery cartoon character offering advice seems like an odd choice. And I've had it pop up a few times after disabling the option, if that continues I may soon hate "bulby" as much as "clippy."
The guardian angel can take automated action on behalf of the user for various purposes (e.g., to compensate for memory loss, to remind a user to take medicine, to assist in social interactions by indicating whether the user has met an individual before, to gauge the appropriateness of jokes or comments given the demographics of the audience, etc.).
I'm slightly confused... Microsoft does this while complaining about privacy intrusion? I suppose the information may not be sent back to Microsoft as in Chrome's case, couldn't this be bad if some random person saw or got hold of that information? There's already a site that does that.
also:
[T]he monitoring component can take note of the number of conversations occurring in a room (and more specifically, a breakdown of the types of people in the room accompanied by a warning for dangerous persons, based on sex offender registration, FBI most wanted, etc.). The monitoring component sends relevant information for current or future decisions to the decision-making component that analyzes the information within the context of personal preference data stored in the user-attribute store in order to make a suggestion or implement a decision.
Where are the "decision-making component" and "user attribute store" located? Is it sending names for inspection across the internet just because their name is mentioned in a conversation? I hate to think that anyone's computer might be dropping eaves on me at any given moment. :)
How quickly we forget. John Sculley was showing demoware of the Knowledge Navigator all over the place in the late 1980s.
Here's a picture of it, bowtie and all.
It has gone to whatever Valhalla OpenDoc, Cyberdog, and QuickDraw GX dwell in.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
So should the fat lady sing already?
Microsoft has three rules the Guardian Angel's AI must follow:
1. The software may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. The software must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. The software must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
In theory, nothing could go wrong.
Meow meeoooww purrrrrrr miau, mrow!
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Oh, from it's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Didn't see it.
We tend to find animated "helpers" annoying. Please stop.
Yours,
People
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Here we have BOB, reincarnated as The Borg! And people wonder why I HATE Microsoft products and refuse to use them, except under extreme duress...
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Information: You are all going to die.
Bow-ties are cool.
What are you talking about? How can anything be worse than emacs? Why bother trying to get worse?
$ make available
Sounds to me like someone just watched Disclosure (1994) with Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. I recall during a few sections
of the film where a character or two moved through a Virtual Reality type database, hosted by a character appearing as
some type of angel. YAWN wake me when people start having original ideas.
vitriol
If the animated helper was a pair of boobs then 50% of the People wouldn't be annoyed.
I misread this as "life-cockroach" but after reading TFA it seems I was right anyway!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
His name was "Clippit", not "Clippy". Names have power.
this will stop others from trying to inflict a copy of this idea on us!
The patent has very little content; it's another one of those "hey, here is an application we want to patent, now everbody get to work and build the technology behind it for us". It's like patenting the idea of processing text on a computer or using a computer for performing addition. It's evil.
I think I'll name him Bob.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
No.
where there's fish, there's cats
Please be so kind as to add a vacuum gauge to the Guardian Angel, so I can at least tell in advance how much it's sucking on any given day...
It sounds more like a thinly disguised overly-general patent troll to me than an actual product or invention ... consider, "The guardian angel can take automated action on behalf of the user for various purposes (e.g., to compensate for memory loss, to remind a user to take medicine" ... does this mean anyone who makes software that does mundane things like remind people to take medicine (probably already exists) would have to pay Microsoft royalties?
Secondly, even if assuming it isn't just a broad patent troll, then it would effectively amount to a patent on a general AI, like every robot butler type of thing we've ever seen in the movies --- surely you should not be allowed to patent such a general AI? There's a fair chance we'll see such things appearing in the next 20 years, and it doesn't sound overblown to me to say that MS shouldn't be entitled to automatically extract royalties just because they filed a patent on the idea now. Patents are for INVENTIONS, i.e. methods, not ideas --- you're not supposed to be able to patent the idea, only the method of implementation thereof. And you claim it's a non-issue based on the absolute "blind hope" that the patent expires before they have an opportunity to get royalties from it? Puh-lease. Overblown my ass.
Can Michael Crichton's estate sue?
Or just another fine reason to continue my avoidance of M$ Office. Never owned a copy and never will.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
The thing is not even out but we already know it will suck.
Well, I guess that makes sense seeing how the iPad is not even out but we know it will rock.
Such a joke.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
>Checks the DateFinishes CoffeeReads TFA againShrugs
End of Line.
not quite as annoying as the "Unexpected Item In Bagging Area!!!" or "Please put the Item in the Bag!!!" is turning out to be...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
> How can anything be worse than emacs? Why bother trying to get worse?
.NET, which has, among other things, pervasive Visual Basic scripting. The VB scripting engine is now so fundamental to VS.NET that the editing features are all implemented in VB (sort of like how the editing features in Emacs are implemented in lisp). It's also now more completely integrated with Exchange, SQL Server, IIS, and Active Directory. For example, source code indentation styles can now be centrally managed in Group Policy. You can even put custom VB.NET code in a GPO, so that everyone's Visual Studio .NET behaves in the same customized manner throughout your entire domain forest.
Apparently you haven't seen the news today. Microsoft announced a beta release of the new Visual Studio
In other news, Glenn Beck has announced that he has secured a major source of funding for his 2012 election campaign, and if he doesn't get the GOP nomination, he'll run for President anyway on an independent ticket. He says he's got some great ideas for how to get people excited about the election, and he wants to start campaigning in earnest as soon as the summer of 2011.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.