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Skylake Has a Voice DSP and Listens To Your Commands
itwbennett writes: Intel's new Skylake processor (like the Core M processor released last year) comes with a built-in digital signal processor (DSP) that will allow you to turn on and control your PC with your voice. Although the feature is not new, what is new is the availability of a voice controlled app to use it: Enter Windows 10 and Cortana. If this sounds familiar, it should, writes Andy Patrizio: 'A few years back when the Xbox One was still in development, word came that Kinect, its motion and audio sensor controller, would be required to use the console and Kinect would always be listening for voice commands to start the console. This caused something of a freak-out among gamers, who feared Microsoft would be listening.'
Cool. Sounds like a really nice thing to have...on a military vessel. Less so around the house.
Im sure plenty of slashdotters will invest time and effort in explaining how this can be manipulated by unscrupulous hackers and foreign intelligence agencies to undermine user security. Yet other slashdotters will wax prophetic on how the erosion of our freedoms at the hands of malevolent corporations will be our downfall
I on the otherhand am offering a completely different take on this Skylake report. As a coincidental shareholder in the tinfoil industry I believe Skylake and other technologies will be a win-win for all parties involved: consumers, producers, and the spider people of Adramalech the dark Samarian god to whom children are sacrificed...remember, without your patented TIN FOIL helmet, Skylark will inform them of how many licks it took YOU to get to the center of the tootsie roll pop.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Wouldn't it make more sense to have a voice-activated power button on the frame, rather than the CPU doing this?
"We made a new processor! It's not any faster but it has an always on mic and exposes a remote-control interface you know nothing about. Oh and did I mention the random generator is biased? You'll love it"
I must admit I am having fun with the voice commands.
I would say it is about 95%ish accurate in decoding what I say.
However, if you get off script in what it knows it just takes the command and dumps it on the default search you have setup (google for me).
'open steam' apparently means open some random game with steam in the name. Which is not what I wanted.
'open weather' means open the built in weather app. Which is what I wanted.
'will it rain' and it will give me a nice summary of the current weather and 'guess'.
'shutdown the computer' apparently means open up firefox and google for it.
It is also a 'slow cpu' drain. In the background the DSP audio service built into windows is always listening. So it is eating a bit of CPU (about .05%) just from ambient noise. Yesterday the one of the 3 cortana background apps decided to crash wildly. It kept crashing and restarting at a rate of about 30 times a second. No dumps or anything. Just a small 1-2% cpu usage. Reboot and it was all well but no indication of what was going on.
XBox Shut Off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I would think one of the shiny new instruction features added to skylake could go horribly horribly wrong in basically the worst way you could possibly imagine:
http://slashdot.org/firehose.p...
Basically, imagine code running on your computer that you aren't allowed to see even at the binary level, which means anti-malware software cannot scan it, and you can't debug it if you suspect it is doing something malicious, and even worse, I suspect that groups like the NSA could NSL the keys so that they could write their own state sponsored backdoors. IMO this is a feature that really doesn't belong on consumer grade hardware.
Sure, but the computer is Galaxy Quest was only listening to ONE person (Sigourney Weaver). In fact, her one and only job was to repeat any questions to the computer, then repeat the computer's response back to the questioner...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I think in the dephinition of *ophile is that the condition both is so extreme that the victim has difficulty controlling his impulses in accordance with the laws of his lands, and prefers this particular age group almost to the exclusion of all others. To actually diagnose him with a problem requires way more information than the age of his first wife. So really this is just an anal vibration that his PC has entered into the slashdot comment box, go Skylake.
Almost all men (and it says this somewhere) find women increasingly attractive as they progress through puberty and afterwards. Most of us however will not focus on this age group to all exclusion, nor will we disobey laws. A 17yo female is a fully grown adult in most cases, so it really doesn't even seem like this falls into any juvenile category. In reality this is just biology. Secondary sex characteristics, and the male fondness for them are not accidents, and are not coincidentally developed at puberty as the female reaches fertility. The actual problem with all this is purely social, and a consequence of how our cultures deal with sex and its consequences. But, someone who is not actually insane, is capable of complying with the laws even if he both doesn't agree with them, and also finds that young girl unusually attractive for some reason.
Contrast this with "Jared" of Subway fame, who allegedly both propositioned a minor for sex but also allegedly requested she bring younger friends. That's a sign of someone with a real problem who probably needs to at least be kept away from minors.
I think people just learn these words on the internets and like to start using them inappropriately, as with autism and Asperger's.
The problem is that we have valuable die real-estate being taken up by this shit when additional L1/L2 cache, a core, or other SIMD instruction sets would be better. The market is full of DSP chips, why this, and why on the fucking die!
Life is not for the lazy.
They're pretty, but then they talk. Child snaps to focus.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Apparently one of the justifications for spending space on such a ridiculously specialized task, is that in the rare event that it's being used, some of the other stuff (e.g. the general-purpose parts) might have a brief opportunity to cool off a bit. Your bigger cache wouldn't have that advantage, because you'd be using it so often.
Some say often-dark silicon will be a growing trend.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Initiate fap session.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Paraphrased quote from NTK (years ago!).
I'm going to run into a room full of people working and shout "Quit. Don't save."
It's a mobile processor. It will be in laptops, if not in tablets. Power saving in laptops is still important.
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