Well my anecdote is working as a DoD voice transcriptionist for nearly 20 years. We always tried Dragon, but it was always awful. My point is actually really simple. Regardless if Siri uses Dragon technology in the background, it works relatively well right out of the box (on a phone with a crappy mic, nonetheless), and the Dragon NaturallySpeaking takes weeks (months) of training to still not be good enough to actually use for anything other than novelty. As a joke, we used to send each other first-email-of-the-day with the stipulation it had to be dictated and captured by NaturallySpeaking and you had to send it without editing. Good times.
Back to my main point though. Consumers don't care what makes something work. It could technically be the best freakin' voice recognition algorithm ever written, but if it doesn't deliver with little effort, then it's not worth the hassle for most consumers. If they try something and it doesn't work very well (even anecdotally), they are going to move on to something that seems to work better (even anecdotally). This, in my opinion, is where Dragon NaturallySpeaking fails. For a couple hundred bucks, it should just work, not just "kinda work, and even then, only after hours of training".
Sorry to rail against it, but this has to be the single most disappointing tech promise of my lifetime.
Does it matter to the end user? Not one bit. Maybe Dragon should have used backend servers so it wouldn't suck as badly.
I'm not giving Siri any credit. I'm simply stating that expensive voice dictation software should work after a few hours of training, if not immediately, like Siri.
That's the problem hanging out here...you guys are so disconnected from the reality of the average user, you can't see simple logic like "Dragon sucks compared to Siri because Siri taps into the power of a backend database...maybe Dragon should have done that too as to not suck so badly?"
And for the record, Siri kind of sucks (as does the voice recognition on Android phones. This technology is about as frustrating as waiting for my flying car.
It is painfully evident to anyone who has used Dragon software that they are not technologists. I'd forgive the mish-mash awful UI if the software worked well, but it doesn't. I had a powerhouse workstation and had been "training" Dragon Naturally Speaking for a few months only to get worse voice recognition than Siri on an underpowered cell phone out of the box (no training), with crappy mic line in, on a busy street with lots of ambient noise.
Seriously, that is the worst piece of software I've ever used. Maybe it's my indistinguishable Pacific NW accent (read: no accent at all) that was throwing it off, but that program was embarrassingly bad.
In reality, 3D movies are getting better and better.
3D movies suck because they have to rely on the 3D gimmick to get anyone to come to them. Seriously, the only people I know who supposedly like 3D also shop at Walmart and think Golden Corral is fine dining. 3D movies (this time around, just like in the 30 years ago, and 15 years before that) are like velvet paintings, garden gnomes, and Elvis Pressley collectibles. Tacky to the max.
Toy Story 3 and Up were good 3D movies, but that's because the were good 2D movies to start with, and in both cases, you forget they are even in 3D.
Thanks to you guys on slashdot, I learned that "monetize" does not mean what the author of TFA thinks. Wikipedia obviously isn't "monetizing" its patrons because the author is using the term incorrectly.
Also, this is probably a revenue-per-click article, as the premise is that Wikipedia is somehow awful, but then lavishes praise throughout TFA. I hate that crap. I can't opt out of their crappy revenue generation mechanism until I've already generated revenue for them...bah!
I don't disagree, I'm just stating that there's no reason for Facebook to go out of their way to track this sort of thing. If anything, they should be posting all kinds of disclaimers taking no responsibility for what we say/do while using Facebook to distance themselves from liability.
The main difference is the bar doesn't go out of it's way to implement technology to eavesdrop on its patrons. Seems like an awful business model for a bar (unless they are bounty hunters in disguise).
A patron overhearing you in a bar is not the same thing as somebody who works for the bar actively listening for criminal activity. The random person at the bar hearing your criminal activity is the same thing as the "report photo/story" feature in Facebook, which seems to be ok with most of us, but Facebook admins (or bots) crawling through chats isn't.
Better translation: our IT policies were stupid and overly restrictive and nobody could get any work done so EVERYBODY had a work around. You can't fire everyone, but starting with the idiot IT policy makers would have been a good first start.
I changed jobs last year. I used to work on government contracts and we weren't even allowed to take thumb drives or laptops out of the building. Wasteful and inefficient for very little security returns (with nothing in place to keep me from just forwarding the stuff to my gmail account, and then working on it from home, something everyone did, btw).
Now I work in a place that is BYOD. We have NO security problems like the old place. Not because BYOD is more secure, but because when you surround yourself with a security circus, all the IT power-mongers make EVERYTHING a security priority and you get a security circus. Allowing BYOD is the first step for the IT dorks to realize that not everything has to be locked down tight just because it is your job to do so.
The productive employees actually doing all the work and avoiding meetings and other non-productive tasks like scrolling through blackberry email are sitting at fully functioning computers, being productive. Computer keyboards, even the bad ones, trump the best tactile keyboards on any phone ever.
Part of the reason RIM is in trouble is there aren't enough people like you who think a physical keyboard is system requirement #1. Sure it's a good keyboard, but that's on of the most insignificant features one could tout. If the other keyboards were simply unusable, the physical keyboard would be a viable differentiation, but most virtual keyboards work good enough for most people, leaving room for things that most people think are more important.
Excellent observation. This is why the tablet market "died on arrival" and the iPad is a huge success. The "tablet" PC was trying to be a PC in a flat form factor. The iPad is trying to be NOT a PC. Thus, people who get mad at Apple for just copying the failed tablet PC concept are completely missing the point, and most likely will continue to do so as Apple continues to dominate. These same people think iPads suck because they don't do things that PCs do. Yes. This is exactly the point.
(off topic)....but why do people think that having a low or high user ID has any correlation to how technical somebody is? As if there aren't hundreds of other technical sites that technical people like to go to instead of this bickering cesspool of trolls and fanbois?
Android and iPhone are poor subsitutions for Blackberry, and it is my opinion that the vast majority of people who disagree should never have had blackberries to begin with.
Please tell us you are either a Program Manager, work in HR, or are a middle manager in IT, because what you just wrote said no productive employee ever.
The economy is another factor. The machine at your desk is already paid for.
Well, I left the typical crappy Dell Cube Farm style office a year ago, but I can tell you, the machine at your desk in this environment is being leased, not paid for. Dell's genius is not in making good products (because they generally don't), it's with locking in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of lease contracts with government entities.
RIM has to be the most ridiculously over-analyzed business failure in history. Pick up a Blackberry, use it for 5 minutes. Pick up an Android or iOS device and use it for 5 minutes. Blackberry is terrible, by comparison, and there are only so many stiffs on the planet to justify the "enterprise" features of Blackberry over the other fully capable, yet better designed devices. They simply tried to duplicate the 1990s Microsoft business model of selling a bunch of boring stuff at razor thin profit margins to business stiffs who don't care about anything but the bottom line price. Problem is, people expect more from business tools these days.
Here's a fun anecdote...circa 2008 all the program managers were toting around their Blackberries (the ones with the stupid scroll wheel). In a meeting and someone needs to check something on the Internet...bunch of dopey PMs whip out their Blackberries but none of them can successfully find/get to/access the web page we are trying to look at. I whip out my shiny new first gen iPhone and am on the site in 5 seconds. Also, for all it's supposed "enterprise functionality" same PMs would come to me on business trips to fill out our time cards (required daily by government contracts) because their "enterprise" Blackberries had problems reliably accessing the VPN to get to the timecard. They also couldn't get their email when they had VPN access issues. You know what connected flawlessly to our Exchange Server via VPN without any need to put an IT ticket in and be without a device for a week? Yeah, my iPhone (and my coworkers' Androids as well).
So yeah. Be first to market for enterprise level tools on a phone but then spend the rest of your existence being last to adopt things like "touch screens" and there ya go. Business failure.
Well, my current PC running Win7 is actually really good (and it's a cheap, sub-$600 emachines), but the difference is that it less than 3 years old, so still within the very usable lifespan of a cheap PC. My anecdote was simply to state that my old-ass Mac that hasn't been upgradable for the past 5 years is still decent, but my 5 year old Compaq PC is crap. I expect the same thing in 5 years when I compare this 2008 Macbook with my 2010 emachines. Sorry you can't read my mind. I should have been more clear.
Yeah, sorry, didn't mean to sound so trollish, but Dell laptops were pretty crappy in 2006 compared to other offerings (and MacBook Pros). And since I'm coming from an all Dell Latitude (600 series) organization (worked there 2007-2011), I can tell you that Dell Latitudes from 2007-2010 (D610, 620 at least) could NOT run Windows Vista or Windows 7 well enough to meet the requirements of our contract. This kind of sucks when your contract requires your software to run on Vista (government hadn't switched to Win7 yet) and your organization uses nothing but a bunch of business grade crappy Dell laptops.
Not at all. I upgrade my equipment as much as possible because I generally like upgrades (Win and OSX). If his 6-year old computer "runs perfectly" with Snow Leopard, then what's the problem? It's not like Snow Leopard is obsolete, given it is still the most used version of OS X.
I have purchased three Windows PC in that time frame, only one of which can run anything beyond XP, thanks to cheap PC manufacturers using outdated RAM and CPUs and using minimal RAM slots (2 that max out at 2GB, for one example). I know, I know, I bought a cheap PC so I get what I deserve, but you'll see plenty of anecdotes in this thread making the ridiculous claim that $300 e-machines PCs still run Windows 7 great, six years on. Riiiiiight.
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Well my anecdote is working as a DoD voice transcriptionist for nearly 20 years. We always tried Dragon, but it was always awful. My point is actually really simple. Regardless if Siri uses Dragon technology in the background, it works relatively well right out of the box (on a phone with a crappy mic, nonetheless), and the Dragon NaturallySpeaking takes weeks (months) of training to still not be good enough to actually use for anything other than novelty. As a joke, we used to send each other first-email-of-the-day with the stipulation it had to be dictated and captured by NaturallySpeaking and you had to send it without editing. Good times.
Back to my main point though. Consumers don't care what makes something work. It could technically be the best freakin' voice recognition algorithm ever written, but if it doesn't deliver with little effort, then it's not worth the hassle for most consumers. If they try something and it doesn't work very well (even anecdotally), they are going to move on to something that seems to work better (even anecdotally). This, in my opinion, is where Dragon NaturallySpeaking fails. For a couple hundred bucks, it should just work, not just "kinda work, and even then, only after hours of training".
Sorry to rail against it, but this has to be the single most disappointing tech promise of my lifetime.
Does it matter to the end user? Not one bit. Maybe Dragon should have used backend servers so it wouldn't suck as badly.
I'm not giving Siri any credit. I'm simply stating that expensive voice dictation software should work after a few hours of training, if not immediately, like Siri.
That's the problem hanging out here...you guys are so disconnected from the reality of the average user, you can't see simple logic like "Dragon sucks compared to Siri because Siri taps into the power of a backend database...maybe Dragon should have done that too as to not suck so badly?"
And for the record, Siri kind of sucks (as does the voice recognition on Android phones. This technology is about as frustrating as waiting for my flying car.
It is painfully evident to anyone who has used Dragon software that they are not technologists. I'd forgive the mish-mash awful UI if the software worked well, but it doesn't. I had a powerhouse workstation and had been "training" Dragon Naturally Speaking for a few months only to get worse voice recognition than Siri on an underpowered cell phone out of the box (no training), with crappy mic line in, on a busy street with lots of ambient noise.
Seriously, that is the worst piece of software I've ever used. Maybe it's my indistinguishable Pacific NW accent (read: no accent at all) that was throwing it off, but that program was embarrassingly bad.
Well, name a good movie you saw in 3D, then ask yourself what made it good. If you have any taste, your answer will never be "because of the 3D".
In reality, 3D movies are getting better and better.
3D movies suck because they have to rely on the 3D gimmick to get anyone to come to them. Seriously, the only people I know who supposedly like 3D also shop at Walmart and think Golden Corral is fine dining. 3D movies (this time around, just like in the 30 years ago, and 15 years before that) are like velvet paintings, garden gnomes, and Elvis Pressley collectibles. Tacky to the max.
Toy Story 3 and Up were good 3D movies, but that's because the were good 2D movies to start with, and in both cases, you forget they are even in 3D.
What makes you think MS would ship an OS with an email app in place? It's not like Win7 ships with one, so evidently your dog is stupid.
Thanks to you guys on slashdot, I learned that "monetize" does not mean what the author of TFA thinks. Wikipedia obviously isn't "monetizing" its patrons because the author is using the term incorrectly.
Also, this is probably a revenue-per-click article, as the premise is that Wikipedia is somehow awful, but then lavishes praise throughout TFA. I hate that crap. I can't opt out of their crappy revenue generation mechanism until I've already generated revenue for them...bah!
I don't disagree, I'm just stating that there's no reason for Facebook to go out of their way to track this sort of thing. If anything, they should be posting all kinds of disclaimers taking no responsibility for what we say/do while using Facebook to distance themselves from liability.
The main difference is the bar doesn't go out of it's way to implement technology to eavesdrop on its patrons. Seems like an awful business model for a bar (unless they are bounty hunters in disguise).
A patron overhearing you in a bar is not the same thing as somebody who works for the bar actively listening for criminal activity. The random person at the bar hearing your criminal activity is the same thing as the "report photo/story" feature in Facebook, which seems to be ok with most of us, but Facebook admins (or bots) crawling through chats isn't.
Why would Facebook spend money policing it's patrons and voluntarily reporting misdeeds? They are a "for profit" company, not a social service.
Better translation: our IT policies were stupid and overly restrictive and nobody could get any work done so EVERYBODY had a work around. You can't fire everyone, but starting with the idiot IT policy makers would have been a good first start.
I changed jobs last year. I used to work on government contracts and we weren't even allowed to take thumb drives or laptops out of the building. Wasteful and inefficient for very little security returns (with nothing in place to keep me from just forwarding the stuff to my gmail account, and then working on it from home, something everyone did, btw).
Now I work in a place that is BYOD. We have NO security problems like the old place. Not because BYOD is more secure, but because when you surround yourself with a security circus, all the IT power-mongers make EVERYTHING a security priority and you get a security circus. Allowing BYOD is the first step for the IT dorks to realize that not everything has to be locked down tight just because it is your job to do so.
The productive employees actually doing all the work and avoiding meetings and other non-productive tasks like scrolling through blackberry email are sitting at fully functioning computers, being productive. Computer keyboards, even the bad ones, trump the best tactile keyboards on any phone ever.
I'm not sure it would be a good business model to ignore 37 million hipsters, as disdainful as hipsters can be.
Part of the reason RIM is in trouble is there aren't enough people like you who think a physical keyboard is system requirement #1. Sure it's a good keyboard, but that's on of the most insignificant features one could tout. If the other keyboards were simply unusable, the physical keyboard would be a viable differentiation, but most virtual keyboards work good enough for most people, leaving room for things that most people think are more important.
The iPhone may have been niche, but that was one helluva short niche period.
Excellent observation. This is why the tablet market "died on arrival" and the iPad is a huge success. The "tablet" PC was trying to be a PC in a flat form factor. The iPad is trying to be NOT a PC. Thus, people who get mad at Apple for just copying the failed tablet PC concept are completely missing the point, and most likely will continue to do so as Apple continues to dominate. These same people think iPads suck because they don't do things that PCs do. Yes. This is exactly the point.
(off topic)....but why do people think that having a low or high user ID has any correlation to how technical somebody is? As if there aren't hundreds of other technical sites that technical people like to go to instead of this bickering cesspool of trolls and fanbois?
Android and iPhone are poor subsitutions for Blackberry, and it is my opinion that the vast majority of people who disagree should never have had blackberries to begin with.
Please tell us you are either a Program Manager, work in HR, or are a middle manager in IT, because what you just wrote said no productive employee ever.
The OS is one of their few remaining strengths.
Well, right up to the part where you try to actually use the OS, that is.
The economy is another factor. The machine at your desk is already paid for.
Well, I left the typical crappy Dell Cube Farm style office a year ago, but I can tell you, the machine at your desk in this environment is being leased, not paid for. Dell's genius is not in making good products (because they generally don't), it's with locking in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of lease contracts with government entities.
RIM has to be the most ridiculously over-analyzed business failure in history. Pick up a Blackberry, use it for 5 minutes. Pick up an Android or iOS device and use it for 5 minutes. Blackberry is terrible, by comparison, and there are only so many stiffs on the planet to justify the "enterprise" features of Blackberry over the other fully capable, yet better designed devices. They simply tried to duplicate the 1990s Microsoft business model of selling a bunch of boring stuff at razor thin profit margins to business stiffs who don't care about anything but the bottom line price. Problem is, people expect more from business tools these days.
Here's a fun anecdote...circa 2008 all the program managers were toting around their Blackberries (the ones with the stupid scroll wheel). In a meeting and someone needs to check something on the Internet...bunch of dopey PMs whip out their Blackberries but none of them can successfully find/get to/access the web page we are trying to look at. I whip out my shiny new first gen iPhone and am on the site in 5 seconds. Also, for all it's supposed "enterprise functionality" same PMs would come to me on business trips to fill out our time cards (required daily by government contracts) because their "enterprise" Blackberries had problems reliably accessing the VPN to get to the timecard. They also couldn't get their email when they had VPN access issues. You know what connected flawlessly to our Exchange Server via VPN without any need to put an IT ticket in and be without a device for a week? Yeah, my iPhone (and my coworkers' Androids as well).
So yeah. Be first to market for enterprise level tools on a phone but then spend the rest of your existence being last to adopt things like "touch screens" and there ya go. Business failure.
Well, my current PC running Win7 is actually really good (and it's a cheap, sub-$600 emachines), but the difference is that it less than 3 years old, so still within the very usable lifespan of a cheap PC. My anecdote was simply to state that my old-ass Mac that hasn't been upgradable for the past 5 years is still decent, but my 5 year old Compaq PC is crap. I expect the same thing in 5 years when I compare this 2008 Macbook with my 2010 emachines. Sorry you can't read my mind. I should have been more clear.
Yeah, sorry, didn't mean to sound so trollish, but Dell laptops were pretty crappy in 2006 compared to other offerings (and MacBook Pros). And since I'm coming from an all Dell Latitude (600 series) organization (worked there 2007-2011), I can tell you that Dell Latitudes from 2007-2010 (D610, 620 at least) could NOT run Windows Vista or Windows 7 well enough to meet the requirements of our contract. This kind of sucks when your contract requires your software to run on Vista (government hadn't switched to Win7 yet) and your organization uses nothing but a bunch of business grade crappy Dell laptops.
Hopefully I just untrolled my troll comment?
Not at all. I upgrade my equipment as much as possible because I generally like upgrades (Win and OSX). If his 6-year old computer "runs perfectly" with Snow Leopard, then what's the problem? It's not like Snow Leopard is obsolete, given it is still the most used version of OS X.
I have purchased three Windows PC in that time frame, only one of which can run anything beyond XP, thanks to cheap PC manufacturers using outdated RAM and CPUs and using minimal RAM slots (2 that max out at 2GB, for one example). I know, I know, I bought a cheap PC so I get what I deserve, but you'll see plenty of anecdotes in this thread making the ridiculous claim that $300 e-machines PCs still run Windows 7 great, six years on. Riiiiiight.