TFA "The percentage of your working day spent in a commute will go down and the time you spend being productive and being paid, or simply relaxing, will go up. Also, more people will do business in the city, because they can get to stores, offices or the theater more easily."
Really? And how exactly will more people do business in the city if less people are travelling in by car?
London implemented a large congestion zone five years ago and the city has pretty much the same levels of conegstion as ever. Before the scheme there were already plenty of excess commuters who would have wanted to drive their car in but were deterred by the congestion levels. Once the charge was implemented the folk who could afford the charge started driving in! There are more busses and taxi's buzzing around than ever before and the all important *average commute time* does not appear to have been reduced by much if at all. It seems to be a big cash cow for the local authorities with little real benefits for the majority of city goers.
More like 'Student Inoculation Strategy': Prepare kids' immune systems as early as possible for a lifetime of MS bloatware; inoculate the young minds from all Windows & Office usability issues, grooming a whole new generation of narrow-minded corporate drones with a "that's what we're familiar with/ that's what we've always used/ everybody else uses it too, so.." ignorant, conformist and sceptical-of-change mentality. Or is it me who's gone all sceptical?
With free open source platforms such as Ubuntu/Kubuntu offering increasingly sophisticated 'windows style' desktop environments, more configurability and faster release cycles I can quite see why MS is becoming paranoid over the sucession of bloatware they continue to offer to the home desktop market.
Your average home user is now in a position to purchase even a mid-range PC for £500 which probably offers more document management and multimedia capabilities then they will probably need; typically just browsing, email, IM, media play/record, DTP etc. Persuading this market of the *additional benefit* of upgrading, firstly to Hasta la Vista and, apparently quite soon, to Windows 7, will be a tought sell.
IMO, unless MS or another software vendor comes up with a so-called "killer applicaton" in the mean time, that will only run on the latest MS OS platform (though I think MS7 will still be 32 bit?) or only on a high spec hardware (forcing said user to upgrade their PC to a new one pre-loaded, of course, with the new MS OS!), then how, exactly, MS intend to market this new OS any better than Vista is beyond me.
FYI, I've been dual booting Vista and Linux K/Ubuntu for a few months now and, aside for some driver issues, the Linux environment has not compromised my core usability in any significant way, though clearly some tweaking - which would generally be beyond the level of (and undesirabe to) the mainstream home market - is still currently required. But as the open source OS market continues to grow, how does MS intend to combat this threat? By speeding up their own release cycles, of course, in desperate attempts to quickly copy and match the latest OS functionality and UI gimmicks already freely available on the rival platforms!
I noticed that too. According to this site an "Intent-to-Use" application is made when the TM is NOT being use yet whilst a "use-based" application is filed when it's already in use.
Let's just wait for the official forensics rather than patched together rumours shall we?
Yeah, and hopefully CSI: Heathrow will finally dig up my North Face backpack which they handily "misassigned" somewhere deep within the bowls of their sophisticated baggage management system, back in '94. I wouldn't have been that bothered only I lost a EEPROM datapack (all 64k of it) for my Psion Organiser, which had my coursework on it!
The moon's like, just hanging round up there all day long: let's face it, we've all seen that old boy before! At least them asteroids are always goin new places. Now, if I was a spaceman (and i'm not saying an alien or anything - just a regular spaceman from down Florida) i'd much rather git aboard one of them asteroids and go to new places - wouldn't ya'll?
Anyhoo, I hear them asteroids git hot damn good fuel econ: so none of that bitchin''bout the vironment and all that polushon jazz, now boys!
Interacting with ticket machines and other public terminals? Think i'll stick to the dedicated interfaces they will continue to provide: more efficiet and more secure.
Interacting with video advertising displays? Gee, I can't wait.
Using my handset to interact with public devices will only be cool when I can stop the 07:43 train from taking off without me at Clapham Junction and when I can disable that stereo system the five punks in the Camaro Convertible have blasting my head off at the traffic lights. (Perhaps you can do this one already?)
What you want is simply to interact with your handset which will replicate the public interface/display on its screen. I.e. Multiple users simultaneously accessing a terminal display and no more queues. Little need to control the external display except as a gimmick.
and watch in ecstasy as one of Google's suitcase drives SLURPS up the FBI's *real* datasets on 9/11, Elvis... oh, and that schematic for a site-to-site transporter beam that I knocked up a while back, which they somehow stole off my google docs.
I must admit he does spend a lot of time on his blog these days.
After he won "Best in Show" at the 2006 Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show, his blog was serialized in Breeders Times and he just doesn't get time to go for regular walkies anymore.
... between the AI and humans tested playing the game appears to be (last para) that the humans were able to adapt their tactics.
E.g. They learned to lure ghosts close to Ms Pac-man so they would easuer to catch and eat once they became edible.
I'm sure this tactic could be programmed as a new rule and added to appropriate position on the AI's 'priority' list. But until this 'cross-entropy' learning method (and any other AI learning technique for that) can truly teach the AI to adapt by itself - from it's own observations - then it's just not proper AI, imo.
Over here (in "Little Britain") a large 'rural area' probably equates to a small city park in N. America - so net accessibility in remote regions is not such a big issue: we simly don't tell them the internet exists.
Agreed. Speech Recognition will realistically only become a viable substitute to the traditional keyboard/mouse interface - for the user majority, at least - when the AI (and processing power required to run) it has advanced to the point where you and your box can actually hold a 'semi intelligent' interaction/conversation.
Now, considering that much of said user majority out there is barely able to reach this iq threshold simply interacting amongst themselves, we should shortly be seeing this kind of product being advertised as
'...productivity levels achievable will be limited to the chip spec installed in your user sub-group'
According to the
Julius blurb on the acoustic models used, there are currently just two languages available: Japanese and English.
"Since Julius itself is a language-independent decoding program, you can make a recognizer of a language if given an appropriate language model and acoustic model for the target language. The recognition accuracy largely depends on the models. "
"We currently have a sample English acoustic model trained from the WSJ database. According to the license of the database, this model *cannot* be used to develop or test products for commercialization, nor can they use it in any commercial product or for any commercial purpose. Also, the performance is not so good"
--Sounds like you'll be better off using the Japanese acoustic model for now;)
Slashdot Mirror
TFA "The percentage of your working day spent in a commute will go down and the time you spend being productive and being paid, or simply relaxing, will go up. Also, more people will do business in the city, because they can get to stores, offices or the theater more easily."
Really? And how exactly will more people do business in the city if less people are travelling in by car?
London implemented a large congestion zone five years ago and the city has pretty much the same levels of conegstion as ever. Before the scheme there were already plenty of excess commuters who would have wanted to drive their car in but were deterred by the congestion levels. Once the charge was implemented the folk who could afford the charge started driving in! There are more busses and taxi's buzzing around than ever before and the all important *average commute time* does not appear to have been reduced by much if at all.
It seems to be a big cash cow for the local authorities with little real benefits for the majority of city goers.
More like 'Student Inoculation Strategy': Prepare kids' immune systems as early as possible for a lifetime of MS bloatware; inoculate the young minds from all Windows & Office usability issues, grooming a whole new generation of narrow-minded corporate drones with a "that's what we're familiar with/ that's what we've always used/ everybody else uses it too, so.." ignorant, conformist and sceptical-of-change mentality.
Or is it me who's gone all sceptical?
With free open source platforms such as Ubuntu/Kubuntu offering increasingly sophisticated 'windows style' desktop environments, more configurability and faster release cycles I can quite see why MS is becoming paranoid over the sucession of bloatware they continue to offer to the home desktop market.
Your average home user is now in a position to purchase even a mid-range PC for £500 which probably offers more document management and multimedia capabilities then they will probably need; typically just browsing, email, IM, media play/record, DTP etc.
Persuading this market of the *additional benefit* of upgrading, firstly to Hasta la Vista and, apparently quite soon, to Windows 7, will be a tought sell.
IMO, unless MS or another software vendor comes up with a so-called "killer applicaton" in the mean time, that will only run on the latest MS OS platform (though I think MS7 will still be 32 bit?) or only on a high spec hardware (forcing said user to upgrade their PC to a new one pre-loaded, of course, with the new MS OS!), then how, exactly, MS intend to market this new OS any better than Vista is beyond me.
FYI, I've been dual booting Vista and Linux K/Ubuntu for a few months now and, aside for some driver issues, the Linux environment has not compromised my core usability in any significant way, though clearly some tweaking - which would generally be beyond the level of (and undesirabe to) the mainstream home market - is still currently required.
But as the open source OS market continues to grow, how does MS intend to combat this threat?
By speeding up their own release cycles, of course, in desperate attempts to quickly copy and match the latest OS functionality and UI gimmicks already freely available on the rival platforms!
I noticed that too. According to this site an "Intent-to-Use" application is made when the TM is NOT being use yet whilst a "use-based" application is filed when it's already in use.
I wouldn't have been that bothered only I lost a EEPROM datapack (all 64k of it) for my Psion Organiser, which had my coursework on it!
The moon's like, just hanging round up there all day long: let's face it, we've all seen that old boy before! At least them asteroids are always goin new places.
Now, if I was a spaceman (and i'm not saying an alien or anything - just a regular spaceman from down Florida) i'd much rather git aboard one of them asteroids and go to new places - wouldn't ya'll?
Anyhoo, I hear them asteroids git hot damn good fuel econ: so none of that bitchin''bout the vironment and all that polushon jazz, now boys!
Interacting with ticket machines and other public terminals? Think i'll stick to the dedicated interfaces they will continue to provide: more efficiet and more secure.
Interacting with video advertising displays? Gee, I can't wait.
Using my handset to interact with public devices will only be cool when I can stop the 07:43 train from taking off without me at Clapham Junction and when I can disable that stereo system the five punks in the Camaro Convertible have blasting my head off at the traffic lights. (Perhaps you can do this one already?)
What you want is simply to interact with your handset which will replicate the public interface/display on its screen. I.e. Multiple users simultaneously accessing a terminal display and no more queues. Little need to control the external display except as a gimmick.
and watch in ecstasy as one of Google's suitcase drives SLURPS up the FBI's *real* datasets on 9/11, Elvis... oh, and that schematic for a site-to-site transporter beam that I knocked up a while back, which they somehow stole off my google docs.
I must admit he does spend a lot of time on his blog these days.
After he won "Best in Show" at the 2006 Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show, his blog was serialized in Breeders Times and he just doesn't get time to go for regular walkies anymore.
It's the hackers thatt need a union, what with all the negative publicity they get when they do naughty stuff.
;)
The Hackers Guild could then provide *protection* to the Bloggers Guild - for a small fee, of course...
... between the AI and humans tested playing the game appears to be (last para) that the humans were able to adapt their tactics.
E.g. They learned to lure ghosts close to Ms Pac-man so they would easuer to catch and eat once they became edible.
I'm sure this tactic could be programmed as a new rule and added to appropriate position on the AI's 'priority' list.
But until this 'cross-entropy' learning method (and any other AI learning technique for that) can truly teach the AI to adapt by itself - from it's own observations - then it's just not proper AI, imo.
Point taken.
Over here (in "Little Britain") a large 'rural area' probably equates to a small city park in N. America - so net accessibility in remote regions is not such a big issue: we simly don't tell them the internet exists.
So using 'white space' will provide better internet services to cows and stuff?
Sounds like Borg Cube to me.
Perhaps they'll get me the hell outa here. I start dual booting Vista and linux to hedge my compatibility bets.
Agreed. Speech Recognition will realistically only become a viable substitute to the traditional keyboard/mouse interface - for the user majority, at least - when the AI (and processing power required to run) it has advanced to the point where you and your box can actually hold a 'semi intelligent' interaction/conversation.
Now, considering that much of said user majority out there is barely able to reach this iq threshold simply interacting amongst themselves, we should shortly be seeing this kind of product being advertised as
'...productivity levels achievable will be limited to the chip spec installed in your user sub-group'
According to the Julius blurb on the acoustic models used, there are currently just two languages available: Japanese and English.
;)
"Since Julius itself is a language-independent decoding program, you can make a recognizer of a language if given an appropriate language model and acoustic model for the target language. The recognition accuracy largely depends on the models. "
"We currently have a sample English acoustic model trained from the WSJ database. According to the license of the database, this model *cannot* be used to develop or test products for commercialization, nor can they use it in any commercial product or for any commercial purpose. Also, the performance is not so good"
--Sounds like you'll be better off using the Japanese acoustic model for now