The Swedish railway has a voice-recognition system that you can query over the phone for train time tables. This means it has to recognize city names, time of the day and a handful of commands, like "yes", "no", "earlier", "later", etc. It works tolerably well, I suppose. Sometimes it gets it right on the first try. Sometimes I have to repeat myself several times before it understands. (Annoyingly, it was the city where I live it had the most trouble understanding, and its interpretation didn't even sound close to me.)
Even when it does work it's vaguely annoying though I can't think of any better way of working things over the phone, short of a live human being. (You do get that if you wait long enough.) I wouldn't want to control my computer like that, but if the developers at Interplay want to experiment with it I'd say let them. As long as they don't make it the only way of communicating with the game.
Does this scare anyone else? Since most unix files are not strongly 'extensioned', i.e. sound files aren't always.wav or.au (nor should they be), I'm just hoping these ex-Apple guys aren't trying to impose the creator type mess from the Mac onto Linux/Unix.
I assumed it meant that they would use the same "magic number" mechanism as the "file" command, which usually - not always - does a pretty good job of figuring out what a file is.
Even though Windows' extension type database isn't *that much* better, it's still loads less confusing.
Is it really? My memories of the Mac are pretty shaky, not to mention 10+ years out of date, but the way Windows does this always seemed particularly brain-damaged to me. File extensions are just too ambiguous: Is.PS "PostScript document" or "Paint Shop image"? Is.CNF "configuration" or is it whatever Microsoft NetMeeting has decided it to be; possibly conference? Is.DOC "text file with documentation" or "Word document of unknown version"? These are all examples that I've encountered, and I'm sure there are plenty of others.
One of the things that annoys me the most is that at least the Swedish version of Windows 98 that I use at work absolutely refuses to admit when it doesn't know. If it finds a file named ROADMAP.XYZ it won't call it an "unknown text file" or "unknown data file". It will state, with great authority, that this is an XYZ-file. It's not even a particularly good guess.
I'm willing to admit that there are some things that Windows does pretty well, but file associations isn't one of them.
I use Lynx for viewing documentation that has been written as HTML. At least as long as it is mostly text, and doesn't use any fancy formatting, a graphical browser would probably be overkill.
(These articles have pointed me to some browsers I wasn't aware of before though, so I might reconsider.)
The file system is capable of long filenames. I don't see where confusion over 8.3 comes from, unless you're referring to Microsoft's continued (and, I agree, somewhat braindead) usage of 8.3 filenames in the SYSTEM directory (no long names on DLLs, etc.).
Sometimes the 8.3 filenames shine through in unexpected places, though. For instance, I added a link to WordPad in C:\WINDOWS\SendTo. (I discovered this directory by accident, by the way. Is it documented anywhere?) This means I can right-click on a file and send it to WordPad instead of Notepad, which is useful since WordPad handles long files and understands UNIX line breaks. The odd thing is that if I do this to, say, a file called proofreading.txt, WordPad's window title will be "PROOFR~1.TXT - WordPad". If instead I open the file from within WordPad, the window title will be the expected "proofreading.txt - WordPad".
This is just a minor detail of course, and for all I know it may have been fixed in later versions of Windows 98. Overall the Windows 98 GUI strikes me as pretty good. There are several non-GUI issues which makes something UNIX-y far, *far* better suited to my needs, but that's for another discussion.
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The Swedish railway has a voice-recognition system that you can query over the phone for train time tables. This means it has to recognize city names, time of the day and a handful of commands, like "yes", "no", "earlier", "later", etc. It works tolerably well, I suppose. Sometimes it gets it right on the first try. Sometimes I have to repeat myself several times before it understands. (Annoyingly, it was the city where I live it had the most trouble understanding, and its interpretation didn't even sound close to me.)
Even when it does work it's vaguely annoying though I can't think of any better way of working things over the phone, short of a live human being. (You do get that if you wait long enough.) I wouldn't want to control my computer like that, but if the developers at Interplay want to experiment with it I'd say let them. As long as they don't make it the only way of communicating with the game.
Does this scare anyone else? Since most unix files are not strongly 'extensioned', i.e. sound files aren't always .wav or .au (nor should they be), I'm just hoping these ex-Apple guys aren't trying to impose the creator type mess from the Mac onto Linux/Unix.
I assumed it meant that they would use the same "magic number" mechanism as the "file" command, which usually - not always - does a pretty good job of figuring out what a file is.
Even though Windows' extension type database isn't *that much* better, it's still loads less confusing.
Is it really? My memories of the Mac are pretty shaky, not to mention 10+ years out of date, but the way Windows does this always seemed particularly brain-damaged to me. File extensions are just too ambiguous: Is .PS "PostScript document" or "Paint Shop image"? Is .CNF "configuration" or is it whatever Microsoft NetMeeting has decided it to be; possibly conference? Is .DOC "text file with documentation" or "Word document of unknown version"? These are all examples that I've encountered, and I'm sure there are plenty of others.
One of the things that annoys me the most is that at least the Swedish version of Windows 98 that I use at work absolutely refuses to admit when it doesn't know. If it finds a file named ROADMAP.XYZ it won't call it an "unknown text file" or "unknown data file". It will state, with great authority, that this is an XYZ-file. It's not even a particularly good guess.
I'm willing to admit that there are some things that Windows does pretty well, but file associations isn't one of them.
I use Lynx for viewing documentation that has been written as HTML. At least as long as it is mostly text, and doesn't use any fancy formatting, a graphical browser would probably be overkill.
(These articles have pointed me to some browsers I wasn't aware of before though, so I might reconsider.)
The file system is capable of long filenames. I don't see where confusion over 8.3 comes from, unless you're referring to Microsoft's continued (and, I agree, somewhat braindead) usage of 8.3 filenames in the SYSTEM directory (no long names on DLLs, etc.).
Sometimes the 8.3 filenames shine through in unexpected places, though. For instance, I added a link to WordPad in C:\WINDOWS\SendTo. (I discovered this directory by accident, by the way. Is it documented anywhere?) This means I can right-click on a file and send it to WordPad instead of Notepad, which is useful since WordPad handles long files and understands UNIX line breaks. The odd thing is that if I do this to, say, a file called proofreading.txt, WordPad's window title will be "PROOFR~1.TXT - WordPad". If instead I open the file from within WordPad, the window title will be the expected "proofreading.txt - WordPad".
This is just a minor detail of course, and for all I know it may have been fixed in later versions of Windows 98. Overall the Windows 98 GUI strikes me as pretty good. There are several non-GUI issues which makes something UNIX-y far, *far* better suited to my needs, but that's for another discussion.