It works really well IMO. I haven't tried it since the first couple of releases back around 1997-1998, but even then it was much better than you're desribing. Yes you have to speak punctuation. You have to type it too, this isn't an unreasonable requirement. Accents very rarely caused major problems and the software is very good at adjusting to nearly any user.
Quick correction, Dragon's product line is Naturally Speaking (or NatSpeak). Dictate was the discrete system that they introduced in 1989-1990 and was the state-of-the-art until NatSpeak arrived in 1995ish.
Too bad the whole L&H thing happened. It would be much more interesting if Dragon still existed (for real, not the ScanSoft ownership of the name/cade that isn't still the same company).
This was just on CNBC... apparently the assumed front runner for doing the security development took off today on the news despite the fact that this is at LEAST a year or two out and that there's no guarantee that they'd be the company that most people used....
Gotta love that market.
A friend of mine has worked off and on as a rent-a-cop type security guard for the past year or so. Her company was recently bought up and as a result of some paperwork hassles was told that to work over the summer she would need to go through the normal new employee process. Part of that process included taking a personality test that was "not the sole criteria for employment". Appearently what they meant by not the sole criteria was that they have several different things and failing any of them means you don't get the job. Despite the fact that she had a year of experience with the company, good referrals from her boss at the company, no history of tardiness or missing work, etc. etc. She was told as soon as the test was scored that she wasn't employable.
Ever since we've been trying to figure out if they failed her because she didn't have a personality or because she had one.:)
Cowardice by the English or stupidity by the French? At both Agincourt and Crecy the French allowed themselves to be suckered into trying to charge heavily loaded horses across large open MUDDY fields slogging through the range of the long bows. And to make matters worse, at Crecy they stuck their crossbowmen in front of their knights who eventually got frustrated at getting picked of by the English and rode down their own bowmen. Learning a lesson from this, a hundred years later at Agincourt they stuck the crossbowmen behind the knights, rendering them SO far out of range that they again were a non factor.
The French had the English massively outnumbered and out provisioned and still managed to get spanked twice on their own turf. Is fighting a battle when your enemy has 3 times your number cowardice, or is it only cowardice when you use a tech and tactical edge to win decisively?
C'mon, let's look at all of this "power" that those evil corporatists have in a historical perspective. Compare it to say the Catholic Church (and no, this isn't intended to troll, merely illustrate). Even taking ALL of the corporatists as one unit this still seems a pretty valid comparison (and if you think MS and Sun are working together on all issues....).
And nearly everything now lies within their jurisdictions. America is becoming the headquarters of the Corporate Republic, a new kind of political entity that transcends geographic boundaries
Okay, the church certainly felt (feels actually, but I'll be mostly talking about a few centuries ago when it actually wielded significant power) that everything in daily life was their jurisdiction and, while headquartered in Europe rather than America they (it?) also definately transcended geographic boundaries.
Criticism is different from confrontation. Criticism -- still thriving on the Net, but declining elsewhere -- is the individual's primary weapon, a means to personal affirmation, the most readily available exercise of dignity and legitimacy. But criticism is often linked to culture, and as the latter become corporatized, criticism is on the decline. In the Corporate Republic, comformity and acquiescence are elevated, while criticism and individualism gets punished, marginalized or ignored.
You don't get much more against criticism than claiming that all who speak against the party line or even don't actively support it are damned to spend all of eternity being tortured in a wasteland of fire and brimstone. Talk about encouraging conformity -- "join with us, do as we do and after you finish with this possibly miserable, but in any case temporary life we'll make sure that you go to paradise for all of time, oppose us and after a life who's duration is meaningless compared to eternity you will pay...."
Yes, perhaps corporatism is a bad thing, wielding that kind of control can dampen individual's creativity and selfness, but it's not like it's new, it's merely a different form of how we (people that is) have always yielded to peer pressure and decided that it was easier to let some power from above dictate the framework within which we live our lifes... it's hard work always being an individual, most people are lazy and conformity means having to make fewer decisions.
At least with corporism it is not only possible but not all that hard for new members to join the oligarchy of power.... how many religions got any type of power in the domain of Catholicism (Europe primarily) during the thousand years 500-1500? In any case, the FORM of the powerholders may have shifted, but the fact that there ARE such powerholders has not. You can idealize all you want about individual freedoms and liberties but the fact remains that most people, given a choice, would rather let someone else make the choices.
First of all, I will say that charging someone for something they didn't order or authorize is
patently wrong and in most countries/states considered a form of fraud. I agree that this is how it should be.
Wait, it may be patently wrong, but doesn't Amazon own THAT patent too?
This isn't meant as a troll, it's meant to point out something that most people here seem to be missing.
1-click shopping fits the PTO's definition of an unobvious innovation. The standard says something similar to that if any experienced practitioner of the art would find the innovation obvious then it doesn't get protection. It should be obvious that 1-click shopping is a good thing, yet it still took Amazon a year or two before they started using it. They clearly HAD experienced practitioners working to improve the site constantly and yet it wasn't obvious to them, this alone shows that it fits the legal requirement to deserve protection.
Remember, back then (and still now on most sites) everything was viewed as a grocery-style model with users putting things into a shopping cart and then taking the shopping cart to a checkout. Once Amazon has shown that there IS a way to do 1-click shopping, it becomes easy to see ways of making it work, but until someone does it first it ISN'T obvious that the problems are solvable (for instance, if I order 3 books I want to pay a combined shipping charge, rather than 3 single book charges).
If someone can show that there was prior art, THAT would be a reason to have blocked this patent, but remember, it has to be art prior to Amazon's use of it in July 1996, not just prior to the filing date of June 1997. By the time they filed many people had copied them, but when Amazon first announced and started using 1-click it was a new model. They deserve the patent.
That said, I don't think they SHOULD enforce it, but they certainly seem to have the RIGHT to enforce it.
Patenting affiliate programs on the other hand..... I believe there WAS plently of prior art on THIS one.
One of the related stories from the same site a couple of weeks ago was titled "NASA auditors slam Boeing for space station overruns." And THAT was when they were only figuratively throwing money away.
Hi all, And no, this isn't intended as a troll. So far I haven't seen anyone give a single example of prior art. The best argument that anyone has made is that it was an obvious use of the existing technology (ie cookies). By cookies had been out for a year or two before Amazon started offering 1-click shopping. In HINDSIGHT this is an obvious invention. Given that it so obviously IS a benefit to the customers and that Amazon did have lots of intelligent people trying to make the customer experience better, why would it take them over a year to impliment this "obvious" invention. Because perhaps it isn't "obvious" until you've seen it. I think that 1-click shopping DOES meet the USPTO's definitions for patentability.
Now they could still have it disallowed if someone can prove prior art. One thing to note here is that you don't need to prove art prior to the June 1997 filing date, you need to prove art prior to the July 1996 date taht Amazon made the technology public. Even citing the fact that it was in widespread use as of the date they filed the patent is meaningless if no one else had publically used it before they did (as long as those two dates are less then a year apart which they were).
I've seen people cite prior art on the associates/affiliates program patent but I haven't seen anyone cite a specific dated example of prior use of 1-click ordering. If people DO have hard data of a use before July 1996 THAT would be a reason for the patent to be invalidated, but this was NOT an obvious invention and shouldn't be disallowed as one.
Again, I'm not trying to troll here, I think that this is an important point that gets overlooked constantly in these discussions. All that said I don't think Amazon SHOULD defend the patent, but to me it looks like they have the RIGHT to.
And we all KNOW that there aren't any student run porn sites that would be in *.edu domains....
There IS no easy fix that will filter everything "bad" and allow even reasonable amounts of non-"bad" to be unfiltered. It should be obvious that selectively allowing sites on a page by page basis would be nearly unworkable, especially when the dynamic nature of the sites and pages is taken into consideration.
That said, if you take filtering as a requirement, this is a reasonable way to filter MOST porn. If enough man-hours are put into adding trusted sites this could be workable, but it would require very large amounts of work to build the trust lists fast enough. If I were designing a commercial filter I think that I would use this method and hire a bunch of high school or college kids to build the lists (and quickly fire anyone who blatently included porn sites in the trust lists). This would still suffer from Rob's demonstrations of blocked sites that shouldn't be, but should block most porn (if done correctly, nearly all of the porn that is allowed should be only from domains that themselves don't have controls -- universities that host thousands of student websites, etc.). This is probably the most workable solution IF you require filtering, but it certainly WON'T block all porn.
-Brad
Re:Yes, you DO talk MUCH faster than you type!!!
on
Voice-Op Linux PDA
·
· Score: 2
Granted SR isn't right for everything, I wouldn't want to draw with it (or play quake, or any thing else where you need to move a pointer quickly and accurately, quake and photoshop don't work with SR for the same reason). For writing it is MUCH faster than typing. I can go at about 40 wpm typing or maybe a little faster... certainly I'm not exceptional, that's faster than most of my friends, but I've never taken any typing classes. Contrast this to my talking speeds. I can get accurate recognition from Dragon NaturallySpeaking at around 140 wpm and I used to work with someone who routiney is in excess of 160 wpm (I belive Dragon claims speeds of up to 150 wpm, the person I'm referring to was easily in excess of that).
Those are the figures for speaking at speeds that DNS can accurately transcribe. Yes, you do have to also account for correction, but if I'm writing I combine this step with my normal editing. It adds time but not too much, especially after you've used the system for a while and are getting good performance (98% or so).
When writing a report or whatever SR is easily faster than typing. It's not perfect, it doesn't work well for things other than text entry and command and control, but for what it does (which incidently is also nearly everything that people use their keyboard for) it does well and faster.
I just thought of an interesting idea... playing a 1st person shoot-em-up with mouse control for aiming and voice control for most other actions. I guess I'd still want the keyboard for movement, voce control of trying to run or whatever would still be kludgy. Oh well.
It does not say that it's open source, there's no indication that it is. why would you assume that it's open source just because it's designed to go on a Linux platform?
I am doubtful that we will see
true large vocabulary voice recognition (beyond the toy level) in the next 20, if not 50 years.
How do you define large vocabulary?
To give people an idea of what a large vocabulary is, Shakespeare used just over 31,000 words in ALL of his printed works counting proper names, words used once and mis-spellings. Any of the major speech recognition vendors (L&H, Dragon, IBM) can easily handle many more words than this. Certainly more words than are used by anyone in everyday life.
Not only isn't this open source, it's not new. AltaVista has been running this affiliate program for a while (at least months if not a year or more) offering $.03/click through for any link including search boxes. The translation might by newly added to the program, but the program just isn't news. -Brad
Actually I believe what they say is that you can't reuse THEIR discriptions/acounts/pictures/etc. of the game (wish I could remember EXACTLY what they say, but it's along those lines...).
Uhm.... One problem with this. In general the researchers don't own the IP they create. When I was in grad school I was required to sign a document giving my university the rights to anything new I came up with while doing research for them. Companies are the same way. The researchers are already owned, as are whatever they invent.
My understanding (from having recently looked into what it takes to switch to Florida residency) is that in general you can choose what state you're a resident of, but you might need to defend that choice. Indications that you really are a resident include things such as owning a home, being a registered voter, having a driver's license, etc.
The general thing is that you're a resident of the state you intend to return to when you're not there.
Oh, and the primary indication would be where you file your taxes.
If Company A is using a technology first, Company B can't patent it due to the fact that it is prior art from Company A. So you can't just going looking at what a company is doing, figure out what they forgot to patent, patent it and hold them ransom for huge royalties for your "invention".
Yeah, but for cases like this where a real underwriter wouldn't be willing to touch you and all you need is to trick a bunch of retail investors into thinking "ooohhh, here's another LINUX IPO that'll go up 700% today, but this one _I_ can get in on at the beginning...." it probably will work. If they'd positioned themselves as "trying to do an Internet IPO 'to help the individual investor get a better deal'" and doing this more as a statement against traditional methods rather than because they are too scammy to do it the real way they could even have good enough spin that guilible investors might buy the story (and the stock).
Unfortunately they'll probably manage to do well and make a pile of money before disappearing into the night....
Slashdot Mirror
It works really well IMO. I haven't tried it since the first couple of releases back around 1997-1998, but even then it was much better than you're desribing. Yes you have to speak punctuation. You have to type it too, this isn't an unreasonable requirement. Accents very rarely caused major problems and the software is very good at adjusting to nearly any user.
Too bad the whole L&H thing happened. It would be much more interesting if Dragon still existed (for real, not the ScanSoft ownership of the name/cade that isn't still the same company).
-B
-B
-B :)
This was just on CNBC... apparently the assumed front runner for doing the security development took off today on the news despite the fact that this is at LEAST a year or two out and that there's no guarantee that they'd be the company that most people used.... Gotta love that market.
Ever since we've been trying to figure out if they failed her because she didn't have a personality or because she had one. :)
Cowardice by the English or stupidity by the French? At both Agincourt and Crecy the French allowed themselves to be suckered into trying to charge heavily loaded horses across large open MUDDY fields slogging through the range of the long bows. And to make matters worse, at Crecy they stuck their crossbowmen in front of their knights who eventually got frustrated at getting picked of by the English and rode down their own bowmen. Learning a lesson from this, a hundred years later at Agincourt they stuck the crossbowmen behind the knights, rendering them SO far out of range that they again were a non factor.
The French had the English massively outnumbered and out provisioned and still managed to get spanked twice on their own turf. Is fighting a battle when your enemy has 3 times your number cowardice, or is it only cowardice when you use a tech and tactical edge to win decisively?
-B
Yes, perhaps corporatism is a bad thing, wielding that kind of control can dampen individual's creativity and selfness, but it's not like it's new, it's merely a different form of how we (people that is) have always yielded to peer pressure and decided that it was easier to let some power from above dictate the framework within which we live our lifes... it's hard work always being an individual, most people are lazy and conformity means having to make fewer decisions.
At least with corporism it is not only possible but not all that hard for new members to join the oligarchy of power.... how many religions got any type of power in the domain of Catholicism (Europe primarily) during the thousand years 500-1500? In any case, the FORM of the powerholders may have shifted, but the fact that there ARE such powerholders has not. You can idealize all you want about individual freedoms and liberties but the fact remains that most people, given a choice, would rather let someone else make the choices.
-B
I just wonder who was trolling better, the original poster or the moderator who flagged this as interesting? :)
1-click shopping fits the PTO's definition of an unobvious innovation. The standard says something similar to that if any experienced practitioner of the art would find the innovation obvious then it doesn't get protection. It should be obvious that 1-click shopping is a good thing, yet it still took Amazon a year or two before they started using it. They clearly HAD experienced practitioners working to improve the site constantly and yet it wasn't obvious to them, this alone shows that it fits the legal requirement to deserve protection.
Remember, back then (and still now on most sites) everything was viewed as a grocery-style model with users putting things into a shopping cart and then taking the shopping cart to a checkout. Once Amazon has shown that there IS a way to do 1-click shopping, it becomes easy to see ways of making it work, but until someone does it first it ISN'T obvious that the problems are solvable (for instance, if I order 3 books I want to pay a combined shipping charge, rather than 3 single book charges).
If someone can show that there was prior art, THAT would be a reason to have blocked this patent, but remember, it has to be art prior to Amazon's use of it in July 1996, not just prior to the filing date of June 1997. By the time they filed many people had copied them, but when Amazon first announced and started using 1-click it was a new model. They deserve the patent.
That said, I don't think they SHOULD enforce it, but they certainly seem to have the RIGHT to enforce it.
Patenting affiliate programs on the other hand..... I believe there WAS plently of prior art on THIS one.
-B
-Brad
And no, this isn't intended as a troll.
So far I haven't seen anyone give a single example of prior art. The best argument that anyone has made is that it was an obvious use of the existing technology (ie cookies). By cookies had been out for a year or two before Amazon started offering 1-click shopping. In HINDSIGHT this is an obvious invention. Given that it so obviously IS a benefit to the customers and that Amazon did have lots of intelligent people trying to make the customer experience better, why would it take them over a year to impliment this "obvious" invention. Because perhaps it isn't "obvious" until you've seen it. I think that 1-click shopping DOES meet the USPTO's definitions for patentability.
Now they could still have it disallowed if someone can prove prior art. One thing to note here is that you don't need to prove art prior to the June 1997 filing date, you need to prove art prior to the July 1996 date taht Amazon made the technology public. Even citing the fact that it was in widespread use as of the date they filed the patent is meaningless if no one else had publically used it before they did (as long as those two dates are less then a year apart which they were).
I've seen people cite prior art on the associates/affiliates program patent but I haven't seen anyone cite a specific dated example of prior use of 1-click ordering. If people DO have hard data of a use before July 1996 THAT would be a reason for the patent to be invalidated, but this was NOT an obvious invention and shouldn't be disallowed as one.
Again, I'm not trying to troll here, I think that this is an important point that gets overlooked constantly in these discussions. All that said I don't think Amazon SHOULD defend the patent, but to me it looks like they have the RIGHT to.
-Brad
There IS no easy fix that will filter everything "bad" and allow even reasonable amounts of non-"bad" to be unfiltered. It should be obvious that selectively allowing sites on a page by page basis would be nearly unworkable, especially when the dynamic nature of the sites and pages is taken into consideration.
That said, if you take filtering as a requirement, this is a reasonable way to filter MOST porn. If enough man-hours are put into adding trusted sites this could be workable, but it would require very large amounts of work to build the trust lists fast enough. If I were designing a commercial filter I think that I would use this method and hire a bunch of high school or college kids to build the lists (and quickly fire anyone who blatently included porn sites in the trust lists). This would still suffer from Rob's demonstrations of blocked sites that shouldn't be, but should block most porn (if done correctly, nearly all of the porn that is allowed should be only from domains that themselves don't have controls -- universities that host thousands of student websites, etc.). This is probably the most workable solution IF you require filtering, but it certainly WON'T block all porn.
-Brad
Those are the figures for speaking at speeds that DNS can accurately transcribe. Yes, you do have to also account for correction, but if I'm writing I combine this step with my normal editing. It adds time but not too much, especially after you've used the system for a while and are getting good performance (98% or so).
When writing a report or whatever SR is easily faster than typing. It's not perfect, it doesn't work well for things other than text entry and command and control, but for what it does (which incidently is also nearly everything that people use their keyboard for) it does well and faster.
I just thought of an interesting idea... playing a 1st person shoot-em-up with mouse control for aiming and voice control for most other actions. I guess I'd still want the keyboard for movement, voce control of trying to run or whatever would still be kludgy. Oh well.
-Brad :)
To give people an idea of what a large vocabulary is, Shakespeare used just over 31,000 words in ALL of his printed works counting proper names, words used once and mis-spellings. Any of the major speech recognition vendors (L&H, Dragon, IBM) can easily handle many more words than this. Certainly more words than are used by anyone in everyday life.
So exactly how large is TRUE large vocabulary?
-Brad :)
Not only isn't this open source, it's not new. AltaVista has been running this affiliate program for a while (at least months if not a year or more) offering $.03/click through for any link including search boxes. The translation might by newly added to the program, but the program just isn't news. -Brad
You COULD publish your OWN description.
-Brad :)
-Brad :)
One problem with this. In general the researchers don't own the IP they create. When I was in grad school I was required to sign a document giving my university the rights to anything new I came up with while doing research for them. Companies are the same way. The researchers are already owned, as are whatever they invent.
-Brad :)
My understanding (from having recently looked into what it takes to switch to Florida residency) is that in general you can choose what state you're a resident of, but you might need to defend that choice. Indications that you really are a resident include things such as owning a home, being a registered voter, having a driver's license, etc.
The general thing is that you're a resident of the state you intend to return to when you're not there.
Oh, and the primary indication would be where you file your taxes.
-Brad
If Company A is using a technology first, Company B can't patent it due to the fact that it is prior art from Company A. So you can't just going looking at what a company is doing, figure out what they forgot to patent, patent it and hold them ransom for huge royalties for your "invention".
Unfortunately they'll probably manage to do well and make a pile of money before disappearing into the night....
-Brad :)