"Virtually overnight, Siri, the personal assistant technology in Apple's new iPhone 4S, has brought state-of-the-art AI to the consumer mainstream."
I just choked on my cup of tea reading that. It's voice recognition feed into some search engines, Wolfram Alpha, Yelp and some snippets from Wikipedia and the result plays through text to speech, mashed up with voice commands. If you call such a remix of off-the-shelf tech and existing services state-of-the art AI then you must be joking. Indeed voice commands have been in many phones for a while, Android has had it, including dictation, since the dawn of the time. The only part about that is right is Apple's sucess at re-launching things that have been around for a while as something new, and actually getting people to use them. FaceTime for example, is mere video calling which many phones support, but nobody uses.
What's worse is Apple probably managed to get a patent or two on Siri. It is so obvious that a bunch of coders at a hackathon could put something similar together in a few hours and have a demo of the same thing. Oh... wait... they've done exactly that, it's called Iris Alpha from a firm called, and it took eight hours.
Point is, while Apple's idea is clever, the polish and packaging good and the marketing cleverest, but it is absolutely not start of the art artificial intelligence, it's the sorry state of artificial stupidity, and why we have little to fear in the way of robot uprisings yet.
Give it a cute name and throw in some smart ass answers to inevitable cheeky questions and Apple has fooled a lot of people, clearly.
Because finally we'd start thinking long term, really long term. Right now mankind can't see much past the next financial year or two. And it's killing us.
What would really happen is incredible things that are not possible due to our still too-short life spans. It would easily be worthwhile to undertake projects that would not pay off for 20, 50 or 100 years. Something which just doesn't happen now. 5-10 years is too longer ROI in the global economy for many. A good fraction of our inability to think long term is our mortality creeping into economic decisions.
I am alone in thinking the social change that would come from this would be something other than the standard line about population boom, food shortages, and the others. Last I checked populations are crashing in western nations due to declining birth rate, we're facing a lack of workforce to care for a booming population of elderly, there is also a lot of inefficiency in the food supply throw in we are eating ourselves obese in the western world. We actually need to combat age related decline and extend life.
But think about this from your own personal perspective what could you do with a lifetimes wisdom, if you could be put back in a 20-something year olds body and mind? It's pretty simple. You'd kick ass.
Sounds a bit like Androids approach, which uses an aggressive approach to unloading components of apps out of memory, as well as closing background tasks. Basically things only really run when they are needed, and are expunged with prejudice if memory is required. It's a novel alternate approach for devices with limited memory that cannot have swap space. Right now conventional OSes will obediently use more and memory until it runs out. In fact it makes it look like swap space was always a ugly kludge in the computing world, and that giving the OS more power to manage it's memory was the way it should have always been.
Android never runs "out of memory", under extreme load it will aggressively force close apps to make room as necessary, eventually killing your foreground task, should it not behave itself. Beautifully the platform forces developers to consider data loss more.
All those years we lost our work due to memory issues. Now to calculate how much of my life has been wasted by an OS thrashing a swap file and ponder how things could have been.
Usablity is a problem just cannot be solved at a programmers desk. Part of the problem is developers use computers in a fundamentally different way to 99% of the rest of the population (commandline etc) and have a fundamentally different mental aptitude to users. There's no subsititute for getting people into a lab and watching what they do and even just asking them just to point out what they don't like and throw suggestions out there. You'll find what made sense at design time turns out to be not so good, perhaps a disaster. You'll perhaps find you didn't do enough designing and got into coding.
This is how Apple, Microsoft and others do it, and how some others with famous usability problems don't.
Radical suggestion, but consider the primary purpose of your application. If it's to be used by people (ie it's not a server), then usability and interface should of course be your number one consideration before the first line of code is even written. 99% of the IT world does not think like that, hence the horrific state of user interfaces.
Unlike the "look and feel" patents Apple is blocking the new Samsung Galaxy Tab over, this is actual real patent. On a side note, patent system still broken.
A lot of people use the integrated search in the start menu, often using the Windows hot key to pop it up, type something, hit enter. Power users especially work this way, it's the sole reason I keep coming back to Windows7 is the start menu with it's search and the taskbar is a productivity combo I don't seem to be able to match anywhere else.
Don't get me wrong metro is nice.. but I don't see it being productive. Microsoft seems unaware a good fraction of their users use their OS to get stuff done. Leave the idle content consumption and finger swipping to Apple.
For a momment there I had the crazy impression that there were already linux smartphone OSes you could buy and that the summary was wrong.
Android and Meego are Linux by any pertinent definition. Customizing a Linux kernel for $any_task is not itself an impressive feat -- a couple of hackers can shoe horn a kernel into a refridgeration compressor microcontroller in a weekend, while drunk. Coming up with a useful and spiffy looking software stack on top of it that runs on low end hardware is the real feat Nokia has to pull off.
We're only seeing the "no user serviceable parts in side" phenomena because the manurfacturers so far are the kind that love to do that, Apple, Motorola, Samsung, et al.
If you are introduce a shiny new product category that rabid fans will buy no matter how crippled it is, you somewhat get to dictate your terms to the market. Ie no administrator access and ToS that locks you out of dicking about with the hardware.
We'll see more serviceable tablets in the future, purely because there is some demand for it, that isn't currently being met at all.
Also after a while, people will have two or three generations tablets kicking about at home and suddenly realise what planned obsolesence means, that they have been buying a new on of these every 8-12 months, and adding to a growing pile of e-waste.
There's a limited but viable market there for repurposing, upgrading and revitalising old computing devices of any kind.
Honestly a lot of us are holding back from buying tablet computers because of the inability to do something as simple as plug in a usb stick or some other peripheral. There's a whole world of existing computing peripherals that are walled off to these idle content consumption devices.
Now if someone came out with a modular reconfigurable tablet form factor you'd bet it'd be popular with the/. crowd.
Judging by that, Password123 fits Apples definition of a 'secure' password. So does something like S3cur1tyP355w0rd which is the kind of thing I've seen set by allegedly qualified administrators to highly critical systems.
Ultimately including numbers, mixed case and punctuation invites easy-to-remember common substitutions and number combinations, which is what will happen 90% of the time, this doesn't significantly draw out a brute force attack attempt. A few random lowercase letters has more possible combinations than anything containing a dictionary word, and a few numbers.
Users tend to use the same or similar passwords across systems. If you could somehow get the user to sign up for something else, then what percentage of those who are also iTunes users will use the same password for iTunes? I wouldn't be surprised if it was 10% 20% or more?
Obviously, one of the random apps purchased will belong to the crooked developer/hacker. But if they've bought apps from multiple developers it would hide their fraud amongst random transactions. Steal $100 million to get $1 million? Probably worth it, if also untraceable.
Communication technology goes both ways, it's a tool. There is no simple clear cut answer whether it's good or evil it is equally available. We love to paint things broadly with a black or white brush and that's what's happened after the middle easy uprising and the London riots. One seeing praise for open communication, one seeing suggestions twitter and blackberry PIN messaging should have been turned off.
In reality really pissed off people will find a way to fight back. Taking a step back here, ultimately cutting off the communication network is not going to do much because that is not the actual cause, rather a mildly helpful catalyst. It's just an easy target for whoever needs to be seen to doing something, and is getting rather desperate.
Hell, if they cut of my slashdots I'd riot harder.
Ultimately a savvy dictatorship would use internet, the internet after all doesn't care what it's used for it just pipes your data. Certainly governments and influential organisations, political movements etc use misinformation on the internet and it's useful idiot syndrome to great affect (see Fox news lol).
Secretly we all know that facebook, twitter and anything blackberry is actually kind of crap. It's just that everyone else is on them, and they seem to work well enough. There's still no substitution for old school word of mouth for your little uprising, which by some measures is more effective. They can't switch that off.
Also, I would add: Home, End, in combination of course with the AVC and F. For example, holding shift then home/end will select text in a field before/after the cursor, which you can quickly delete. I do this without thinking about a dozen times a day, particularly with URLs.
When I see people clicking carefully repeatedly tapping backspace to edit something, I show them these tricks and yeah it's the "OMG I've been wasting my life.." response alright.
This is the basic shit that should be taught in schools, after first learning essentials like touch typing, but juding by the standard of IT new recruits today, it's not being taught instead kids are learning excel and powerpoint. Unfortunately in the world of Macs and now iPads this isn't going to get any better.
How about ultra high energy cosmic rays striking our atmosphere? The resulting collisions are far more energetic than any human experiment has so far achieved. They probably spit out a lot of stuff we haven't detected yet. http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/
In practice it won't matter. I calculated my 60gb SSD would have a lifespan of eight years based on it's current use over 6 months. Well before then 60gb won't be a useful size, and it would be bested in both price and performance by a $20 bargain bin 2 terabyte USB stick in 2019. It's more likely the RoHS compliant crap the controller board is soldered up with these days will fail long before the NAND chips actually begin to eat itself. Considering many gadgets these days have a 2-3 year design life (OTTOMH some laptop manurfacturers report 25% failure on three year warranty programs) before they are horrifically obsolete flash cycle limitations is just not a problem.
All it takes is something soft.. I've known people to lose a cellphone out of a pocket on a motorbike at 150kph only to find it relatively unscathed in a patch of grass. However reading TFA and seeing the picture, that phone hardly "survived" even if it does make calls.
I rooted my HTC Magic, a long time ago and have been running aftermarket ROMs on it.
It's kind of cool that I have current generation Android running on 2008 spec hardware which was abandoned by carriers at version 1.6 and the community has lost interest in updating Android for such decrepid hardware (CyanogenMod has stopped supporting this past 6.1). It's a testament to how awesome the OSS & modding community is.
Was it worth it? The phone works fine for calls and texts, has 90% of it's battery life, and is still working flawless after some horrific abuse that would have seen a iPhone 4 shatter into dust. (They don't make Droids like they used to). But increasingly many new Apps just don't work on such a old phone, let alone run acceptably. Many crash due to lack of RAM unless I enable a swap partition on a SD card (yes it's linux after all, can do that easily).
Ultimately I learned a lot about how the OS works, and learned quite a lot about how an OS should be done. Innovative multitasking and memory management and security too. Puts desktop OSes to shame. Somehow, it's Linux, yet you can make a lot of changes to your OS above and beyond installing apps without ever having to punch in a password to elevate to root. After decades of desktop OS practice, this is refreshing security practice.
It is always worth it for the learning and the insight.
Not just pay them not to attack, but pay them to go and place the bouys for you. Why? Because it gives them money from a non-piracy endeavour, their primary intention being financial gain. It's money they would have otherwise sought through ransom etc, and ulimtately keeps good people out of harms way. Would they hold the bouys to ransom? Well maybe, but you could make sure they are expendable, after all it's the data you want.
Or just get a Navy vessel to drop off the gear. Get in some target practice on anything that approaches. Only way to be sure.
Good job you posted anonymously. I think the balance of studies would point to, diet, lifestyle, environmental factors and psychological environment being the main causes of depression. Idiosyncratic and genetic factors cannot account for the entire problem in western society.
Man indigenous cultures don't even have a word for depression and wouldn't know what you meant if you explained to them.
There is substantial evidence mental illness has a huge dietary component. For instance, indigenous peoples around the world just do not experience western diseases as we know them, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancers, mental illnesses. Often an indigenous population picks up a western diet, western diseases explode out of nowhere.
It's been observed with North American Inuit, pacific islanders, Maori, Aboriginals and in asian countries. Dare I say there's more than ample evidence for a causal link between what we eat and a shit load of physical and mental illness.
Many cultures didn't even have words for depression, and when explained wouldn't have understood what it meant.
Asside from our obviously shitty psychological environment. What we eat is making us sick and unhappy.
Material wealth staves off unhappiness. Problem is, you don't meed much other than basic nutrition, some shelter and some useful possessions to be happy. Happiness comes from the social structure of the community you live in, and fufillment through experiences, social interaction and little things like hobbies.
The happiest people I know are into gardening or painting or travelling, make a point of not watching TV and really don't have affluenza or an obsession with the latest shiniest iThings.
Slashdot Mirror
"Virtually overnight, Siri, the personal assistant technology in Apple's new iPhone 4S, has brought state-of-the-art AI to the consumer mainstream."
I just choked on my cup of tea reading that. It's voice recognition feed into some search engines, Wolfram Alpha, Yelp and some snippets from Wikipedia and the result plays through text to speech, mashed up with voice commands. If you call such a remix of off-the-shelf tech and existing services state-of-the art AI then you must be joking. Indeed voice commands have been in many phones for a while, Android has had it, including dictation, since the dawn of the time. The only part about that is right is Apple's sucess at re-launching things that have been around for a while as something new, and actually getting people to use them. FaceTime for example, is mere video calling which many phones support, but nobody uses.
What's worse is Apple probably managed to get a patent or two on Siri. It is so obvious that a bunch of coders at a hackathon could put something similar together in a few hours and have a demo of the same thing. Oh... wait... they've done exactly that, it's called Iris Alpha from a firm called, and it took eight hours.
Point is, while Apple's idea is clever, the polish and packaging good and the marketing cleverest, but it is absolutely not start of the art artificial intelligence, it's the sorry state of artificial stupidity, and why we have little to fear in the way of robot uprisings yet.
Give it a cute name and throw in some smart ass answers to inevitable cheeky questions and Apple has fooled a lot of people, clearly.
Because finally we'd start thinking long term, really long term. Right now mankind can't see much past the next financial year or two. And it's killing us. What would really happen is incredible things that are not possible due to our still too-short life spans. It would easily be worthwhile to undertake projects that would not pay off for 20, 50 or 100 years. Something which just doesn't happen now. 5-10 years is too longer ROI in the global economy for many. A good fraction of our inability to think long term is our mortality creeping into economic decisions.
I am alone in thinking the social change that would come from this would be something other than the standard line about population boom, food shortages, and the others. Last I checked populations are crashing in western nations due to declining birth rate, we're facing a lack of workforce to care for a booming population of elderly, there is also a lot of inefficiency in the food supply throw in we are eating ourselves obese in the western world. We actually need to combat age related decline and extend life.
But think about this from your own personal perspective what could you do with a lifetimes wisdom, if you could be put back in a 20-something year olds body and mind? It's pretty simple. You'd kick ass.
Sounds a bit like Androids approach, which uses an aggressive approach to unloading components of apps out of memory, as well as closing background tasks. Basically things only really run when they are needed, and are expunged with prejudice if memory is required. It's a novel alternate approach for devices with limited memory that cannot have swap space. Right now conventional OSes will obediently use more and memory until it runs out. In fact it makes it look like swap space was always a ugly kludge in the computing world, and that giving the OS more power to manage it's memory was the way it should have always been. Android never runs "out of memory", under extreme load it will aggressively force close apps to make room as necessary, eventually killing your foreground task, should it not behave itself. Beautifully the platform forces developers to consider data loss more.
All those years we lost our work due to memory issues. Now to calculate how much of my life has been wasted by an OS thrashing a swap file and ponder how things could have been.
Usablity is a problem just cannot be solved at a programmers desk. Part of the problem is developers use computers in a fundamentally different way to 99% of the rest of the population (commandline etc) and have a fundamentally different mental aptitude to users. There's no subsititute for getting people into a lab and watching what they do and even just asking them just to point out what they don't like and throw suggestions out there. You'll find what made sense at design time turns out to be not so good, perhaps a disaster. You'll perhaps find you didn't do enough designing and got into coding.
This is how Apple, Microsoft and others do it, and how some others with famous usability problems don't.
Radical suggestion, but consider the primary purpose of your application. If it's to be used by people (ie it's not a server), then usability and interface should of course be your number one consideration before the first line of code is even written. 99% of the IT world does not think like that, hence the horrific state of user interfaces.
Unlike the "look and feel" patents Apple is blocking the new Samsung Galaxy Tab over, this is actual real patent. On a side note, patent system still broken.
A lot of people use the integrated search in the start menu, often using the Windows hot key to pop it up, type something, hit enter. Power users especially work this way, it's the sole reason I keep coming back to Windows7 is the start menu with it's search and the taskbar is a productivity combo I don't seem to be able to match anywhere else.
Don't get me wrong metro is nice.. but I don't see it being productive. Microsoft seems unaware a good fraction of their users use their OS to get stuff done. Leave the idle content consumption and finger swipping to Apple.
For a momment there I had the crazy impression that there were already linux smartphone OSes you could buy and that the summary was wrong.
Android and Meego are Linux by any pertinent definition. Customizing a Linux kernel for $any_task is not itself an impressive feat -- a couple of hackers can shoe horn a kernel into a refridgeration compressor microcontroller in a weekend, while drunk. Coming up with a useful and spiffy looking software stack on top of it that runs on low end hardware is the real feat Nokia has to pull off.
We're only seeing the "no user serviceable parts in side" phenomena because the manurfacturers so far are the kind that love to do that, Apple, Motorola, Samsung, et al.
/. crowd.
If you are introduce a shiny new product category that rabid fans will buy no matter how crippled it is, you somewhat get to dictate your terms to the market. Ie no administrator access and ToS that locks you out of dicking about with the hardware.
We'll see more serviceable tablets in the future, purely because there is some demand for it, that isn't currently being met at all.
Also after a while, people will have two or three generations tablets kicking about at home and suddenly realise what planned obsolesence means, that they have been buying a new on of these every 8-12 months, and adding to a growing pile of e-waste.
There's a limited but viable market there for repurposing, upgrading and revitalising old computing devices of any kind.
Honestly a lot of us are holding back from buying tablet computers because of the inability to do something as simple as plug in a usb stick or some other peripheral. There's a whole world of existing computing peripherals that are walled off to these idle content consumption devices.
Now if someone came out with a modular reconfigurable tablet form factor you'd bet it'd be popular with the
Judging by that, Password123 fits Apples definition of a 'secure' password. So does something like S3cur1tyP355w0rd which is the kind of thing I've seen set by allegedly qualified administrators to highly critical systems.
Ultimately including numbers, mixed case and punctuation invites easy-to-remember common substitutions and number combinations, which is what will happen 90% of the time, this doesn't significantly draw out a brute force attack attempt. A few random lowercase letters has more possible combinations than anything containing a dictionary word, and a few numbers.
Users tend to use the same or similar passwords across systems. If you could somehow get the user to sign up for something else, then what percentage of those who are also iTunes users will use the same password for iTunes? I wouldn't be surprised if it was 10% 20% or more?
Obviously, one of the random apps purchased will belong to the crooked developer/hacker. But if they've bought apps from multiple developers it would hide their fraud amongst random transactions. Steal $100 million to get $1 million? Probably worth it, if also untraceable.
Have detailed firewall logs showing who's downloading what.
Communication technology goes both ways, it's a tool. There is no simple clear cut answer whether it's good or evil it is equally available. We love to paint things broadly with a black or white brush and that's what's happened after the middle easy uprising and the London riots. One seeing praise for open communication, one seeing suggestions twitter and blackberry PIN messaging should have been turned off.
In reality really pissed off people will find a way to fight back. Taking a step back here, ultimately cutting off the communication network is not going to do much because that is not the actual cause, rather a mildly helpful catalyst. It's just an easy target for whoever needs to be seen to doing something, and is getting rather desperate.
Hell, if they cut of my slashdots I'd riot harder.
Ultimately a savvy dictatorship would use internet, the internet after all doesn't care what it's used for it just pipes your data. Certainly governments and influential organisations, political movements etc use misinformation on the internet and it's useful idiot syndrome to great affect (see Fox news lol).
Secretly we all know that facebook, twitter and anything blackberry is actually kind of crap. It's just that everyone else is on them, and they seem to work well enough. There's still no substitution for old school word of mouth for your little uprising, which by some measures is more effective. They can't switch that off.
We are walking spacesuits for our single celled ancestors. They won billions of years ago. Excuse me, they need feeding now.
Also, I would add: Home, End, in combination of course with the AVC and F. For example, holding shift then home/end will select text in a field before/after the cursor, which you can quickly delete. I do this without thinking about a dozen times a day, particularly with URLs.
When I see people clicking carefully repeatedly tapping backspace to edit something, I show them these tricks and yeah it's the "OMG I've been wasting my life.." response alright.
This is the basic shit that should be taught in schools, after first learning essentials like touch typing, but juding by the standard of IT new recruits today, it's not being taught instead kids are learning excel and powerpoint. Unfortunately in the world of Macs and now iPads this isn't going to get any better.
I had a easier time than you. I just installed some .deb packages. Yeah a lot easier than Lion, haven't managed that yet.
How about ultra high energy cosmic rays striking our atmosphere? The resulting collisions are far more energetic than any human experiment has so far achieved. They probably spit out a lot of stuff we haven't detected yet. http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/
In practice it won't matter. I calculated my 60gb SSD would have a lifespan of eight years based on it's current use over 6 months. Well before then 60gb won't be a useful size, and it would be bested in both price and performance by a $20 bargain bin 2 terabyte USB stick in 2019. It's more likely the RoHS compliant crap the controller board is soldered up with these days will fail long before the NAND chips actually begin to eat itself. Considering many gadgets these days have a 2-3 year design life (OTTOMH some laptop manurfacturers report 25% failure on three year warranty programs) before they are horrifically obsolete flash cycle limitations is just not a problem.
All it takes is something soft.. I've known people to lose a cellphone out of a pocket on a motorbike at 150kph only to find it relatively unscathed in a patch of grass. However reading TFA and seeing the picture, that phone hardly "survived" even if it does make calls.
I rooted my HTC Magic, a long time ago and have been running aftermarket ROMs on it.
It's kind of cool that I have current generation Android running on 2008 spec hardware which was abandoned by carriers at version 1.6 and the community has lost interest in updating Android for such decrepid hardware (CyanogenMod has stopped supporting this past 6.1). It's a testament to how awesome the OSS & modding community is.
Was it worth it? The phone works fine for calls and texts, has 90% of it's battery life, and is still working flawless after some horrific abuse that would have seen a iPhone 4 shatter into dust. (They don't make Droids like they used to). But increasingly many new Apps just don't work on such a old phone, let alone run acceptably. Many crash due to lack of RAM unless I enable a swap partition on a SD card (yes it's linux after all, can do that easily).
Ultimately I learned a lot about how the OS works, and learned quite a lot about how an OS should be done. Innovative multitasking and memory management and security too. Puts desktop OSes to shame. Somehow, it's Linux, yet you can make a lot of changes to your OS above and beyond installing apps without ever having to punch in a password to elevate to root. After decades of desktop OS practice, this is refreshing security practice.
It is always worth it for the learning and the insight.
Not just pay them not to attack, but pay them to go and place the bouys for you. Why? Because it gives them money from a non-piracy endeavour, their primary intention being financial gain. It's money they would have otherwise sought through ransom etc, and ulimtately keeps good people out of harms way. Would they hold the bouys to ransom? Well maybe, but you could make sure they are expendable, after all it's the data you want.
Or just get a Navy vessel to drop off the gear. Get in some target practice on anything that approaches. Only way to be sure.
Good job you posted anonymously. I think the balance of studies would point to, diet, lifestyle, environmental factors and psychological environment being the main causes of depression. Idiosyncratic and genetic factors cannot account for the entire problem in western society.
Man indigenous cultures don't even have a word for depression and wouldn't know what you meant if you explained to them.
There is substantial evidence mental illness has a huge dietary component. For instance, indigenous peoples around the world just do not experience western diseases as we know them, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancers, mental illnesses. Often an indigenous population picks up a western diet, western diseases explode out of nowhere.
It's been observed with North American Inuit, pacific islanders, Maori, Aboriginals and in asian countries. Dare I say there's more than ample evidence for a causal link between what we eat and a shit load of physical and mental illness.
Many cultures didn't even have words for depression, and when explained wouldn't have understood what it meant.
Asside from our obviously shitty psychological environment. What we eat is making us sick and unhappy.
Material wealth staves off unhappiness. Problem is, you don't meed much other than basic nutrition, some shelter and some useful possessions to be happy. Happiness comes from the social structure of the community you live in, and fufillment through experiences, social interaction and little things like hobbies.
The happiest people I know are into gardening or painting or travelling, make a point of not watching TV and really don't have affluenza or an obsession with the latest shiniest iThings.
Hyperconsumerism = unhappiness.
I have suspected for a while now that certain players in the private space industry is quietly interested in going to Mars.
Modular in source, but still monolithic in runtime, since 1991. NT and OSX left behind monolithic kernels in the 1990s.