The absolute best part of this is the applicability of Wheaton's Law, part of a speech that was ironically delivered *at* PAX, which this guy clearly was "too good" to pay attention to:
This guy's life isn't over because he had a bad day, his life is over because he can no longer hide from how big of a douche he is... If you are having a bad day you can a) ignore emails and calls, b) reply tersely to emails and calls, or c) reply with hubris and hostility to emails and calls. He chose C, and not many people who aren't huge douchey assholes would do the same. Now, everyone knows his rap and I have to say that in this case (but not every case) the "mob" on the internet did the world a favor. This guy deserves to have a very very shitty reputation, as he had many MANY opportunities to not be a complete dick but chose instead, to be a complete dick.
His "bad day" was the one where he got caught, called out, and summarily e-persecuted for it.
It's the complete reverse in the rest of America, too. Everyone else is pushing for online payment and electronic billing because it saves on paper and postage costs.
Verizon is the first company I've seen try to pull an asshat move like this. I think why Verizon is trying it now involves a couple things. For one, large telecoms like Verizon and AT&T have for years felt entitled to licenses to print money hand over fist, and whenever revenue drops due to market changes or technological development, their biggest priority is to find somewhere else to recoup that lost revenue. My guess here is that Verizon noticed that a majority of their customers were already paying their bills online, so they decided to start charging a fee to do it, knowing that their customer base already appreciates the convenience of online bill payment and inertia would prevent them from paying by mail. Other service providers, public utilities for example, likely have much older, entrenched, and less 'tech-savvy' customers so they need to provide incentives to move towards online billing and its associated cost savings.
A majority of their customers certainly pay their bills online, but they do it automatically and are hence exempt from this fee. Verizon is doing something very simple, encouraging their customers to prefer the automatic process over the manual one. There is undoubtedly a price break to handling the exact same payment method month after month vs handling a unique one each time, and they know they will save more money than they will lose in pissed off customers.
Sending invoice or auto-billing via internet saves them a lot, so I'm not sure I understand why Verizon would want to do thi.. oh right, more $$$.
Read TFA... It's about AUTO billing, as in giving VZ your payment info up front so they can sit back and let the money roll in. If you do that, there is no fee. The uncertainty of not knowing if the customer will pay their bill on time is worth the $2, at least to them.
The gist of this is to collect the money more *reliably*... If you set up auto-billpay (even if you choose to pay your bill some other way, which works fine in their system) you will not see this fee. They are doing this solely to encourage (nay, force) users to set up some sort of auto pay account so that they can have the assurance of getting their $165 per month for a family cell phone package... Like it or hate it, the fact is most users won't give a crap, either because they already chose the automatic option or they underestimate the ability for VZ to hide fees as line items that never get noticed, and just throw money at their cellphone bill each month anyway. Think of it this way, that $2 fee is only the equivalent of 8 full-rate text messages. And how long does it take you to rack up 8 text messages?
If people choose the 'wrong' app, and that could have been used to buy the 'right' one, people get irritated.
I think they over thought this one by a long shot.
That's it in a nutshell. Nothing feels worse than being out $1, AND knowing that you were the dope that pulled the trigger on the wrong thing. Once this happens once or twice you start to get a real aversion toward app purchases in general. If there were a better remediation process than a 15 minute(!) window to claim a refund, or the ability to really stick it to the app dev by one-starring his app (out of 1,237,843 reviews) maybe people would feel more at ease about the purchase.
The way it is today, you feel like you are at a bazaar and you are being hocked a $10 Rollex; you think to yourself "if this thing breaks even 15 minutes from now I will never see this guy again." Low low prices, nonexistent "Brands", and a lousy return policy all add up to a lousy "marketplace". If Apple (or whoever) wants to turn the tide on the flood of shit apps, they need to find devs who are better at branding, and give them ways to promote themselves. But then again, they are making billions off of people who have no problem plonking down $1 here and there without thinking twice, so why should they even care?
Had Apple created a really low minimum price for apps — say $0.15 — instead of offering free apps on day one, Ariely suggests, we would be anchored to the idea that apps should cost something.
Normally I really enjoy a good behavioral economics essay but this is more of a mashup of hyperbole and sarcasm. The anguish about buying $.99 apps IS that we don't have a good understanding of what a "fair" price is, like he suggests. But more to the point, the reason we don't think we can judge the fairness of the price is that there is SO. MUCH. SHIT. in the app store (this goes for every app store out there.) A free app might be super great and we feel like we really struck gold when we downloaded it and fired it up. A $4.99 app might have been totally disappointing to the point where we either go after a refund (if it is available) or simply anguish over the wasted money on an app that is so poorly written as to be preferably NOT installed on our mobile device of choice. The same effect that makes us feel like we struck gold with that free app find works against our desire to get a paid app, we feel like we are really rolling the dice, and to most of us gambling is only attractive when its flashy and involves glossy cards or red dice.
Get a gingerbread version on it (see: androidcentral.com, xda-developers.net, or any similar site) and be careful when you enable 4g data (it kills the battery on any phone). You will not regret it; the Galaxy S is a solid performer. Samsung definitely has a screwed up software release process (not unlike most other companies) but the hardware is fantastic.
We'll have to wait for consumer spending to go up before the 'flying surfboard' arrives
How dumb is a quote like that? Well in France they actually HAVE a flying surfboard, RIGHT NOW. Way for your first "prediction" to be completely wrong. I won't bother to point out the "news" source that would publish this kind of hyper-pessimist attitude, you can fill in the blank yourselves.
Bzzzzt. Wrong. All the things you described don't mean shit because the ability/attractiveness of two working parents lies solely in the cost/convenience of child care, not simply about the value of what either parent takes home. The things you describe might account for the decline in the number of children per family unit but not for the family's decision to have both parents work. If anything, the "declining value" of individual income would lead more people to prefer staying home and taking care of the kids instead of trying to work in order to afford paying someone else to do it. Or, did you think child care was free?
Homeschooling only works if you can afford the loss of income of one of the parents (or the time-equivalent of one of the parents, or the split of work-hours such that neither parent gets to see the other one most days...).
Which brings to mind another question - productivity is now many times what it was when the country was founded - we're down to less than 2% of the workforce needed for agriculture from something like 80%, and that's not even the industry with the most significant gains.
So.. why DO so many families need two full-time incomes just to make ends meet, or even to live in a modest amount of comfort?
What exactly is a skyscraper full of tax auditors or derivatives traders doing for the bottom line productivity of the nation? Sure, it takes less people to grow our food but we have found plenty of other ways to dick around since then. Add in the increase in the standard of living, since surely you don't think that there is no resource difference between a family of 8 living in 1500 sq feet to a family of 3 living in 2500 sq feet with 4 flat screen TVs and two cars (oh and interior plumbing AND electricity.)
But I digress. The reason the two-working-parents lifestyle is so attractive is that anyone with a reasonable education can earn more than those who provide child care, and simple math will point you in the right direction from there. A parent with any sort of education and ambition is more valuable in the workforce than sitting at home watching the young'ns (for a reasonably low quantity of young'ns.)
Yeah, let's weld the bugger shut, so that nobody, including the imaginary bad guy can get in. And if you need to change the oil then just buy a new and upgraded car, that will come with brand new oil.
It's that or you will have droves of flaming fanboys chanting "android cars don't get oil changes in a timely manner even though it doesnt impact performance at all!" and "my iThing gets oil changes every other week whether i like it or not; and yes i like it!"
Why we can't just leave the device details up to the manufacturers and pick our devices based on the features and benefits they offer is beyond me. Some people just love to drown in minutia, personally I would rather buy something that works, return it if it doesn't, and buy another/newer one if it makes me happy.
To correctly understand the meaning of a question or sentence you'll need something with the horsepower, database and algorithms of IBM's Watson.
And even tough it is quite impressive, it takes a full room just to parse a single question within a second, so if you want 99% accuracy you'll have to wait some more time...
At a rate of 1 a second, Google could still get a single datacenter to solve 86,400 questions a day. Not quite their normal speed (nor would they make much money at that rate) but they could cache the most popular results and after a few days probably only need to call on the computer for 1 in 10,000 searches. Remember, the true horsepower of voice recognition/response is not needed on your phone, but rather in a network of huge room-sized computers scattered all over the planet.
As for your reference to IBM's Watson supercomputer, it was just 10 racks (still a lot, sure) and it was *questioning answers*, not the other way around... I don't imagine any time I need my phone to think of the right response to "It is the only state lying south of the tropic of cancer" unless I am watching Jeopardy! trying to get all the answers right.
And that's why Siri has a "beta" label. English is ambiguous, and where it gets the wrong side of an ambiguity, it needs extra rules or more training to correct that. These things are spotted and Apple will fix them.
By the time Google are ready, Siri will be much better than it is now. And you can expect all the mistakes Google's "Majel" to then be the object of scorn, with side by side examples showing Majel getting it wrong, and the then more mature Siri getting it right.
Want to put money on it, or is this just more misguided fanboy prognostication? Never mind that as described, the main difference between Siri and the Google product will be a lack of "cute" bullshit like this; the Google product may not even have such a stupid notion as holding an identity for its "master" to get wrong in the first place. Maybe, just maybe, it will actually just focus on doing what the user wants.
There's a big difference between standard search engine queries and the things people ask voice recognition software. Simply owning a search engine doesn't mean you're going to be awesome at understanding human language and delivering results accordingly. That comes through trial-and-error, which is why Apple has a headstart here.
If you don't realize that a significant number of Google searches are entered in plain English (in the form of a question) then boy are you behind... Fire up any Google portal that supports suggested searching and start a question, like "how do i" and watch as it recants popular natural language searches. I like "how do i update my iphone", how apropos. You will see similar things for "how will" "how should" "how does" etc. People have been using Google like they would use a "human" for many years. They also know that for any given natural question, what results are the most popular (based on a number of choices only possible to present on a full computer screen). Don't worry one bit about how well Google understands language, accurate results, etc.
Yep, that never made sense. Data was impossible to reproduce (even by Data), even though his creator had produced two of him, and he could be perfectly disassembled and reassembled at a molecular level by a common transporter. By all rights, there should have been thousands of Data-like androids in existence.
Notice how the only time they ever used the transporter for replication (aka a "failure" that resulted in a copy of the thing being transported), it turned out AWFUL? Who is to say that Lore isn't the byproduct of a transporter accident? Why aren't important people "buffered" in the transporter in case they get killed in an away mission so they can just be resurrected video game style? Lots of things about it aren't obvious but at a point (way before any of these questions are asked, btw) you have to just say "that's the way it has to be"... Star Trek was a show about ONE possible future with significantly advanced technology, not EVERY possible future.
Real world usage of voice recognition at the level of Siri? Yes. Here's an article by an ex-IBM researcher who worked on voice recognition for six years explaining why Siri was released in beta form in the first place. The saying in the community is "there is no data like more data." Engineers at Apple can see all the things people are asking Siri, the queries it doesn't recognize, and so on, and they can use that valuable feedback to tweak the system. Infamous gaps in Siri's functionality, like the "abortion clinic" question, will be fixed at release.
Google certainly had voice recognition features before, but they weren't much used, nor were they on the level of Siri.
Don't forget "From now on, I will call you 'An Ambulance', OK?"... Hilarious sense of humor that she has, I imagine if I were in that situation my iPhone 4S would be headed out the nearest window at light speed.
End the two-party system. That is the only way we're going to get ANY kind of accountability or responsibility from the American government. We need the alternative vote NOW, and we need to end the electoral college.
The United States aren't a democracy, and we're not even a republic anymore. We don't have the right to vote on matters of policy, nor do we have the right to vote for the president and his cabinet. We participate in a shell game they set up through gerrymandering and the threat that your vote will be meaningless if you don't vote for one of the two approved party candidates.
There is NO legitimate excuse why we shouldn't have the alternative vote in America, except that the Democrats and Republicans don't want it. There is NO legitimate excuse as to why we need the electoral college in America, we don't even have ballots anymore, it is all done electronically.
You raise another unfortunate issue: Gerrymandering (in its many forms) allows whatever party is in power to conglomerate that power. Put three parties up there and guess what, you have three groups to blame for the shitty way the country is run. You need one (of however many) parties to be not only "for" but "hell bent on" AND "backed by a majority" regarding issues like electoral equality, free speech, civil rights, etc. Until then you can have fifteen parties and still end up with the same crap (see: any other 3+ party system in the world).
Yes. Thats why Apple release Siri for older phones. Its because they dont want you to buy the latest iProduct.
No, that's because Siri is beta and they want to tune the thing with a reasonable amount of load before they push it out to all iOS5 owners.
Nothing says "small beta" like a national advertising campaign extolling the virtues of a phone that "you just talk to"... Or a launch event claiming it was a "Game changer" even though Android phones have had every bit of that technology (minus the self-reading SMS) already rolled into one app. Nope, that doesn't make sense, Apple would only do something with a sound technical basis, in the interest of the customers. I will be waiting with baited breath on the upcoming release of Siri for the iPhone 3GS (a phone still being sold as new and fully capable of running Siri).
...and iOS 5.0 supports my two-and-a-half year old iPhone 3GS.
Can someone tell me if any Android-based phone of that age is still supported by any vendor? Rail against Apple all you want, but the fact is that iPhones are supported longer than any Android-based phones. It's not iPhone buyers that are compelled to rush to the store to buy the newest model. It's Android-based phone users that are flavor-of-the-week... because they have no choice.
Do those "updates" perform equally well (Cough, iPhone 3) and are all of the features available (cough, Siri) on all of the platforms? If the answer to either question is no, then what is an upgrade besides a change to the text in the version number and perhaps some alternate windowdressing? The fact is that Apple makes it's customers happy by providing updates but the net effect is shockingly similar to what Android users experience: by and large a phone that does what they want it to do.
There is no substance unless there is a point to be made that leaving older devices to go without updates is somehow detrimental to their performance (which there may be, and that is where the argument should originate.) Playing the game of whose updates are more frequent or more visible is really just a pissing match.
I've always loved that argument. It's like saying McDonald's shouldn't improve its food because it's the most popular restaurant, or that Justin Bieber is a better artist than Mozart because he sells more music per year.
Why, pray tell, should McDonalds improve their food? Except for the (possibly valid, depending on where you fall in the support of Nanny-State vs Libertarianism) argument that their food is unhealthy to the point of being a risk to public health, the fact remains that people by the billions *choose* to eat there in the face of many many alternatives.
Is it the "best" food by a metric of healthfulness or flavor? Not many will argue that it is. Is it nevertheless sought after by billions worldwide? Unless all their customers are somehow deceived or defrauded while frequenting McDonalds, what exactly is the problem with accepting the fact that it is an immensely popular product? Should only those companies whose standards align with *yours* be permitted to be popular?
Android is more like a collection of related but not entirely compatible operating systems. The inability to have a consistent version of the operating system across current smartphones is really surprising for something that's supposed to be an open source project, but one of the big drawbacks of Android is how much control Google gives the carriers over your phone.
Sounds like someone has very little understanding of what Android is or does. The source can be compiled and run on nearly any device bearing the "Android" name, the big issue is that they are each so unique that it takes a significant amount of dedicated code for each device to perform to the fullest of its ability. Trying to make a version that literally ran on every single phone and tablet would result in a monstrously bloated OS that was impossible to update on its own anyway, so these sorts of complaints are really surprising in their own right due to the naivete required to lodge them. And as for the carriers having control; they are the ones selling and supporting the phone (not Google) so they rightly deserve a modicum of control. Whether the carrier chooses to do something good or bad with that control is a matter of perspective to the consumer and they should be expected to respond to that. After all, if they wanted to buy something that acted exactly the same way on every single branded device on every single carrier, they could have chosen that one to begin with.
Some call the fact that Android is co-opted by handset makers to do a variety of wonderful things on a huge array of unique platforms a problem...
When the actions of the service owner directly contradict the very NAME of the service in question,
So they changed it from a series of tubes to a dump truck?
Bingo. And not just any dump truck, one of those asshole dump trucks that drives around dropping 2" pieces of rock out the back and has a sign affixed to it proclaiming "Not Responsible For Broken Windshields".
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The absolute best part of this is the applicability of Wheaton's Law, part of a speech that was ironically delivered *at* PAX, which this guy clearly was "too good" to pay attention to:
Don't Be A Dick. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_Wheaton#Wheaton.27s_Law )
Full stop, say no more, we are through. If he knew of this simple rule he might still have a job.
Morale[sic] is: don't be a dick.
Wheaton's law strikes again!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_Wheaton#Wheaton.27s_Law
This guy's life isn't over because he had a bad day, his life is over because he can no longer hide from how big of a douche he is... If you are having a bad day you can a) ignore emails and calls, b) reply tersely to emails and calls, or c) reply with hubris and hostility to emails and calls. He chose C, and not many people who aren't huge douchey assholes would do the same. Now, everyone knows his rap and I have to say that in this case (but not every case) the "mob" on the internet did the world a favor. This guy deserves to have a very very shitty reputation, as he had many MANY opportunities to not be a complete dick but chose instead, to be a complete dick.
His "bad day" was the one where he got caught, called out, and summarily e-persecuted for it.
It's the complete reverse in the rest of America, too. Everyone else is pushing for online payment and electronic billing because it saves on paper and postage costs.
Verizon is the first company I've seen try to pull an asshat move like this. I think why Verizon is trying it now involves a couple things. For one, large telecoms like Verizon and AT&T have for years felt entitled to licenses to print money hand over fist, and whenever revenue drops due to market changes or technological development, their biggest priority is to find somewhere else to recoup that lost revenue. My guess here is that Verizon noticed that a majority of their customers were already paying their bills online, so they decided to start charging a fee to do it, knowing that their customer base already appreciates the convenience of online bill payment and inertia would prevent them from paying by mail. Other service providers, public utilities for example, likely have much older, entrenched, and less 'tech-savvy' customers so they need to provide incentives to move towards online billing and its associated cost savings.
A majority of their customers certainly pay their bills online, but they do it automatically and are hence exempt from this fee. Verizon is doing something very simple, encouraging their customers to prefer the automatic process over the manual one. There is undoubtedly a price break to handling the exact same payment method month after month vs handling a unique one each time, and they know they will save more money than they will lose in pissed off customers.
Sending invoice or auto-billing via internet saves them a lot, so I'm not sure I understand why Verizon would want to do thi.. oh right, more $$$.
Read TFA... It's about AUTO billing, as in giving VZ your payment info up front so they can sit back and let the money roll in. If you do that, there is no fee. The uncertainty of not knowing if the customer will pay their bill on time is worth the $2, at least to them.
The gist of this is to collect the money more *reliably*... If you set up auto-billpay (even if you choose to pay your bill some other way, which works fine in their system) you will not see this fee. They are doing this solely to encourage (nay, force) users to set up some sort of auto pay account so that they can have the assurance of getting their $165 per month for a family cell phone package... Like it or hate it, the fact is most users won't give a crap, either because they already chose the automatic option or they underestimate the ability for VZ to hide fees as line items that never get noticed, and just throw money at their cellphone bill each month anyway. Think of it this way, that $2 fee is only the equivalent of 8 full-rate text messages. And how long does it take you to rack up 8 text messages?
If people choose the 'wrong' app, and that could have been used to buy the 'right' one, people get irritated.
I think they over thought this one by a long shot.
That's it in a nutshell. Nothing feels worse than being out $1, AND knowing that you were the dope that pulled the trigger on the wrong thing. Once this happens once or twice you start to get a real aversion toward app purchases in general. If there were a better remediation process than a 15 minute(!) window to claim a refund, or the ability to really stick it to the app dev by one-starring his app (out of 1,237,843 reviews) maybe people would feel more at ease about the purchase.
The way it is today, you feel like you are at a bazaar and you are being hocked a $10 Rollex; you think to yourself "if this thing breaks even 15 minutes from now I will never see this guy again." Low low prices, nonexistent "Brands", and a lousy return policy all add up to a lousy "marketplace". If Apple (or whoever) wants to turn the tide on the flood of shit apps, they need to find devs who are better at branding, and give them ways to promote themselves. But then again, they are making billions off of people who have no problem plonking down $1 here and there without thinking twice, so why should they even care?
Had Apple created a really low minimum price for apps — say $0.15 — instead of offering free apps on day one, Ariely suggests, we would be anchored to the idea that apps should cost something.
Normally I really enjoy a good behavioral economics essay but this is more of a mashup of hyperbole and sarcasm. The anguish about buying $.99 apps IS that we don't have a good understanding of what a "fair" price is, like he suggests. But more to the point, the reason we don't think we can judge the fairness of the price is that there is SO. MUCH. SHIT. in the app store (this goes for every app store out there.) A free app might be super great and we feel like we really struck gold when we downloaded it and fired it up. A $4.99 app might have been totally disappointing to the point where we either go after a refund (if it is available) or simply anguish over the wasted money on an app that is so poorly written as to be preferably NOT installed on our mobile device of choice. The same effect that makes us feel like we struck gold with that free app find works against our desire to get a paid app, we feel like we are really rolling the dice, and to most of us gambling is only attractive when its flashy and involves glossy cards or red dice.
Get a gingerbread version on it (see: androidcentral.com, xda-developers.net, or any similar site) and be careful when you enable 4g data (it kills the battery on any phone). You will not regret it; the Galaxy S is a solid performer. Samsung definitely has a screwed up software release process (not unlike most other companies) but the hardware is fantastic.
We'll have to wait for consumer spending to go up before the 'flying surfboard' arrives
How dumb is a quote like that? Well in France they actually HAVE a flying surfboard, RIGHT NOW. Way for your first "prediction" to be completely wrong. I won't bother to point out the "news" source that would publish this kind of hyper-pessimist attitude, you can fill in the blank yourselves.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Water-Powered-Jetpack-Boots-Rocket,news-13444.html
Bzzzzt. Wrong. All the things you described don't mean shit because the ability/attractiveness of two working parents lies solely in the cost/convenience of child care, not simply about the value of what either parent takes home. The things you describe might account for the decline in the number of children per family unit but not for the family's decision to have both parents work. If anything, the "declining value" of individual income would lead more people to prefer staying home and taking care of the kids instead of trying to work in order to afford paying someone else to do it. Or, did you think child care was free?
The average cost of center-based daycare in the United States is $11,666 per year ($972 a month) per child.
http://www.babycenter.com/0_how-much-youll-spend-on-childcare_1199776.bc
Homeschooling only works if you can afford the loss of income of one of the parents (or the time-equivalent of one of the parents, or the split of work-hours such that neither parent gets to see the other one most days...).
Which brings to mind another question - productivity is now many times what it was when the country was founded - we're down to less than 2% of the workforce needed for agriculture from something like 80%, and that's not even the industry with the most significant gains.
So.. why DO so many families need two full-time incomes just to make ends meet, or even to live in a modest amount of comfort?
What exactly is a skyscraper full of tax auditors or derivatives traders doing for the bottom line productivity of the nation? Sure, it takes less people to grow our food but we have found plenty of other ways to dick around since then. Add in the increase in the standard of living, since surely you don't think that there is no resource difference between a family of 8 living in 1500 sq feet to a family of 3 living in 2500 sq feet with 4 flat screen TVs and two cars (oh and interior plumbing AND electricity.)
But I digress. The reason the two-working-parents lifestyle is so attractive is that anyone with a reasonable education can earn more than those who provide child care, and simple math will point you in the right direction from there. A parent with any sort of education and ambition is more valuable in the workforce than sitting at home watching the young'ns (for a reasonably low quantity of young'ns.)
Yeah, let's weld the bugger shut, so that nobody, including the imaginary bad guy can get in. And if you need to change the oil then just buy a new and upgraded car, that will come with brand new oil.
It's that or you will have droves of flaming fanboys chanting "android cars don't get oil changes in a timely manner even though it doesnt impact performance at all!" and "my iThing gets oil changes every other week whether i like it or not; and yes i like it!"
Why we can't just leave the device details up to the manufacturers and pick our devices based on the features and benefits they offer is beyond me. Some people just love to drown in minutia, personally I would rather buy something that works, return it if it doesn't, and buy another/newer one if it makes me happy.
To correctly understand the meaning of a question or sentence you'll need something with the horsepower, database and algorithms of IBM's Watson.
And even tough it is quite impressive, it takes a full room just to parse a single question within a second, so if you want 99% accuracy you'll have to wait some more time...
At a rate of 1 a second, Google could still get a single datacenter to solve 86,400 questions a day. Not quite their normal speed (nor would they make much money at that rate) but they could cache the most popular results and after a few days probably only need to call on the computer for 1 in 10,000 searches. Remember, the true horsepower of voice recognition/response is not needed on your phone, but rather in a network of huge room-sized computers scattered all over the planet.
As for your reference to IBM's Watson supercomputer, it was just 10 racks (still a lot, sure) and it was *questioning answers*, not the other way around... I don't imagine any time I need my phone to think of the right response to "It is the only state lying south of the tropic of cancer" unless I am watching Jeopardy! trying to get all the answers right.
And that's why Siri has a "beta" label. English is ambiguous, and where it gets the wrong side of an ambiguity, it needs extra rules or more training to correct that. These things are spotted and Apple will fix them.
By the time Google are ready, Siri will be much better than it is now. And you can expect all the mistakes Google's "Majel" to then be the object of scorn, with side by side examples showing Majel getting it wrong, and the then more mature Siri getting it right.
Want to put money on it, or is this just more misguided fanboy prognostication? Never mind that as described, the main difference between Siri and the Google product will be a lack of "cute" bullshit like this; the Google product may not even have such a stupid notion as holding an identity for its "master" to get wrong in the first place. Maybe, just maybe, it will actually just focus on doing what the user wants.
There's a big difference between standard search engine queries and the things people ask voice recognition software. Simply owning a search engine doesn't mean you're going to be awesome at understanding human language and delivering results accordingly. That comes through trial-and-error, which is why Apple has a headstart here.
If you don't realize that a significant number of Google searches are entered in plain English (in the form of a question) then boy are you behind... Fire up any Google portal that supports suggested searching and start a question, like "how do i" and watch as it recants popular natural language searches. I like "how do i update my iphone", how apropos. You will see similar things for "how will" "how should" "how does" etc. People have been using Google like they would use a "human" for many years. They also know that for any given natural question, what results are the most popular (based on a number of choices only possible to present on a full computer screen). Don't worry one bit about how well Google understands language, accurate results, etc.
Yep, that never made sense. Data was impossible to reproduce (even by Data), even though his creator had produced two of him, and he could be perfectly disassembled and reassembled at a molecular level by a common transporter. By all rights, there should have been thousands of Data-like androids in existence.
Notice how the only time they ever used the transporter for replication (aka a "failure" that resulted in a copy of the thing being transported), it turned out AWFUL? Who is to say that Lore isn't the byproduct of a transporter accident? Why aren't important people "buffered" in the transporter in case they get killed in an away mission so they can just be resurrected video game style? Lots of things about it aren't obvious but at a point (way before any of these questions are asked, btw) you have to just say "that's the way it has to be"... Star Trek was a show about ONE possible future with significantly advanced technology, not EVERY possible future.
Real world usage of voice recognition at the level of Siri? Yes. Here's an article by an ex-IBM researcher who worked on voice recognition for six years explaining why Siri was released in beta form in the first place. The saying in the community is "there is no data like more data." Engineers at Apple can see all the things people are asking Siri, the queries it doesn't recognize, and so on, and they can use that valuable feedback to tweak the system. Infamous gaps in Siri's functionality, like the "abortion clinic" question, will be fixed at release.
Google certainly had voice recognition features before, but they weren't much used, nor were they on the level of Siri.
Don't forget "From now on, I will call you 'An Ambulance', OK?"... Hilarious sense of humor that she has, I imagine if I were in that situation my iPhone 4S would be headed out the nearest window at light speed.
http://thingsthatsirisays.com/uncategorized/call-me-an-ambulance-fail/
I am pretty sure that neither are the classmates I would be interested in talking to again
See it as if your internal algorithm improved so that not all exceptions bring you to a grinding hold.
Like that one about Facebook membership being a mortal sin... Let's hope no one is still hung up on that...
End the two-party system. That is the only way we're going to get ANY kind of accountability or responsibility from the American government. We need the alternative vote NOW, and we need to end the electoral college.
The United States aren't a democracy, and we're not even a republic anymore. We don't have the right to vote on matters of policy, nor do we have the right to vote for the president and his cabinet. We participate in a shell game they set up through gerrymandering and the threat that your vote will be meaningless if you don't vote for one of the two approved party candidates.
There is NO legitimate excuse why we shouldn't have the alternative vote in America, except that the Democrats and Republicans don't want it. There is NO legitimate excuse as to why we need the electoral college in America, we don't even have ballots anymore, it is all done electronically.
You raise another unfortunate issue: Gerrymandering (in its many forms) allows whatever party is in power to conglomerate that power. Put three parties up there and guess what, you have three groups to blame for the shitty way the country is run. You need one (of however many) parties to be not only "for" but "hell bent on" AND "backed by a majority" regarding issues like electoral equality, free speech, civil rights, etc. Until then you can have fifteen parties and still end up with the same crap (see: any other 3+ party system in the world).
Yes. Thats why Apple release Siri for older phones. Its because they dont want you to buy the latest iProduct.
No, that's because Siri is beta and they want to tune the thing with a reasonable amount of load before they push it out to all iOS5 owners.
Nothing says "small beta" like a national advertising campaign extolling the virtues of a phone that "you just talk to"... Or a launch event claiming it was a "Game changer" even though Android phones have had every bit of that technology (minus the self-reading SMS) already rolled into one app. Nope, that doesn't make sense, Apple would only do something with a sound technical basis, in the interest of the customers. I will be waiting with baited breath on the upcoming release of Siri for the iPhone 3GS (a phone still being sold as new and fully capable of running Siri).
...and iOS 5.0 supports my two-and-a-half year old iPhone 3GS.
Can someone tell me if any Android-based phone of that age is still supported by any vendor? Rail against Apple all you want, but the fact is that iPhones are supported longer than any Android-based phones. It's not iPhone buyers that are compelled to rush to the store to buy the newest model. It's Android-based phone users that are flavor-of-the-week... because they have no choice.
Do those "updates" perform equally well (Cough, iPhone 3) and are all of the features available (cough, Siri) on all of the platforms? If the answer to either question is no, then what is an upgrade besides a change to the text in the version number and perhaps some alternate windowdressing? The fact is that Apple makes it's customers happy by providing updates but the net effect is shockingly similar to what Android users experience: by and large a phone that does what they want it to do.
There is no substance unless there is a point to be made that leaving older devices to go without updates is somehow detrimental to their performance (which there may be, and that is where the argument should originate.) Playing the game of whose updates are more frequent or more visible is really just a pissing match.
I've always loved that argument. It's like saying McDonald's shouldn't improve its food because it's the most popular restaurant, or that Justin Bieber is a better artist than Mozart because he sells more music per year.
Why, pray tell, should McDonalds improve their food? Except for the (possibly valid, depending on where you fall in the support of Nanny-State vs Libertarianism) argument that their food is unhealthy to the point of being a risk to public health, the fact remains that people by the billions *choose* to eat there in the face of many many alternatives.
Is it the "best" food by a metric of healthfulness or flavor? Not many will argue that it is. Is it nevertheless sought after by billions worldwide? Unless all their customers are somehow deceived or defrauded while frequenting McDonalds, what exactly is the problem with accepting the fact that it is an immensely popular product? Should only those companies whose standards align with *yours* be permitted to be popular?
Android is more like a collection of related but not entirely compatible operating systems. The inability to have a consistent version of the operating system across current smartphones is really surprising for something that's supposed to be an open source project, but one of the big drawbacks of Android is how much control Google gives the carriers over your phone.
Sounds like someone has very little understanding of what Android is or does. The source can be compiled and run on nearly any device bearing the "Android" name, the big issue is that they are each so unique that it takes a significant amount of dedicated code for each device to perform to the fullest of its ability. Trying to make a version that literally ran on every single phone and tablet would result in a monstrously bloated OS that was impossible to update on its own anyway, so these sorts of complaints are really surprising in their own right due to the naivete required to lodge them. And as for the carriers having control; they are the ones selling and supporting the phone (not Google) so they rightly deserve a modicum of control. Whether the carrier chooses to do something good or bad with that control is a matter of perspective to the consumer and they should be expected to respond to that. After all, if they wanted to buy something that acted exactly the same way on every single branded device on every single carrier, they could have chosen that one to begin with.
Some call the fact that Android is co-opted by handset makers to do a variety of wonderful things on a huge array of unique platforms a problem...
When the actions of the service owner directly contradict the very NAME of the service in question,
So they changed it from a series of tubes to a dump truck?
Bingo. And not just any dump truck, one of those asshole dump trucks that drives around dropping 2" pieces of rock out the back and has a sign affixed to it proclaiming "Not Responsible For Broken Windshields".