In fairness (I can't believe I'm defending a governing body fairly local to me), yes, these systems DO exist - today. If this project has been running for the past ten years, then the question becomes "did these systems exist somewhere in the 2000-2001 timespan?". It's like calling for heads when a company spent millions on developing custom devices for mobile security camera monitoring for a government insitution. Yes, in 2011, we have apps on our cell phones and relatively inexpensive tablets (on a government scale) to implement a mostly-off-the-shelf solution. The executive VP at my company can watch the security cameras anywhere he wants on his iPhone with his 3G data plan, but to have done that in 2001 would have been almost unthinkable (remember, in 2001 802.11b was JUST coming to market, and cellular data was as expensive as it was slow).
...and the axe of many of my friends, is that Facebook keeps changing their layout, users find out when they log in and are like "...what's going on?" since they can't find whatever it is they're looking for, and there's no way to change it back. I'm certain that Farmville users can find their farms, but it's getting more and more distilled into a platform where the communication aspects are less useful.
While yes, 99% of the groups were "1,000,000 strong for not clubbing baby seals" and "I hate it when people text me 'k'", there were a few groups that I was a part of that were genuine groups with active discussion boards. All of the discussion threads turned into wall posts with massive amounts of comments...and to someone, that made sense.
There's more and more spam happening. While admittedly they're doing much more to mitigate it than Myspace ever did, filtering out the malicious links is still ultimately a manual job. Even the nonmalicious stuff that's still unwanted takes a ridiculous amount of time to do right. While I blocked Mafia Wars, *ville, etc., my block list is a mile long because of it. The only one that was actually fun to me was Superpoke (there is, in fact, an odd humor to be found in throwing a virtual sheep at a friend), but the first time there was an official "new facebook", Superpoke got ditched in the process, so plug-ins became less useful unless you were someone like Zynga.
I was a fan of the 'old' messaging system, where it was effectively an e-mail. it made a lot of sense, since it was much easier to scroll the address book (i.e. my friend list), my friends frequently set up SMS notifiations so they could respond in a timely manner, and read receipts were automatic. When they asked if I wanted to change to the 'new message' system, I was like, "yeah, I'll try it out", silly me thinking they would allow me to go back if I didn't like it. Naturally, it was a one-way street.
At this point, Facebook to me is just another e-mail account, with a 'public message' view, a 'private message' view, and a game view (along with questionable privacy practices). Some of my friends are holdouts and still don't have a Facebook. While I used to be all "zomg you need one", I'm finding myself now saying "don't sweat it - is e-mail or cell better for you?" This usually provides me at least one - usually two - explicit means of contacting them. Facebook is relevant and useful, but I feel that there's a distinct possibility that it's in a position where its best days are behind it. If Zuckerburg is smart, he'll cash out now.
As long as there isn't a recovery partition (or even if there is, most of the time), boot from an OS install disk, go to repair mode, then type 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr'. you're now have a stock MBR.
I am a proud to be called a nerd. Call it to me in public as an insult and I will give you a public dissertation on how you suck at everything Cyrano style.
This.
Granted, this is Slashdot, where Geek Pride is basically expected, but I love beating people at their own game.
Them: Geek! (pejoratively) Me: Really? (enthusiastically) Them: Uhh...yeah. (*flips hair) Me: One question - do you generally make it a habit to call someone of inferior intellect a geek? Them: lolwut? Me: When you call someone a geek, is it because you think they're less intelligent? Them: No. Me:...So basically what you're telling me is that you're trying to insult me by admitting to everyone that I'm smarter than you...and I'm supposed to take offense to this? Them: uhhh......
It was particularly fun in college, when I'd bring up the fact that they're paying tuition dollars to attend the same institution, yet only one of us was getting our money's worth.
The Storm units sucked (everyone I know who bought one either hated it or has it stashed in a drawer with the rest of their defunct tech), but you could play tennis with a Curve 8330, walk away from the match, and continue making calls on it without thinking twice.
Unlikely because PhotoShop has significant "non-infringing" uses.
More to the point, it puts Adobe in a pretty sticky situation. Adobe uses all kinds of DRM and activation on their products, and Photoshop is among the most pirated pieces of software in existence. They rank pretty high up on a list of BSA members when sorted by columns involving dollar signs, so clearly they have a very vested interest in having a DMCA to throw at pirates. They don't (at least not in any high profile cases to my knowledge), but it's certainly a back-pocket play for them, should it ever be in theory be advantageous for them.
Conversely, if Photoshop is deemed as being a tool where "singificant noninfringing uses" are no longer sufficient, then that'd be quite the amusing scene to watch as a civil war erupts in Adobe's legal department. While the Slashdot Cynic in me says "it's a corporation, they'll pay off the judge to make some sort of exception", the more whimsical side would find that there would be significant entertainment value in watching lawyers duke it out. Once they've finished their little competition, the winner of the grudge match will be decided by the consensus of the Chief Actuary and CFO. For true irony, the verdict will be generated through a pirated copy of Excel.
...and I'd be perfectly fine with that - *IF* it actually worked that way. See, the voice recognition menu systems I generally deal with have absolutely no AI behind them - they are usually worse than the "Press 1 for billing, 2 for sales, 3 for support..." stuff, because they SAY they can understand you, but invariably point you to the wrong place.
See, a voice driven interface in which a specific set of commands is required is just a command line. Don't believe me? Call T-Mobile customer care and say "unlock my phone". I did this recently, since I wanted a SIM unlock for a phone that was out of contract and out of warranty. The first time I said it, it replied, "alright, problems with calls. So, briefly tell me what you're calling about." "I want to unlock my phone". "I'm sorry, I didn't get that, Let's try again." "Unlock my phone". "Sorry, can we give it another try?" "Unlock. My. Phone." After a few more rounds of this, the system finally decided to forward me to "a representative who could help". Fine. It sent me to general support, who then sent me to tier 1 support, who then had to forward me to a specialist.
I don't blame T-Mo for this, because this is just the norm. In fact, that call, end to end, took me about 15 minutes. A friend of mine was on the phone with a general representative over at Verizon for over an hour and a half trying to get the bluetooth to work with her car stereo before the rep admitted that she wasn't really a tech support rep! Certainly that's not exactly a good case study for voice driven menu systems.
I'm down for automating forwarding a customer to the correct department so they can get help. However, it seems to me that the mood that anyone calling a support line would inherently be in doesn't lend itself to making the customer feel supported by a computer who requires an argument, when a half decent receptionist could route calls better.
yes, I know i'll come off as an MS shill, but them's the breaks...
-I'll give you TCP/IP, only because I was a smidge too young to remember most of that story aside from the Wikipedia entry on Trumpet Winsock. However, being as Windows 98 and later came with TCP/IP, and all their server software releases supported it from 2000 on (I think NT 4.0 did as well), so it's not like Windows still doesn't support it, or it just got it in Win7.
-.Net was first rolled out around the time that Longhorn was in alpha testing. Recall during that time that broadband hadn't hit critical mass yet, and even Flash was still a Macromedia product, which was largely the successor to Shockwave which had a much higher install base at the time. The cloud makes a lick of sense in 2011, but in 2002 it didn't, at least at the scale necessary to make it work.
-Virtual Earth, Google Earth...can you elaborate on the competition? Sure, more people have Google Earth installed in my circle of users...but from what I can gather neither are exactly money makers, so I doubt either companies' shareholders are pounding down doors for it.
-In its day, Windows Mobile had a sizeable market share of the smartphone market. Granted, that was predecated on the idea of being able to do stuff at all, rather than doing it WELL, but there was still a market. Also, consider that the fact that the HTC G1 was on the market for over a year before T-Mobile started marketing it at all, and at that it wasn't really until Verizon bet the farm on the Motorola Droid that Android took off. I personally am clinging to WinMo 6.5 for dear life for certain reasons, but "failed" means that the product never made any significant market share, not "it wasn't an immediate success".
-The Zune was a flop, but to play the flip side, consider that at the time of release, iTunes still had DRM that wasn't compatible with the Zune Software, and Microsoft took too long to get their digital media house in order, which is an MS failure, but not a failure based on bad hardware - it was more a late-to-market ecosystem.
The one thing I agree with is the fact that a large company that's got a formula (MS with Windows and Office) is going to inevitably have an issue whereby intertia is almost impossible to overcome. Google without search? Apple without iTunes? Amazon without direct sales? This is what happens. MS will keep chugging along as long as there are desktops and servers in homes and small businesses.
Last I checked, Best Buy owned Napster, which, for $5 a month, let you stream whatever you wanted without having to upload anything AND purchase MP3 tracks AND has an iOS/Android app AND is completely independent of iTunes AND a halfway decent browser-based portal AND a thick client for people like me who still prefer it and/or use mobile devices it can sync with ("Janus", aka "PlaysForSure" devices along with generic mass storage devices, keeping in mind that Creative had some pretty slick media players back in 2007).
Forget "me too" behavior, this is "reinventing the wheel because the left hand is completely unaware of the existence of the right hand" behavior.
I was actually thinking about this earlier today. Admittedly, I do love how accurate speech-to-text is on my Android phone; typing out a text message *is* a lot quicker that way. However, my thoughts were more focused on how "For sales, press 1. For support, press 2. For billing, press 3." has been replaced with an automated voice (invariably female) who says "tell me what you're calling about", and then hasn't the slightest idea what to do when I say "technical support" or "representative"...or tries to evade actually sending me to one. Here's the epiphany I had:
Voice activated interfaces, independent of an AI, is a command line.
The commands are different, and generally optimized for things people are likely to say rather than minimizing typing, but when you boil it down the user must know the commands the computer will recognize. Until a viable means of comprehension is paired with voice activation, all we've got is a different means of doing the very thing that GUIs were designed to move us away from. Now I'm not saying that moving in this direction is a bad idea, like I said dictating text messages is a good thing. However, I think that there are other reasons why 100% voice interactivity will never be fully actualized, and they're not technical. If a person is texting in a movie theater, sitting toward the back with their phone on silent and the brightness low, it's not disturbing a whole lot of people. When I'm on the train, everyone is reading m.cnn.com, catching up on e-mail, or watching a video, and it's mostly quiet. Imagine half the train trying to dictate a URL? How do you play Angry Birds with your voice? Have you ever texted the person sitting next to you for the very reason that what you're saying isn't appropriate to be said aloud? The list continues like that.
You're arguing two points. An ad that tracks user data beyond the intent of the app (e.g. Google Nav needs to know where I am as a core component of its functionality, as does FourSquare [not that I use it]) is a bad thing. Traditional ads are a good thing, as is keeping them relevant. No sense in advertising a movie that's no longer in theaters, or rolling out new apps just for the sake up updating the ad packages, or making the APKs triple the size for the sake of bundling ads. Streaming ads from an ad server is an acceptable practice for a program that is free.
I agree with the fact that devaluing traditional ads is a bad thing, as is the extremely targeted ads that seem to be the growing trend. My point is more that network access to pull generic ads or coarsely targeted ads (i.e. a free SSH client advertising Rackspace or Kace given the inherent demographic that would download an SSH client in the first place) is acceptable to me. Making it possible for those devs to lose their revenue like this is not, but neither is the scenario you paint.
Every time the Kin comes up, I feel compulsed to write up the three sentence summary of the problem that was obviously overlooked by anyone using the Kin as a means of bashing MS...
The Kin cost $199, required a $30 data plan, and was a feature phone with facebook and twitter clients. The Blackberry Curve cost $199, though almost invariably had some sort of gimmick involving rebates, buy-one-get-one-free, or similar. It required a $30 data plan too, but had an actual web browser (didn't say a GOOD web browser), music and video player, MicroSD card, facebook/twitter clients, and BBM.
The Kin was a flop, but if it had a music player and only cost $5 for the data plan, the story might have been a bit different.
In fairness, every ad supported app requires network access for downloading apps. If you take that away, we as consumers like it as it's a quick and dirty ad blocker, but the advertisers and ad-supported app developers would get the short end of that particular stick.
I think the best compromise is on-demand permissions akin to what SuperUser does every time I start Wireless Tether or MyBackup Root - prompts me once root permissions are requested, giving me an accept/deny/remember my choice interface.
Usually I am against the rampant lawsuits over hot coffee and anything else the shills can think of, but this is one I am in favor of. Sony seems to have taken over as the current best example of "Evil Large Corporation" in the public eye, and deservedly so.
You must be confused, I haven't seen Sony behave in an evil way that is at all dissimilar to the other evil companies (MS, Apple, Nintendo, etc). So why should they be given the title of "best example of ELC".
Apple and Sony both sell devices whose firmware was jailbroken. Both jailbreak methods were made available through significant contributions from George Hotz. One of them brought Hotz to court. Guess Who.
DirecTV has something in their favor over Netflix: a set of pipes. Satellite internet is AFAIK still expensive and inherently very high latency (Counterstrike players, day traders, and VoIP users need not apply; you'll never see a two-digit ping), but it's an option that would be especially lucrative in rural areas where dial-up or wireless tethering are the only options. They've already got the backhaul circling the globe, so it's really a matter of whether they can match Comcast/Time Warner/Cablevision + Netflix subscription at the price point. On top of that, they've already got enough pull in Hollywood for their garden variety broadcast licensing. It'd be separate of course, but they've got the precedent. If they can ensure that the service can scale while keeping the prices competitive with the other guys without having to deal with the bandwidth caps, then they could actually be a serious threat to the present system for large groups of people.
I'd pay $15 a month to my local shoe store if they let me try them on, wear them to work or a party, and return them the next day, whenever I wanted, even multiple times a day.
True, but they're for different kinds of discovery. Pandora is great for finding stuff you haven't heard and expanding one's musical horizons. However, if $GOOD_BAND releases a new album, I'm not going to listen to 50 hours of Pandora to hear it. It's also not good at hearing older albums of bands with more recent releases, unless you're station seeds lend themselves to the older era.
Renting music is exactly like renting movies. There are certain movies I'll buy shortly after DVD release. There are other movies I'll buy at the bargain bin. Still others I'll get from Netflix. Some I'll watch when they're on broadcast TV and nothing better is on. They all compliment each other.
I'm a Napster subscriber, and have been since 2005. For $15 a month, I can stream whatever I want, and download protected WMA files. DRM, yes...but I clearly don't own them. I do this in order to determine whether a song or album is worth purchasing before I actually go out and buy it. Some songs I don't like enough to justify the purchase, so they eventually get deleted. Sometimes I'll put on a random playlist.
The anti-music rental camp seems to believe that renting music is at the complete exclusion of music purchases. I've got a sickening stack of receipts from iTunes, Napster, Amazon, and even buy about half a dozen CDs per year, on top of renting the music. Yes, rental-only is bad. Rental+purchase is not.
4) Google may be a big company, but they don't have the one really big stick - namely, the iTunes music store - that Apple does. Apple may actually be able to get the music industry to agree to non-extortionary terms that Google & Amazon simply don't have the leverage to negotiate.
You're right, but it would be funny as hell to hear the Google negotiations.
"We want to start a cloud music service so your customers have more ways to pay for your product" "That'll be *puts pinky to mouth* Ten BEEEELION dollars." "we were thinking more like...less than that, plus revenue sharing" "Well I'm sorry then, but I'm late to a meeting with Steve Jobs for his iStream project negotiations" "Alright then, we'll just have to save up our money then. I think we're going to have to downsize, starting with our DMCA takedown department...I'm sure those Rapidshare links will flush themselves in several months...and I dunno if we really have the bandwidth for those awfully popular VEVO videos on Youtube..." "...let me go make a phone call."
In their defense, they started the 'unlimited' pricing back with dial-up. Then, the telcos and cablecos were trying to get people to sign up for broadband, and if AOL was still offering unlimited and the cable company was offering a 50GB cap, even though it's technologically impossible to download that amount of data over a 56K modem, they wouldn't have made the sales they did. Besides, the web was still heavily targeting the dial-up crowd. When unlimited pricing started, there was no Netflix, no Youtube, no Flikr, no Carbonite, no bittorrent, and Napster at the time only did MP3s...I'm sure that back in 1998 when the local cableco started rolling out cable internet, anyone who hit a 10GB cap was comfortably in the third standard deviation. Double-backing on the 'unlimited' monkier would have been suicide at the time, simply because of inertia. Over that time, even low end users started using more and more bandwidth, but there's no clear-cut point when they could have stopped saying "unlimited" and not had a backlash.
It wasn't deceitful when they were able to deliver it. It is now since they no longer can.
that's not quite a fair comparison though. Cameras can be used to invade privacy (many celebrities learn this quickly), but those infringements are much more quantifiable an actionable, as it involves someone else taking the photos with their own camera. In this case, it is the person's own device taking location data without the user's explicit consent.
No, I can't really argue against someone's right to sit at a coffee shop across the street and log my going and coming into a particular building. I can't stop them from following me in traffic, but there can - and should be - recourse againse those things being used to my detriment. Once I step on private property, that right no longer applies, and recourse can - and should be - taken at that point. But there's also a difference between simply being stalked by someone with nothing better to do and a device I carry around for the sake if my own benefit performing a function that I don't desire it to do. I think that difference has to do with the distinction between privacy and anonymity. I can be anonymous to people in the street without being private about it. A phone tied to my account information collecting that kind of data allows neither privacy nor anonymity.
Yes, citizens should be allowed to video encounters with law enforcement, but that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. There's a difference between keeping a cop honest since they know they're being video recorded and being required to hand over location logging data without consent. And yes, given that there's no "disable logging" option buried anywhere, that constitutes without consent in my book.
HP hasn't bombed as badly as you think. Yes, it's not ideal for the average consumer, and yes their WebOS tablets mean that they'll essentially be directly competing with themselves, but they're really not. From the get-go, anyone with a brain stem was able to figure out that the HP Slate was not a tablet for the masses. It's a tablet to serve a niche market - the group of people who need a tablet that runs Windows. Believe it or not, that market does exist. It's small but viable, since HP has been making swivel tablets for most of the past decade. There are applications like OneNote and Illustrator that simply lend themselves to the form factor. Sure, the device is a bit 'off' for playing Angry Birds or to use as an eReader, but the industrial market is a reliable one. Windows Mobile still runs many, many inventory management devices, barcode scanners, and specialty hardware.
Just because the Slate hasn't captured the consumer market the way the iPad has, it doesn't mean that the device hasn't sold at all. In fact, there was a good several months that they were drop shipping the things right to customers, and at that there was a 3-6 week backlog. It's a sleeper, but it's not a load of crap to the market it's designed to serve. You're simply not a part of that market.
Apple has always had the graphic design market, but it shocks me that they haven't designed some flavor of the iPad to target this demographic. Steve Jobs may have said that the stylus is a bad input method (and for a cell phone it is), but Wacom makes a mint selling pen input pads, and every graphic designer I know has one. A GD friend of mine actually contemplated getting an HP Slate due to its hybrid touch/stylus input in conjunction with the ability to run Photoshop and Illustrator.
IMO what Apple really has to fear is Adobe releasing their Creative Suite for Linux. The OSX battle cry of the graphic and web design professionals has gotten weaker over the past half-decade; many of them are sticking with the platform due to intertia, investment, and a disdain for Microsoft. It is possible that the tide could slowly start to turn if MS and Android start catering to creative designers and Apple starts ignoring them.
Well, my guess is that it'd be a bit of both. Dropbox is a business, albeit one that gives away the first tier of their service. My expectation is that if a cop showed up and said 'pretty please' regarding a user on their free plan, they'd most likely oblige. There's nothing in it for them if they argue the cop on the customer's behalf, but I'm certain the officer, if determined, could make Dropbox's life miserable, spin it to the press, tip off the BSA to cause a software audit, etc. etc.
By contrast, if the officer was inquiring about a corporate customer that has several Pro100 accounts for their users, THEN dropbox is in a position where they could potentially lose a valuable account to a competitor. At that point, they'd be more likely to ask for a subpoena.
If you (and I mean the general, collective 'you', not necessarily the parent poster) are that worried about stuff being seized by law enforcement, either host your own storage server (while frowned upon, most residential ISPs won't block FTP, or only block it on port 21), only upload encrypted RARs, or use an offshore provider that the cops can't touch.
Slashdot Mirror
In fairness (I can't believe I'm defending a governing body fairly local to me), yes, these systems DO exist - today. If this project has been running for the past ten years, then the question becomes "did these systems exist somewhere in the 2000-2001 timespan?". It's like calling for heads when a company spent millions on developing custom devices for mobile security camera monitoring for a government insitution. Yes, in 2011, we have apps on our cell phones and relatively inexpensive tablets (on a government scale) to implement a mostly-off-the-shelf solution. The executive VP at my company can watch the security cameras anywhere he wants on his iPhone with his 3G data plan, but to have done that in 2001 would have been almost unthinkable (remember, in 2001 802.11b was JUST coming to market, and cellular data was as expensive as it was slow).
...and the axe of many of my friends, is that Facebook keeps changing their layout, users find out when they log in and are like "...what's going on?" since they can't find whatever it is they're looking for, and there's no way to change it back. I'm certain that Farmville users can find their farms, but it's getting more and more distilled into a platform where the communication aspects are less useful.
While yes, 99% of the groups were "1,000,000 strong for not clubbing baby seals" and "I hate it when people text me 'k'", there were a few groups that I was a part of that were genuine groups with active discussion boards. All of the discussion threads turned into wall posts with massive amounts of comments...and to someone, that made sense.
There's more and more spam happening. While admittedly they're doing much more to mitigate it than Myspace ever did, filtering out the malicious links is still ultimately a manual job. Even the nonmalicious stuff that's still unwanted takes a ridiculous amount of time to do right. While I blocked Mafia Wars, *ville, etc., my block list is a mile long because of it. The only one that was actually fun to me was Superpoke (there is, in fact, an odd humor to be found in throwing a virtual sheep at a friend), but the first time there was an official "new facebook", Superpoke got ditched in the process, so plug-ins became less useful unless you were someone like Zynga.
I was a fan of the 'old' messaging system, where it was effectively an e-mail. it made a lot of sense, since it was much easier to scroll the address book (i.e. my friend list), my friends frequently set up SMS notifiations so they could respond in a timely manner, and read receipts were automatic. When they asked if I wanted to change to the 'new message' system, I was like, "yeah, I'll try it out", silly me thinking they would allow me to go back if I didn't like it. Naturally, it was a one-way street.
At this point, Facebook to me is just another e-mail account, with a 'public message' view, a 'private message' view, and a game view (along with questionable privacy practices). Some of my friends are holdouts and still don't have a Facebook. While I used to be all "zomg you need one", I'm finding myself now saying "don't sweat it - is e-mail or cell better for you?" This usually provides me at least one - usually two - explicit means of contacting them. Facebook is relevant and useful, but I feel that there's a distinct possibility that it's in a position where its best days are behind it. If Zuckerburg is smart, he'll cash out now.
As long as there isn't a recovery partition (or even if there is, most of the time), boot from an OS install disk, go to repair mode, then type 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr'. you're now have a stock MBR.
I am a proud to be called a nerd. Call it to me in public as an insult and I will give you a public dissertation on how you suck at everything Cyrano style.
This.
Granted, this is Slashdot, where Geek Pride is basically expected, but I love beating people at their own game.
Them: Geek! (pejoratively) ...So basically what you're telling me is that you're trying to insult me by admitting to everyone that I'm smarter than you...and I'm supposed to take offense to this?
Me: Really? (enthusiastically)
Them: Uhh...yeah. (*flips hair)
Me: One question - do you generally make it a habit to call someone of inferior intellect a geek?
Them: lolwut?
Me: When you call someone a geek, is it because you think they're less intelligent?
Them: No.
Me:
Them: uhhh......
It was particularly fun in college, when I'd bring up the fact that they're paying tuition dollars to attend the same institution, yet only one of us was getting our money's worth.
The Storm units sucked (everyone I know who bought one either hated it or has it stashed in a drawer with the rest of their defunct tech), but you could play tennis with a Curve 8330, walk away from the match, and continue making calls on it without thinking twice.
Unlikely because PhotoShop has significant "non-infringing" uses.
More to the point, it puts Adobe in a pretty sticky situation. Adobe uses all kinds of DRM and activation on their products, and Photoshop is among the most pirated pieces of software in existence. They rank pretty high up on a list of BSA members when sorted by columns involving dollar signs, so clearly they have a very vested interest in having a DMCA to throw at pirates. They don't (at least not in any high profile cases to my knowledge), but it's certainly a back-pocket play for them, should it ever be in theory be advantageous for them.
Conversely, if Photoshop is deemed as being a tool where "singificant noninfringing uses" are no longer sufficient, then that'd be quite the amusing scene to watch as a civil war erupts in Adobe's legal department. While the Slashdot Cynic in me says "it's a corporation, they'll pay off the judge to make some sort of exception", the more whimsical side would find that there would be significant entertainment value in watching lawyers duke it out. Once they've finished their little competition, the winner of the grudge match will be decided by the consensus of the Chief Actuary and CFO. For true irony, the verdict will be generated through a pirated copy of Excel.
...and I'd be perfectly fine with that - *IF* it actually worked that way. See, the voice recognition menu systems I generally deal with have absolutely no AI behind them - they are usually worse than the "Press 1 for billing, 2 for sales, 3 for support..." stuff, because they SAY they can understand you, but invariably point you to the wrong place.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAnB-Xz9J1U (start at 0:32, then again at 3:20)
See, a voice driven interface in which a specific set of commands is required is just a command line. Don't believe me? Call T-Mobile customer care and say "unlock my phone". I did this recently, since I wanted a SIM unlock for a phone that was out of contract and out of warranty. The first time I said it, it replied, "alright, problems with calls. So, briefly tell me what you're calling about." "I want to unlock my phone". "I'm sorry, I didn't get that, Let's try again." "Unlock my phone". "Sorry, can we give it another try?" "Unlock. My. Phone." After a few more rounds of this, the system finally decided to forward me to "a representative who could help". Fine. It sent me to general support, who then sent me to tier 1 support, who then had to forward me to a specialist.
I don't blame T-Mo for this, because this is just the norm. In fact, that call, end to end, took me about 15 minutes. A friend of mine was on the phone with a general representative over at Verizon for over an hour and a half trying to get the bluetooth to work with her car stereo before the rep admitted that she wasn't really a tech support rep! Certainly that's not exactly a good case study for voice driven menu systems.
I'm down for automating forwarding a customer to the correct department so they can get help. However, it seems to me that the mood that anyone calling a support line would inherently be in doesn't lend itself to making the customer feel supported by a computer who requires an argument, when a half decent receptionist could route calls better.
yes, I know i'll come off as an MS shill, but them's the breaks...
-I'll give you TCP/IP, only because I was a smidge too young to remember most of that story aside from the Wikipedia entry on Trumpet Winsock. However, being as Windows 98 and later came with TCP/IP, and all their server software releases supported it from 2000 on (I think NT 4.0 did as well), so it's not like Windows still doesn't support it, or it just got it in Win7.
-.Net was first rolled out around the time that Longhorn was in alpha testing. Recall during that time that broadband hadn't hit critical mass yet, and even Flash was still a Macromedia product, which was largely the successor to Shockwave which had a much higher install base at the time. The cloud makes a lick of sense in 2011, but in 2002 it didn't, at least at the scale necessary to make it work.
-Virtual Earth, Google Earth...can you elaborate on the competition? Sure, more people have Google Earth installed in my circle of users...but from what I can gather neither are exactly money makers, so I doubt either companies' shareholders are pounding down doors for it.
-In its day, Windows Mobile had a sizeable market share of the smartphone market. Granted, that was predecated on the idea of being able to do stuff at all, rather than doing it WELL, but there was still a market. Also, consider that the fact that the HTC G1 was on the market for over a year before T-Mobile started marketing it at all, and at that it wasn't really until Verizon bet the farm on the Motorola Droid that Android took off. I personally am clinging to WinMo 6.5 for dear life for certain reasons, but "failed" means that the product never made any significant market share, not "it wasn't an immediate success".
-The Zune was a flop, but to play the flip side, consider that at the time of release, iTunes still had DRM that wasn't compatible with the Zune Software, and Microsoft took too long to get their digital media house in order, which is an MS failure, but not a failure based on bad hardware - it was more a late-to-market ecosystem.
The one thing I agree with is the fact that a large company that's got a formula (MS with Windows and Office) is going to inevitably have an issue whereby intertia is almost impossible to overcome. Google without search? Apple without iTunes? Amazon without direct sales? This is what happens. MS will keep chugging along as long as there are desktops and servers in homes and small businesses.
Last I checked, Best Buy owned Napster, which, for $5 a month, let you stream whatever you wanted without having to upload anything AND purchase MP3 tracks AND has an iOS/Android app AND is completely independent of iTunes AND a halfway decent browser-based portal AND a thick client for people like me who still prefer it and/or use mobile devices it can sync with ("Janus", aka "PlaysForSure" devices along with generic mass storage devices, keeping in mind that Creative had some pretty slick media players back in 2007).
Forget "me too" behavior, this is "reinventing the wheel because the left hand is completely unaware of the existence of the right hand" behavior.
I was actually thinking about this earlier today. Admittedly, I do love how accurate speech-to-text is on my Android phone; typing out a text message *is* a lot quicker that way. However, my thoughts were more focused on how "For sales, press 1. For support, press 2. For billing, press 3." has been replaced with an automated voice (invariably female) who says "tell me what you're calling about", and then hasn't the slightest idea what to do when I say "technical support" or "representative"...or tries to evade actually sending me to one. Here's the epiphany I had:
Voice activated interfaces, independent of an AI, is a command line.
The commands are different, and generally optimized for things people are likely to say rather than minimizing typing, but when you boil it down the user must know the commands the computer will recognize. Until a viable means of comprehension is paired with voice activation, all we've got is a different means of doing the very thing that GUIs were designed to move us away from.
Now I'm not saying that moving in this direction is a bad idea, like I said dictating text messages is a good thing. However, I think that there are other reasons why 100% voice interactivity will never be fully actualized, and they're not technical. If a person is texting in a movie theater, sitting toward the back with their phone on silent and the brightness low, it's not disturbing a whole lot of people. When I'm on the train, everyone is reading m.cnn.com, catching up on e-mail, or watching a video, and it's mostly quiet. Imagine half the train trying to dictate a URL? How do you play Angry Birds with your voice? Have you ever texted the person sitting next to you for the very reason that what you're saying isn't appropriate to be said aloud? The list continues like that.
You're arguing two points. An ad that tracks user data beyond the intent of the app (e.g. Google Nav needs to know where I am as a core component of its functionality, as does FourSquare [not that I use it]) is a bad thing. Traditional ads are a good thing, as is keeping them relevant. No sense in advertising a movie that's no longer in theaters, or rolling out new apps just for the sake up updating the ad packages, or making the APKs triple the size for the sake of bundling ads. Streaming ads from an ad server is an acceptable practice for a program that is free.
I agree with the fact that devaluing traditional ads is a bad thing, as is the extremely targeted ads that seem to be the growing trend. My point is more that network access to pull generic ads or coarsely targeted ads (i.e. a free SSH client advertising Rackspace or Kace given the inherent demographic that would download an SSH client in the first place) is acceptable to me. Making it possible for those devs to lose their revenue like this is not, but neither is the scenario you paint.
*sigh*
Every time the Kin comes up, I feel compulsed to write up the three sentence summary of the problem that was obviously overlooked by anyone using the Kin as a means of bashing MS...
The Kin cost $199, required a $30 data plan, and was a feature phone with facebook and twitter clients.
The Blackberry Curve cost $199, though almost invariably had some sort of gimmick involving rebates, buy-one-get-one-free, or similar. It required a $30 data plan too, but had an actual web browser (didn't say a GOOD web browser), music and video player, MicroSD card, facebook/twitter clients, and BBM.
The Kin was a flop, but if it had a music player and only cost $5 for the data plan, the story might have been a bit different.
In fairness, every ad supported app requires network access for downloading apps. If you take that away, we as consumers like it as it's a quick and dirty ad blocker, but the advertisers and ad-supported app developers would get the short end of that particular stick.
I think the best compromise is on-demand permissions akin to what SuperUser does every time I start Wireless Tether or MyBackup Root - prompts me once root permissions are requested, giving me an accept/deny/remember my choice interface.
Usually I am against the rampant lawsuits over hot coffee and anything else the shills can think of, but this is one I am in favor of.
Sony seems to have taken over as the current best example of "Evil Large Corporation" in the public eye, and deservedly so.
You must be confused, I haven't seen Sony behave in an evil way that is at all dissimilar to the other evil companies (MS, Apple, Nintendo, etc). So why should they be given the title of "best example of ELC".
Apple and Sony both sell devices whose firmware was jailbroken. Both jailbreak methods were made available through significant contributions from George Hotz. One of them brought Hotz to court. Guess Who.
DirecTV has something in their favor over Netflix: a set of pipes. Satellite internet is AFAIK still expensive and inherently very high latency (Counterstrike players, day traders, and VoIP users need not apply; you'll never see a two-digit ping), but it's an option that would be especially lucrative in rural areas where dial-up or wireless tethering are the only options. They've already got the backhaul circling the globe, so it's really a matter of whether they can match Comcast/Time Warner/Cablevision + Netflix subscription at the price point. On top of that, they've already got enough pull in Hollywood for their garden variety broadcast licensing. It'd be separate of course, but they've got the precedent. If they can ensure that the service can scale while keeping the prices competitive with the other guys without having to deal with the bandwidth caps, then they could actually be a serious threat to the present system for large groups of people.
I'd pay $15 a month to my local shoe store if they let me try them on, wear them to work or a party, and return them the next day, whenever I wanted, even multiple times a day.
True, but they're for different kinds of discovery. Pandora is great for finding stuff you haven't heard and expanding one's musical horizons. However, if $GOOD_BAND releases a new album, I'm not going to listen to 50 hours of Pandora to hear it. It's also not good at hearing older albums of bands with more recent releases, unless you're station seeds lend themselves to the older era.
Lemme try to break it down:
Renting music is exactly like renting movies. There are certain movies I'll buy shortly after DVD release. There are other movies I'll buy at the bargain bin. Still others I'll get from Netflix. Some I'll watch when they're on broadcast TV and nothing better is on. They all compliment each other.
I'm a Napster subscriber, and have been since 2005. For $15 a month, I can stream whatever I want, and download protected WMA files. DRM, yes...but I clearly don't own them. I do this in order to determine whether a song or album is worth purchasing before I actually go out and buy it. Some songs I don't like enough to justify the purchase, so they eventually get deleted. Sometimes I'll put on a random playlist.
The anti-music rental camp seems to believe that renting music is at the complete exclusion of music purchases. I've got a sickening stack of receipts from iTunes, Napster, Amazon, and even buy about half a dozen CDs per year, on top of renting the music. Yes, rental-only is bad. Rental+purchase is not.
4) Google may be a big company, but they don't have the one really big stick - namely, the iTunes music store - that Apple does. Apple may actually be able to get the music industry to agree to non-extortionary terms that Google & Amazon simply don't have the leverage to negotiate.
You're right, but it would be funny as hell to hear the Google negotiations.
"We want to start a cloud music service so your customers have more ways to pay for your product"
"That'll be *puts pinky to mouth* Ten BEEEELION dollars."
"we were thinking more like...less than that, plus revenue sharing"
"Well I'm sorry then, but I'm late to a meeting with Steve Jobs for his iStream project negotiations"
"Alright then, we'll just have to save up our money then. I think we're going to have to downsize, starting with our DMCA takedown department...I'm sure those Rapidshare links will flush themselves in several months...and I dunno if we really have the bandwidth for those awfully popular VEVO videos on Youtube..."
"...let me go make a phone call."
In their defense, they started the 'unlimited' pricing back with dial-up. Then, the telcos and cablecos were trying to get people to sign up for broadband, and if AOL was still offering unlimited and the cable company was offering a 50GB cap, even though it's technologically impossible to download that amount of data over a 56K modem, they wouldn't have made the sales they did. Besides, the web was still heavily targeting the dial-up crowd. When unlimited pricing started, there was no Netflix, no Youtube, no Flikr, no Carbonite, no bittorrent, and Napster at the time only did MP3s...I'm sure that back in 1998 when the local cableco started rolling out cable internet, anyone who hit a 10GB cap was comfortably in the third standard deviation. Double-backing on the 'unlimited' monkier would have been suicide at the time, simply because of inertia. Over that time, even low end users started using more and more bandwidth, but there's no clear-cut point when they could have stopped saying "unlimited" and not had a backlash.
It wasn't deceitful when they were able to deliver it. It is now since they no longer can.
There's always the 3D alternative of "outside".
I hear their pr0n selection is unbeatable.
that's not quite a fair comparison though. Cameras can be used to invade privacy (many celebrities learn this quickly), but those infringements are much more quantifiable an actionable, as it involves someone else taking the photos with their own camera. In this case, it is the person's own device taking location data without the user's explicit consent.
No, I can't really argue against someone's right to sit at a coffee shop across the street and log my going and coming into a particular building. I can't stop them from following me in traffic, but there can - and should be - recourse againse those things being used to my detriment. Once I step on private property, that right no longer applies, and recourse can - and should be - taken at that point. But there's also a difference between simply being stalked by someone with nothing better to do and a device I carry around for the sake if my own benefit performing a function that I don't desire it to do. I think that difference has to do with the distinction between privacy and anonymity. I can be anonymous to people in the street without being private about it. A phone tied to my account information collecting that kind of data allows neither privacy nor anonymity.
Yes, citizens should be allowed to video encounters with law enforcement, but that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. There's a difference between keeping a cop honest since they know they're being video recorded and being required to hand over location logging data without consent. And yes, given that there's no "disable logging" option buried anywhere, that constitutes without consent in my book.
HP hasn't bombed as badly as you think. Yes, it's not ideal for the average consumer, and yes their WebOS tablets mean that they'll essentially be directly competing with themselves, but they're really not. From the get-go, anyone with a brain stem was able to figure out that the HP Slate was not a tablet for the masses. It's a tablet to serve a niche market - the group of people who need a tablet that runs Windows. Believe it or not, that market does exist. It's small but viable, since HP has been making swivel tablets for most of the past decade. There are applications like OneNote and Illustrator that simply lend themselves to the form factor. Sure, the device is a bit 'off' for playing Angry Birds or to use as an eReader, but the industrial market is a reliable one. Windows Mobile still runs many, many inventory management devices, barcode scanners, and specialty hardware.
Just because the Slate hasn't captured the consumer market the way the iPad has, it doesn't mean that the device hasn't sold at all. In fact, there was a good several months that they were drop shipping the things right to customers, and at that there was a 3-6 week backlog. It's a sleeper, but it's not a load of crap to the market it's designed to serve. You're simply not a part of that market.
1000% this.
Apple has always had the graphic design market, but it shocks me that they haven't designed some flavor of the iPad to target this demographic. Steve Jobs may have said that the stylus is a bad input method (and for a cell phone it is), but Wacom makes a mint selling pen input pads, and every graphic designer I know has one. A GD friend of mine actually contemplated getting an HP Slate due to its hybrid touch/stylus input in conjunction with the ability to run Photoshop and Illustrator.
IMO what Apple really has to fear is Adobe releasing their Creative Suite for Linux. The OSX battle cry of the graphic and web design professionals has gotten weaker over the past half-decade; many of them are sticking with the platform due to intertia, investment, and a disdain for Microsoft. It is possible that the tide could slowly start to turn if MS and Android start catering to creative designers and Apple starts ignoring them.
Well, my guess is that it'd be a bit of both. Dropbox is a business, albeit one that gives away the first tier of their service. My expectation is that if a cop showed up and said 'pretty please' regarding a user on their free plan, they'd most likely oblige. There's nothing in it for them if they argue the cop on the customer's behalf, but I'm certain the officer, if determined, could make Dropbox's life miserable, spin it to the press, tip off the BSA to cause a software audit, etc. etc.
By contrast, if the officer was inquiring about a corporate customer that has several Pro100 accounts for their users, THEN dropbox is in a position where they could potentially lose a valuable account to a competitor. At that point, they'd be more likely to ask for a subpoena.
If you (and I mean the general, collective 'you', not necessarily the parent poster) are that worried about stuff being seized by law enforcement, either host your own storage server (while frowned upon, most residential ISPs won't block FTP, or only block it on port 21), only upload encrypted RARs, or use an offshore provider that the cops can't touch.