Except I want to turn it off while I have Internet connectivity. The scenario (and it's a real scenario, but with a different playlist name) is that I'm driving in my car with my iPhone hooked up to the stereo and want to play a specific playlist. This is why Siri was able to do it in the first place, after all - I'm complaining that it takes an annoyingly long time to do it, not that I can't access voice controls at all.
And what that KB article fails to mention is that if you turn off Siri while connected to the Internet, Apple deletes all your training data from their servers! So you can't just toggle it off briefly and back on again - it's all or nothing. (Apparently your phone will resend the training data if you turn Siri back on? Maybe? I'm unclear on exactly what data is deleted, but it warns you that your data will be deleted if you try to turn Siri off.)
Ultimately, all of this is entirely unnecessary. The way Siri should have worked - the way I assumed it would work when Apple announced it - is that the existing voice controls are given a first pass. If they recognize the command, then they handle it with no network access. If not, then hand it off to Apple's servers. This gives you the best of both worlds - natural language recognition for things like "wake me up at one PM tomorrow morning" and a quick turnaround for existing commands like "play playlist driving songs."
Doing the processing on the server seems very slow to me - I can find a contact much faster by pressing the first few letters than waiting for the round-trip latency to siri.
Yep. It's extremely annoying, actually, because Siri replaces the existing voice commands. So doing something like "call brother" - which used to take maybe a half second - takes a good three seconds or so of lag time. More annoyingly is things like "play playlist driving songs" - first you have to wait for the three seconds round-trip processing, then you have to wait for the iPhone to decide which playlist that matches ("Looking for playlist driving songs," Siri says), then you have to wait for her to narrate "playing playlist driving songs" before the music actually starts.
Yay progress. About the only thing I use Siri for is asking dumb questions and seeing what responses I get. For actual voice controls, it's - well, not useless, exactly, just obnoxiously slow.
Because if I don't, the area behind the window where Firefox is will tear. (Actually, it will lag behind the rest of the display by several frames.)
I suspect that this won't happen with games that claim the entire GPU to themselves. But in every modern games I've tried, even when fullscreened, Firefox will slow them down and create artifacts if you leave it running.
Google started with this version numbering scheme, and not inventing a new one is better for everyone - less confusion.
But not "no confusion," I note. Like what would have happened if you hadn't bothered changing the versioning scheme for absolutely no useful benefit. (Yeah, sure, there are benefits, they're just not, well, useful. At all.)
That is a long discussion, for sure! But this is nothing to do with Firefox. All browsers are including 3D acceleration
Ah, yes, the 3D acceleration, which is presumably the reason Firefox now visibly tears when you try and scroll through pages. And the reason I have to remember to close my browser before using any 3D games. Oh, and it screws up font rendering on Windows, so that's a bonus too.
We are working very hard on those issues. If you try this release, I think you'll see significant improvements on both issues, and there are even more in the pipeline for the versions coming up afterwards.
And you'd be completely wrong. At best, I have seen no improvement in Firefox since - well, ever. It's stayed about the same. Right now, Firefox is using 30% CPU for no reason I can figure out (apparently writing a comment takes a lot of processing power?) and nearly 550MB of RAM. That's about what I recall Firefox 3 using.
Literally the only reason I still use Firefox these days is for NoScript and AdBlock Plus. Their Chrome counter-parts aren't quite as good. There's certainly nothing about Firefox itself that keeps me using it.
You can't actually ask Siri that. (Yes, I know it's a joke.)
It's still kind of a weird thing for "the voice interface" to the phone to completely leave out. You really can't ask questions about anything that the phone is doing. If you ask about battery life, Siri offers to search the web for it.
Also, while I was typing this, Siri went down. (I had some other questions about things like storage space left that I wanted to try.) So that's cool too.
I have a feeling that at some point the ability to ask about battery charge left will be added, but right now, you can't ask Siri that.
Didn't Apple advertise Siri with a video of a guy jogging, receiving a text, and then using Siri to reply, all done with voice? There's one use case that involves only voice. Here's another one:
"Where is the nearest gas station?"
Here's what Siri will answer: "I found a number of gas stations. (Number) are fairly close to you."
Um... thanks? Mind telling me what the closest one?
Nope. It doesn't even sort the results by distance, it just dumps a list to the screen. Awesome.
I'd much rather have in-phone implementation of basic voice commands like: "text contactmessage send text", "navigate to address/business", "add contact name name number number, etc.
Oh God yes. If you haven't tried Siri, it's considerably worse than existing voice commands for one simple reason: lag.
The most annoying one is for iPod voice commands. Like, for example, "Play" to start playing whatever's on the iPod app. In earlier iPhones, this was a short pause for it to understand it, and then the music started.
In Siri, this is now a one second pause for it to round trip to the server, then Siri saying "OK," and then, finally, the music starts playing.
"navigate to address/business"
Yeah, you... can't navigate on iOS. At all. Sure, you can get a list of directions - but good luck following those without driving into something, especially since it won't automatically move through the next steps while you're moving. Annoying as the passenger, impossible as the driver.
I'm American. Siri has problems with my accent. So, if I were to guess: not very good.
At one point I got fed up with Siri misunderstanding me and said "do I need to speak slower or do you understand the words coming out of my mouth?" Siri decided I asked "data space lorikeet Thompson was a coming on my mouth." It couldn't come up with an answer for that. (I saved a screenshot of it.)
If I speak slowly and very carefully - in other words, unnaturally - Siri is very good at recognizing what I say. Otherwise, it really isn't.
It doesn't delete the download. What it did do was pop up an error message that read "an internal error has occurred." If you clicked on "More Details" it would tell you to go through the following steps: 1. Reinstall iTunes. 2. Remove all other USB devices from your computer. 3. You're hosed. (Actually, for a good part of the day of the release, it wouldn't even tell you that. It would tell you "HTTP 503: Apple's support site is undergoing restructuring.")
If you ignored the incorrect advice, you would have to completely restart the update process. (As iTunes wouldn't automatically retry.) This involved clicking on "OK" to two dialog boxes again, and then waiting for it to fail again.
As far as I can tell, the update process happens in these steps:
1. The phone is backed up. (Just the OS, not your apps or data or anything like that.) 2. The update is then verified with the Apple servers (chance one for it to fail and redo from start). 3. The update is then applied to the backup taken in step 1. 4. The patched backup is then verified with the Apple servers (chance two for it to fail and redo from start). 5. The newly patched backup is restored. 6. You wait to copy all your apps/music/photos/videos back over to the newly updated iPhone.
All told, the update process took me a mere 25 hours from start to finish (give or take). (9 hours to finally get the update authenticated as detailed above, another 2 hours to sync half the data, 10 hours to go to sleep and then discover that the sync randomly aborted, 1 hour fucking around to convince the phone/iTunes that, no, it hadn't really copied everything over, and then 2 hours to actually finish everything.)
Apple users can only hope that the new over-the-air update feature (yeah, that's new as of iOS 5) actually fucking works and that's the last time an update involves resyncing the entire fucking phone.
Supposedly, yes. Samsung has one, called the Samsung Galaxy S Wifi or maybe that's the Samsung Galaxy Player or who knows, their website sucks. So instead here's a Wikipedia link.
As far as I know, that's really the only iPod Touch competitor that exists.
How good of an iPod Touch competitor is it? Not a clue.
It would also stick you with a $100-$400 phone you can't use anywhere else.
Sure, the real cost of the phone might be closer to $800 and you're getting half the cost subsidized, but you're still stuck with a lot of cash spent on something that only works with one carrier. Or possibly two, if you're on AT&T, and the merger falls through.
So, sure, you can cancel your contract without penalty. And then you can enjoy your new, $400 iPod Touch that used to be a phone. (Although I just checked, the iPod Touch costs the same as the equivalent storage space iPhone 4S with contract. I didn't realize the iPod Touch was so overpriced.)
In Boston, they just use one male voice for everything. Although I guess it makes sense, due to things like the following being common:
(leaving Porter Square): Next stop, Harvard Square. (arriving at Harvard Square): Now arriving at Harvard Square. (leaving Harvard Square): Next stop, Harvard Square. (arriving at Central Square): Now arriving at Harvard Square. (leaving Central Square): Next stop, Harvard Square. (And so on)
I've also heard it do the stations backwards, giving the next stop as the stop in the other direction.
I guess if the system is going to constantly be broken, using a male voice makes sense. I guess people expect female voices to know what they're talking about, but are used to running into men that continue to give bad information even after it's clear that what they're saying can't possibly be correct.:)
They did? I can't remember Square ever admitting that they offshored the dev team. As far as I know, they claimed that the only change in the dev team that has been made was firing Tanaka and replacing him with Yoshida.
Although honestly, it would be best for Square Enix to blame offshoring rather than claiming that the best they can do is a graphics engine that can't do shadows right (you can cast shadows on light sources!) and can't handle being Alt-Tabbed out of.
Have they fixed the alt-tab thing? I know the forums forced them to admit it was an issue, but I don't think they've ever bothered fixing it.
But, hey, at least patch 1.19 is adding in horsebirds! That should be exciting. Or something.
I agree completely. But the original plan was fairly simple: all numbered Final Fantasy games after X are MMOs.
Then they realized that was a fucking stupid plan, and released FFXII. (And later FFXIII.)
Then they decided that since the PS2 was nearing the end of its life, they should release another MMO for the new generation of consoles, so they decided to create FFXIV.
Why not just call FFXIV "Final Fantasy Online" and be done with it? Well, if there's anything FFXIII and FFXIV both prove, it's that no one with any clue at all is left at Square Enix.
Especially with this latest plan of announcing that they're going to start charging for subscriptions at the end of this year, and then completely change the game at the end of the next year. Somehow, I think I'll wait. And I doubt I'm alone in that decision.
I'm sure the suddenly-woefully-inadequate iPhone 4 could handle it just fine too.
Could? Did! Siri used to be just another app on the App store. Then Apple bought Siri, Inc. and bundled their app with the 4S, after removing the old one from the App store and disabling it on all existing phones that had downloaded it.
I suppose it's possible that something changed between then and now, but Siri is literally over a year old, having originally released on the App store in early 2010.
Hell, when they first announced Siri, if you Googled it, you would get reviews of the original Siri Assistant app. (The consensus? It wasn't very good.)
Incorrect. It's done in the cloud, just like Android's implementation. You need a data connection for it to work. Apple stated this in the introductory announcement.
The real answer is more "only Apple knows what does and doesn't happen in the cloud." You're right, though, that they flat-out say:
Siri is available in Beta only on iPhone 4S and requires Internet access.
However that leaves a few questions. Do you need Internet access to use Siri at all? (Which would mean that all processing in the cloud, and the 4S restriction is just Apple being assholes.)
Or do you need Internet access just to run things that clearly require Internet access, like retrieving a weather forecast or running an Internet search? (Which would mean that the voice recognition happens on the phone, and the 4S restriction is because only the 4S is powerful enough.)
Or, is some preprocessing done on the phone (basic voice recognition) and once that's done, the rest happens in the cloud? (This is my personal bet - basic voice recognition happens on the phone, then the results of that are sent to the cloud, and an answer is sent back. This brings the 4S restriction back to "Apple being assholes" since Siri used to be an iPhone 4 app.)
Of course the last option also leaves some questions. Can I just use the speech-to-text ability with no data connection? Can I use voice commands to do things like control the iPod app without Internet access? (Something the 3GS can do.)
Until the 4S is actually out, the answer is simply "only Apple knows."
Although we can answer one question: is Siri really all that revolutionary? No, not really. Voice recognition has been around for ages. The only real "innovation" here is hooking the output of a speech-to-text program to a "natural language processing" program. You know, like the ones that fail to provide any help on most tech company's tech support sites. ("Chat with our virtual tech support agent!")
Did you do it from Finder or the Applications stack in the Dock? If you try it from a stack, it just silently fails without prompting you for a password.
You'd think successfully downloading the 700MB update would be the last time you have to contact the update servers.
Nope.
You have to hit them twice more to verify that the file you already downloaded is, in fact, really signed by Apple, and has not, in fact, been replaced with a jailbroken version in the minute it takes for the updater to finally finish processing the stupid thing.
Yeah, I'd say being angry at having downloaded the update and then having iTunes literally refuse to install it (because it can't get through to Apple - twice) and then forwarding me to a support article that says "your iTunes install is corrupt, better reinstall!" warrants a bit of anger.
I'm still using Mac OS X 10.6, so no 10.7 update for me.
It sounded more like you updated to 10.7.2 and then went on some kind of deleting rampage removing iTunes and kernel extensions, etc.
Nah, I found the support article in the Google cache. So it's only one kernel extension you have to delete, and fewer reboots than I remember because I was thinking of this issue which I ran into once before which does require three reboots.
It's worse than that article makes it sound, because it contacts the upgrade servers multiple times. So far, the furthest I've gotten is:
"Extracting software..." "Verifying with iPhone update with Apple..." "Restoring update..." "Verifying with iPhone update with Apple..."
And then it bombs. Both bolded lines are a chance for it to fail, after which you get to do the entire thing (minus the download) over again from the start. Which includes a backup which takes forever.
You'd think downloading the update would be enough to install, but - NOPE! Gotta get that DRM in there too. Otherwise, people might run custom software on Apple's phone.
Re:Troll? Re:That didn't take too long to fail
on
iOS 5 Update Available
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· Score: 4, Informative
1) A brand new full iTunes download is 103mb, not 700 as you claimed.
Oh crap, you're right, that was supposed to read "the iOS update," which is 700MB. I have no clue how large the iTunes update was because I didn't bother watching that download.
2) I've never ever had to do anything remotely like you claim about removing kernel extensions and rebooting 3 times with iTunes
You only need to do that if you need to reinstall iTunes. Which is what the support article for "our update authentication servers are down" tells you to do for some braindead reason.
3) I just dragged iTunes to the trash. OSX asked for my password. I entered it. It deleted.
Only works in Finder. I was trying to do it from the Applications stack in the Dock, because you can do that with apps you've installed yourself. Doing it that way just silently fails.
5) Absolutely false what you claimed about Apple expecting a crashed iPhone to just drain off the battery.
It used to be in there somewhere, for what to do if a hard reset doesn't work. Which, now that the support site is up again, turns out to be holding both the Wake/Sleep button and the Home button for 10 seconds. That's intuitive.
iTunes does not require a reboot! iTunes is an 87.9 MB download from software update.
All I can tell you is that whether or not iTunes requires a reboot, I was forced to reboot when Software Update updated it. This is on a Mac, remember, so maybe it's different under Windows, but I definitely had to reboot to install the update. I don't care if it's "not supposed to," did.
You can restart your phone by "pressing and holding the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time for at least 10 seconds, until the Apple logo appears."
That's nice. It's nice to know the way to recover your phone after the iOS update fails and crashes the fucking thing! (Which, so far, I've only gotten to happen once. Which is good, I guess?)
Face it, the bottom line is that the iTunes/iPhone update process completely and totally sucks. Apparently the problem I'm running into is that Apple's DRM servers are down, so I can't authenticate the update. (Why do I have to do that again? Didn't it authenticate the signatures when it downloaded the fucking thing? Do I have to delete the update and redownload the entire 650MB or however large the update turns out to be?! Who knows! Apple's support site just tells me to reinstall iTunes, disconnect USB devices, uninstall antivirus, and reboot! If that doesn't work, tough!)
And I'm not the only one that it's happened to in the comments to this story. The Apple update process is just completely horrible. If the update servers are down, tell me the fucking update servers are down and don't tell me I corrupted my iTunes installation!
Here's the problem with that - if you look at the screenshot in the article, that's the only information you're given. The "3200 error" only appears briefly when you press "More Information" and only in the URL of the link it sends you to.
Thankfully the servers are swamped enough that it took long enough to redirect (finally) for me to notice the error number and be able to search for it. Once it redirects, it sends you to a support article telling you that you need to reinstall iTunes (and make sure no other USB devices are installed, and that your computer is up to date, and that if you've done all that, you're screwed).
The problem was made worse by the support site 503ing briefly, because that meant that instead of the error showing up at all it instantly redirected you to a "site is unavailable" URL. (And, yes, it redirected, so the original URL was gone.)
About the only thing interesting in the Console (which is the log utility for Mac OS X - it's the equivalent of Gnome's "Log Viewer") is the error message "No connection wrapper thingy." Which is mildly amusing.
Oh, hey, it hard-crashed my phone.
OK, so it hadn't, it was just in the middle of rebooting (or something) - which left the screen frozen with a clock several minutes out of date for some reason. And I've yet to get it to repeat that, so, whatever. And it's nice to know how to restart an iPhone, now that Apple's support site is back up and it's possible to look it up again.
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Except I want to turn it off while I have Internet connectivity. The scenario (and it's a real scenario, but with a different playlist name) is that I'm driving in my car with my iPhone hooked up to the stereo and want to play a specific playlist. This is why Siri was able to do it in the first place, after all - I'm complaining that it takes an annoyingly long time to do it, not that I can't access voice controls at all.
And what that KB article fails to mention is that if you turn off Siri while connected to the Internet, Apple deletes all your training data from their servers! So you can't just toggle it off briefly and back on again - it's all or nothing. (Apparently your phone will resend the training data if you turn Siri back on? Maybe? I'm unclear on exactly what data is deleted, but it warns you that your data will be deleted if you try to turn Siri off.)
Ultimately, all of this is entirely unnecessary. The way Siri should have worked - the way I assumed it would work when Apple announced it - is that the existing voice controls are given a first pass. If they recognize the command, then they handle it with no network access. If not, then hand it off to Apple's servers. This gives you the best of both worlds - natural language recognition for things like "wake me up at one PM tomorrow morning" and a quick turnaround for existing commands like "play playlist driving songs."
Doing the processing on the server seems very slow to me - I can find a contact much faster by pressing the first few letters than waiting for the round-trip latency to siri.
Yep. It's extremely annoying, actually, because Siri replaces the existing voice commands. So doing something like "call brother" - which used to take maybe a half second - takes a good three seconds or so of lag time. More annoyingly is things like "play playlist driving songs" - first you have to wait for the three seconds round-trip processing, then you have to wait for the iPhone to decide which playlist that matches ("Looking for playlist driving songs," Siri says), then you have to wait for her to narrate "playing playlist driving songs" before the music actually starts.
Compare to the previous, non-Siri version:
"Play playlist driving songs."
(half-second pause) "Playing playlist driving songs." (music starts)
Yay progress. About the only thing I use Siri for is asking dumb questions and seeing what responses I get. For actual voice controls, it's - well, not useless, exactly, just obnoxiously slow.
Because if I don't, the area behind the window where Firefox is will tear. (Actually, it will lag behind the rest of the display by several frames.)
I suspect that this won't happen with games that claim the entire GPU to themselves. But in every modern games I've tried, even when fullscreened, Firefox will slow them down and create artifacts if you leave it running.
Google started with this version numbering scheme, and not inventing a new one is better for everyone - less confusion.
But not "no confusion," I note. Like what would have happened if you hadn't bothered changing the versioning scheme for absolutely no useful benefit. (Yeah, sure, there are benefits, they're just not, well, useful. At all.)
That is a long discussion, for sure! But this is nothing to do with Firefox. All browsers are including 3D acceleration
Ah, yes, the 3D acceleration, which is presumably the reason Firefox now visibly tears when you try and scroll through pages. And the reason I have to remember to close my browser before using any 3D games. Oh, and it screws up font rendering on Windows, so that's a bonus too.
We are working very hard on those issues. If you try this release, I think you'll see significant improvements on both issues, and there are even more in the pipeline for the versions coming up afterwards.
And you'd be completely wrong. At best, I have seen no improvement in Firefox since - well, ever. It's stayed about the same. Right now, Firefox is using 30% CPU for no reason I can figure out (apparently writing a comment takes a lot of processing power?) and nearly 550MB of RAM. That's about what I recall Firefox 3 using.
Literally the only reason I still use Firefox these days is for NoScript and AdBlock Plus. Their Chrome counter-parts aren't quite as good. There's certainly nothing about Firefox itself that keeps me using it.
So where's the lawsuit against Applebee's since that apple looks a lot more like Apple (Inc.)'s logo than AppleADay's logo?
This. I was fastforwarding through commercials on my DVR the other day, and I thought I saw an add containing a burning Apple logo.
It was the Applebee's logo.
So, where's the lawsuit against Applebee's, Apple? If you just glance at them, they really do look identical.
"Siri, tell me if my battery is about to die!"
You can't actually ask Siri that. (Yes, I know it's a joke.)
It's still kind of a weird thing for "the voice interface" to the phone to completely leave out. You really can't ask questions about anything that the phone is doing. If you ask about battery life, Siri offers to search the web for it.
Also, while I was typing this, Siri went down. (I had some other questions about things like storage space left that I wanted to try.) So that's cool too.
I have a feeling that at some point the ability to ask about battery charge left will be added, but right now, you can't ask Siri that.
Didn't Apple advertise Siri with a video of a guy jogging, receiving a text, and then using Siri to reply, all done with voice? There's one use case that involves only voice. Here's another one:
"Where is the nearest gas station?"
Here's what Siri will answer: "I found a number of gas stations. (Number) are fairly close to you."
Um... thanks? Mind telling me what the closest one?
Nope. It doesn't even sort the results by distance, it just dumps a list to the screen. Awesome.
I'd much rather have in-phone implementation of basic voice commands like: "text contact message send text", "navigate to address/business", "add contact name name number number, etc.
Oh God yes. If you haven't tried Siri, it's considerably worse than existing voice commands for one simple reason: lag.
The most annoying one is for iPod voice commands. Like, for example, "Play" to start playing whatever's on the iPod app. In earlier iPhones, this was a short pause for it to understand it, and then the music started.
In Siri, this is now a one second pause for it to round trip to the server, then Siri saying "OK," and then, finally, the music starts playing.
"navigate to address/business"
Yeah, you ... can't navigate on iOS. At all. Sure, you can get a list of directions - but good luck following those without driving into something, especially since it won't automatically move through the next steps while you're moving. Annoying as the passenger, impossible as the driver.
How good is Siri for such groups?
I'm American. Siri has problems with my accent. So, if I were to guess: not very good.
At one point I got fed up with Siri misunderstanding me and said "do I need to speak slower or do you understand the words coming out of my mouth?" Siri decided I asked "data space lorikeet Thompson was a coming on my mouth." It couldn't come up with an answer for that. (I saved a screenshot of it.)
If I speak slowly and very carefully - in other words, unnaturally - Siri is very good at recognizing what I say. Otherwise, it really isn't.
It doesn't delete the download. What it did do was pop up an error message that read "an internal error has occurred." If you clicked on "More Details" it would tell you to go through the following steps: 1. Reinstall iTunes. 2. Remove all other USB devices from your computer. 3. You're hosed. (Actually, for a good part of the day of the release, it wouldn't even tell you that. It would tell you "HTTP 503: Apple's support site is undergoing restructuring.")
If you ignored the incorrect advice, you would have to completely restart the update process. (As iTunes wouldn't automatically retry.) This involved clicking on "OK" to two dialog boxes again, and then waiting for it to fail again.
As far as I can tell, the update process happens in these steps:
1. The phone is backed up. (Just the OS, not your apps or data or anything like that.)
2. The update is then verified with the Apple servers (chance one for it to fail and redo from start).
3. The update is then applied to the backup taken in step 1.
4. The patched backup is then verified with the Apple servers (chance two for it to fail and redo from start).
5. The newly patched backup is restored.
6. You wait to copy all your apps/music/photos/videos back over to the newly updated iPhone.
All told, the update process took me a mere 25 hours from start to finish (give or take). (9 hours to finally get the update authenticated as detailed above, another 2 hours to sync half the data, 10 hours to go to sleep and then discover that the sync randomly aborted, 1 hour fucking around to convince the phone/iTunes that, no, it hadn't really copied everything over, and then 2 hours to actually finish everything.)
Apple users can only hope that the new over-the-air update feature (yeah, that's new as of iOS 5) actually fucking works and that's the last time an update involves resyncing the entire fucking phone.
Supposedly, yes. Samsung has one, called the Samsung Galaxy S Wifi or maybe that's the Samsung Galaxy Player or who knows, their website sucks. So instead here's a Wikipedia link.
As far as I know, that's really the only iPod Touch competitor that exists.
How good of an iPod Touch competitor is it? Not a clue.
It would also stick you with a $100-$400 phone you can't use anywhere else.
Sure, the real cost of the phone might be closer to $800 and you're getting half the cost subsidized, but you're still stuck with a lot of cash spent on something that only works with one carrier. Or possibly two, if you're on AT&T, and the merger falls through.
So, sure, you can cancel your contract without penalty. And then you can enjoy your new, $400 iPod Touch that used to be a phone. (Although I just checked, the iPod Touch costs the same as the equivalent storage space iPhone 4S with contract. I didn't realize the iPod Touch was so overpriced.)
In Boston, they just use one male voice for everything. Although I guess it makes sense, due to things like the following being common:
(leaving Porter Square): Next stop, Harvard Square.
(arriving at Harvard Square): Now arriving at Harvard Square.
(leaving Harvard Square): Next stop, Harvard Square.
(arriving at Central Square): Now arriving at Harvard Square.
(leaving Central Square): Next stop, Harvard Square.
(And so on)
I've also heard it do the stations backwards, giving the next stop as the stop in the other direction.
I guess if the system is going to constantly be broken, using a male voice makes sense. I guess people expect female voices to know what they're talking about, but are used to running into men that continue to give bad information even after it's clear that what they're saying can't possibly be correct. :)
Eventually Square had to admit it.
They did? I can't remember Square ever admitting that they offshored the dev team. As far as I know, they claimed that the only change in the dev team that has been made was firing Tanaka and replacing him with Yoshida.
Although honestly, it would be best for Square Enix to blame offshoring rather than claiming that the best they can do is a graphics engine that can't do shadows right (you can cast shadows on light sources!) and can't handle being Alt-Tabbed out of.
Have they fixed the alt-tab thing? I know the forums forced them to admit it was an issue, but I don't think they've ever bothered fixing it.
But, hey, at least patch 1.19 is adding in horsebirds! That should be exciting. Or something.
I agree completely. But the original plan was fairly simple: all numbered Final Fantasy games after X are MMOs.
Then they realized that was a fucking stupid plan, and released FFXII. (And later FFXIII.)
Then they decided that since the PS2 was nearing the end of its life, they should release another MMO for the new generation of consoles, so they decided to create FFXIV.
Why not just call FFXIV "Final Fantasy Online" and be done with it? Well, if there's anything FFXIII and FFXIV both prove, it's that no one with any clue at all is left at Square Enix.
Especially with this latest plan of announcing that they're going to start charging for subscriptions at the end of this year, and then completely change the game at the end of the next year. Somehow, I think I'll wait. And I doubt I'm alone in that decision.
I'm sure the suddenly-woefully-inadequate iPhone 4 could handle it just fine too.
Could? Did! Siri used to be just another app on the App store. Then Apple bought Siri, Inc. and bundled their app with the 4S, after removing the old one from the App store and disabling it on all existing phones that had downloaded it.
I suppose it's possible that something changed between then and now, but Siri is literally over a year old, having originally released on the App store in early 2010.
Hell, when they first announced Siri, if you Googled it, you would get reviews of the original Siri Assistant app. (The consensus? It wasn't very good.)
Incorrect. It's done in the cloud, just like Android's implementation. You need a data connection for it to work. Apple stated this in the introductory announcement.
The real answer is more "only Apple knows what does and doesn't happen in the cloud." You're right, though, that they flat-out say:
Siri is available in Beta only on iPhone 4S and requires Internet access.
However that leaves a few questions. Do you need Internet access to use Siri at all? (Which would mean that all processing in the cloud, and the 4S restriction is just Apple being assholes.)
Or do you need Internet access just to run things that clearly require Internet access, like retrieving a weather forecast or running an Internet search? (Which would mean that the voice recognition happens on the phone, and the 4S restriction is because only the 4S is powerful enough.)
Or, is some preprocessing done on the phone (basic voice recognition) and once that's done, the rest happens in the cloud? (This is my personal bet - basic voice recognition happens on the phone, then the results of that are sent to the cloud, and an answer is sent back. This brings the 4S restriction back to "Apple being assholes" since Siri used to be an iPhone 4 app.)
Of course the last option also leaves some questions. Can I just use the speech-to-text ability with no data connection? Can I use voice commands to do things like control the iPod app without Internet access? (Something the 3GS can do.)
Until the 4S is actually out, the answer is simply "only Apple knows."
Although we can answer one question: is Siri really all that revolutionary? No, not really. Voice recognition has been around for ages. The only real "innovation" here is hooking the output of a speech-to-text program to a "natural language processing" program. You know, like the ones that fail to provide any help on most tech company's tech support sites. ("Chat with our virtual tech support agent!")
Did you do it from Finder or the Applications stack in the Dock? If you try it from a stack, it just silently fails without prompting you for a password.
I am. (Was?) Posting while angry and having an increasingly worsening cold appears to be a bad idea.
But the update did finally succeed - some 8 hours after I first tried to install it.
You'd think successfully downloading the 700MB update would be the last time you have to contact the update servers.
Nope.
You have to hit them twice more to verify that the file you already downloaded is, in fact, really signed by Apple, and has not, in fact, been replaced with a jailbroken version in the minute it takes for the updater to finally finish processing the stupid thing.
Yeah, I'd say being angry at having downloaded the update and then having iTunes literally refuse to install it (because it can't get through to Apple - twice) and then forwarding me to a support article that says "your iTunes install is corrupt, better reinstall!" warrants a bit of anger.
I'm still using Mac OS X 10.6, so no 10.7 update for me.
It sounded more like you updated to 10.7.2 and then went on some kind of deleting rampage removing iTunes and kernel extensions, etc.
Nah, I found the support article in the Google cache. So it's only one kernel extension you have to delete, and fewer reboots than I remember because I was thinking of this issue which I ran into once before which does require three reboots.
But at least I've learned not to trust Apple error messages when they tell you to reinstall iTunes instead of just admitting that it's their DRM servers that're preventing you from installing the update.
It's worse than that article makes it sound, because it contacts the upgrade servers multiple times. So far, the furthest I've gotten is:
"Extracting software..."
"Verifying with iPhone update with Apple..."
"Restoring update..."
"Verifying with iPhone update with Apple..."
And then it bombs. Both bolded lines are a chance for it to fail, after which you get to do the entire thing (minus the download) over again from the start. Which includes a backup which takes forever.
You'd think downloading the update would be enough to install, but - NOPE! Gotta get that DRM in there too. Otherwise, people might run custom software on Apple's phone.
1) A brand new full iTunes download is 103mb, not 700 as you claimed.
Oh crap, you're right, that was supposed to read "the iOS update," which is 700MB. I have no clue how large the iTunes update was because I didn't bother watching that download.
2) I've never ever had to do anything remotely like you claim about removing kernel extensions and rebooting 3 times with iTunes
You only need to do that if you need to reinstall iTunes. Which is what the support article for "our update authentication servers are down" tells you to do for some braindead reason.
3) I just dragged iTunes to the trash. OSX asked for my password. I entered it. It deleted.
Only works in Finder. I was trying to do it from the Applications stack in the Dock, because you can do that with apps you've installed yourself. Doing it that way just silently fails.
5) Absolutely false what you claimed about Apple expecting a crashed iPhone to just drain off the battery.
It used to be in there somewhere, for what to do if a hard reset doesn't work. Which, now that the support site is up again, turns out to be holding both the Wake/Sleep button and the Home button for 10 seconds. That's intuitive.
iTunes does not require a reboot! iTunes is an 87.9 MB download from software update.
All I can tell you is that whether or not iTunes requires a reboot, I was forced to reboot when Software Update updated it. This is on a Mac, remember, so maybe it's different under Windows, but I definitely had to reboot to install the update. I don't care if it's "not supposed to," did.
You can restart your phone by "pressing and holding the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time for at least 10 seconds, until the Apple logo appears."
That's nice. It's nice to know the way to recover your phone after the iOS update fails and crashes the fucking thing! (Which, so far, I've only gotten to happen once. Which is good, I guess?)
Face it, the bottom line is that the iTunes/iPhone update process completely and totally sucks. Apparently the problem I'm running into is that Apple's DRM servers are down, so I can't authenticate the update. (Why do I have to do that again? Didn't it authenticate the signatures when it downloaded the fucking thing? Do I have to delete the update and redownload the entire 650MB or however large the update turns out to be?! Who knows! Apple's support site just tells me to reinstall iTunes, disconnect USB devices, uninstall antivirus, and reboot! If that doesn't work, tough!)
And I'm not the only one that it's happened to in the comments to this story. The Apple update process is just completely horrible. If the update servers are down, tell me the fucking update servers are down and don't tell me I corrupted my iTunes installation!
Well, at least now I know what's going on:
Apple's iOS 5 upgrade servers are slammed, causing 3200 or "internal error" update issues
Here's the problem with that - if you look at the screenshot in the article, that's the only information you're given. The "3200 error" only appears briefly when you press "More Information" and only in the URL of the link it sends you to.
Thankfully the servers are swamped enough that it took long enough to redirect (finally) for me to notice the error number and be able to search for it. Once it redirects, it sends you to a support article telling you that you need to reinstall iTunes (and make sure no other USB devices are installed, and that your computer is up to date, and that if you've done all that, you're screwed).
The problem was made worse by the support site 503ing briefly, because that meant that instead of the error showing up at all it instantly redirected you to a "site is unavailable" URL. (And, yes, it redirected, so the original URL was gone.)
About the only thing interesting in the Console (which is the log utility for Mac OS X - it's the equivalent of Gnome's "Log Viewer") is the error message "No connection wrapper thingy." Which is mildly amusing.
Oh, hey, it hard-crashed my phone.
OK, so it hadn't, it was just in the middle of rebooting (or something) - which left the screen frozen with a clock several minutes out of date for some reason. And I've yet to get it to repeat that, so, whatever. And it's nice to know how to restart an iPhone, now that Apple's support site is back up and it's possible to look it up again.