It's the other way around : Android comes with the Google apps, gmail, calendar, Google search as default, etc. Not to include these apps means you cannot be Android certified. iOS devices still have 55% of mobile internet usage share, Apple could have switched all those users to their own maps, yahoo search or circumvented Google search for Wolfram Alpha as they have done with Siri. So Google built their own platform where their services are the default or it isn't Android.
The principle of the matter is the same:undermine the competition by offering your version, tied to your products for free.
He presented his opinion. I have more respect for him that people who responded with mod downs and ad hominem attacks. There can be more than one opinion on a discussion board.
Google licenses Android for free, because they get paid in different ways and have a strategy that stretches beyond next quarter. They don't have any kind of monopoly in any of their businesses, so the comparison with MSFT of the 90's isn't a great comparison.
It's a little like Mozilla giving Firefox away for free because they get paid in different ways. Should they be stopped because others who want to charge money for the browser can't figure out a way to compete?
Software and process patents are just a way to funnel money from innovators to lawyers.
No it's exactly like Microsoft in the 90's. Netscape was threatening their business by building a layer between the user and the OS so MS decided to cut them off at the feet by offering competing software for free and bind it closely to their moneymaker Windows. Google was concerned Apple was building a layer between them and their customers so they decided to cut Apple off at the feet by offering a competing product for free that was bound closely to their moneymaker services. It's hard to find a closer parallel than that.
but don't forget friend we have Apple claiming rights to a square and so far the courts have sided with them
No they are not claiming that. It's part of it but what Apple are saying is that: Samsung copied the look of the device in several ways, they copied the look of the packaging, they copied the look of the icons and software, they even copied the power brick, etc. Now each of these claims by itself would be ridiculous but add them all together and you get a rip-off product. This article does a good job of breaking down all the claims Apple is making.
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.)
That's a privacy issue. People in this story are already commenting on how Apple must be gathering information on them.
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."
It's still beta, it'll get better. If it doesn't suit your needs right now, don't use it. I agree that traditional voice controls should handle input first but doing this might make Siri operation actually slower because you're going to try local processing first. I'm going to assume there was a trade-off in there somewhere Apple made and as usual when they do that it's going to piss some people off.
It'll probably come in a future revision, that's the Apple way. Like how they shipped Lion without the ability to rearrange full screen apps and workspaces in System Control but then added it in an update. Implement, ship, improve.
Yeah why wouldn't they want to flood their servers with millions of devices before they have had a chance to test under serious load first ? Come on, even Google ramped availability of its products by doing limited beta's first, then doing invites and only then going free sign up. Siri is still, unusually for Apple, a beta service after all.
So turn it off : "If you wish to use Voice Control while you are not connected to the Internet, turn Siri off from Settings > General > Siri. Make sure to turn Siri back on when you have Internet connectivity and you wish to use it again."
How long until they crack the unique ID generator and create viable clones of existing phones?
Then Apple can perform an additional check with location services, find the ID's that are accessed from widely differing locations within a relatively short timeframe and block them.
The more I think about this the more I'm surprised this hasn't been done before. An iPhone based solution could replace several of the products on the linked page: - just iphone app with zooming display on screen for mobile reading of small print (eg. in stores) - small iPhone caddy with built in leds with output to TV for more mobile reading in house. - iPhone held in stationary reading post outputting to large attached monitor, with lots of illumination.
You don't need the computer to do processing, basically all that's needed is the casing to hold the phone and the software written for iOS.
iPhone, the iPhone 4 has an excellent macro mode. Build a sled for the iPhone, couple with custom written app that takes camera input and sends picture to TV via AppleTV. The sled would be hand-sized so very mobile, wireless and easy to scan by moving the hand. Zoom level could be regulated by pinching gestures on the upward facing screen. As an added bonus controls would be easy to use because of iOS assistive technologies.
Well they did finally release, so kudos for that but the fact remains that Google gets to determine what gets released and when. That's OK for hobbyists but not for people who would like to build a business around Android without being bound hands and feet to Google. There's a reason Amazon has basically forked Android by basing their new platform around version 2.1
You know we've got computers these days that'll display dates in your local format right ? Everybody is doing dates wrong anyway. It should be YYYYMMDD.
I'm painting with very broad strokes here of course. You can be a geek and a slob, and some artists are quite geeky:-) I keep a lot of files dumped in my "Downloads" folder myself, but others are meticulously organized. What I mean is that most users can't seem to grasp hierarchical filesystems let alone fully use them, just like some people can't seem to wrap their heads around pointers.
Just go look at some Windows users in the wild. The fact that they had to create an automatic desktop cleanup wizard for Windows speaks volumes. People who do this all say the same thing: it's convenient, they know where the files are and don't have to think about it. We are catagorizers, we think in trees and hierarchies, normal people just use stacks. As in: a stack of papers on my desk ("it's in here somewhere") and a stack of files on their desktop.
Part of this is solved by search, like Gmail does: don't sort your mail, just search it. Apple also does this with Spotlight, its system wide search. Another solution is to keep data tied to an app. Arguably Apple already does this with iTunes and iPhoto which are backed by folders but folders you never need to go into because you access your data through the apps. The data stays in the app where you "left it" until you explicitely export it in some way. This seems much more intuitive to normal people and works well with sandboxing. It's also abhorrent to geeks because they fear lock-in although personally I think it's difficult to imagine lock-in in an internet connected world where the first feature users ask of their software is easy sharing.
Lion, Snow Leopard and Leopard respectively, updates can be referred to by release date. I think the names are better known than the version numbers by a lot of people. I don't think version numbers are redundant by the way but they could have been completely avoided in this story.
They are probably going to converge although no one knows when (definitely not in the short term though, that's the Windows 8 approach.) But the end result won't look like today's iOS. The current iOS is like the orignal Macintosh: can we see its influence on the mac today ? Absolutely. Today's macs however are different in many ways and the make different compromises because they not only serve different needs but they have evolved with the times. The "converged Apple OS" is to iOS as the 128K Mac is to todays iMac.
Lion's 16% installed base is NOT bad after only 4 months. The Apple fora have always been full of complaints. All the rest is just opinions and conjecture on your part, how about some figures ?
Customers were used to using drivers for scanners and etc, Apple took that away (effectively taking away the supported hardware) in Snow Leopard by breaking tons of them -- and never going back to fix them.
That's a third party problem, they need to support their own devices.
Customers were used to being able to run the PPC apps they had spent many dollars on... Apple took that away in Lion.
After they licensed very expensive software (Rosetta) to give you years to ween yourself of off PPC. I find it hard to imagine another OS vendor expending that much effort to do a seamless transition, even Bill Gates was impressed they pulled the intel switch off as seamlessly as Apple did. Ungrateful much ?
Customers have been used to apps (oh, I dunno, like Photoshop?) that were part of a system of apps that worked with their data, and Apple's taking that away within the bounds of the app store... and you think it's unlikely that this policy will spread outside the store?
Yes, they're not going to piss off a sizeable part of their customer base by making it impossible to run Photoshop or other Pro apps.
Buddy, Apple does what it wants -- they are *famous* for doing "teh stupidz" -- folders that don't nest under IOS, "wifi sync" that doesn't work under Leopard, a 4-year old native OS, while it does under XP, a ten year old non-native OS, they break the living hell out of IOS apps with just about every "upgrade", forcing developers to put up Yet Another Version of their app to correct for the incompatibilities...
Nested folders are a bad idea. People don't get nested hierarchies, spend some time watching non-geeks use computers and you'll see. Leopard is down to 22% market share, XP only just dipped below 50% this summer. There's a vast amount of XP machines out there, so unfortunately Apple should expend the effort to support them. iOS is a platform that's developing at an enormous pace because mobile is so competitive and fast evolving. Change or get left behind is the name of the game, accumulating backwards compatibility cruft à la Windows would be deadly. That said I have not heard many complaints about breakages.
When your reasoning depends upon Apple doing things because customers have expectations, your reasoning is no better than a random guess. Apple makes roadmaps, has "visions", and then aims at them. Up until Leopard and IOS4, they were doing pretty well at hitting the target, though of course everyone wanted more. 10.6 and later, IOS5... these are huge bags of fail from several perspectives, most especially from the one you're using to make your assertion: Apple doesn't aim at keeping customers expectations static.
You obviously don't like iOS5 and Lion. There are a lot of us who would beg to differ.
You're absolutely right. This is always the path taken with sandboxing. Once people realize that the sandbox is preventing them from getting real work done, the next hyped "feature" is usually some way to bypass the sandbox.
No they won't because "people" don't understand filesystems, that's a geek thing. That's why so many people have all their files on their desktop. Computing is finally tilting away from geeks and towards making norms comfortable. Don't worry, you'll always have Linux.
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It's the other way around : Android comes with the Google apps, gmail, calendar, Google search as default, etc. Not to include these apps means you cannot be Android certified. iOS devices still have 55% of mobile internet usage share, Apple could have switched all those users to their own maps, yahoo search or circumvented Google search for Wolfram Alpha as they have done with Siri. So Google built their own platform where their services are the default or it isn't Android.
The principle of the matter is the same :undermine the competition by offering your version, tied to your products for free.
He presented his opinion. I have more respect for him that people who responded with mod downs and ad hominem attacks. There can be more than one opinion on a discussion board.
Google licenses Android for free, because they get paid in different ways and have a strategy that stretches beyond next quarter. They don't have any kind of monopoly in any of their businesses, so the comparison with MSFT of the 90's isn't a great comparison.
It's a little like Mozilla giving Firefox away for free because they get paid in different ways. Should they be stopped because others who want to charge money for the browser can't figure out a way to compete?
Software and process patents are just a way to funnel money from innovators to lawyers.
No it's exactly like Microsoft in the 90's. Netscape was threatening their business by building a layer between the user and the OS so MS decided to cut them off at the feet by offering competing software for free and bind it closely to their moneymaker Windows. Google was concerned Apple was building a layer between them and their customers so they decided to cut Apple off at the feet by offering a competing product for free that was bound closely to their moneymaker services. It's hard to find a closer parallel than that.
but don't forget friend we have Apple claiming rights to a square and so far the courts have sided with them
No they are not claiming that. It's part of it but what Apple are saying is that: Samsung copied the look of the device in several ways, they copied the look of the packaging, they copied the look of the icons and software, they even copied the power brick, etc. Now each of these claims by itself would be ridiculous but add them all together and you get a rip-off product. This article does a good job of breaking down all the claims Apple is making.
I think it was "Birthright, the book of man" from Demonoid. Or as the narrator says : "BIRTHright ... the BOOK ... of maaaaaaaannn."
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.
First world problems. Everything's Amazing & Nobody's Happy
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.)
That's a privacy issue. People in this story are already commenting on how Apple must be gathering information on them.
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."
It's still beta, it'll get better. If it doesn't suit your needs right now, don't use it. I agree that traditional voice controls should handle input first but doing this might make Siri operation actually slower because you're going to try local processing first. I'm going to assume there was a trade-off in there somewhere Apple made and as usual when they do that it's going to piss some people off.
It'll probably come in a future revision, that's the Apple way. Like how they shipped Lion without the ability to rearrange full screen apps and workspaces in System Control but then added it in an update. Implement, ship, improve.
It doesn't support MOD either and yet somehow it's still successful, fancy that.
Yeah why wouldn't they want to flood their servers with millions of devices before they have had a chance to test under serious load first ? Come on, even Google ramped availability of its products by doing limited beta's first, then doing invites and only then going free sign up. Siri is still, unusually for Apple, a beta service after all.
So turn it off : "If you wish to use Voice Control while you are not connected to the Internet, turn Siri off from Settings > General > Siri. Make sure to turn Siri back on when you have Internet connectivity and you wish to use it again."
How long until they crack the unique ID generator and create viable clones of existing phones?
Then Apple can perform an additional check with location services, find the ID's that are accessed from widely differing locations within a relatively short timeframe and block them.
The more I think about this the more I'm surprised this hasn't been done before. An iPhone based solution could replace several of the products on the linked page:
- just iphone app with zooming display on screen for mobile reading of small print (eg. in stores)
- small iPhone caddy with built in leds with output to TV for more mobile reading in house.
- iPhone held in stationary reading post outputting to large attached monitor, with lots of illumination.
You don't need the computer to do processing, basically all that's needed is the casing to hold the phone and the software written for iOS.
iPhone, the iPhone 4 has an excellent macro mode. Build a sled for the iPhone, couple with custom written app that takes camera input and sends picture to TV via AppleTV. The sled would be hand-sized so very mobile, wireless and easy to scan by moving the hand. Zoom level could be regulated by pinching gestures on the upward facing screen. As an added bonus controls would be easy to use because of iOS assistive technologies.
Could be worse. I once downloaded an audiobook that sounded like it was narrated by Zapp Brannigan. That got real old real fast.
Well they did finally release, so kudos for that but the fact remains that Google gets to determine what gets released and when. That's OK for hobbyists but not for people who would like to build a business around Android without being bound hands and feet to Google. There's a reason Amazon has basically forked Android by basing their new platform around version 2.1
You know we've got computers these days that'll display dates in your local format right ?
Everybody is doing dates wrong anyway. It should be YYYYMMDD.
WiFi is fast enough for transferring data.
Not for the initial multi gigabyte sync.
I'm painting with very broad strokes here of course. You can be a geek and a slob, and some artists are quite geeky :-) I keep a lot of files dumped in my "Downloads" folder myself, but others are meticulously organized. What I mean is that most users can't seem to grasp hierarchical filesystems let alone fully use them, just like some people can't seem to wrap their heads around pointers.
Sorry, you're on Slashdot. "Gooble, gobble one of us, one of us."
If it makes you feel better you can think of it as normal++.
Just go look at some Windows users in the wild. The fact that they had to create an automatic desktop cleanup wizard for Windows speaks volumes. People who do this all say the same thing: it's convenient, they know where the files are and don't have to think about it. We are catagorizers, we think in trees and hierarchies, normal people just use stacks. As in: a stack of papers on my desk ("it's in here somewhere") and a stack of files on their desktop.
Part of this is solved by search, like Gmail does: don't sort your mail, just search it. Apple also does this with Spotlight, its system wide search. Another solution is to keep data tied to an app. Arguably Apple already does this with iTunes and iPhoto which are backed by folders but folders you never need to go into because you access your data through the apps. The data stays in the app where you "left it" until you explicitely export it in some way. This seems much more intuitive to normal people and works well with sandboxing. It's also abhorrent to geeks because they fear lock-in although personally I think it's difficult to imagine lock-in in an internet connected world where the first feature users ask of their software is easy sharing.
Lion, Snow Leopard and Leopard respectively, updates can be referred to by release date. I think the names are better known than the version numbers by a lot of people. I don't think version numbers are redundant by the way but they could have been completely avoided in this story.
They are probably going to converge although no one knows when (definitely not in the short term though, that's the Windows 8 approach.) But the end result won't look like today's iOS. The current iOS is like the orignal Macintosh: can we see its influence on the mac today ? Absolutely. Today's macs however are different in many ways and the make different compromises because they not only serve different needs but they have evolved with the times. The "converged Apple OS" is to iOS as the 128K Mac is to todays iMac.
Lion's 16% installed base is NOT bad after only 4 months. The Apple fora have always been full of complaints. All the rest is just opinions and conjecture on your part, how about some figures ?
Customers were used to using drivers for scanners and etc, Apple took that away (effectively taking away the supported hardware) in Snow Leopard by breaking tons of them -- and never going back to fix them.
That's a third party problem, they need to support their own devices.
Customers were used to being able to run the PPC apps they had spent many dollars on... Apple took that away in Lion.
After they licensed very expensive software (Rosetta) to give you years to ween yourself of off PPC. I find it hard to imagine another OS vendor expending that much effort to do a seamless transition, even Bill Gates was impressed they pulled the intel switch off as seamlessly as Apple did. Ungrateful much ?
Customers have been used to apps (oh, I dunno, like Photoshop?) that were part of a system of apps that worked with their data, and Apple's taking that away within the bounds of the app store... and you think it's unlikely that this policy will spread outside the store?
Yes, they're not going to piss off a sizeable part of their customer base by making it impossible to run Photoshop or other Pro apps.
Buddy, Apple does what it wants -- they are *famous* for doing "teh stupidz" -- folders that don't nest under IOS, "wifi sync" that doesn't work under Leopard, a 4-year old native OS, while it does under XP, a ten year old non-native OS, they break the living hell out of IOS apps with just about every "upgrade", forcing developers to put up Yet Another Version of their app to correct for the incompatibilities...
Nested folders are a bad idea. People don't get nested hierarchies, spend some time watching non-geeks use computers and you'll see.
Leopard is down to 22% market share, XP only just dipped below 50% this summer. There's a vast amount of XP machines out there, so unfortunately Apple should expend the effort to support them.
iOS is a platform that's developing at an enormous pace because mobile is so competitive and fast evolving. Change or get left behind is the name of the game, accumulating backwards compatibility cruft à la Windows would be deadly. That said I have not heard many complaints about breakages.
When your reasoning depends upon Apple doing things because customers have expectations, your reasoning is no better than a random guess. Apple makes roadmaps, has "visions", and then aims at them. Up until Leopard and IOS4, they were doing pretty well at hitting the target, though of course everyone wanted more. 10.6 and later, IOS5... these are huge bags of fail from several perspectives, most especially from the one you're using to make your assertion: Apple doesn't aim at keeping customers expectations static.
You obviously don't like iOS5 and Lion. There are a lot of us who would beg to differ.
You're absolutely right. This is always the path taken with sandboxing. Once people realize that the sandbox is preventing them from getting real work done, the next hyped "feature" is usually some way to bypass the sandbox.
No they won't because "people" don't understand filesystems, that's a geek thing. That's why so many people have all their files on their desktop. Computing is finally tilting away from geeks and towards making norms comfortable. Don't worry, you'll always have Linux.