For example replying to and sending messages while changing train, or setting reminders for things I think of while walking. I also use "hey Siri" to get the weather forecast and stuff hands free while getting ready in the morning, and for setting timers while cooking.
It's easy to see why it's not much use for a lot of people though.
The fact that it requires this much explanation just for the workaround shows how badly the user interface experience has been screwed up. I'm surprised at the amount of defence Google's poor design is getting. If Apple or Microsoft had done the same thing they'd be dragged over coals.
That's hardly ideal. Now you're keeping around an extra Gmail account only to be able to log into Google+. How long would people bother with that? Not long, is my bet. They'll just forget about it eventually.
"What was my other account's password?... Ah bugger it, I don't really need Google+ anyway!"
Many people use Google Apps for their personal email address because they have a personal website but don't want to administer an email server. Also, this doesn't help at all with the changed her name when they got married problem his wife has.
I am thinking early next year Siri will be rolled out to iPhone 4 and iPad 2 owners
No doubt I'll be wrong in some spectacular way but my guess is that it'll be a paid option for the iPhone 4 and iPad 2. If that's correct it'll probably cost Apple's usual "token" amount of $10 or so.
You, sir, are not a typical user then. I know us geeks like to think we are a huge market segment that can dictate how things should be done but that is fantasy.
Alas! We nerds are but a small pimple on the market's arse.
I think with (b) the poster is talking about the totally idiotic way you move files between applications on iOS.
Say I have a text file created in one Application and I want to open it with another to do some formatting then open in again in the original application. On a sane system I'd have some sort of file browser I can use to locate the file. On iOS you have to send a copy to the other application, modify it, hope it knows about the original application so it can send it back, send back another copy of the file. It's a huge mess. It means you only ever bother to get documents onto iOS devices to view them and never bother trying to edit them there for fear you'll never be able to keep the dozens of eventual copies in order.
Even iOS applications that have native support for WebDAV manage to screw up and make duplicates of things all the time. The iWork apps on iPad are great examples of this. You wan't to work on something on a WebDAV share? Sure, here's a copy. You want to save those changes back to the WebDAV share? Ok, I'll just make another copy....
I hope that at some point Apple figures out that everybody hates their iOS file swapping system and at least gives us a walled of file area that we can access via WebDAV or over USB. Applications should then just pick files from that common area rather than maintaining their own duplicates of everything.
Access to the root filesystem of the device would be even better but I know that's unlikely to happen.
Your statement is even more absurd when you consider the research that must be done to determine the probability of successful vaccination. In the case of the MMR vaccine it's only around 80%, IIRC. Luckily most children are surrounded by vaccinated people who wont spread it to them.
I don't know if you're trolling or honestly believe a big medical conspiracy is out to kill you but either way, you're wrong.
The last thing you want in an e-reader is for it to be light emitting. There's a reason we're putting so much effort into developing better eInk displays.
The only people who don't seem to understand this are the ones who don't read much or haven't read much on an eInk screen. It's a huge improvement over anything that works by shining light directly into your eyes.
I'm not sure what you expected from Apple. It's a technical reference. The content is well organised and concise.
The MSDN content is maybe slightly more confusing. Why, for example, is the first link under "Getting Started with Visual Basic" a list of "what's new" and the "Visual Basic Guided Tour" is in "related sections"? Seems backwards.
I'm sure it would be possible to find examples showing it to be the other way around.
Both are real documentation for professional audiences. If either was written in the style each company uses for end user documentation they'd be unusable. Not that I think you were trying to suggest they should be.
The only major phone that doesn't work that way? You guessed it: Apple's iPhone.
It's ridiculous, I agree, but it's quite possibly the telephone operators who are to blame.
They've been used to selling services that they know most customers will never actually use for years. A couple of phones come onto the market that actually make use of their internet connections and boom it's network meltdown.
Blaming Apple makes no sense, why would they care about how much data you use?
At least this is the problem here in Australia. On the plus side, the introduction of the iPhone means that mobile internet packages have become much better. Even Telstra, the government created monopoly, give you more than 2MB (not a typo) per month now.
And if you disable a virus and put a very tiny amount in a vaccine, will that make you sick> No. But will it help train your immune system against it? Yes. Wow, where to start? First of all the amount isn't tiny. It's larger than what would often be required to infect you with the live virus. Repeatedly diluting this amount would make it less effective not more yet this is how homeopathy is supposed to work. Secondly there's a well understood process involved which doesn't rely on water having a "memory" or any of the other pseudo science homeopathy practitioners like to espouse. And thirdly there's a mountain of evidence for it working that fits or understanding of biology. Where's the evidence of homeopathy working?
If it is so diluted that it no longer contains the original material, then I agree that is likely crap. However a low dilution may work. And the evidence of a low dilution working would be? Do you believe homeopathy's claim that repeated dilution makes a solution more potent? Where is the evidence of homeopathy working?
Look it up. They don't know how dogs can detect seizures before they occur, and they dont fully understand how they can smell on the order of one part per million.
I did some googling and can't find anything that suggests there's any mystery to dogs' sense of smell that doesn't apply to all animals. Their chemoreceptors are apparently like most mammals just denser and their olfactory bulb is forty times larger than in humans. The information I can find makes smelling things in such low concentrations perfectly plausible and not subject to some as yet undetected process. What's the great mystery you're talking about? Smell is understood and has a physical basis and it really doesn't matter if we don't know how they predict seizures because there are physiological causes for them that dogs can plausibly detect. It can't be pretended that it's some kind of spooky effect that runs counter to established science. What was the physical basis for thinking homeopathy might work? Where is the evidence of homeopathy working?
Dogs can detect molecules on the order of a couple parts per million, far below our level of detection. They can also smell cancer, and can tell the difference between different kinds of internal cancer just by smelling the skin.
And your point would be? If I dilute alcohol to the limits very of detection will it still get me drunk? And what of the homoeopathic solutions which have been diluted to the point that they don't contain a single molecule of the original active ingredient?
The burden of proof is on you. There's no body of evidence to suggest homeoeopathy has any effectiveness beyond the placebo effect. NOW is when you provide the evidence and claim your Nobel prize for discrediting a fairly important scientific principle (i.e. that you need a cause for a chemical effect).
They have also been shown to be able to predict seizures, and hypoglycemic attacks.
And this matters because? There are physical precursors to seizures so it's entirely possible that a dog might be able to detect them. That's neat but how is it relevant to homoeopathy where any active ingredient has been made absent?
Most of what dogs can do we dont know how they do it because we cant detect what they can.
Er, what? We know how dogs detect those things. The chemical receptors in their noses aren't that difficult to study. There's no need to make it out as some kind of spooky trick they have.
Just because we cannot detect low levels, doesn't mean they are not there nor have any effect.
We've got lots of evidence for lowering levels reducing effects and none for lowering levels increasing effects. The burden of proof is on you. Step up and actually show it and you'll be in every chemistry textbook printed in the next thousand years.
Perhaps it's my turn to be a dick: [citation needed].
Are you implying homeopathic medicine has no effect on people? i.e. same as a placebo?
Yes of course.
Are you suggesting that a solution diluted until there are no measurable levels of any active ingredient has any effect beyond that of plain water?
If so you'd better be writing this up because you'll get Nobel Prizes for chemistry, physics and medicine. Not to mention $1,000,000 from the James Randi Education Foundation.
This is the point in the discussion where someone will either mention their great aunt's best friend who was "cured of cancer" or start warning us of a vast medical conspiracy to keep homoeopathy a secret. Bonus points go to anyone who tells us all the repeatable controlled studies into the matter are flawed for some vague reason.
That factoid is cited on the very place you make fun of with your homorous [citation needed]. But nevermind, here's the link for you since you weren't even willing to look at at least the Wikipedia page yourself.
Some of the tattoos are near acupuncture areas. Not only were our ancestors playing bone flutes 35,000 years ago, but were also doing primitive medicine 5300 years ago. (Note homeopathic)
His body was "littered" with tattoos and some are near acupuncture points?
Colour me surprised!
Oh, and sticking needles into people can have an actual measurable effect. Therefore it's not homeopathic. Even the WHO agrees apparently.
What's left of his skin was littered with simple cross and line markings.
... upon closer inspection the scientists determined this to be Chinese writing which says "Forever Protector of Old Ladies". Work to locate the man's Facebook profile and collection of popped collar shirts is continuing.
Actually, you learn about bubble sort so you can understand where is might actually be a valid choice -- i.e. where you need to sort a small set in place with minimal use of stack space or other temporary storage.
Exactly! People who throw out perfectly valid algorithms because they're problematic in some cases are just as bad as people who dismiss all design patterns because they once worked with someone who didn't know when to stop using their hammer to drive in screws.
Bubble sort is also fine for situations where you know a list is nearly sorted already and you don't care about perfect sorting. I think the classic example is a virtual bird needing to know it's closest neighbours in flight. Their relative positions don't change quickly so you only need one or two passes and if you make a mistake, who cares! So long as you haven't actually clipped your neighbours wings yet you can be a bit imprecise and let the next round of movement/sorting sort things out.
Conroy and ISPs implementing the blacklist confirm that this is a fake:
It's identical to the list being extracted from filtering packages which use the ACMA list. One of the packages even stores it in a file called websites_ACMA.txt embedded into the product.
It might not be the most current version of the list but it damn well is real.
The iLiad Book Edition is a good choice. The hardware is nice and the firmware is open source. It's also very expensive.
You could also look at the BeBook. It uses the same 6" panel as everyone else, has excellent wide and open format support and the firmware is open source. It's also sold under many other names, Hanlin V3 being the most common.
I've bought a BeBook. It should last me long enough that a better and probably cheaper generation of devices will come out. There's no need to go for the top of the line models now, the technology is changing too fast.
If your primary motivation is reading not fiddling then don't bother with wireless and touch panels yet. They cut the battery life from several weeks to a few days on every model that has them.
Slashdot Mirror
I use it more when I'm not driving.
For example replying to and sending messages while changing train, or setting reminders for things I think of while walking. I also use "hey Siri" to get the weather forecast and stuff hands free while getting ready in the morning, and for setting timers while cooking.
It's easy to see why it's not much use for a lot of people though.
And here's some more comparing Apple, TomTom, Google, and OpenStreetMap for (roughly) the same area: http://imgur.com/a/Q03kK
The fact that it requires this much explanation just for the workaround shows how badly the user interface experience has been screwed up. I'm surprised at the amount of defence Google's poor design is getting. If Apple or Microsoft had done the same thing they'd be dragged over coals.
That's hardly ideal. Now you're keeping around an extra Gmail account only to be able to log into Google+. How long would people bother with that? Not long, is my bet. They'll just forget about it eventually.
"What was my other account's password?... Ah bugger it, I don't really need Google+ anyway!"
Many people use Google Apps for their personal email address because they have a personal website but don't want to administer an email server. Also, this doesn't help at all with the changed her name when they got married problem his wife has.
I am thinking early next year Siri will be rolled out to iPhone 4 and iPad 2 owners
No doubt I'll be wrong in some spectacular way but my guess is that it'll be a paid option for the iPhone 4 and iPad 2. If that's correct it'll probably cost Apple's usual "token" amount of $10 or so.
with apologies to Oscar Wilde
Oh, it's quite all right.
I know what happens when I minimize a window.
You, sir, are not a typical user then. I know us geeks like to think we are a huge market segment that can dictate how things should be done but that is fantasy.
Alas! We nerds are but a small pimple on the market's arse.
I think with (b) the poster is talking about the totally idiotic way you move files between applications on iOS.
Say I have a text file created in one Application and I want to open it with another to do some formatting then open in again in the original application. On a sane system I'd have some sort of file browser I can use to locate the file. On iOS you have to send a copy to the other application, modify it, hope it knows about the original application so it can send it back, send back another copy of the file. It's a huge mess. It means you only ever bother to get documents onto iOS devices to view them and never bother trying to edit them there for fear you'll never be able to keep the dozens of eventual copies in order.
Even iOS applications that have native support for WebDAV manage to screw up and make duplicates of things all the time. The iWork apps on iPad are great examples of this. You wan't to work on something on a WebDAV share? Sure, here's a copy. You want to save those changes back to the WebDAV share? Ok, I'll just make another copy....
I hope that at some point Apple figures out that everybody hates their iOS file swapping system and at least gives us a walled of file area that we can access via WebDAV or over USB. Applications should then just pick files from that common area rather than maintaining their own duplicates of everything.
Access to the root filesystem of the device would be even better but I know that's unlikely to happen.
NASA astronomers will be flying onboard a specially equipped DC-8
Sure, right.
We all know that when they say "astronomers" they really mean Xenu.
We all know that when they say "DC-8"s the really mean space ships that look exactly like DC-8s.
Don't be fooled people! It's all happening again!
On a mac you can actually press the help key. It's over near the home key, IIRC.
I wonder if it could be made to actually insert the word help into text fields, it's certainly never used for any useful help information.
Notice when there are outbreaks of measles, etc. they never tell you what percentage of those infected were 'vaccinated', do they... I wonder why...
Rubbish.
They most certainly do. Around a third of children infected with measles will have been vaccinated but they have milder infections and are far less likely to die of them. Take a look at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14506371, http://www.jstor.org/pss/30106702, and http://www.springerlink.com/content/wv6714265t3l8150/ for some examples.
Your statement is even more absurd when you consider the research that must be done to determine the probability of successful vaccination. In the case of the MMR vaccine it's only around 80%, IIRC. Luckily most children are surrounded by vaccinated people who wont spread it to them.
I don't know if you're trolling or honestly believe a big medical conspiracy is out to kill you but either way, you're wrong.
Oh for goodness sake!
The last thing you want in an e-reader is for it to be light emitting. There's a reason we're putting so much effort into developing better eInk displays.
The only people who don't seem to understand this are the ones who don't read much or haven't read much on an eInk screen. It's a huge improvement over anything that works by shining light directly into your eyes.
I'm fine with both.
I'm not sure what you expected from Apple. It's a technical reference. The content is well organised and concise.
The MSDN content is maybe slightly more confusing. Why, for example, is the first link under "Getting Started with Visual Basic" a list of "what's new" and the "Visual Basic Guided Tour" is in "related sections"? Seems backwards.
I'm sure it would be possible to find examples showing it to be the other way around.
Both are real documentation for professional audiences. If either was written in the style each company uses for end user documentation they'd be unusable. Not that I think you were trying to suggest they should be.
The only major phone that doesn't work that way? You guessed it: Apple's iPhone.
It's ridiculous, I agree, but it's quite possibly the telephone operators who are to blame.
They've been used to selling services that they know most customers will never actually use for years. A couple of phones come onto the market that actually make use of their internet connections and boom it's network meltdown.
Blaming Apple makes no sense, why would they care about how much data you use?
At least this is the problem here in Australia. On the plus side, the introduction of the iPhone means that mobile internet packages have become much better. Even Telstra, the government created monopoly, give you more than 2MB (not a typo) per month now.
Oh and save your blah blah blah about needing a data connection...
Aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the show?
And if you disable a virus and put a very tiny amount in a vaccine, will that make you sick> No. But will it help train your immune system against it? Yes.
Wow, where to start? First of all the amount isn't tiny. It's larger than what would often be required to infect you with the live virus. Repeatedly diluting this amount would make it less effective not more yet this is how homeopathy is supposed to work. Secondly there's a well understood process involved which doesn't rely on water having a "memory" or any of the other pseudo science homeopathy practitioners like to espouse. And thirdly there's a mountain of evidence for it working that fits or understanding of biology. Where's the evidence of homeopathy working?
If it is so diluted that it no longer contains the original material, then I agree that is likely crap. However a low dilution may work.
And the evidence of a low dilution working would be? Do you believe homeopathy's claim that repeated dilution makes a solution more potent? Where is the evidence of homeopathy working?
Look it up. They don't know how dogs can detect seizures before they occur, and they dont fully understand how they can smell on the order of one part per million.
I did some googling and can't find anything that suggests there's any mystery to dogs' sense of smell that doesn't apply to all animals. Their chemoreceptors are apparently like most mammals just denser and their olfactory bulb is forty times larger than in humans. The information I can find makes smelling things in such low concentrations perfectly plausible and not subject to some as yet undetected process. What's the great mystery you're talking about? Smell is understood and has a physical basis and it really doesn't matter if we don't know how they predict seizures because there are physiological causes for them that dogs can plausibly detect. It can't be pretended that it's some kind of spooky effect that runs counter to established science. What was the physical basis for thinking homeopathy might work? Where is the evidence of homeopathy working?
Dogs can detect molecules on the order of a couple parts per million, far below our level of detection. They can also smell cancer, and can tell the difference between different kinds of internal cancer just by smelling the skin.
And your point would be? If I dilute alcohol to the limits very of detection will it still get me drunk? And what of the homoeopathic solutions which have been diluted to the point that they don't contain a single molecule of the original active ingredient?
The burden of proof is on you. There's no body of evidence to suggest homeoeopathy has any effectiveness beyond the placebo effect. NOW is when you provide the evidence and claim your Nobel prize for discrediting a fairly important scientific principle (i.e. that you need a cause for a chemical effect).
They have also been shown to be able to predict seizures, and hypoglycemic attacks.
And this matters because? There are physical precursors to seizures so it's entirely possible that a dog might be able to detect them. That's neat but how is it relevant to homoeopathy where any active ingredient has been made absent?
Most of what dogs can do we dont know how they do it because we cant detect what they can.
Er, what? We know how dogs detect those things. The chemical receptors in their noses aren't that difficult to study. There's no need to make it out as some kind of spooky trick they have.
Just because we cannot detect low levels, doesn't mean they are not there nor have any effect.
We've got lots of evidence for lowering levels reducing effects and none for lowering levels increasing effects. The burden of proof is on you. Step up and actually show it and you'll be in every chemistry textbook printed in the next thousand years.
Perhaps it's my turn to be a dick: [citation needed].
Are you implying homeopathic medicine has no effect on people? i.e. same as a placebo?
Yes of course.
Are you suggesting that a solution diluted until there are no measurable levels of any active ingredient has any effect beyond that of plain water?
If so you'd better be writing this up because you'll get Nobel Prizes for chemistry, physics and medicine. Not to mention $1,000,000 from the James Randi Education Foundation.
This is the point in the discussion where someone will either mention their great aunt's best friend who was "cured of cancer" or start warning us of a vast medical conspiracy to keep homoeopathy a secret. Bonus points go to anyone who tells us all the repeatable controlled studies into the matter are flawed for some vague reason.
[citation needed]
You fail AC.
That factoid is cited on the very place you make fun of with your homorous [citation needed]. But nevermind, here's the link for you since you weren't even willing to look at at least the Wikipedia page yourself.
Some of the tattoos are near acupuncture areas. Not only were our ancestors playing bone flutes 35,000 years ago, but were also doing primitive medicine 5300 years ago. (Note homeopathic)
His body was "littered" with tattoos and some are near acupuncture points?
Colour me surprised!
Oh, and sticking needles into people can have an actual measurable effect. Therefore it's not homeopathic. Even the WHO agrees apparently.
What's left of his skin was littered with simple cross and line markings.
... upon closer inspection the scientists determined this to be Chinese writing which says "Forever Protector of Old Ladies". Work to locate the man's Facebook profile and collection of popped collar shirts is continuing.
Now back to you in the studio, Dave.
Actually, you learn about bubble sort so you can understand where is might actually be a valid choice -- i.e. where you need to sort a small set in place with minimal use of stack space or other temporary storage.
Exactly! People who throw out perfectly valid algorithms because they're problematic in some cases are just as bad as people who dismiss all design patterns because they once worked with someone who didn't know when to stop using their hammer to drive in screws.
Bubble sort is also fine for situations where you know a list is nearly sorted already and you don't care about perfect sorting. I think the classic example is a virtual bird needing to know it's closest neighbours in flight. Their relative positions don't change quickly so you only need one or two passes and if you make a mistake, who cares! So long as you haven't actually clipped your neighbours wings yet you can be a bit imprecise and let the next round of movement/sorting sort things out.
Conroy and ISPs implementing the blacklist confirm that this is a fake:
It's identical to the list being extracted from filtering packages which use the ACMA list. One of the packages even stores it in a file called websites_ACMA.txt embedded into the product.
It might not be the most current version of the list but it damn well is real.
The iLiad Book Edition is a good choice. The hardware is nice and the firmware is open source. It's also very expensive.
You could also look at the BeBook. It uses the same 6" panel as everyone else, has excellent wide and open format support and the firmware is open source. It's also sold under many other names, Hanlin V3 being the most common.
I've bought a BeBook. It should last me long enough that a better and probably cheaper generation of devices will come out. There's no need to go for the top of the line models now, the technology is changing too fast.
If your primary motivation is reading not fiddling then don't bother with wireless and touch panels yet. They cut the battery life from several weeks to a few days on every model that has them.