ActiveX was MS attempt at competing with Java applets. After everyone realized what an unsafe idea ActiveX was, Java was championed as the "right way" to do it but never was used much due to it's terrible speed.
The essence of Jeopardy is to answers questions correctly and quickly.
Watson has prove itself to be almost at the level of, if not equal to, humans in this regard.
In professions like medicine and law, where the amount of information a practitioner has to keep in his head is enormous and will only grow, Watson even in it's 1.0 "release" can be of great help.
I won't be surprise that in 4 years, as IBM continues to improve it's "reasoning" ability, that Watson will be asking questions in return to clarify the details of questions posed to it - and to compensate for the limited context it can perceive.
As you said, all publishers have to do is go straight to Apple and ignore Amazon as the middleman, they still get 70%.
I don't see a problem really, it's not as if publishers can't sell to both Amazon and Apple. They sell to B&N and Amazon at the same time with no problems.
I used to worry about Apple getting a monopoly in mobile phones, but with the explosion of Android, RIM appearing to be getting their heads out of their arses, and MS aggressively trying to move into the mobile market, chances of Apple having a monopoly gets less by the day.
I more worried about MS and WP7, MS is still the same old bastards they were in teh 90s, willing to use any underhanded tricks they can - etc, fucking with Yahoo's stock price and threatening a take over forcing them to use Bing when Yahoo's own search engine is 2nd only to Google's (and probably doesn't rely on spying on Google), the infiltration of Nokia (lets face it the Nokia we know is dead, it's now exist as an expandable arm of MS in all but name)
Just because what you do now is good, doesn't mean the wrong you did in your past is suddenly OK.
Bill Gates giving to charity is a good thing.
MS however is still the same old company it always was, until they show they have turned over a new leaf (unlikely without new leaders), they are a company to be warily off.
It's ability to translate speech or OCR text isn't the biggest point here, don't know if it even does any of that rather then just accept input as raw text, it's the ability to interpret and answer questions phrased in English (well enough) that is the big feature.
I don't think the MS plans to commit a Mobile Harakiri(tm) any time soon. Their CE$ announcement of ARM Windows suggest that they are in it for the long term.
Pardon me, but why would dropping Nokia be Harakiri?
Once they have market share, and Nokia has out lived it's usefulness, why restricting yourself to them when you can sell to all vendors (like they do Windows on the desktop) and force the price down (commodizing the hardware).
Nokia better come up with some exotic hardware that no one else can produce and tie WP7 tightly to it (so it's reliance on their hardware) if they want to do this exclusive thing.
Else they are completely at the mercy of MS, where MS can dump them for another hardware manufacturer and they can't drop WP7 without losing their customer base who has invested heavy in WP7 applications.
You can now write fully native apps, the Dalvik VM is probably being phrased out - there is no point to having it any more IMO, all phones are run on (and will probably continue to run on) one architecture, ARM.
Really foolish of them to put themselves at the mercy of one of the most ruthless tech companies in existence.
If MS suddenly decide they don't want to sell WP7 to them or decides to price gouge them, Nokia is utterly fucked.
All the apps are reliant on WP7 not Nokia's hardware, your users will be MS's customers not yours.
I find it ironic that Nokia CEO list fear of commodization as the reason to join MS instead of Android, when all they will be doing soon is providing generic (and commodized) hardware for WP7.
I'm namely approaching this from the point of view of HTML5 standardization.
That said, I never really considered the issue from the encoder perspective. But if this codec really is completely royalty free (now MPEG is going to manage this I don't know), patents or no patents, then using it in the HTML5 standard shouldn't be a problem.
H.264 is obvious out unless they make it royalty free too, but that is highly unlikely to happen.
I think the main issue with including non-royalty free codecs in the HTML5 standard, is that it places the display of and the creation of HTML5 content under the control of the owners of the said non-royalty free codec. No one will be able to create nor display a HTML5 video without a license from codec owners. That IMHO is not good for the Internet.
I for one don't care all that much about patents issues, as long as Mozilla and Opera can implement it to me it means problem solved. HTML5 can be standardized and we can move on with our lives.
Whether it's VP8 or whatever.
If it's quality is better than VP8 all the better, those unhappy with VP8's output can now be happy.
I got a feeling this codec will be highly optimized for low bitrates and streaming, so it won't compete with H.264 main profile for other uses.
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You have no idea how disappointed I was when I found out it couldn't play PSP games - that I thought it would be able to based on it's name.
Replace "after" with "unlike" then. :p
ActiveX was MS attempt at competing with Java applets. After everyone realized what an unsafe idea ActiveX was, Java was championed as the "right way" to do it but never was used much due to it's terrible speed.
It's just a trojan horse on an alternative app market.
Just like on the PC you have to exercise caution as to where you get your apps.
Good thing it's not a security vulnerability, like one that allows an attacker to get root access to a phone, that needs patching to fix.
Java was supposed to be the safe (but painfully slow) way to run "web apps" after the giant clusterfuck that was ActiveX.
But over the years it seems it too have "growth" into a security risk.
I wonder if Javascript will suffer the same fate one day.
The essence of Jeopardy is to answers questions correctly and quickly.
Watson has prove itself to be almost at the level of, if not equal to, humans in this regard.
In professions like medicine and law, where the amount of information a practitioner has to keep in his head is enormous and will only grow, Watson even in it's 1.0 "release" can be of great help.
I won't be surprise that in 4 years, as IBM continues to improve it's "reasoning" ability, that Watson will be asking questions in return to clarify the details of questions posed to it - and to compensate for the limited context it can perceive.
Err... how does this screw over authors?
As you said, all publishers have to do is go straight to Apple and ignore Amazon as the middleman, they still get 70%.
I don't see a problem really, it's not as if publishers can't sell to both Amazon and Apple. They sell to B&N and Amazon at the same time with no problems.
Pretty much.
I used to worry about Apple getting a monopoly in mobile phones, but with the explosion of Android, RIM appearing to be getting their heads out of their arses, and MS aggressively trying to move into the mobile market, chances of Apple having a monopoly gets less by the day.
I more worried about MS and WP7, MS is still the same old bastards they were in teh 90s, willing to use any underhanded tricks they can - etc, fucking with Yahoo's stock price and threatening a take over forcing them to use Bing when Yahoo's own search engine is 2nd only to Google's (and probably doesn't rely on spying on Google), the infiltration of Nokia (lets face it the Nokia we know is dead, it's now exist as an expandable arm of MS in all but name)
Just because what you do now is good, doesn't mean the wrong you did in your past is suddenly OK.
Bill Gates giving to charity is a good thing.
MS however is still the same old company it always was, until they show they have turned over a new leaf (unlikely without new leaders), they are a company to be warily off.
amazing how much hate MS gets just for being Microsoft
It's a reputation they have earned over the decades.
You reap what you sow.
Better late than never.
They should catch up after a few phones.
I don't think Microsoft has normally done such things as long as the other party hasn't done something nasty or went out of business.
But they can. Hence Nokia will be completely at the mercy of MS.
If MS decides to price gouge Nokia, there is nothing Nokia can do.
That said, on it's test run http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/13/ibms-watson-supercomputer-destroys-all-humans-in-jeopardy-pract/ it doesn't reply unless it's highly certain, but even in such situations it's top ranking answer is right more times that not.
Having seen a video of it in action, I'm very impressed.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/13/ibms-watson-supercomputer-destroys-all-humans-in-jeopardy-pract/
It's ability to translate speech or OCR text isn't the biggest point here, don't know if it even does any of that rather then just accept input as raw text, it's the ability to interpret and answer questions phrased in English (well enough) that is the big feature.
I don't think the MS plans to commit a Mobile Harakiri(tm) any time soon. Their CE$ announcement of ARM Windows suggest that they are in it for the long term.
Pardon me, but why would dropping Nokia be Harakiri?
Once they have market share, and Nokia has out lived it's usefulness, why restricting yourself to them when you can sell to all vendors (like they do Windows on the desktop) and force the price down (commodizing the hardware).
Nokia better come up with some exotic hardware that no one else can produce and tie WP7 tightly to it (so it's reliance on their hardware) if they want to do this exclusive thing.
Else they are completely at the mercy of MS, where MS can dump them for another hardware manufacturer and they can't drop WP7 without losing their customer base who has invested heavy in WP7 applications.
Well I assumed they might not mind having Qt on Android. /shrug
Maybe Google can throw some cash their way ...
From what I heard it's being fixed.
You can now write fully native apps, the Dalvik VM is probably being phrased out - there is no point to having it any more IMO, all phones are run on (and will probably continue to run on) one architecture, ARM.
No harm really.
Unlike Windows, Android is open source. Whatever changes comes to Android you can follow up in your own OS.
Your OS is effectively Android (from the view point of developers and users) in all but name to be honest.
Really foolish of them to put themselves at the mercy of one of the most ruthless tech companies in existence.
If MS suddenly decide they don't want to sell WP7 to them or decides to price gouge them, Nokia is utterly fucked.
All the apps are reliant on WP7 not Nokia's hardware, your users will be MS's customers not yours.
I find it ironic that Nokia CEO list fear of commodization as the reason to join MS instead of Android, when all they will be doing soon is providing generic (and commodized) hardware for WP7.
Was going to post just this.
This is the way to do it IMO.
Nokia jumping in bed with MS was a retarded idea.
Why would anybody outside of RIM bother to write apps for Blackberry if this happens?
That's the point, with this idea they wouldn't have too.
I don't know about device ownership and stuff.
I'm namely approaching this from the point of view of HTML5 standardization.
That said, I never really considered the issue from the encoder perspective.
But if this codec really is completely royalty free (now MPEG is going to manage this I don't know), patents or no patents, then using it in the HTML5 standard shouldn't be a problem.
H.264 is obvious out unless they make it royalty free too, but that is highly unlikely to happen.
I think the main issue with including non-royalty free codecs in the HTML5 standard, is that it places the display of and the creation of HTML5 content under the control of the owners of the said non-royalty free codec. No one will be able to create nor display a HTML5 video without a license from codec owners. That IMHO is not good for the Internet.
I for one don't care all that much about patents issues, as long as Mozilla and Opera can implement it to me it means problem solved.
HTML5 can be standardized and we can move on with our lives.
Whether it's VP8 or whatever.
If it's quality is better than VP8 all the better, those unhappy with VP8's output can now be happy.
I got a feeling this codec will be highly optimized for low bitrates and streaming, so it won't compete with H.264 main profile for other uses.