First, it's common across platforms; second, yes, the issue partially is how difficult it is, because in the grand scheme of things it's about the most minor annoyance you will ever have to deal with in your life. First world problems, anyone? "Meeeh, my computer keeps trying to open Word when I want to open the file in Notepad, I had to actually click the mouse three times to stop it, meeeeeeeh". I'm a person who usually stands on his principles but fuck me, this is meta-complaining at its finest.
Only two types of people would pay a $500 - $1000 (or more) premium for something anyone with the most basic computer literacy can do in 15 minutes: an idiot, or someone who likes to boast about having the money to do so. Which is funny, because in the grown-up world, most of us can afford an extra $500 or $1000 here and there, so your thinly-veiled bragging just sounds pathetic, that's all....although if people are willing to pay that kind of money for no crapware, I think I may have a new career as a Crapware Removal specialist.
Christ, the crapware isn't Microsoft's fault, it's the makers of that particular computer. This is a problem on the maker side, not on the OS side. Shit, if third party makers were able to produce Macs commercially you can bet your britches they would be loaded up with crapware, too. This whole debate is moot.
Right click > open with > select program and check "always use this program for this kind of file." Just so you know. And you could always, like, uninstall the Word preview if you weren't planning on using it, which would solve the problem as well.
I had a similar problem on my Mac. Fucking iTunes used to try to open every movie I made in iMovie, so then a clicked the mouse a few times and told it not to. Problem solved.
Is it annoying? I guess so... I don't really get my panties in a bunch about it; I just uninstall it and then I never have to deal with it again. Basic computer literacy, really.
Although it has sucked to be the son of a divorced couple, it's far better for me that they divorced when they did and find happiness separately than stay together, be miserable, and create a dysfunctional situation.
The parents of a friend of mine divorced as soon as he (the youngest sibling) graduated high school and left home. So in addition to the usual complicated feelings when your parents divorce, he was saddled with the extra guilt of feeling like he had forced his parents to stay together in misery all those years. Fucked him up pretty bad, even though he was an adult when it happened.
Haven't the makers of certain DVR units been successfully sued or otherwise forced to stop providing devices that automatically skip ads in DVR'd content? I remember hearing stories like that and thinking "well, shit, AdBlock is next to go."
Personally I detest the idea of not being able to choose whether or not I want (my kids) to see an advertisement. It's bad enough these days that our common space has been overwhelmed with advertisements to the point where I'm bombarded every time I drive to the supermarket; browser+ Adblock is one of the few havens I feel I still have from the relentless nature of advertising these days. And I have to admit I'm a bit worried that so many people have no problem allowing themselves to be coerced into buying products... arguments about content producers having the right to monetize their products are fine and dandy until you take a hard look at the psychological trickery and deceit that goes into modern advertising. "Born to Buy" should be mandatory reading.
I have to say I'm embarrassed about our Senator's reprehensible stance on electronic issues -- he's the guy who behind SOPA as well. I gave him a piece of my mind on that one, and I'll be doing the same with this one. I have to wonder what the fuck this guy's problem is.
For a party that bitches and moans about excessive regulations as much as the GOP, it astounds me that they cannot see how current IP law is smothering proper innovation.
(Okay, it doesn't astound me; in the context of corporate power in the US, it makes perfect sense. I guess what's most surprising is the doublethink required to enable these guys to spout off anti-regulation propaganda while wholeheartedly supporting complex systems of regulation, rail against welfare while supporting vast corporate welfare programs and subsidies, etc. etc.)
This is not a step, but a tiny tiptoe, if that. The best commercially-available voice recognition program (DNS) is capable of around 95% accuracy, but only if you have a high-quality mic, are in an otherwise silent environment, and speak clearly and evenly. With phones you're taking conversational voice sampled at very low bitrates with a variety of levels of background noise, which is going to severely impact the VR accuracy. You're then going to put that slightly mangled VR-generated text through a machine translation engine, which, as anyone who works between Japanese and English knows very well, will utterly destroy anything but the shortest phrases. With the raw VR-generated text, you at least have some context from which to guess what mistaken words were supposed to mean, but you kill that ability when you run it through MT. I can't say anything about the Japanese-Korean or Korean-English side of things, but the Japanese-English product will be utterly unusable garbage, I guarantee....and I don't know why people are freaking out about the MS video posted a short while ago. If you actually pay attention you'll see that the VR text was riddled with mistakes. I'd really like to hear the opinion of someone who speaks Chinese, and see how it performs with an everyday conversation rather than a speech someone prepared and recited in a slow, clear voice.
...is to update Windows 8 so it has a switch in the user settings area: optimize for touch screen input, or optimize for mouse/trackpad input. The former gives you the Metro start screen, and the latter gives you back the Start button. That's all they need to do and the main problem with Windows 8 would basically be eliminated. I think the idea of trying to create a single OS that works on both desktops and tablets is a good one; a couple of relatively minor tweaks and I think Windows 8 could be excellent.
That said, Metro on a tablet is awesome -- I just bought my wife an Asus Vivotab with RT and we were both blown away by how nice it is. I mean, it's the same concept as an iPad (sliding tiles around) but something about the way the tiles are grouped and whatnot makes it easier to use and more customizable IMO. (For mobile, I don't get the hate for Metro. The people who complain about the "learning curve" strike me as idiots -- it took me about an hour of messing around with it to figure out how to navigate everything pretty much perfectly.)
It's funny, because I've always thought of Satie's use of the occasional dissonant notes as what makes the music "human". Check his Danses de Travers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x6nuiNN3JI) at 0:38, 0:52, 1:02, and so on and so forth... the dissonant elements are what breathe real life into an already impeccably beautiful piece.
(Disclaimer: I know nothing of music theory but know a lot of music.)
Well, they already replaced the cutesy bubbly log-on sound with an obnoxious robot middle-management guy saying "yOu haVe SIGNED IN!" It's Microsoft, so they'll make their unmistakable mark on it somehow, for sure.
Just publish the apology and be done with it, you stupid cunts. Childish behavior is childish behavior, whether it happens in the kindergarten classroom or the Court of Appeal courtroom.
You forgot "every three months when Facebook decides to change their default privacy policy and app policy."
That might be my problem, though. All my actual friends barely use Facebook (if they even have an account) which gave me a pretty low S/N... Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
Basically this is why I cancelled my Facebook account. I keep in regular touch with my actual friends regardless, and all the noise from those relatively meaningless acquaintances is cut out. This is what was once known as "normal life." (For the acquaintances with whom I do want to maintain a contact channel for whatever reason, I have a LinkedIn account, which I basically only look at once a month, if that.)
As for Googling people, all I can say is some people have too much time on their hands. I'm either working, playing, or spending time with my family. I don't have the time to play cyber detective, and even if I did, I couldn't really give two shits about digging up dirt on people.
Some do. There are some Christian groups that accept that evolution is fact, but that it is just another facet of the wonderful system god has created. How they navigate the mental acrobatics required to square that with the content of the fundamental text of their religion is beyond me, but "faith" is something I have stopped trying to understand (beyond considering it a combination of willful ignorance, intellectual sloth, and wishful thinking).
It's the fundamentalists who deny evolution that represent that basic contradiction Dawkins is talking about. These people have no problem with the science behind how your freezer makes ice cubes and even how a microwave heats your food up, but this one particular scientific concept crosses the line. I'd say it's because evolution so directly challenges their faith that they are so resistant, but when you think about it, so do freezers and microwaves -- but as soon as you get into that argument, you've crossed the threshold for logical/reasonable conversations with the "faithful" and you're back to square one.
I currently use the best commercial voice recognition software, and have experience with a variety of machine translation suites that do Japanese-English, so I have somewhat of a frame of reference.
With respect to the former, the quality is quite good. I can speak at a relatively natural pace and get upwards of 95% accuracy. That said, I still have to adjust my speech in a sometimes unnatural manner to be sure the program "hears" me correctly, and I have heard horror stories from people with different accents/dialects having a terrible time. (Someone made a joke about Welsh, but I know a Welsh fellow and he had some colorful things to say about the commercially-available VR programs.) An additional complicating factor in the J-E scenario is that Japanese has many words that sound nearly identical, and are distinguished only by slight inflections: (hashi; chopsticks) and (hashi; bridge) is a typical example. There are thousands of examples of such words, and from what I understand, Japanese voice recognition software is quite far behind because of this particular trait. Without a UI for speakers to choose which word they are actually trying to say, I can imagine that the VR side of this program has a slew of problems.
Now, onto machine translation. As it stands, MT works great for some language pairs, but Japanese-English is notoriously problematic. AFAIK part of the reason is the highly contextual nature of the Japanese language. Subjects and objects are often omitted entirely, for example. I don't really have to go into this in detail -- just run any Japanese Wikipedia article through Google translate and see what happens. Other commercially-available and proprietary software I've used has been basically the same (Google actually seems to be a bit better, usually.) English-Japanese is a bit easier because the context (subjects, objects, verbs) are typically "all there" -- so even if the result is Japanese that is horribly unnatural, you may still be able to get the info you need.
But now, they're going to take the VR-generated input of varying degrees of accuracy, and run THAT through MT software that butchers even the most simple and perfect sentences? I could be wrong, but I'm having trouble seeing how the result will be anything less than a disaster. "The software involved cannot offer perfect translations, limiting its use in some situations" sounds like the understatement of the year. Get ready for synthesized-voice gobbeldygook and an mp3 website called "spoken Engrish."
(Full disclosure: I am a translator, but in a lot of ways a yearn for the day when MT will be good enough to put me out of a job; I think the idea of people being able to instantly communicate with speakers of other languages is exciting and would lead to a much more open world. However, I've been hearing that tech like this is 3-5 years away for decades now. If this product showcased a revolutionary engine for MT, then I would be singing a different tune, but for now it seems like a mere combination of two imperfect technologies.)
Slashdot Mirror
First, it's common across platforms; second, yes, the issue partially is how difficult it is, because in the grand scheme of things it's about the most minor annoyance you will ever have to deal with in your life. First world problems, anyone? "Meeeh, my computer keeps trying to open Word when I want to open the file in Notepad, I had to actually click the mouse three times to stop it, meeeeeeeh". I'm a person who usually stands on his principles but fuck me, this is meta-complaining at its finest.
Gee, you're right, I better go spend an extra $1000 on a Mac.
Only two types of people would pay a $500 - $1000 (or more) premium for something anyone with the most basic computer literacy can do in 15 minutes: an idiot, or someone who likes to boast about having the money to do so. Which is funny, because in the grown-up world, most of us can afford an extra $500 or $1000 here and there, so your thinly-veiled bragging just sounds pathetic, that's all. ...although if people are willing to pay that kind of money for no crapware, I think I may have a new career as a Crapware Removal specialist.
Christ, the crapware isn't Microsoft's fault, it's the makers of that particular computer. This is a problem on the maker side, not on the OS side. Shit, if third party makers were able to produce Macs commercially you can bet your britches they would be loaded up with crapware, too. This whole debate is moot.
Right click > open with > select program and check "always use this program for this kind of file." Just so you know. And you could always, like, uninstall the Word preview if you weren't planning on using it, which would solve the problem as well.
I had a similar problem on my Mac. Fucking iTunes used to try to open every movie I made in iMovie, so then a clicked the mouse a few times and told it not to. Problem solved.
Is it annoying? I guess so... I don't really get my panties in a bunch about it; I just uninstall it and then I never have to deal with it again. Basic computer literacy, really.
Although it has sucked to be the son of a divorced couple, it's far better for me that they divorced when they did and find happiness separately than stay together, be miserable, and create a dysfunctional situation.
The parents of a friend of mine divorced as soon as he (the youngest sibling) graduated high school and left home. So in addition to the usual complicated feelings when your parents divorce, he was saddled with the extra guilt of feeling like he had forced his parents to stay together in misery all those years. Fucked him up pretty bad, even though he was an adult when it happened.
Haven't the makers of certain DVR units been successfully sued or otherwise forced to stop providing devices that automatically skip ads in DVR'd content? I remember hearing stories like that and thinking "well, shit, AdBlock is next to go."
Personally I detest the idea of not being able to choose whether or not I want (my kids) to see an advertisement. It's bad enough these days that our common space has been overwhelmed with advertisements to the point where I'm bombarded every time I drive to the supermarket; browser+ Adblock is one of the few havens I feel I still have from the relentless nature of advertising these days. And I have to admit I'm a bit worried that so many people have no problem allowing themselves to be coerced into buying products... arguments about content producers having the right to monetize their products are fine and dandy until you take a hard look at the psychological trickery and deceit that goes into modern advertising. "Born to Buy" should be mandatory reading.
Goldberry is waiting... for her Tom Bomba-dildo.
What number, etc.? Can't find it in TFA. Need to call Leahy's office and give him a dressing-down.
I have to say I'm embarrassed about our Senator's reprehensible stance on electronic issues -- he's the guy who behind SOPA as well. I gave him a piece of my mind on that one, and I'll be doing the same with this one. I have to wonder what the fuck this guy's problem is.
For a party that bitches and moans about excessive regulations as much as the GOP, it astounds me that they cannot see how current IP law is smothering proper innovation.
(Okay, it doesn't astound me; in the context of corporate power in the US, it makes perfect sense. I guess what's most surprising is the doublethink required to enable these guys to spout off anti-regulation propaganda while wholeheartedly supporting complex systems of regulation, rail against welfare while supporting vast corporate welfare programs and subsidies, etc. etc.)
This is not a step, but a tiny tiptoe, if that. The best commercially-available voice recognition program (DNS) is capable of around 95% accuracy, but only if you have a high-quality mic, are in an otherwise silent environment, and speak clearly and evenly. With phones you're taking conversational voice sampled at very low bitrates with a variety of levels of background noise, which is going to severely impact the VR accuracy. You're then going to put that slightly mangled VR-generated text through a machine translation engine, which, as anyone who works between Japanese and English knows very well, will utterly destroy anything but the shortest phrases. With the raw VR-generated text, you at least have some context from which to guess what mistaken words were supposed to mean, but you kill that ability when you run it through MT. I can't say anything about the Japanese-Korean or Korean-English side of things, but the Japanese-English product will be utterly unusable garbage, I guarantee. ...and I don't know why people are freaking out about the MS video posted a short while ago. If you actually pay attention you'll see that the VR text was riddled with mistakes. I'd really like to hear the opinion of someone who speaks Chinese, and see how it performs with an everyday conversation rather than a speech someone prepared and recited in a slow, clear voice.
...is to update Windows 8 so it has a switch in the user settings area: optimize for touch screen input, or optimize for mouse/trackpad input. The former gives you the Metro start screen, and the latter gives you back the Start button. That's all they need to do and the main problem with Windows 8 would basically be eliminated. I think the idea of trying to create a single OS that works on both desktops and tablets is a good one; a couple of relatively minor tweaks and I think Windows 8 could be excellent.
That said, Metro on a tablet is awesome -- I just bought my wife an Asus Vivotab with RT and we were both blown away by how nice it is. I mean, it's the same concept as an iPad (sliding tiles around) but something about the way the tiles are grouped and whatnot makes it easier to use and more customizable IMO. (For mobile, I don't get the hate for Metro. The people who complain about the "learning curve" strike me as idiots -- it took me about an hour of messing around with it to figure out how to navigate everything pretty much perfectly.)
It's funny, because I've always thought of Satie's use of the occasional dissonant notes as what makes the music "human". Check his Danses de Travers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x6nuiNN3JI) at 0:38, 0:52, 1:02, and so on and so forth... the dissonant elements are what breathe real life into an already impeccably beautiful piece.
(Disclaimer: I know nothing of music theory but know a lot of music.)
Well, they already replaced the cutesy bubbly log-on sound with an obnoxious robot middle-management guy saying "yOu haVe SIGNED IN!" It's Microsoft, so they'll make their unmistakable mark on it somehow, for sure.
Just publish the apology and be done with it, you stupid cunts. Childish behavior is childish behavior, whether it happens in the kindergarten classroom or the Court of Appeal courtroom.
I have officially lost.
You forgot "every three months when Facebook decides to change their default privacy policy and app policy."
That might be my problem, though. All my actual friends barely use Facebook (if they even have an account) which gave me a pretty low S/N... Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
Basically this is why I cancelled my Facebook account. I keep in regular touch with my actual friends regardless, and all the noise from those relatively meaningless acquaintances is cut out. This is what was once known as "normal life." (For the acquaintances with whom I do want to maintain a contact channel for whatever reason, I have a LinkedIn account, which I basically only look at once a month, if that.)
As for Googling people, all I can say is some people have too much time on their hands. I'm either working, playing, or spending time with my family. I don't have the time to play cyber detective, and even if I did, I couldn't really give two shits about digging up dirt on people.
...but something about the "fuck you, everyone" wording of that message made me never want to buy another Apple product, ever.
TV sucks no matter what resolution and size you watch it in.
Some do. There are some Christian groups that accept that evolution is fact, but that it is just another facet of the wonderful system god has created. How they navigate the mental acrobatics required to square that with the content of the fundamental text of their religion is beyond me, but "faith" is something I have stopped trying to understand (beyond considering it a combination of willful ignorance, intellectual sloth, and wishful thinking).
It's the fundamentalists who deny evolution that represent that basic contradiction Dawkins is talking about. These people have no problem with the science behind how your freezer makes ice cubes and even how a microwave heats your food up, but this one particular scientific concept crosses the line. I'd say it's because evolution so directly challenges their faith that they are so resistant, but when you think about it, so do freezers and microwaves -- but as soon as you get into that argument, you've crossed the threshold for logical/reasonable conversations with the "faithful" and you're back to square one.
Infuriating.
I currently use the best commercial voice recognition software, and have experience with a variety of machine translation suites that do Japanese-English, so I have somewhat of a frame of reference.
With respect to the former, the quality is quite good. I can speak at a relatively natural pace and get upwards of 95% accuracy. That said, I still have to adjust my speech in a sometimes unnatural manner to be sure the program "hears" me correctly, and I have heard horror stories from people with different accents/dialects having a terrible time. (Someone made a joke about Welsh, but I know a Welsh fellow and he had some colorful things to say about the commercially-available VR programs.) An additional complicating factor in the J-E scenario is that Japanese has many words that sound nearly identical, and are distinguished only by slight inflections: (hashi; chopsticks) and (hashi; bridge) is a typical example. There are thousands of examples of such words, and from what I understand, Japanese voice recognition software is quite far behind because of this particular trait. Without a UI for speakers to choose which word they are actually trying to say, I can imagine that the VR side of this program has a slew of problems.
Now, onto machine translation. As it stands, MT works great for some language pairs, but Japanese-English is notoriously problematic. AFAIK part of the reason is the highly contextual nature of the Japanese language. Subjects and objects are often omitted entirely, for example. I don't really have to go into this in detail -- just run any Japanese Wikipedia article through Google translate and see what happens. Other commercially-available and proprietary software I've used has been basically the same (Google actually seems to be a bit better, usually.) English-Japanese is a bit easier because the context (subjects, objects, verbs) are typically "all there" -- so even if the result is Japanese that is horribly unnatural, you may still be able to get the info you need.
But now, they're going to take the VR-generated input of varying degrees of accuracy, and run THAT through MT software that butchers even the most simple and perfect sentences? I could be wrong, but I'm having trouble seeing how the result will be anything less than a disaster. "The software involved cannot offer perfect translations, limiting its use in some situations" sounds like the understatement of the year. Get ready for synthesized-voice gobbeldygook and an mp3 website called "spoken Engrish."
(Full disclosure: I am a translator, but in a lot of ways a yearn for the day when MT will be good enough to put me out of a job; I think the idea of people being able to instantly communicate with speakers of other languages is exciting and would lead to a much more open world. However, I've been hearing that tech like this is 3-5 years away for decades now. If this product showcased a revolutionary engine for MT, then I would be singing a different tune, but for now it seems like a mere combination of two imperfect technologies.)
And have they been sterilized with your lighter?