It's terribly obnoxiously slow. It's also a lot broader than previous voice-command efforts. I set a baking timer by saying "Siri, set an alarm for twenty minutes from now." I had no idea that "twenty minutes from now" would be something that Siri understood. It just seemed like it would make sense. And it just worked. "Text my wife that I'll be about 10 minutes late" works too.
Well, it works when the network is responding. And it works terribly slow. But it is really a step towards natural language understanding of voice. Or rather, unlike a lot of other efforts I feel like the phone is trying to understand me rather than the other way around.
The iPhone does have 3 speakers and 2 microphones. Most aren't particularly good ones, mind you, and individual addressability is a problem. It's really not practical. Add in a gps and camera, and it's not quite as bad as you make it out to be.
Of course, using a camera properly would be cheating. But I'm a bit surprised nobody has done it on the iPhone.
Weapons Officer: "Captain I can't get a fix on the enemies position." Science Officer: "We could try using an optimum-autocorrelation-signal and semi-automatic frequency calibration together with an averaging over multiple cycles." Weapons Officer: "You mean, use the auto-shootey?" Science Officer: "Use the auto-shootey."
This is a bit of a simplification, but development on Apple's platform is done with sandbox accounts in a sandbox version of their system. You can build for your company in your certified sandbox, but you need other things when you release to the public. So there is a build certificate. There is also a push notification certificate (though I'm less familiar with that). It looks like Google either had a sandbox push notification certificate instead of a release push notification certificate, or didn't re-generate the store certificate after generating the sandbox certificate (for proper pairing).
What's deceptive is not mentioning what isn't taxed. Which is to say, any money that is invested in a business isn't taxed. Stock Market transactions aren't taxed. Basically, things that rich people do to increase their income aren't taxed. The things that everyone else does to increase their income, such as buying cars or going to school, is. Business purchases of raw materials could also not be taxed in this way, as business frequently don't add 35% of value to their materials. So either we institute a European Value-Added-Tax style bureaucratic nightmare, or businesses get away even more free than before. And we're talking about zero-sum relative burdens here... if one person isn't paying, someone else is paying more.
Also, your comics, when taken globally, are disingenuously counting the 35% tax twice to get to the 50% number. Either they count for the person at time of earning, or they count for the person at the time of spending. Counting it twice in the manner of the comics overcounts. And taxes as share of GDP in the US is actually 27%.
The problem is a simple 3-way intersection. 1. People believe they need higher education to get jobs, of which there are few. 2. Education costs are going further and further up, especially with for-profit institutes and non-academic collegiate activities needed for prestige. 3. Student loans are basically unlimited. Banks will sign you a blank check, with no sense of your ability to pay it back.
If you're not high enough academically to enter state-run institutions, in the US you're looking at around 100k in tuition alone for a 4-year college. After getting out of a college with a 100k bill, that comes out to around $1,500 monthly in student loans. If you've got a professional job and you're earning, say, $20 an hour working as a nurse, you get a take home in the ballpark of 2.5k per month. Even in these good situations, more than half of your income is going to student loans. That's why %10 of students default within 2 years of graduation.
Take that ridiculous, oversized, mind-bendingly overpriced coin.
Mint a field of 250 thousand of them. That's the US debt.
Launch a comically supervillian plot to steal every bit of gold ever mined in the lifespan of humanity, stealing from fort knox, buckingham palace, motherboards, every wedding ring, etc. If you took all 10 billion oz of gold in the world, and sold it all at current market rates, you'd barely pay off the federal debt.
Most coins are actually more expensive to mint than their stated face value. The value from a coin comes from the repeated re-use in transactions, rather than in the creation of value.
Not to say that this is a practical example of that, mind you. Just that most coins follow the same model on a more practical scale.
Android voice recognition is equivalent to voice commands. "Open Internet Explorer... Highlight Search Box... Type 'weather, return.'"
Siri is a heck of a lot more interesting. Siri is a first grasp at understanding intent. "Is it going to rain tomorrow?" "Text my wife that I'll be there in 5 minutes." "Remind me at 6PM tomorrow to call the doctor." "How do I get home?"
Now, it's not perfect. Siri is damned slow, when it runs at all. And it works a lot better in the sorts of quiet places where you probably shouldn't be talking into a phone. And it was bought by apple, rather than being initially developed by them. But it's interesting in that it forms relational databases about the world around you, and starts to correlate bits of information. It's not just voice recognition, it's meaning recognition.
I'm a generally identified Liberal, due to get-out-of-my-bedroom policies and belief that healthcare in this country is completely f*ed up. But if the bulk of the Republican party stuck to professed Republican ideals, I might actually be a Republican. When they had the opportunity to make a balanced budget during the Contract with America, they cut taxes on the rich without actually cutting programs. After 911 they got us into Iraq, grew the government massively, and started wiretapping everyone. They're the reason why whenever you go through an airport now, there is a 2 hour wait for a college dropout to shove their hand up your bum. And of course it's a slap in the face to callthe super-rich "job creators" (HP just spent 240 million dollars to FIRE 3 CEO's in 5 years), while claiming that the employed teachers in Ohio are "entitled children" "ruining the state."
When I speak to my Libertarian-leaning Republican friends, I have to tell them that I believe in their ideals but not in their people. And while the party keeps falling for candidates that are Bachtarded, there is little chance that the ideology will remain anything other than a name-check in a mad dash for power and money.
Opera also did a great job with back / forward saving editing fields. You could be writing an e-mail, accidentally close the browser, re-open it, and it would still be there.
Or you could do what I seem to do a lot: start typing about something, absentmindedly click a link to get more info, and return with your text still intact.
Are you listening Chrome Team? Copy this feature next please.
Yes. How could analysts possibly compare iCloud to other cloud services. What cloud they possibly have in common? And Apple's talk of "automatic daily backups" should have been taken in the context of the iPhone, which as everyone who has one knows the iPhone "backup" is a skeletal husk of a thing.
I never really expected iCloud to amount to much (it is replacing 2 failed Apple cloud services, after all). And it is a first rollout. But even I was hoping for a little more in the way of integrated sync out the gate. Maybe just a cross-device Safari sync? No? Ok.
So that people know what they're talking about, Opera was the first (or one of the first) browsers to offer:
Tabbed interface (and MDI before tabs) Saved Sessions Previous windows re-opening when you launch the browser Mouse Gestures Virtual folders in Mail RAM Cache Zooming Integrated search Speed dial Undo of closing tabs Using the user's CSS and Javascript instead of the site's
A lot of others that failed because they were shots in the dark (integrated web server? voice control?) Others that succeeded that I'm probably forgetting.
Really, if you follow the development of the browser for the past 10 years or so, Opera has basically been the experimental branch of the tree. Features are created by opera, then integrated into other browsers. Recently, Chrome has done some nice experimentations, and Firefox's extensions saw a burst of weird creativity. But for day-in, day-out browsing, Opera has really defined a lot of the features we now take for granted.
There was one point where I was going to give a laptop to my mother, so that she could check and write e-mails from home. But even the basics of walking her through setting up a wireless network from across the country was basically insurmountable.
Comparatively, an iPad with a 3G connection would just work. No Antivirus. Simple configuration. Easy to work with. I'd have a hard time explaining to my mother how to even send an e-mail with Outlook. With the iPad it's just tap and type.
Most of the android pads I've worked with are getting better, but it's not there yet.
The Rio800 was a flash-based player. A solid one... I had a Rio PMP300 and 500 as well, and gazed longingly at the Rio 800's 128MB of space. But the original iPod had a micro HDD, up until then only used in photography, which started at 5GB of space. They definitely were the first to jump down from notebook hard drives to micro drives, in order to get a HDD based player into your pocket.
The signature scroll wheel is also easier to navigate large lists of songs with. And Apple was the first to integrate a real databasing system into song selection. This made it possible to choose songs by band, album, genre, year, etc, rather than just by folder. The Archos definitely needed that. And Apple got the music ecosystem behind them by having the first legal downloadable music store (that both encrypted and wasn't an afterthought by the company). While the programmers of iTunes deserve to be stabbed through the eye with forks, it really did help get the music industry behind portable music.
There were a lot of people out there in the MP3 who could buy out competitors without blinking twice. Microsoft comes to mind. Creative tried it. Sony, eventually. The iPod won because Apple took a niche technological gadget, and made a smooth, painless ecosystem around it. They made it accessible to a wide swath of people.
As an Archos Jukebrick fan myself, the innovative part that the iPod brought was bringing the technology to a functional level of convenience. The iPod was the first one that fit in your pocket.
I'm not going to be able to explain to my mother how to get an ssh server up and running on her machine. But getting Chrome installed with an extension? That I could believe.
The key is *enabling.* Twenty years ago, setting up an FTP based home file synchronization service was technically possible. But it was a huge PITA. DropBox automated everything with a simple single login. Similarly, simplifying VNC into something that everyone already has. That means that people who wouldn't have exposure to remote control, now do.
Outside of the digital realm, this basically describes the concept of stores. But, you know, stores "On A Computer" "On The Internet" "On A Phone!" That makes it meet the qualifications for patentability in the US 3 times over.
So... Italian law might allow anyone to rewrite history on Wikipedia. How is that significantly different than how Wikipedia already functions? If someone is offended by something on Wikipedia, they can submitedit the article. And within 48 hours (seconds actually) it will be present without comment. And then 10 seconds later, someone else will have corrected it back to the truth.
Where in the law does it say the edit has to stay up?
Doom 3 was a shiny let down. Quake 4 had a few great sequences, but was behind the times. Return to Castle Wolfenstein was bland and lacking a special something. All were by and large single player games with some tacked-on multiplayer component.
I'd like to see id return to their pure multiplayer ways too. But in general, I'd like to see them put LESS effort into each release, releasing more frequently, with a purer feature set, and something creatively risky in each release. As it stands, when you release every 4 years you have massive amounts of pressure to avoid taking the kinds of risks that are required to make a successful title.
“We want you to continue to use this technology, we just want our client to get his due share,” McAndrews said. “This is not a seat-of-the-pants, fly-by-night shakedown.”
Well, they admitted that it's a professional shakedown. A professional hit seems only fair.
Slashdot Mirror
It's terribly obnoxiously slow. It's also a lot broader than previous voice-command efforts. I set a baking timer by saying "Siri, set an alarm for twenty minutes from now." I had no idea that "twenty minutes from now" would be something that Siri understood. It just seemed like it would make sense. And it just worked. "Text my wife that I'll be about 10 minutes late" works too.
Well, it works when the network is responding. And it works terribly slow. But it is really a step towards natural language understanding of voice. Or rather, unlike a lot of other efforts I feel like the phone is trying to understand me rather than the other way around.
If you didn't have a console, you could always plug that into your TV and watch Netflix.
The iPhone does have 3 speakers and 2 microphones. Most aren't particularly good ones, mind you, and individual addressability is a problem. It's really not practical. Add in a gps and camera, and it's not quite as bad as you make it out to be.
Of course, using a camera properly would be cheating. But I'm a bit surprised nobody has done it on the iPhone.
Weapons Officer: "Captain I can't get a fix on the enemies position."
Science Officer: "We could try using an optimum-autocorrelation-signal and semi-automatic frequency calibration together with an averaging over multiple cycles."
Weapons Officer: "You mean, use the auto-shootey?"
Science Officer: "Use the auto-shootey."
Strangely, it seems to see a spike in traffic around Halloween...
This is a bit of a simplification, but development on Apple's platform is done with sandbox accounts in a sandbox version of their system. You can build for your company in your certified sandbox, but you need other things when you release to the public. So there is a build certificate. There is also a push notification certificate (though I'm less familiar with that). It looks like Google either had a sandbox push notification certificate instead of a release push notification certificate, or didn't re-generate the store certificate after generating the sandbox certificate (for proper pairing).
http://www.tipb.com/2011/11/02/notification-error-valid-apsenvironment-entitlement-string-fond-application/
Apple's certificates system is a bit befuddling, quite frankly. This is an easy mistake to make.
What's deceptive is not mentioning what isn't taxed. Which is to say, any money that is invested in a business isn't taxed. Stock Market transactions aren't taxed. Basically, things that rich people do to increase their income aren't taxed. The things that everyone else does to increase their income, such as buying cars or going to school, is. Business purchases of raw materials could also not be taxed in this way, as business frequently don't add 35% of value to their materials. So either we institute a European Value-Added-Tax style bureaucratic nightmare, or businesses get away even more free than before. And we're talking about zero-sum relative burdens here... if one person isn't paying, someone else is paying more.
Also, your comics, when taken globally, are disingenuously counting the 35% tax twice to get to the 50% number. Either they count for the person at time of earning, or they count for the person at the time of spending. Counting it twice in the manner of the comics overcounts. And taxes as share of GDP in the US is actually 27%.
The problem is a simple 3-way intersection.
1. People believe they need higher education to get jobs, of which there are few.
2. Education costs are going further and further up, especially with for-profit institutes and non-academic collegiate activities needed for prestige.
3. Student loans are basically unlimited. Banks will sign you a blank check, with no sense of your ability to pay it back.
If you're not high enough academically to enter state-run institutions, in the US you're looking at around 100k in tuition alone for a 4-year college. After getting out of a college with a 100k bill, that comes out to around $1,500 monthly in student loans. If you've got a professional job and you're earning, say, $20 an hour working as a nurse, you get a take home in the ballpark of 2.5k per month. Even in these good situations, more than half of your income is going to student loans. That's why %10 of students default within 2 years of graduation.
Take that ridiculous, oversized, mind-bendingly overpriced coin.
Mint a field of 250 thousand of them. That's the US debt.
Launch a comically supervillian plot to steal every bit of gold ever mined in the lifespan of humanity, stealing from fort knox, buckingham palace, motherboards, every wedding ring, etc. If you took all 10 billion oz of gold in the world, and sold it all at current market rates, you'd barely pay off the federal debt.
Most coins are actually more expensive to mint than their stated face value. The value from a coin comes from the repeated re-use in transactions, rather than in the creation of value.
Not to say that this is a practical example of that, mind you. Just that most coins follow the same model on a more practical scale.
Android voice recognition is equivalent to voice commands. "Open Internet Explorer... Highlight Search Box... Type 'weather, return.'"
Siri is a heck of a lot more interesting. Siri is a first grasp at understanding intent. "Is it going to rain tomorrow?" "Text my wife that I'll be there in 5 minutes." "Remind me at 6PM tomorrow to call the doctor." "How do I get home?"
Now, it's not perfect. Siri is damned slow, when it runs at all. And it works a lot better in the sorts of quiet places where you probably shouldn't be talking into a phone. And it was bought by apple, rather than being initially developed by them. But it's interesting in that it forms relational databases about the world around you, and starts to correlate bits of information. It's not just voice recognition, it's meaning recognition.
I'm a generally identified Liberal, due to get-out-of-my-bedroom policies and belief that healthcare in this country is completely f*ed up. But if the bulk of the Republican party stuck to professed Republican ideals, I might actually be a Republican. When they had the opportunity to make a balanced budget during the Contract with America, they cut taxes on the rich without actually cutting programs. After 911 they got us into Iraq, grew the government massively, and started wiretapping everyone. They're the reason why whenever you go through an airport now, there is a 2 hour wait for a college dropout to shove their hand up your bum. And of course it's a slap in the face to callthe super-rich "job creators" (HP just spent 240 million dollars to FIRE 3 CEO's in 5 years), while claiming that the employed teachers in Ohio are "entitled children" "ruining the state."
When I speak to my Libertarian-leaning Republican friends, I have to tell them that I believe in their ideals but not in their people. And while the party keeps falling for candidates that are Bachtarded, there is little chance that the ideology will remain anything other than a name-check in a mad dash for power and money.
I knew Tesla was mad about the review. Which if you watch it, didn't exactly put the car in the best light.
But suing over it? For this bloody long? I suddenly have lost any interest I might have had in their sports electric.
Opera also did a great job with back / forward saving editing fields. You could be writing an e-mail, accidentally close the browser, re-open it, and it would still be there.
Or you could do what I seem to do a lot: start typing about something, absentmindedly click a link to get more info, and return with your text still intact.
Are you listening Chrome Team? Copy this feature next please.
Yes. How could analysts possibly compare iCloud to other cloud services. What cloud they possibly have in common? And Apple's talk of "automatic daily backups" should have been taken in the context of the iPhone, which as everyone who has one knows the iPhone "backup" is a skeletal husk of a thing.
I never really expected iCloud to amount to much (it is replacing 2 failed Apple cloud services, after all). And it is a first rollout. But even I was hoping for a little more in the way of integrated sync out the gate. Maybe just a cross-device Safari sync? No? Ok.
I'm sure they will offer a service where your domain is "Pre-Verified" and not subject to abuse takedowns... For $1,000 per year, of course.
So that people know what they're talking about, Opera was the first (or one of the first) browsers to offer:
Tabbed interface (and MDI before tabs)
Saved Sessions
Previous windows re-opening when you launch the browser
Mouse Gestures
Virtual folders in Mail
RAM Cache
Zooming
Integrated search
Speed dial
Undo of closing tabs
Using the user's CSS and Javascript instead of the site's
A lot of others that failed because they were shots in the dark (integrated web server? voice control?)
Others that succeeded that I'm probably forgetting.
Really, if you follow the development of the browser for the past 10 years or so, Opera has basically been the experimental branch of the tree. Features are created by opera, then integrated into other browsers. Recently, Chrome has done some nice experimentations, and Firefox's extensions saw a burst of weird creativity. But for day-in, day-out browsing, Opera has really defined a lot of the features we now take for granted.
There was one point where I was going to give a laptop to my mother, so that she could check and write e-mails from home. But even the basics of walking her through setting up a wireless network from across the country was basically insurmountable.
Comparatively, an iPad with a 3G connection would just work. No Antivirus. Simple configuration. Easy to work with. I'd have a hard time explaining to my mother how to even send an e-mail with Outlook. With the iPad it's just tap and type.
Most of the android pads I've worked with are getting better, but it's not there yet.
The Rio800 was a flash-based player. A solid one... I had a Rio PMP300 and 500 as well, and gazed longingly at the Rio 800's 128MB of space. But the original iPod had a micro HDD, up until then only used in photography, which started at 5GB of space. They definitely were the first to jump down from notebook hard drives to micro drives, in order to get a HDD based player into your pocket.
The signature scroll wheel is also easier to navigate large lists of songs with. And Apple was the first to integrate a real databasing system into song selection. This made it possible to choose songs by band, album, genre, year, etc, rather than just by folder. The Archos definitely needed that. And Apple got the music ecosystem behind them by having the first legal downloadable music store (that both encrypted and wasn't an afterthought by the company). While the programmers of iTunes deserve to be stabbed through the eye with forks, it really did help get the music industry behind portable music.
There were a lot of people out there in the MP3 who could buy out competitors without blinking twice. Microsoft comes to mind. Creative tried it. Sony, eventually. The iPod won because Apple took a niche technological gadget, and made a smooth, painless ecosystem around it. They made it accessible to a wide swath of people.
I laugh at your security-enhanced Linux from my virus-free no-external-plugs QNX brick.
As an Archos Jukebrick fan myself, the innovative part that the iPod brought was bringing the technology to a functional level of convenience. The iPod was the first one that fit in your pocket.
I'm not going to be able to explain to my mother how to get an ssh server up and running on her machine. But getting Chrome installed with an extension? That I could believe.
The key is *enabling.* Twenty years ago, setting up an FTP based home file synchronization service was technically possible. But it was a huge PITA. DropBox automated everything with a simple single login. Similarly, simplifying VNC into something that everyone already has. That means that people who wouldn't have exposure to remote control, now do.
Outside of the digital realm, this basically describes the concept of stores. But, you know, stores "On A Computer" "On The Internet" "On A Phone!" That makes it meet the qualifications for patentability in the US 3 times over.
So... Italian law might allow anyone to rewrite history on Wikipedia. How is that significantly different than how Wikipedia already functions? If someone is offended by something on Wikipedia, they can submitedit the article. And within 48 hours (seconds actually) it will be present without comment. And then 10 seconds later, someone else will have corrected it back to the truth.
Where in the law does it say the edit has to stay up?
Doom 3 was a shiny let down. Quake 4 had a few great sequences, but was behind the times. Return to Castle Wolfenstein was bland and lacking a special something. All were by and large single player games with some tacked-on multiplayer component.
I'd like to see id return to their pure multiplayer ways too. But in general, I'd like to see them put LESS effort into each release, releasing more frequently, with a purer feature set, and something creatively risky in each release. As it stands, when you release every 4 years you have massive amounts of pressure to avoid taking the kinds of risks that are required to make a successful title.
“We want you to continue to use this technology, we just want our client to get his due share,” McAndrews said. “This is not a seat-of-the-pants, fly-by-night shakedown.”
Well, they admitted that it's a professional shakedown. A professional hit seems only fair.