LOL nope, had no mods lately. You're just a) paranoid, b) pretty much suck. You should learn from other Apple fans here who don't come across as obnoxious as you do.
I'm not an "Apple fan." There aren't any Apple fans on Slashdot, as far as I can tell. The extremely obnoxious Android fanboys that have taken over the site drove them away. You're obviously too afraid to post on your real account because that would reveal one of your puppets.
Can you spell "nonsequitur"? I was talking about, for example, 4S, which is basically slightly upgraded 4 but with revolutionary UI (which is voice recognition plugged into Wolfram Alpha). And which every iFanboy still had a duty to buy as soon as it got to the Apple Store.
So you're mocking Siri, the voice recognition technology that Google has admitted it is trying to come out with a competitor to. Gotcha.
By the way, can Android scroll smoothly yet? Just wondering if it ever caught up to the 2007 iPhone.
500 different models of Android handsets mean just as much as 500 different makes of PCs.
The mainstream doesn't care about manually managing software. They see the iPhone like they see game consoles, another platform with software approval. They don't feel like their "computing device" (they don't call their phone that either) is being controlled. It's not as if non-techies go out and willingly choose Android; it's simply what comes on budget phones.
Frankly, as a technical user, I don't feel like I'm being controlled either, but I also just use iOS as an appliance and not like some Linux distro. I listen to music, I play games, I read books...I don't get this need to feel like a beautiful and unique snowflake and "stick it to the man" by tweaking my smartphone and lecturing others about freedom and control over a freaking smartphone operating system.
By the way, the 2 1/2 year old iPhone 3GS can run the latest iOS, while an Android phone a few months old can't run Android 4.0. That really puts me off from getting an Android phone at all. And there are lots of locked down Android phones.
You can use really dumb terms like "iFanboy" if you want, but you're the one coming off like a virulent, tribalistic fanboy. You even went through my comments and used all five of your mod points to mark them down--not that it matters with my karma.
You didn't refute a single argument I made, nor did you respond to the fact that Samsung phones that are only a few months old aren't getting ICS. This kind of compatibility is just getting worse and worse with Android, and it's one of the reasons developers are abandoning the platform in droves.
As for your snide remark about a new model of "iThingy," are you really going to make that criticism when there are like 500 different Android handset models every year? Try harder next time.
Do you really think business students represent mainstream users? There are iPad docks, but you're talking about one with a battery and USB ports, turning the tablet into a netbook. People don't want that. They don't want the old, clunky computer designs anymore, and they don't want to deal with a mess of cables. Mice and keyboards are wireless now. Hell, even iOS devices can sync wirelessly.
There's just this fundamental disconnect between what techies want and what the rest of the world wants. Techies want more ports, more specs, more everything. The rest of the world wants reduced complexity, not more of it.
You represent all that has become wrong with the Slashdot community since Android's release. This site, which used to be respectful of Apple and praised them, has now become so vehemently anti-Apple (simply because they now compete with Google) that it's driven away many of the rational posters to other communities like Hacker News and Digg, which only skews the demographic even further. Reading Slashdot comments has become like reading a Worst Of Engadget feed.
You are the angry neck beard. You fetishize marketshare as if it's the only thing that matters, because you're still seeking a victory for Linux after its failure to capture any non-trivial desktop share. You hate Apple fans because Apple is popular, so you stand cross-armed in the corner, grumbling at everyone else having a good time. You don't represent the mainstream user, who doesn't want to jailbreak or configure or plug things into other things, etc. They like the iPad because it just works--as an appliance should.
There's a huge clash going on between the new paradigm of appliance computing and the old guard who wants the 1990s tweak able nerd playground to linger forever, and a black cloud of bitterness that has been seething from Slashdot in the last couple of years because of it. The industry is changing. Configurability is disappearing because it turns out consumers don't want it and never wanted it, and the technology is now here to deliver that experience. This site is read by a niche of techies who still run Linux on the desktop and think configuring a computer is a worthy way to spend an evening.
Business is run on profits. It doesn't matter if iOS is outnumbered by Android phones--it was inevitable because the iPhone is just one phone--Apple is making obscene amounts of money off its devices. Android only benefits carriers and handset makers. What's worse, they have complete control over the operating system, leading to shit like Carrier IQ and TouchWiz. The era of fragmented platforms is over in the PC world. Android is now experiencing it because this market is new, but seamless, controlled experiences always win out in the end. Just look at how the game industry moved away from PCs to consoles over the course of a few years. Android developer support has actually declined by one-third over the course of the year, according to a study by Flurry Analytics.
The conclusion here is that claiming Apple's star is waning is not just ridiculous, it's outright retarded. The company is making crazy amounts of money. They're set to release the iPad 3 in a few months with a Retina Display, which will push the iPad even further ahead. The bitterness over Apple's popularity here on Slashdot has led to an arrogant, condescending attitude toward their users that just looks really petty to outsiders, and the inability to "get" what normal people want is the reason there are high-rated posts here actually praising the fragmentation of Android and its endless configurability options. You may use computers in that way, but to the rest of the world, computers are just a tool and not a hobby. Tablets are the promise of computing without the mess--it's finally here, and computer tweakers are spiteful because of it.
Slashdotters keep referring to Android like it's one giant company. Android is 80 different handsets in the market at the same time, each running their own offshoots of a foundation that Google calls "Android."
And this is why Slashdot will never get it. You don't understand what tablets represent. Normal people don't want to dock a tablet with a keyboard and USB ports an turn it into a netbook--only people on tech forums that's a cool thing to do.
Tablets represent the culmination of appliance computing. It's the inevitable reinvention of the personal computer and the shedding of previous paradigms. The industry is no longer geek-driven; those days are over. People don't want to plug things into other things, dock this into that, mess with device drivers, etc. They don't even want to use USB cables anymore; they want it wireless.
As for the convergence of ICS, the Android platform is so fragmented, and so many devices are incompatible with other devices, that there's hardly a convergence at all, because Android has become simply a foundation for hardware manufacturers to bundle their own operating systems (e.g., the Kindle Fire). We all used to think Windows OEM junkware was bad, but at least Microsoft had enough to control to guarantee that there was still a compatible version of Windows underneath it all. Anything goes in the world of Android. Samsung just announced today that the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab won't even be getting ICS. Why? Because there's not enough room to run both Android 4.0 and Samsung's custom crapware.
The impasse is between techies and everyone else. Techies think the Wild West is great, because their hobby is tweaking computers. But people don't want to do that anymore. We're past the 1990s and into the era of appliance computing, where you don't even have to install antivirus software anymore (if you're running iOS, that is--okay, cheap shot). That's why claiming that 2012 will be the year of the Android tablet is hilarious. There may very well be a lot more total Android tablets out there, but the iPad will still be the #1 tablet.
It's not that Android "turned out to be popular." It's that there are so many phone models running different versions of it, but it's all lumped together in one market share figure. Nobody outside of tech forums is going down to the store and specifically choosing an Android phone. It's what comes on budget smartphones by default. It's as if you were claiming that Windows turned out to be popular when the truth is that it's just what came on PCs at the time.
Slashdot still fetishes marketshare numbers, ignoring other market factors as well as the fact that Apple is the one making tons of money off of their mobile operating system. No single Android smartphone outsells the iPhone--Apple is still the #1 smartphone vendor. But figures like that don't get reported because it's more exciting to obsess over marketshare as if it's all that matters. Of course the total number of Android phones is going to outnumber the phones of one single vendor!
No, that's not a good thing to people outside of tech forums. People don't want varieties, a selection of features, a personalized experience, and an interface customized by the manufacturer. They don't want to configure and maintain a tablet; they just want one that works out of the box. You're missing the whole point of a tablet, and you're missing the fact that everyone's iPad being the same is a selling point, not a drawback.
Fragmentation hurts Android; it doesn't help it. Samsung just announced today that the Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S won't be getting Android 4.0. Android is no longer an operating system; it's a bundle that manufacturers build their own operating systems on, slightly incompatible with all the rest.
I didn't say the mobile desktop paradigm would be good on a desktop PC. I said the old desktop paradigm is a dead end and that mainstream operating systems are adopting certain features from these hugely successful mobile operating systems that had the advantage of not being tied to a legacy paradigm. People love the simplicity and reduced scope of smartphone operating systems.
I wasn't even really arguing or against it. I was just explaining why Linux desktop developers might be interested in doing these things that seem crazy and contrarian--because it's what the rest of the industry is doing.
10 years ago was 2002. You think that in 2002, online video was virtually nonexistent, pictures were all low resolution, and allowing user comments was rare? Video sites like Ebaumsworld were already posting user-submitted videos. Instead of Facebook pages, people had Myspace pages. And no, the blink tag was not still popular--at that point it only existed on old Geocities sites and other leftovers from the 90s.
Information-wise, the web has barely changed. Slashdot was several years old at that point and already posting the same things posts now.
I don't understand the abhorrent removal of features and configurability.
The world has moved on from the 1990s desktop. Windows 8 is replacing the Start menu with a radical new touch interface, and OS X Lion has adopted iOS features. Mobile operating systems that look and feel nothing like desktop operating systems are a huge hit. The 1990s desktop paradigm is dead in the mainstream, and Linux software developers are trying to progress computing forward by appealing to people outside of tech forums. That means reducing the insane amount of configurability and feature-itis that often ails Linux desktop software.
You may consider it abhorrent, but you are a minority. The rest of the world uses computers simply as a tool, not as a hobby.
"The suit also claims that this is a unfair Business practice on Sony's part, and requires users to forgo their rights in order to use the device that they purchased."
I don't know about the rest (avoiding legal culpability isn't exactly uncommon in EULAs), but this part is untrue. You don't have to use PSN to use a PS3, and you are also free to return the PS3 if you don't like the EULA for its online component.
Anti-Sony stories are one of Slashdot's most common page-view drawing tactics, so I'm always a little suspicious of any stories Slashdot posts. Not to automatically dismiss this one, but lawsuits are filed literally every day for every reason imaginable, and this one is only getting reported because it's "ironic" and it's a well-known company that Slashdotters love to hate. Strangely, Nintendo gets a lot of love even though it has a history of being even more evil than Sony.
No doubt there will be comments about the evils of EULAs following mine (assuming I'm not modbombed into oblivion), but I should mention that EULAs are no different from free software licenses--they are contracts you agree to the terms of in using the software. The majority of U.S. courts have upheld the enforceability of EULAs.
There's a big difference between standard search engine queries and the things people ask voice recognition software. Simply owning a search engine doesn't mean you're going to be awesome at understanding human language and delivering results accordingly. That comes through trial-and-error, which is why Apple has a headstart here.
Google has tons of data from which to trawl for edge cases. What precisely did you think that the Google Voice transcription service was all about? People let Google transcribe their voicemails by algorithm and Google gets more data. I doubt very much they even bother looking at messages which aren't reported to them as inaccurate.
Do you realize how many more people are using Siri compared to how many let Google transcribe their voicemails? Do you really think that's a widely-used Google feature?
So, I'd venture to guess that they're actually a lot more used than Siri is. I have a hard time believing that Siri is so used that it's been used more in 4 months than Google Voice in a couple years.
Siri's current system is based on the data from the third-party Siri app that Apple purchased, so the core technology is older than four months.
As for sophistication, Google's implementation might be significantly less sophisticated, but it does work reliably, Siri from what I've heard, not so much.
Well, Siri is in limited beta, and by the time Majel comes out, Siri will almost certainly be significantly more reliable. That leaves the core differences in presentation, and Google insiders have been claiming that they are intentionally not including any of Siri's human-like personality attributes. It's really going to be an inhuman query machine and not as fun because of it. That's why I said it signifies everything about the difference between Google's and Apple's approaches to usability. Google is so strictly engineering-driven that they often don't get what it is people like. There's no design instinct, no human touch. Like typical engineers, everything they do must be based on data, such as the infamous survey on 41 shades of blue just to decide on an interface color.
Clippy was annoying because it popped up intrusively and was almost always unhelpful. This is voice recognition that responds only when you give it a query, and it really does do what it's supposed to most of the time. Not the same thing.
It's all in good fun. Seriously, Siri is just fun to use, and that's important in a gadget intended to be a part of your daily life. It's kind of like when Slashdotters in years past were criticizing Windows and OS X for having fading animations, translucency effects, and other visuals. Well, now Linux desktops have all that. Because it's fun and pleasant to use.
To be honest, this site skews pro-Google and anti-Apple at nearly every opportunity. Once upon a time, you could get away with being one of the few contrarians making some good points about the competition--there even used to be rational Microsoft defenders--but you can't do that anymore without getting attacked by rabid Google/Android fanboys, who in my opinion have become the most annoying fanboys on the Internet. It feels as if many of the sane posters left for other tech communities like Reddit and Hacker News, and so Slashdot's remaining readership is becoming more extreme and closed-minded on average. I mean, it always had that streak, but it was balanced out by high-rated comments expressing opposing viewpoints. Now, I see troll comments get modded up all the time. Hell, I risk my karma just for posting this. You can barely even get pity moderation anymore just for making an unpopular but valid point.
Anyway, it's not like you would just "be talking to an emotionless computer". That's a very shallow take on it.
If you've read the many Android sites reporting on this, there are remarks from insiders stating that, for example, Google engineers are intentionally not giving the voice recognition a "character" (in other words, no funny remarks or human-like responses in the vein of Siri). It really will be like talking to a an emotionless computer that simply executes its given queries. That's all I was trying to say.
Think about it. You're a techie posting on a techie site; you are already in the minority. Most people want to communicate with machines using human-like queries and do want to not address it as if they're an Enterprise crew member addressing the Star Trek computer. One is friendly and fun, the other is cold and emotionless. Between the two spectrums, which qualities do you think would be more appealing in a consumer electronics device?
I don't mean to say that Google couldn't create human-like voice recognition, but the insider remarks that have been posted on various Android sites have so far stated that Google is not implementing Siri's "funny" remarks, for example. That alone is so Apple-like. Based on past statements by Google (Marissa Meyer once criticized interfaces that looked like they were made by humans, instead favoring interfaces made by machines...), they just don't seem to get people. They definitely come off like an engineering company without the balance of human interface design. This was also the perception of Microsoft for many years, incidentally.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not. Do Slashdotters really believe this? Clang/LLVM is the driving free-as-in-speech compiler suite these days.
One part of the new standard is that certain features introduced in C99 are now marked as optional and can be checked with a macro.
Of course, when he's not doing that, he's advocating necrophilia and "voluntary pedophilia". Maybe not the best spokesperson to get behind.
I'm not an "Apple fan." There aren't any Apple fans on Slashdot, as far as I can tell. The extremely obnoxious Android fanboys that have taken over the site drove them away. You're obviously too afraid to post on your real account because that would reveal one of your puppets.
So you're mocking Siri, the voice recognition technology that Google has admitted it is trying to come out with a competitor to. Gotcha.
By the way, can Android scroll smoothly yet? Just wondering if it ever caught up to the 2007 iPhone.
Exactly.
The mainstream doesn't care about manually managing software. They see the iPhone like they see game consoles, another platform with software approval. They don't feel like their "computing device" (they don't call their phone that either) is being controlled. It's not as if non-techies go out and willingly choose Android; it's simply what comes on budget phones.
Frankly, as a technical user, I don't feel like I'm being controlled either, but I also just use iOS as an appliance and not like some Linux distro. I listen to music, I play games, I read books...I don't get this need to feel like a beautiful and unique snowflake and "stick it to the man" by tweaking my smartphone and lecturing others about freedom and control over a freaking smartphone operating system.
By the way, the 2 1/2 year old iPhone 3GS can run the latest iOS, while an Android phone a few months old can't run Android 4.0. That really puts me off from getting an Android phone at all. And there are lots of locked down Android phones.
You can use really dumb terms like "iFanboy" if you want, but you're the one coming off like a virulent, tribalistic fanboy. You even went through my comments and used all five of your mod points to mark them down--not that it matters with my karma.
You didn't refute a single argument I made, nor did you respond to the fact that Samsung phones that are only a few months old aren't getting ICS. This kind of compatibility is just getting worse and worse with Android, and it's one of the reasons developers are abandoning the platform in droves.
As for your snide remark about a new model of "iThingy," are you really going to make that criticism when there are like 500 different Android handset models every year? Try harder next time.
Do you really think business students represent mainstream users? There are iPad docks, but you're talking about one with a battery and USB ports, turning the tablet into a netbook. People don't want that. They don't want the old, clunky computer designs anymore, and they don't want to deal with a mess of cables. Mice and keyboards are wireless now. Hell, even iOS devices can sync wirelessly.
There's just this fundamental disconnect between what techies want and what the rest of the world wants. Techies want more ports, more specs, more everything. The rest of the world wants reduced complexity, not more of it.
Android fanboys have officially become more obnoxious than Apple fanboys. Apple's star is waning? The company that's set to report the biggest earnings blowout in history?
You represent all that has become wrong with the Slashdot community since Android's release. This site, which used to be respectful of Apple and praised them, has now become so vehemently anti-Apple (simply because they now compete with Google) that it's driven away many of the rational posters to other communities like Hacker News and Digg, which only skews the demographic even further. Reading Slashdot comments has become like reading a Worst Of Engadget feed.
You are the angry neck beard. You fetishize marketshare as if it's the only thing that matters, because you're still seeking a victory for Linux after its failure to capture any non-trivial desktop share. You hate Apple fans because Apple is popular, so you stand cross-armed in the corner, grumbling at everyone else having a good time. You don't represent the mainstream user, who doesn't want to jailbreak or configure or plug things into other things, etc. They like the iPad because it just works--as an appliance should.
There's a huge clash going on between the new paradigm of appliance computing and the old guard who wants the 1990s tweak able nerd playground to linger forever, and a black cloud of bitterness that has been seething from Slashdot in the last couple of years because of it. The industry is changing. Configurability is disappearing because it turns out consumers don't want it and never wanted it, and the technology is now here to deliver that experience. This site is read by a niche of techies who still run Linux on the desktop and think configuring a computer is a worthy way to spend an evening.
Business is run on profits. It doesn't matter if iOS is outnumbered by Android phones--it was inevitable because the iPhone is just one phone--Apple is making obscene amounts of money off its devices. Android only benefits carriers and handset makers. What's worse, they have complete control over the operating system, leading to shit like Carrier IQ and TouchWiz. The era of fragmented platforms is over in the PC world. Android is now experiencing it because this market is new, but seamless, controlled experiences always win out in the end. Just look at how the game industry moved away from PCs to consoles over the course of a few years. Android developer support has actually declined by one-third over the course of the year, according to a study by Flurry Analytics.
The conclusion here is that claiming Apple's star is waning is not just ridiculous, it's outright retarded. The company is making crazy amounts of money. They're set to release the iPad 3 in a few months with a Retina Display, which will push the iPad even further ahead. The bitterness over Apple's popularity here on Slashdot has led to an arrogant, condescending attitude toward their users that just looks really petty to outsiders, and the inability to "get" what normal people want is the reason there are high-rated posts here actually praising the fragmentation of Android and its endless configurability options. You may use computers in that way, but to the rest of the world, computers are just a tool and not a hobby. Tablets are the promise of computing without the mess--it's finally here, and computer tweakers are spiteful because of it.
Slashdotters keep referring to Android like it's one giant company. Android is 80 different handsets in the market at the same time, each running their own offshoots of a foundation that Google calls "Android."
And this is why Slashdot will never get it. You don't understand what tablets represent. Normal people don't want to dock a tablet with a keyboard and USB ports an turn it into a netbook--only people on tech forums that's a cool thing to do.
Tablets represent the culmination of appliance computing. It's the inevitable reinvention of the personal computer and the shedding of previous paradigms. The industry is no longer geek-driven; those days are over. People don't want to plug things into other things, dock this into that, mess with device drivers, etc. They don't even want to use USB cables anymore; they want it wireless.
As for the convergence of ICS, the Android platform is so fragmented, and so many devices are incompatible with other devices, that there's hardly a convergence at all, because Android has become simply a foundation for hardware manufacturers to bundle their own operating systems (e.g., the Kindle Fire). We all used to think Windows OEM junkware was bad, but at least Microsoft had enough to control to guarantee that there was still a compatible version of Windows underneath it all. Anything goes in the world of Android. Samsung just announced today that the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab won't even be getting ICS. Why? Because there's not enough room to run both Android 4.0 and Samsung's custom crapware.
The impasse is between techies and everyone else. Techies think the Wild West is great, because their hobby is tweaking computers. But people don't want to do that anymore. We're past the 1990s and into the era of appliance computing, where you don't even have to install antivirus software anymore (if you're running iOS, that is--okay, cheap shot). That's why claiming that 2012 will be the year of the Android tablet is hilarious. There may very well be a lot more total Android tablets out there, but the iPad will still be the #1 tablet.
It's not that Android "turned out to be popular." It's that there are so many phone models running different versions of it, but it's all lumped together in one market share figure. Nobody outside of tech forums is going down to the store and specifically choosing an Android phone. It's what comes on budget smartphones by default. It's as if you were claiming that Windows turned out to be popular when the truth is that it's just what came on PCs at the time.
Slashdot still fetishes marketshare numbers, ignoring other market factors as well as the fact that Apple is the one making tons of money off of their mobile operating system. No single Android smartphone outsells the iPhone--Apple is still the #1 smartphone vendor. But figures like that don't get reported because it's more exciting to obsess over marketshare as if it's all that matters. Of course the total number of Android phones is going to outnumber the phones of one single vendor!
No, that's not a good thing to people outside of tech forums. People don't want varieties, a selection of features, a personalized experience, and an interface customized by the manufacturer. They don't want to configure and maintain a tablet; they just want one that works out of the box. You're missing the whole point of a tablet, and you're missing the fact that everyone's iPad being the same is a selling point, not a drawback.
Fragmentation hurts Android; it doesn't help it. Samsung just announced today that the Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S won't be getting Android 4.0. Android is no longer an operating system; it's a bundle that manufacturers build their own operating systems on, slightly incompatible with all the rest.
I didn't say the mobile desktop paradigm would be good on a desktop PC. I said the old desktop paradigm is a dead end and that mainstream operating systems are adopting certain features from these hugely successful mobile operating systems that had the advantage of not being tied to a legacy paradigm. People love the simplicity and reduced scope of smartphone operating systems.
I wasn't even really arguing or against it. I was just explaining why Linux desktop developers might be interested in doing these things that seem crazy and contrarian--because it's what the rest of the industry is doing.
10 years ago was 2002. You think that in 2002, online video was virtually nonexistent, pictures were all low resolution, and allowing user comments was rare? Video sites like Ebaumsworld were already posting user-submitted videos. Instead of Facebook pages, people had Myspace pages. And no, the blink tag was not still popular--at that point it only existed on old Geocities sites and other leftovers from the 90s.
Information-wise, the web has barely changed. Slashdot was several years old at that point and already posting the same things posts now.
Can't it be both? Because right now it's both.
The world has moved on from the 1990s desktop. Windows 8 is replacing the Start menu with a radical new touch interface, and OS X Lion has adopted iOS features. Mobile operating systems that look and feel nothing like desktop operating systems are a huge hit. The 1990s desktop paradigm is dead in the mainstream, and Linux software developers are trying to progress computing forward by appealing to people outside of tech forums. That means reducing the insane amount of configurability and feature-itis that often ails Linux desktop software.
You may consider it abhorrent, but you are a minority. The rest of the world uses computers simply as a tool, not as a hobby.
"The suit also claims that this is a unfair Business practice on Sony's part, and requires users to forgo their rights in order to use the device that they purchased."
I don't know about the rest (avoiding legal culpability isn't exactly uncommon in EULAs), but this part is untrue. You don't have to use PSN to use a PS3, and you are also free to return the PS3 if you don't like the EULA for its online component.
Anti-Sony stories are one of Slashdot's most common page-view drawing tactics, so I'm always a little suspicious of any stories Slashdot posts. Not to automatically dismiss this one, but lawsuits are filed literally every day for every reason imaginable, and this one is only getting reported because it's "ironic" and it's a well-known company that Slashdotters love to hate. Strangely, Nintendo gets a lot of love even though it has a history of being even more evil than Sony.
No doubt there will be comments about the evils of EULAs following mine (assuming I'm not modbombed into oblivion), but I should mention that EULAs are no different from free software licenses--they are contracts you agree to the terms of in using the software. The majority of U.S. courts have upheld the enforceability of EULAs.
There's a big difference between standard search engine queries and the things people ask voice recognition software. Simply owning a search engine doesn't mean you're going to be awesome at understanding human language and delivering results accordingly. That comes through trial-and-error, which is why Apple has a headstart here.
Do you realize how many more people are using Siri compared to how many let Google transcribe their voicemails? Do you really think that's a widely-used Google feature?
Siri's current system is based on the data from the third-party Siri app that Apple purchased, so the core technology is older than four months.
Well, Siri is in limited beta, and by the time Majel comes out, Siri will almost certainly be significantly more reliable. That leaves the core differences in presentation, and Google insiders have been claiming that they are intentionally not including any of Siri's human-like personality attributes. It's really going to be an inhuman query machine and not as fun because of it. That's why I said it signifies everything about the difference between Google's and Apple's approaches to usability. Google is so strictly engineering-driven that they often don't get what it is people like. There's no design instinct, no human touch. Like typical engineers, everything they do must be based on data, such as the infamous survey on 41 shades of blue just to decide on an interface color.
How exactly?
Clippy was annoying because it popped up intrusively and was almost always unhelpful. This is voice recognition that responds only when you give it a query, and it really does do what it's supposed to most of the time. Not the same thing.
It's all in good fun. Seriously, Siri is just fun to use, and that's important in a gadget intended to be a part of your daily life. It's kind of like when Slashdotters in years past were criticizing Windows and OS X for having fading animations, translucency effects, and other visuals. Well, now Linux desktops have all that. Because it's fun and pleasant to use.
To be honest, this site skews pro-Google and anti-Apple at nearly every opportunity. Once upon a time, you could get away with being one of the few contrarians making some good points about the competition--there even used to be rational Microsoft defenders--but you can't do that anymore without getting attacked by rabid Google/Android fanboys, who in my opinion have become the most annoying fanboys on the Internet. It feels as if many of the sane posters left for other tech communities like Reddit and Hacker News, and so Slashdot's remaining readership is becoming more extreme and closed-minded on average. I mean, it always had that streak, but it was balanced out by high-rated comments expressing opposing viewpoints. Now, I see troll comments get modded up all the time. Hell, I risk my karma just for posting this. You can barely even get pity moderation anymore just for making an unpopular but valid point.
If you've read the many Android sites reporting on this, there are remarks from insiders stating that, for example, Google engineers are intentionally not giving the voice recognition a "character" (in other words, no funny remarks or human-like responses in the vein of Siri). It really will be like talking to a an emotionless computer that simply executes its given queries. That's all I was trying to say.
Think about it. You're a techie posting on a techie site; you are already in the minority. Most people want to communicate with machines using human-like queries and do want to not address it as if they're an Enterprise crew member addressing the Star Trek computer. One is friendly and fun, the other is cold and emotionless. Between the two spectrums, which qualities do you think would be more appealing in a consumer electronics device?
I don't mean to say that Google couldn't create human-like voice recognition, but the insider remarks that have been posted on various Android sites have so far stated that Google is not implementing Siri's "funny" remarks, for example. That alone is so Apple-like. Based on past statements by Google (Marissa Meyer once criticized interfaces that looked like they were made by humans, instead favoring interfaces made by machines...), they just don't seem to get people. They definitely come off like an engineering company without the balance of human interface design. This was also the perception of Microsoft for many years, incidentally.