Real world usage of voice recognition at the level of Siri? Yes. Here's an article by an ex-IBM researcher who worked on voice recognition for six years explaining why Siri was released in beta form in the first place. The saying in the community is "there is no data like more data." Engineers at Apple can see all the things people are asking Siri, the queries it doesn't recognize, and so on, and they can use that valuable feedback to tweak the system. Infamous gaps in Siri's functionality, like the "abortion clinic" question, will be fixed at release.
Google certainly had voice recognition features before, but they weren't much used, nor were they on the level of Siri.
This signifies so many of the core differences between Google and Apple. Apple intentionally implemented "attitude" in the character of Siri to make it more endearing and friendly, while Google dismisses that idea and tries to make theirs into an emotion-less Star Trek computer, even naming it after the actress who voiced it. Many of the insider remarks on this project are talking about how it's intended to be like the Star Trek computer, even addressing it as "computer." Often times, I think Google is way too engineering-driven and quite simply doesn't get humans.
Voice recognition is driven by feedback, and Apple has a huge headstart with Siri because it's already out now in beta form, and so Apple has access to real-world usage data. By the time Majel comes out, Siri will be even more advanced and will have been shaped by its users. It will be interesting to see how Google competes.
It would be really interesting to see what happened if solar energy became affordable enough to power people's homes. Based on current technology, the cost of solar panels is several thousands of dollars for a typical home's electricity needs. Over the lifetime of the panels, that's about 30 cents per kilowatt hour, which is three times the cost of typical utility fees. I wonder if there would be resistance from power companies if people were able to put cheap solar panels on their houses, or if they would buy up all the patents so you had to buy your panels from them.
RMS calls it GNU/Linux because he's bitter that Linux supplanted HURD. Referring to operating systems by the userspace software they use is ridiculous.
Please explain how it could be revoked in any way. If you're talking about a company taking the code and using it in a closed source product, that argument has been used countless times, and the response is always the same--the original BSD-licensed code doesn't magically disappear into thin air.
The freedom that the GPL enforces is someone else's narrow definition of freedom. That's not true freedom.
Why does Slashdot report on Pirate Bay so much? Almost like it's pro-piracy or something. The summary even helpfully provides links to Pirate Bay mirrors.
With the death of the Android Update Alliance that promised timely updates for Android devices, it'll probably be a while before other phones even have a hope of seeing this update. This is going to be yet another major Android version out in the wild. Collectively, Android is more like a collection of related but not entirely compatible operating systems, and it's frustrating (particularly for developers) that there isn't a consistent version of the operating system on current phones.
Despite improvements, ICS isn't quite as smooth and responsive as iOS was four years ago on the first iPhone, and it's really becoming quite an annoyance that Google hasn't yet solved this. Much of the reason has to do with the technical foundations Android was based on, rooted in an time when the Blackberry was the most popular smartphone, and Android was expected to drive phones with keyboard input. In that scenario, interface responsiveness wash't as high a priority.
Android was started in 2003 development, while iOS was started in 2005, and before the iPhone came out, the Android emulator looked like this. It wasn't until Apple's little announcement in 2007 that Android suddenly needed to compete on real-time performance, including smooth, touch-based scrolling. iOS is based entirely on Core Animation, with every interface element backed by a GPU-accelerated layer. Android has been CPU-driven, adding bits and pieces of hardware acceleration but not adopting the kind of unified model iOS was based on.
I don't really know why Android's performance hasn't been brought up to par, or why it's taken four years for it to reach the point that ICS has reached. I suspect the requirement to remain generalized and adaptable across multiple hardware devices means many of the design decisions that Apple went with for iOS simply can't be utilized, at least not to the same degree.
By the way, I'm amused at how negative the review is toward previous Android releases, particularly in terms of performance and interface responsiveness, since any time someone brought these common performance criticisms up on Slashdot, they'd always immediately get modded down and their karma ruined:
"Surprisingly, Google never got Gingerbread working smoothly on the Nexus S, and running the stock version of 2.3.6 was a painful experience."
"The old assumption that even a dual core Android phone is not as smooth as a single core iPhone doesn’t apply any more. Apple users will probably still notice some missed frames in animations or small amounts of lag when things are being loaded in the background, but this is no longer a serious usability issue, more a cosmetic one."
"The OS looks much much slicker overall even on the relatively old Nexus S, compared to the cartoonish primitive look of stock Gingerbread."
"The browser gets a much needed overhaul as the stock 2.3 browser was slow and laggy. It is now much faster, smoother to use, and generally stays out of the way like a good browser should."
"To conclude, with no definite date for ICS upgrades for other phones, the Nexus S is a great buy. It is a great example of the importance of software over hardware in a phone, a lesson well learnt from Apple."
can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?
These days, I could. Because the 80s and 90s were something of a fluke in which hardware was progressing at a rapid rate, it coincided with the growth of the video game industry and attracted a lot of hardware geeks. But that era is gone, and hardware has stabilized to the point where new games are coming out targeting five year old hardware, and most people are okay with it. Skyrim runs on my first-generation Intel iMac from 2006.
Diminishing returns in game development has reached the point where the jump to more powerful hardware, and therefore even higher-fidelity visuals, is just costing too much to justify the expense. That is the state of technology today. Some people don't like it because they want to forever relive the glory days of 90s MHz marketing and 3D card upgrades, but it's over, and thank goodness.
It doesn't explain why at all; it just makes a claim. Its implication doesn't even really make sense since there are plenty of less capitalist nations in the world whose governments are more authoritarian.
Slashdot on net neutrality: "Why, of course! I'd love for the government to regulate internet traffic. What could possibly go wrong?" Slashdot on SOPA: "Regulate internet traffic?! Ignorant scum! Viva la revolución!"
I've always loved that argument. It's like saying McDonald's shouldn't improve its food because it's the most popular restaurant, or that Justin Bieber is a better artist than Mozart because he sells more music per year.
You can target the same API and hit all those "related but not entirely compatible operating systems".
Not without tremendous support costs, and mobile developers have been public about this. In addition to the software APIs, there are multiple hardware devices to target with varying capabilities. Even the very existence of variable screen resolutions completely screws up the ability to have a single, unified, cohesive interface across multiple phones.
Android was designed from the ground up to handle significant differences between handsets and OS versions, and gives developers tools for dealing with that gracefully. Whether or not they do it right is another story.
It may have been Android's intention to seamlessly target multiple hardware devices, but you pretty much cap the point yourself--whether or not it actually does is another story. Developer support for Android has declined by one-third over the course of this year.
Are you seriously trying to push the argument that the iPhone is not locked down? Really?
Um, the very sentence you quoted specifically states that Steve Jobs pushed for "full control over the OS," so obviously, he was talking about wresting control away from the carriers so that you're not going through a chain of phones all the time to catch up with the new OS. In fact, it's a credit to Apple that they push out updates for older phones; the two-year-old iPhone 3GS is still selling well.
My favorite part of posting on Slashdot over the years has been getting accused of being other people by angry, anonymous neckbeards. The tally of other people I'm supposed to be at this point must number in the dozens.
To answer your question, I don't care enough about smartphone operating systems to post angry, anonymous messages about them. I do, however, care about the fact that Linux once had a non-trivial chance at gaining desktop marketshare and squandered it. You can't create a stable long-term platform while embracing chaos. It's incompatible.
If Google isn't careful, the problems may become great enough to allow Microsoft to slip in and gain non-trivial marketshare, at the very least in the enterprise where they have long-standing relations. Based on Eric Schmidt's recent remarks, Google is betting on having so much marketshare that people don't have a choice but to work with them, whether they "like it or not."
Yeah, except then Android would just be another proprietary cell phone OS.
That's not an actual argument; it's just a label you're attaching to the idea of quality control. Platforms need leadership or they descend into chaos. Look at desktop Linux.
At the time, the pledge was covered as the best thing to happen at the I/O Conference. It served its purpose--it comforted Android fans, served as a response to critics of Android fragmentation, and probably helped Google sell more Android licenses. To answer your question about why anyone would be surprised, it's because Google is still held in a glowing light, at least on tech sites, and people still take them for their word.
Android is more like a collection of related but not entirely compatible operating systems. The inability to have a consistent version of the operating system across current smartphones is really surprising for something that's supposed to be an open source project, but one of the big drawbacks of Android is how much control Google gives the carriers over your phone.
The asymmetry is balanced in numbers. The regular users outnumber the system admins, and the citizens outnumber the government. We already saw social technologies contribute to the so-called Arab Spring demonstrations this year.
The ubiquity of the technology may contribute to the ease of surveillance, but authoritarian governments were already doing bad things. Ubiquity of technology empowers protest movements just as much as it empowers government, creating a public accountability that wasn't there previously and enabling a transfer of information beyond government restrictions. I believe the tradeoff is worth it because ubiquitous technology in the hands of citizens can be more powerful than in the hands of government.
They don't want YouTube to disappear, because they want to make money off of it. However, they also want to keep Google under their thumbs, and Google will comply like they always do because they're wholly dependent on content publishers in order to have content to put ads around.
Slashdot Mirror
Real world usage of voice recognition at the level of Siri? Yes. Here's an article by an ex-IBM researcher who worked on voice recognition for six years explaining why Siri was released in beta form in the first place. The saying in the community is "there is no data like more data." Engineers at Apple can see all the things people are asking Siri, the queries it doesn't recognize, and so on, and they can use that valuable feedback to tweak the system. Infamous gaps in Siri's functionality, like the "abortion clinic" question, will be fixed at release.
Google certainly had voice recognition features before, but they weren't much used, nor were they on the level of Siri.
This signifies so many of the core differences between Google and Apple. Apple intentionally implemented "attitude" in the character of Siri to make it more endearing and friendly, while Google dismisses that idea and tries to make theirs into an emotion-less Star Trek computer, even naming it after the actress who voiced it. Many of the insider remarks on this project are talking about how it's intended to be like the Star Trek computer, even addressing it as "computer." Often times, I think Google is way too engineering-driven and quite simply doesn't get humans.
Voice recognition is driven by feedback, and Apple has a huge headstart with Siri because it's already out now in beta form, and so Apple has access to real-world usage data. By the time Majel comes out, Siri will be even more advanced and will have been shaped by its users. It will be interesting to see how Google competes.
It would be really interesting to see what happened if solar energy became affordable enough to power people's homes. Based on current technology, the cost of solar panels is several thousands of dollars for a typical home's electricity needs. Over the lifetime of the panels, that's about 30 cents per kilowatt hour, which is three times the cost of typical utility fees. I wonder if there would be resistance from power companies if people were able to put cheap solar panels on their houses, or if they would buy up all the patents so you had to buy your panels from them.
RMS calls it GNU/Linux because he's bitter that Linux supplanted HURD. Referring to operating systems by the userspace software they use is ridiculous.
Therefore it's not true freedom.
Please explain how it could be revoked in any way. If you're talking about a company taking the code and using it in a closed source product, that argument has been used countless times, and the response is always the same--the original BSD-licensed code doesn't magically disappear into thin air.
The freedom that the GPL enforces is someone else's narrow definition of freedom. That's not true freedom.
Um, because that's freedom?
Why does Slashdot report on Pirate Bay so much? Almost like it's pro-piracy or something. The summary even helpfully provides links to Pirate Bay mirrors.
Don't hurt me; just asking.
With the death of the Android Update Alliance that promised timely updates for Android devices, it'll probably be a while before other phones even have a hope of seeing this update. This is going to be yet another major Android version out in the wild. Collectively, Android is more like a collection of related but not entirely compatible operating systems, and it's frustrating (particularly for developers) that there isn't a consistent version of the operating system on current phones.
Despite improvements, ICS isn't quite as smooth and responsive as iOS was four years ago on the first iPhone, and it's really becoming quite an annoyance that Google hasn't yet solved this. Much of the reason has to do with the technical foundations Android was based on, rooted in an time when the Blackberry was the most popular smartphone, and Android was expected to drive phones with keyboard input. In that scenario, interface responsiveness wash't as high a priority.
Android was started in 2003 development, while iOS was started in 2005, and before the iPhone came out, the Android emulator looked like this. It wasn't until Apple's little announcement in 2007 that Android suddenly needed to compete on real-time performance, including smooth, touch-based scrolling. iOS is based entirely on Core Animation, with every interface element backed by a GPU-accelerated layer. Android has been CPU-driven, adding bits and pieces of hardware acceleration but not adopting the kind of unified model iOS was based on.
I don't really know why Android's performance hasn't been brought up to par, or why it's taken four years for it to reach the point that ICS has reached. I suspect the requirement to remain generalized and adaptable across multiple hardware devices means many of the design decisions that Apple went with for iOS simply can't be utilized, at least not to the same degree.
By the way, I'm amused at how negative the review is toward previous Android releases, particularly in terms of performance and interface responsiveness, since any time someone brought these common performance criticisms up on Slashdot, they'd always immediately get modded down and their karma ruined:
"Surprisingly, Google never got Gingerbread working smoothly on the Nexus S, and running the stock version of 2.3.6 was a painful experience."
"The old assumption that even a dual core Android phone is not as smooth as a single core iPhone doesn’t apply any more. Apple users will probably still notice some missed frames in animations or small amounts of lag when things are being loaded in the background, but this is no longer a serious usability issue, more a cosmetic one."
"The OS looks much much slicker overall even on the relatively old Nexus S, compared to the cartoonish primitive look of stock Gingerbread."
"The browser gets a much needed overhaul as the stock 2.3 browser was slow and laggy. It is now much faster, smoother to use, and generally stays out of the way like a good browser should."
"To conclude, with no definite date for ICS upgrades for other phones, the Nexus S is a great buy. It is a great example of the importance of software over hardware in a phone, a lesson well learnt from Apple."
These days, I could. Because the 80s and 90s were something of a fluke in which hardware was progressing at a rapid rate, it coincided with the growth of the video game industry and attracted a lot of hardware geeks. But that era is gone, and hardware has stabilized to the point where new games are coming out targeting five year old hardware, and most people are okay with it. Skyrim runs on my first-generation Intel iMac from 2006.
Diminishing returns in game development has reached the point where the jump to more powerful hardware, and therefore even higher-fidelity visuals, is just costing too much to justify the expense. That is the state of technology today. Some people don't like it because they want to forever relive the glory days of 90s MHz marketing and 3D card upgrades, but it's over, and thank goodness.
It doesn't explain why at all; it just makes a claim. Its implication doesn't even really make sense since there are plenty of less capitalist nations in the world whose governments are more authoritarian.
Slashdot on net neutrality: "Why, of course! I'd love for the government to regulate internet traffic. What could possibly go wrong?"
Slashdot on SOPA: "Regulate internet traffic?! Ignorant scum! Viva la revolución!"
I've always loved that argument. It's like saying McDonald's shouldn't improve its food because it's the most popular restaurant, or that Justin Bieber is a better artist than Mozart because he sells more music per year.
Not without tremendous support costs, and mobile developers have been public about this. In addition to the software APIs, there are multiple hardware devices to target with varying capabilities. Even the very existence of variable screen resolutions completely screws up the ability to have a single, unified, cohesive interface across multiple phones.
It may have been Android's intention to seamlessly target multiple hardware devices, but you pretty much cap the point yourself--whether or not it actually does is another story. Developer support for Android has declined by one-third over the course of this year.
Um, the very sentence you quoted specifically states that Steve Jobs pushed for "full control over the OS," so obviously, he was talking about wresting control away from the carriers so that you're not going through a chain of phones all the time to catch up with the new OS. In fact, it's a credit to Apple that they push out updates for older phones; the two-year-old iPhone 3GS is still selling well.
How do you even pronounce "fanboism?"
My favorite part of posting on Slashdot over the years has been getting accused of being other people by angry, anonymous neckbeards. The tally of other people I'm supposed to be at this point must number in the dozens.
To answer your question, I don't care enough about smartphone operating systems to post angry, anonymous messages about them. I do, however, care about the fact that Linux once had a non-trivial chance at gaining desktop marketshare and squandered it. You can't create a stable long-term platform while embracing chaos. It's incompatible.
If Google isn't careful, the problems may become great enough to allow Microsoft to slip in and gain non-trivial marketshare, at the very least in the enterprise where they have long-standing relations. Based on Eric Schmidt's recent remarks, Google is betting on having so much marketshare that people don't have a choice but to work with them, whether they "like it or not."
That's not an actual argument; it's just a label you're attaching to the idea of quality control. Platforms need leadership or they descend into chaos. Look at desktop Linux.
At the time, the pledge was covered as the best thing to happen at the I/O Conference. It served its purpose--it comforted Android fans, served as a response to critics of Android fragmentation, and probably helped Google sell more Android licenses. To answer your question about why anyone would be surprised, it's because Google is still held in a glowing light, at least on tech sites, and people still take them for their word.
Android is more like a collection of related but not entirely compatible operating systems. The inability to have a consistent version of the operating system across current smartphones is really surprising for something that's supposed to be an open source project, but one of the big drawbacks of Android is how much control Google gives the carriers over your phone.
Google wants it to eventually, for services such as Google TV.
The asymmetry is balanced in numbers. The regular users outnumber the system admins, and the citizens outnumber the government. We already saw social technologies contribute to the so-called Arab Spring demonstrations this year.
The obvious difference is that public outcry led to severe criticism of Carrier IQ as well as a possible FBI investigation.
The ubiquity of the technology may contribute to the ease of surveillance, but authoritarian governments were already doing bad things. Ubiquity of technology empowers protest movements just as much as it empowers government, creating a public accountability that wasn't there previously and enabling a transfer of information beyond government restrictions. I believe the tradeoff is worth it because ubiquitous technology in the hands of citizens can be more powerful than in the hands of government.
They don't want YouTube to disappear, because they want to make money off of it. However, they also want to keep Google under their thumbs, and Google will comply like they always do because they're wholly dependent on content publishers in order to have content to put ads around.