For pure consumption of media or as a fancy drive that plugs into the projector, nothing beats the iPad.
Except the playbook. While giving that same presentation, I can be doing other things on the tablet -- like checking my presentation notes or finding a video clip to reinforce a point. Oh, and I don't need an adapter, just an HDMI cable.
For watching HD video, the aspect ratio is actually correct, and it has a higher ppi, making the experience much better.
And that's why businesses are adopting the iPad far faster than any iPhone.
Presentations I can see, but media consumption? If you already have Blackberry's deployed, Nothing is simpler to deploy than the Playbook. Nothing.
Once bridged (takes just a couple seconds) their email, contacts, calendar, documents, etc. are all instantly available on the tablet. Oh, and no need to purchase a data plan for them -- just bridge to the phone (less power, and MUCH more secure than wifi). The playbook can also act as a shared resource -- whatever employee needs one can just take one off the stack and have instant access to all their resources.
Deployment is as simple as opening the box. No other tablet comes close.
I checked out the demo again I tried a few similar phrases out in Vlingo, with various results. (To your first point, you're right. For whatever reason, it never occurred to me to ask my phone if I need an umbrella when I could simply ask for the weather. I'll take you at your word that I'm in the minority here.)
Back to the demo. Some of the things in the Siri demo are identical in Vlingo such as reading and replying to messages (the jogger in the demo says "read message" and "reply: defiantly, I'll see you there" keeping with the (rather sensible) command / data approach. Same with the "text [name] [message]" part.
It diverges somewhat for questions like "what's the traffic like around here" -- but that's not really interesting within a set of limited domains. It's similar to how Vlingo will give me a list of restaurants near me when I say "Mexican restaurants" or something similar -- snagging my location form the GPS and doing a specialized search like Siri does. Siri just seems to allow more free-form questions
I did try a few free-form inquiries with vlingo just to see what I could get it to do. I started with a simple "send a text to steve, how are you" instead of my normal "text steve message how are you" and they worked identically. The more complex "I'm hungry for Mexican food" snagged my location from GPS and pulled up a list of local Mexican restaraunts (with ratings, address, and a button to call them) just like my earlier, simpler, query. It looks like I'd need to try Siri out to really see how much they actually differ here.
The neat bit with Siri seems to happen with questions like "what about napa valley?" -- remembering the previous inquery and adjusting it and the subsequent reply. I'm curious to see how this will ultimately work in practice, however, as it doesn't seem too far removed from the average chat bot (which is sure to produce some bizarre results in response to odd phrasing or misinterpreted speech.) This isn't to say that it's not nifty, just that I expect it will function more like Alice than the Star Trek computer (the parallel the demo wants us to draw, obviously).
Ultimately, I'd really need to play with Siri for a bit to see how much they really differ and what advantages Siri's narrow-but-deep approach offers over Vlingo's broad-but-shallow approach.
Anyhow, having dug a bit deeper, I think I understand your point.
If Android has had conversational, contextual voice recognition that seamlessly integrates all the core apps plus external information sources allowing the user to speak naturally, then a lot of marketing dweebs in several companies should be fired because I've never heard of it.
Vlingo Plus Personal Assistant for iOS, Android, and Blackberry.
Hasn't Siri been available for a while now? I seem to recall it being an alternative to Vlingo -- which has had it's own virtual assistant product for nearly a year now (on iOS, Android, and Blackberry).
How does this Siri differ from Siri last week -- and how is it different from competing products?
It only worked in 07 because smartphones were so very terrible, and the iPhone was the only decent one.
Don't be ridiculous. The first iPhone lacked basic features which had for years been common to even the cheapest giveaway dumb phones.
The only thing really spectacular about the first iPhone was the browser. IIRC, you couldn't even install apps on the thing. It's debatable that the thing even qualifies as a smartphone.
Even the iPhone 4 is still behind many pre-iPhone offerings when it comes to traditional features like PIM functions and notifications.
Well, it is a HUGE gamble. According to the WSJ article, for Sprint to move 30.5 million iPhones in 4 years, they'd need to convert all of their on-contract customers to the iPhone -- and then double the number of customers on contract! A tall order for a provider who has been shedding customers.
They don't even expect the deal to be profitable until 2014 -- with a 1.5 billion hit to operating profit in the short-term.
Further, as the iPhone 5 looks to be a fairly mundane update, I doubt we'll see many people jumping carriers for it. The WSJ article suggests that Sprint would need to capture a full third of the iPhone market (if demand remains as strong over the next four years).
As a blackberry user, I no longer feel left-out when it comes to web browsing. If you compare the old Torch 9800 to say, the iPhone 3GS (known for having a great browser), you'll find that the Torch actually does a little bit better.
I''m not particularly bothered by it. RIM's slide can be explained by it's severe lack of new phones over the past two years -- and even then, they did surprisingly well against some fierce competition, even with outdated hardware.
Remember, their only really suffering in the US market right now, they have no debt, and they're growing overall world-wide.
Their new phones are competitive, particularly the Bold 9900. They look to be shortening their release cycle, a very good thing, as allowing more than a year between updates to their core products (sometimes longer) was keeping them too far behind. We'll be seeing a steady release of new handsets in 2012 as they roll-out their new QNX phones. If they can keep that up, I don't see any reason that their slide will continue. We'll know more when we have their Q4 results, which I expect to be MUCH better than their Q2 which everyone expected to be as bad or worse than what was reported.
RIM seems to (finally) be "getting it". While we may not see them back in the #1 spot, it doesn't look like their in any serious trouble.
Considering that the installed base for iOS is around 250 million users and growing, and the installed base for Blackberry is around 50 million users and rapidly shrinking... it's hardly difficult to see why people are choosing to put their efforts towards the best opportunity for future growth.
Well, that's not quite right. While RIM is losing market share in the US, it's still gaining users overall, not losing them (though they are down in the US -- they still have more US users than Apple had in Feb. 2011)
50 million is a gross underestimate, just as is 250 million is a gross overestimate. The number of devices sold does not equal the number of users! (a fact you remembered for RIM, and forgot for Apple!)
BBM alone has 45 million active users (and growing) Remembering that RIM outsold Apple until 2011, your figures would suggest that Apple gained 200 million new users in 2011 alone. Unlikely, as Apple shipped 14.1 million iphones *world wide* in Q4 2010 -- I think your figures may be a bit off!
Besides, we're talking US numbers here, and it's really the only market that RIM is struggling in. According to ComScore (May, 2011), Apple had 20.43 million US users and RIM had 18.97 Million. Not a huge difference, is there?
The point, of course, is that number of users isn't a factor between RIM and Apple as their so close. From a developers perspective, they're basically equally sized markets, though RIM offers their apps more visibility and can command a higher price.
Which was my point -- it's incredibly stupid to ignore Blackberry as a platform. When you look at the data, it's abundantly clear that there's lot's of money sitting on the table.
Remember, RIM had 42% of the US smartphone market as late as April 2010, and they out-sold Apple until early 2011 -- they have a massive install base (as large or possibly still larger than Apple). You'd be foolish, as a developer, to ignore the platform right now. There is, apparently, a good bit of money to be made.
It's funny how perceptions always seem to outweigh hard data.
Just removing the platters would be sufficient in that case.
Even that's overkill. All he needs to do is toss them in the trash.
It's extraordinarily unlikely that they'll be found afterward -- and even less likely that anyone would who did find them would do more than giggle at his collection of Japanese tentacle porn for a few minutes before formatting the drive.
Of course, this submitter is clearly insane so the drives are likely already formatted. In that case, his precious secrets (like that evite from his mom about his grandmothers 80th birthday party) would still be perfectly safe. Honestly, who's going to spend the time/money to recover data from a drive they found in some residential trash?
Oh, I don't know -- maybe something to do with all of the young children engaging in "erotic play". That sort of thing tends to make people uncomfortable.
There are two dominant kinds of uninformed posts here: those suggesting that we've somehow read a chunk of brain like a hard disk, and those rambling on about the "singularity".
If anything, the lack of comments suggests that slashdot has not yet been completely overrun by the terminally uninformed.
Take it easy! You sound like someone who went to U. Penn. and can't stand that people don't immediately recognize it as being an Ivy League institution...
There are innumerable accredited universities that offer graduate degrees fully online or with partial residency requirements.
The most respected would probably be University of London Though you can't really go wrong with any traditional brick-and-mortar school which additionally offers a distance program.
No, it's not a U.S. institution, but the U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on highly-raked and well-respected schools! South Africa has several well-respected institutions that offer distance programs such as University of South Africa (UNISA), University of the Western Cape (where Desmond Tutu serves as chancellor), University of Cape Town, and Rhodes University (yes, you've heard of it -- I'll bet you didn't know it was in South Africa!)
The least respected, of course, would likely be University of Phoenix -- even though they are NCA accredited (one of the regional bodies) They're also one of the most expensive, so it seems like a silly choice. Though Liberty University (SACS accredited) may have an even worse reputation due to it's history, a friend of mine who picked up some graduate credits there through their online program assured me it was both rigorous and undeniably secular.
There are zillions of others. Just make sure that any school you select is listed in the CHEA database. If a U.S. institution isn't listed listed there, it's not accredited.
You might also want to check out www.degreeinfo.com for some good feedback on any particular program your interested in.
Finally, if you're having trouble deciding between a schools, check out their ranking on 4icu.
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Which is just ridiculous. The Asus Transformer springs immediately to mind. It's got equal or greater specs, and it's cheaper than an iPad.
For pure consumption of media or as a fancy drive that plugs into the projector, nothing beats the iPad.
Except the playbook. While giving that same presentation, I can be doing other things on the tablet -- like checking my presentation notes or finding a video clip to reinforce a point. Oh, and I don't need an adapter, just an HDMI cable.
For watching HD video, the aspect ratio is actually correct, and it has a higher ppi, making the experience much better.
And that's why businesses are adopting the iPad far faster than any iPhone.
Presentations I can see, but media consumption? If you already have Blackberry's deployed, Nothing is simpler to deploy than the Playbook. Nothing.
Once bridged (takes just a couple seconds) their email, contacts, calendar, documents, etc. are all instantly available on the tablet. Oh, and no need to purchase a data plan for them -- just bridge to the phone (less power, and MUCH more secure than wifi). The playbook can also act as a shared resource -- whatever employee needs one can just take one off the stack and have instant access to all their resources.
Deployment is as simple as opening the box. No other tablet comes close.
I checked out the demo again I tried a few similar phrases out in Vlingo, with various results. (To your first point, you're right. For whatever reason, it never occurred to me to ask my phone if I need an umbrella when I could simply ask for the weather. I'll take you at your word that I'm in the minority here.)
Anyhow, I dug up this article from 2010 which highlights some of the differences between Vlingo and Siri. They seem to take (in general) two different approaches to the same problem:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Vlingo-Answers-Apple-Siri-With-SuperDialer-for-Android-459856/
Back to the demo. Some of the things in the Siri demo are identical in Vlingo such as reading and replying to messages (the jogger in the demo says "read message" and "reply: defiantly, I'll see you there" keeping with the (rather sensible) command / data approach. Same with the "text [name] [message]" part.
It diverges somewhat for questions like "what's the traffic like around here" -- but that's not really interesting within a set of limited domains. It's similar to how Vlingo will give me a list of restaurants near me when I say "Mexican restaurants" or something similar -- snagging my location form the GPS and doing a specialized search like Siri does. Siri just seems to allow more free-form questions
I did try a few free-form inquiries with vlingo just to see what I could get it to do. I started with a simple "send a text to steve, how are you" instead of my normal "text steve message how are you" and they worked identically. The more complex "I'm hungry for Mexican food" snagged my location from GPS and pulled up a list of local Mexican restaraunts (with ratings, address, and a button to call them) just like my earlier, simpler, query. It looks like I'd need to try Siri out to really see how much they actually differ here.
The neat bit with Siri seems to happen with questions like "what about napa valley?" -- remembering the previous inquery and adjusting it and the subsequent reply. I'm curious to see how this will ultimately work in practice, however, as it doesn't seem too far removed from the average chat bot (which is sure to produce some bizarre results in response to odd phrasing or misinterpreted speech.) This isn't to say that it's not nifty, just that I expect it will function more like Alice than the Star Trek computer (the parallel the demo wants us to draw, obviously).
Ultimately, I'd really need to play with Siri for a bit to see how much they really differ and what advantages Siri's narrow-but-deep approach offers over Vlingo's broad-but-shallow approach.
Anyhow, having dug a bit deeper, I think I understand your point.
If Android has had conversational, contextual voice recognition that seamlessly integrates all the core apps plus external information sources allowing the user to speak naturally, then a lot of marketing dweebs in several companies should be fired because I've never heard of it.
Vlingo Plus Personal Assistant for iOS, Android, and Blackberry.
Siri isn't new. It's been around for a while now. I haven't checked, but I'll bet you can still get it on iTunes for your iPhone 4.
There are also alternative products that do the exact same thing for iOS, Android, and Blackberry.
Hasn't Siri been available for a while now? I seem to recall it being an alternative to Vlingo -- which has had it's own virtual assistant product for nearly a year now (on iOS, Android, and Blackberry).
How does this Siri differ from Siri last week -- and how is it different from competing products?
It only worked in 07 because smartphones were so very terrible, and the iPhone was the only decent one.
Don't be ridiculous. The first iPhone lacked basic features which had for years been common to even the cheapest giveaway dumb phones.
The only thing really spectacular about the first iPhone was the browser. IIRC, you couldn't even install apps on the thing. It's debatable that the thing even qualifies as a smartphone.
Even the iPhone 4 is still behind many pre-iPhone offerings when it comes to traditional features like PIM functions and notifications.
Well, it is a HUGE gamble. According to the WSJ article, for Sprint to move 30.5 million iPhones in 4 years, they'd need to convert all of their on-contract customers to the iPhone -- and then double the number of customers on contract! A tall order for a provider who has been shedding customers.
They don't even expect the deal to be profitable until 2014 -- with a 1.5 billion hit to operating profit in the short-term.
Further, as the iPhone 5 looks to be a fairly mundane update, I doubt we'll see many people jumping carriers for it. The WSJ article suggests that Sprint would need to capture a full third of the iPhone market (if demand remains as strong over the next four years).
If that's not a gamble, I don't know what is.
Why would it? As a Blackberry user, Bridge is a MUCH better solution than a native app. I can't even begin to list the many advantages.
Most home users won't make use of it anyway, they'll just us web mail like they do on their computer.
I've had a Quantum Fireball hard drive for years.
I can't use it anymore though. Every time I've tried to read from it, my cat dies.
To the best of my knowledge, there is still no way to filter ads on the device with the stock browser.
Even BlackBerry's PlayBook has what feels like a better browser.
RIM has had a competitive browser for a over a year now. It's in no way incomplete.
Take a look at:
HTML 5 Test - Tablet Results
HTML 5 Test - Mobile Results
As a blackberry user, I no longer feel left-out when it comes to web browsing. If you compare the old Torch 9800 to say, the iPhone 3GS (known for having a great browser), you'll find that the Torch actually does a little bit better.
I''m not particularly bothered by it. RIM's slide can be explained by it's severe lack of new phones over the past two years -- and even then, they did surprisingly well against some fierce competition, even with outdated hardware.
Remember, their only really suffering in the US market right now, they have no debt, and they're growing overall world-wide.
Their new phones are competitive, particularly the Bold 9900. They look to be shortening their release cycle, a very good thing, as allowing more than a year between updates to their core products (sometimes longer) was keeping them too far behind. We'll be seeing a steady release of new handsets in 2012 as they roll-out their new QNX phones. If they can keep that up, I don't see any reason that their slide will continue. We'll know more when we have their Q4 results, which I expect to be MUCH better than their Q2 which everyone expected to be as bad or worse than what was reported.
RIM seems to (finally) be "getting it". While we may not see them back in the #1 spot, it doesn't look like their in any serious trouble.
Considering that the installed base for iOS is around 250 million users and growing, and the installed base for Blackberry is around 50 million users and rapidly shrinking... it's hardly difficult to see why people are choosing to put their efforts towards the best opportunity for future growth.
Well, that's not quite right. While RIM is losing market share in the US, it's still gaining users overall, not losing them (though they are down in the US -- they still have more US users than Apple had in Feb. 2011)
50 million is a gross underestimate, just as is 250 million is a gross overestimate. The number of devices sold does not equal the number of users! (a fact you remembered for RIM, and forgot for Apple!)
BBM alone has 45 million active users (and growing) Remembering that RIM outsold Apple until 2011, your figures would suggest that Apple gained 200 million new users in 2011 alone. Unlikely, as Apple shipped 14.1 million iphones *world wide* in Q4 2010 -- I think your figures may be a bit off!
Besides, we're talking US numbers here, and it's really the only market that RIM is struggling in. According to ComScore (May, 2011), Apple had 20.43 million US users and RIM had 18.97 Million. Not a huge difference, is there?
The point, of course, is that number of users isn't a factor between RIM and Apple as their so close. From a developers perspective, they're basically equally sized markets, though RIM offers their apps more visibility and can command a higher price.
Which was my point -- it's incredibly stupid to ignore Blackberry as a platform. When you look at the data, it's abundantly clear that there's lot's of money sitting on the table.
It's funny, 13% of blackberry developers pull in over 100k through app world. In general, Blackberry developers earn more than their iOS and Android counterparts
Remember, RIM had 42% of the US smartphone market as late as April 2010, and they out-sold Apple until early 2011 -- they have a massive install base (as large or possibly still larger than Apple). You'd be foolish, as a developer, to ignore the platform right now. There is, apparently, a good bit of money to be made.
It's funny how perceptions always seem to outweigh hard data.
Just removing the platters would be sufficient in that case.
Even that's overkill. All he needs to do is toss them in the trash.
It's extraordinarily unlikely that they'll be found afterward -- and even less likely that anyone would who did find them would do more than giggle at his collection of Japanese tentacle porn for a few minutes before formatting the drive.
Of course, this submitter is clearly insane so the drives are likely already formatted. In that case, his precious secrets (like that evite from his mom about his grandmothers 80th birthday party) would still be perfectly safe. Honestly, who's going to spend the time/money to recover data from a drive they found in some residential trash?
I would have thought you old timers had learned your lessons about skimping on what you assumed to be unimportant bytes ;)
Who knew that code would still be in production 30 years later? I'm just glad the 9/9/99 bug went relatively unnoticed.
Bah, that should be B8 00 4C CD 21
Speaking of optimization, you can save a byte with a small change to your sig.
Your sig assembles to: A1 00 4C CD 21 (5 bytes!) whereas:
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
assembles to: B4 4C CD 21 (4 bytes)
Interrupt 21h won't care what's in al, so you don't need to clear it.
You kids these days code like everyone has megabytes of RAM just lying around.
As the parent references Exodus, it wouldn't appear that he feels the same way.
I'm fairly sure the bible never commands anybody to kill non-believers.
Give Deu. 17:3-5 a quick read. You don't get much more explicit than that.
Honestly, I don't see how you could have missed it. Joshua slaughtered just about everyone in Canaan -- with more than a bit of divine assistance.
Oh, I don't know -- maybe something to do with all of the young children engaging in "erotic play". That sort of thing tends to make people uncomfortable.
How about
f. This is about as exciting as a pacemaker.
There are two dominant kinds of uninformed posts here: those suggesting that we've somehow read a chunk of brain like a hard disk, and those rambling on about the "singularity".
If anything, the lack of comments suggests that slashdot has not yet been completely overrun by the terminally uninformed.
Take it easy! You sound like someone who went to U. Penn. and can't stand that people don't immediately recognize it as being an Ivy League institution...
There are innumerable accredited universities that offer graduate degrees fully online or with partial residency requirements.
The most respected would probably be University of London Though you can't really go wrong with any traditional brick-and-mortar school which additionally offers a distance program.
No, it's not a U.S. institution, but the U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on highly-raked and well-respected schools! South Africa has several well-respected institutions that offer distance programs such as University of South Africa (UNISA), University of the Western Cape (where Desmond Tutu serves as chancellor), University of Cape Town, and Rhodes University (yes, you've heard of it -- I'll bet you didn't know it was in South Africa!)
The least respected, of course, would likely be University of Phoenix -- even though they are NCA accredited (one of the regional bodies) They're also one of the most expensive, so it seems like a silly choice. Though Liberty University (SACS accredited) may have an even worse reputation due to it's history, a friend of mine who picked up some graduate credits there through their online program assured me it was both rigorous and undeniably secular.
There are zillions of others. Just make sure that any school you select is listed in the CHEA database. If a U.S. institution isn't listed listed there, it's not accredited.
You might also want to check out www.degreeinfo.com for some good feedback on any particular program your interested in.
Finally, if you're having trouble deciding between a schools, check out their ranking on 4icu.