Unfortunately, natural languages have almost nothing in common with computer languages. Computer languages are for the most part 1:1 codes - the same command means the same thing in whatever context it appears in a particular language. Natural languages are not codes; an idiom means different things in different contexts. That's part of the problem comparing the two.
If someone said that computer languages and human languages were the same thing, and you said "no way", I would agree with that. They aren't exactly the same. But saying that written languages have nothing in common with programming languages? That's stretching it a lot more, actually.
A language is a formal way of communicating information from one to another, from simple things to complex. This is exactly what a programming language is.
If I write a little manual on how to do a few key tasks on someone's computer, how is that different from programming the computer to do those tasks itself? Unless I'm directly carrying out the tasks, I must have communicated something to the computer. And I used written language to do it.
If there were a 1:1 correspondence for writing code, then why could 5 people make a program that does *exactly* the same thing, and all have completely different code?
Natural languages are not codes; an idiom means different things in different contexts.
Yes, and like idioms, at my job there are functions that we use that everyone within the company knows but mean something different nothing to other people programming in the same language. C++ has loaded functions that can do completely different things depending on the context.
I am saying this as someone who studied modern languages and computer science in college, so I've thought a lot about both.
Everything you said in your comment was what you imagine Apple could do. If you are looking to argue about speculation as to what Apple could theoretically do, I think that's a waste of time. Yes, they could go so far as to do all the things Microsoft did to tie IE to Windows.
All you can look at is what Apple's situation is now, and what their general philosophy is. Right now, Safari is totally optional. It's safe to say it will be the browser on the dock on new machines once it is ready. It can simply be dragged to the trash to be erased. This isn't just the way Safari works-- if I want to delete Mail.app, iChat, iMovie, etc., all I have to do is drag the app to the trash. It is part of the easy and intuitive user experience that Apple has always had over Windows, and that has become especially strong in OS X.
Additionally, look at Apple's gameplan. Apple is trying to further the Mac OS, in order to further Apple hardware. They aren't trying to make Safari the dominant browser that crushes all others. Apple felt that a simple browser that is OS X through-and-through, and that integrates with the other iApps, was a very useful piece to making the OS X experience better. The other side-motivation that possibly exists would be to push away the dominant MS products and offer a worthy alternative. In this case it isn't to crush IE, but to keep MS from crushing Apple by leveraging IE.
So, yes, there exists a possibility that Apple could go counter to the way they have developed all their other applications and go against the general design of the platform, but until I start seeing some sort of evidence to at least suggest this is what they are trying to do, I don't see the point in arguing over it.
I'm pretty sure what he means is that Safari is not a part of the system like IE for Windows. You want to delete Safari? Drag it to the trash. I have no doubt it will continue to function in this way after the beta period is over.
I agree that keeping track of the support that happens is important, as well as connecting this to the development of the software. Where I work we use CustomerFirst to do this. Not only are customer support issues well documented, but they are automatically integrated with bug fixing and product development. It might help to keep your support people and your developers on the same page.
When is the cost of the average CD actually going to go down to what music used to cost?? I realize that there is inflation, but CDs were expensive at about $15 in the late 80s, and now CD player and discman prices have dropped dramatically over the years while the price of CDs has remained more or less constant.
Maybe if they would actually consider pricing CDs at an average of about $9-10 people would by a lot more. I know I would (honest!).
We used to have Welltris, and I played it a lot when I was about 10-12 years old. I thought it was a pretty cool game. It was a similar idea to Tetris, but making it 3D and having the option for 5-block pieces expanded the game. It was also pretty original to have a looking-down-a-well perspective.
I don't know... it was not a huge departure from Tetris, but I thought it was decent.
If you are telling the truth, you might want to have a look at this article about the most recent contractor who leaked sensitive Apple info on an Internet forum.
You mentioned biometrics would be good, but they only work in one direction. Well, the problem is the child getting out of the house, I assume, and you're never trying to keep him from coming in. So the biometric security needs only to be for the inside going out, and a normal deadbolt lock for the other direction.
But, like other people suggested, probably an alarm of some sort would be better than an actual locking mechanism, as far as safety is concerned.
They might argue that a cd delivers better audio quality. They might even have a point there.
In that case, my computer should cost $90 trillion because it is millions of times faster than the supercomputers of the 50s that only nations could afford.
When a new type of medium or device is created, the cost is initially higher and then when the technology has matured, it usually becomes much cheaper to produce. If the music industry could make that argument about CDs, then just about every other industry could make similar claims. It's absurd.
My point is, no, they definitely don't have a point there.
I was pretty young when we first got that game, and I would play it with my older sister and dad. For some reason, the witch scared the living shit out of me. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that you had to search through her house, and she could appear at any time with scratchy, loud "witch" sounds, and you couldn't do anything about it.
I remember spending like a month trying to figure out what the magic mirror was. We wrote "pick up _____" with about a million things, like "shield", "rug", "board", "plaque", etc. Even if there was some place to get tips and stuff for games, it definitely did not occur to us at the time.
I'm 99% sure my parents still have that original King's Quest in the basement, and since the box was plastic, I think it should be in near perfect condition. We still have the PCjr as well... I wonder if it still works?
An addiction is where you continue the behavior even though it is detrimental to the rest of your life. There is no clear-cut boundary-- it's a matter of whether it is actually ruining your life or others' lives. If you want to stop but you can't, it's probably an addiction.
Not everyone has an addictive personality, or allows themselves to fall into addiction, and probably you are one of those people who does not. I also have trouble envisioning a situation where my willpower would be unable to take control.
It's not that hard to turn off the damn computer once in a while, and pay attention to those you supposedly care about.
Congratulations. You aren't addicted to video games at all. It's not hard for me to keep from gambling either. I guess gambling addicts are just being little babies about it, too. (Who knows, you might actually think that...)
If you don't, that shows more about how much you care than it does about some sort of 'addiction'.
It's an addiciton! If it was a matter of caring more about one or another it would be called a passion.
What ever happened to people helping themselves, anyway? Why is everything always someone else's fault, no matter what?
Who says that just because it is an addiction that the addict doesn't need to help him/herself, first and foremost? The reason for noticing the addiciton trends is so that you can maybe take measures to keep other people from falling into the same trap in the future.
If someone is buying a Lindows box at Wal-Mart, it's very unlikely they have the knowledge or desire to seek out the parts and figure out how to build their own PC.
For my interpretation of how the lipreading worked, I was looking at the sample on the website. It appeared to be that certain sounds had certain pictures. Anyway, it also had something that touched on what you were talking about. It had a little bit of extra information you can't normally see, like red dots on the cheeks for g and k type sounds, and a red nose for nasal sounds, etc. Extras like these might make up for some of the lacking facial cues.
The other thing I was thinking about was that the lipreading could be part of the understanding process. A good number of people (most?) who are legally deaf are not truly 100% deaf. If a person is able to get a bit of auditory information, plus this lipsynching information, it might be enough to make things a lot easier for these people, even if the lip-reading by itself were too simplistic.
Seriously though, transitioning from OS9 to OSX must be a bit like moving from an automatic to a stick shift.
Not really. OS X is more like an automatic compared to other UNIX-based OSes, since the command line is there, you just never have to use it if you don't want.
Actually, now that I'm using OS X, I have less technical stuff to deal with. I do a lot of technical stuff for fun, but in terms of what I have to do... well I don't have to do anything. The system has never crashed before. Back in the OS 9 days, things would start crashing, and you'd have to go in and do extension troubleshooting and stuff like that. If you bought a peripheral, you'd have to install drivers.
I know you can get into much more confusing stuff with OS X, but like I said, that thing never crashes. On OS 9 it was an inevidability that you would regularly have to deal with tougher stuff.
You may be right, but I've SEEN speech to text. The stuff we use at work for converting news broadcasts to text is around 95% accurate.
I have worked with speech recognition software as well, of course.
There are a lot of applications for specialized speech recognition software that work much better because they have a narrower range of vocabulary to deal with. This makes an enormous amount of difference. Newscasters tend to have a certain "news" way of speaking, and they are reading from a prompter, so there is going to be a lot of consistency there. Also, sentence structure will be much more regular and subject matter is going to have a lot of common ground. I don't know your exact setup at work, but I would imagine that the speech recognition software is trained to the newscasters' voices. My guess is that there is more stuff going on than you think with this software.
Additionally, think about the factors in a cellphone conversation that would make things more difficult. In a phone conversation, there will be ums and uh wells, etc. There will be a lot of stuttering and informal speech. If the signal isn't perfect and all or part of a word is left out, that can change every other word in the sentence (due to the nature of speech recognition-- things aren't figured out one word at a time, but rather one utterance at a time). If someone's name is not in the dictionary, it can easily be replaced with one or several words.
When I was studying speech recognition, I tried varying the load on the processor and seeing how much that affected the speed. The speed started dropping dramatically right away. Your average desktop computer today is going to be able to handle speech recognition, as long as the processor has little to nothing else going on. But your average cellphone is going to have a LOT less processing power, and that will lead to an exponential slowdown in speed.
There are too many subtleties to lipreading for me to believe a CELLPHONE will be able to display an image well enough for it using less resources than than speech to text takes.
There are certainly subtleties in displaying lips, but they aren't as complicated. Displaying lips to read is only a portion of the steps you have to go through to do speech to text-- the easiest part. Both methods take the sounds and figure out which phonemes they represent. Speech recognition would be small and simple if it only had to spit out a string of phonetic symbols, not having to worry about separation between each word, the English language in general, etc. This is all the lip reading software has to do, but instead of spitting out symbols, each phoneme has a picture. Obviously, there are complications I'm probably not aware of, but I don't see how it could possibly be as complicated as the process of converting these sounds into proper English language sentences. The only complicated part I can think of is smoothing together each picture. On the other hand, converting into English is about the toughest thing you can possibly have to do with those phonemes.
Well, for comparison, see how well a speech recognition program does with the same sentence.
And unless you just randomly blurted out the sentence, you probably have context in the surrounding sentences (e.g. you are talking about fig newtons, food in general, newton's law, whatever).
I'd definitely put my money on the lip-reader, frankly.
I'm deaf (severe to profound sensori-neural hearing loss, since birth) and I'll tell you one thing: lip-reading can give ambiguous results. Someone can say "Pot" and yet with the same lip movement, can also say "My". Men with bushy mustaches are a lip-reading disaster.
Imagine if every person enunciated consistently and clearly. I know there's still ambiguity, but it wouldn't be nearly as hard. This computerized face doesn't have problems like bushy moustache, and the pronunciations are precise (of course, it could be better). So you'll be in the best conditions for recognizing what is said (theoretically).
With the accuracy of speech-to-text these days, the margin of error you get reading those lips might very well be smaller than if a computer tries to make those sounds into words and sentences.
If you have to say the sounds for the word "ow", what does that look like? There is a way for a computer to display this that would be pretty clear, and figuring this out would more or less require grabbing the "ow" picture group.
Now, what if you have to write something with a "ow" sound in it, but this "ow" sound might be in the middle, beginning or end of any word? The sounds all around it have an effect on it. It might be spelled "au", "ow", "ao", "ough", god-knows-what-else. There are dozens and dozens of situations where this sound might arise. Including ways you might not even consciously think about. Figuring all this out is really hard for a computer to do, because it has no AI. It doesn't know what is being talked about.
Probably mapping mouth movements isn't dead-easy, but I'd wager it is much easier than speech-to-text.
It's surprising how many people here don't realize that converting a sound to words is harder than converting a sound to pictures of lip movements.
Converting phonemes into sentences requires context. Right now, speech recognition software "simulates" context by having large word banks and using probability. It tries to guess from sample text what the most likely string of words was. This is really not easy. This is why you have to train with speech recognition software. It tries to build up a database of likely things you'll say. It's like Tivo, sort of. And it can get a sentence totally wrong sometimes (often?). If you have a slow processor, going through all this data can take a REALLY long time.
Speech-to-text might be out of the scope of today's PDA to do, whereas the lip-synching stuff wouldn't be.
By doing the pictures, you're essentially leaving the last part (converting the phonemes into words and sentences) to the deaf person reading the lips, instead of a computer.
In order for the computer to do a more reliable job on this last part, it either has to take a long time or the processor has to be really fast. And even with that, the computer is still going to make a lot of mistakes.
This is certainly nowhere near as brain-dead as you make it out to be.
A great speech recognition phone would enable deaf people that speak to use phones for near real-time conversations. In addition, such technology can also be (easily?) adapted to foreign language translators for tourists.
Actually, this is not so easily done.
You come across a number of ways to introduce errors. First, recognizing the speech and figuring out the phonemes, with some margin of error. Then, you have to convert these phonemes to text, which requires a lot of computing power to do in real time, and you introduce a lot more errors. Then you have to translate this text. We all know how babelfish is. So you'd end up with a very garbled (probably unintelligible) message.
I'm not saying this is impossible, just that this is no trivial task.
In the meantime, I think this technology we see in the article is a step in the right direction.
Slashdot Mirror
A language is a formal way of communicating information from one to another, from simple things to complex. This is exactly what a programming language is.
If I write a little manual on how to do a few key tasks on someone's computer, how is that different from programming the computer to do those tasks itself? Unless I'm directly carrying out the tasks, I must have communicated something to the computer. And I used written language to do it.
If there were a 1:1 correspondence for writing code, then why could 5 people make a program that does *exactly* the same thing, and all have completely different code?
Yes, and like idioms, at my job there are functions that we use that everyone within the company knows but mean something different nothing to other people programming in the same language. C++ has loaded functions that can do completely different things depending on the context.
I am saying this as someone who studied modern languages and computer science in college, so I've thought a lot about both.
Everything you said in your comment was what you imagine Apple could do. If you are looking to argue about speculation as to what Apple could theoretically do, I think that's a waste of time. Yes, they could go so far as to do all the things Microsoft did to tie IE to Windows.
All you can look at is what Apple's situation is now, and what their general philosophy is. Right now, Safari is totally optional. It's safe to say it will be the browser on the dock on new machines once it is ready. It can simply be dragged to the trash to be erased. This isn't just the way Safari works-- if I want to delete Mail.app, iChat, iMovie, etc., all I have to do is drag the app to the trash. It is part of the easy and intuitive user experience that Apple has always had over Windows, and that has become especially strong in OS X.
Additionally, look at Apple's gameplan. Apple is trying to further the Mac OS, in order to further Apple hardware. They aren't trying to make Safari the dominant browser that crushes all others. Apple felt that a simple browser that is OS X through-and-through, and that integrates with the other iApps, was a very useful piece to making the OS X experience better. The other side-motivation that possibly exists would be to push away the dominant MS products and offer a worthy alternative. In this case it isn't to crush IE, but to keep MS from crushing Apple by leveraging IE.
So, yes, there exists a possibility that Apple could go counter to the way they have developed all their other applications and go against the general design of the platform, but until I start seeing some sort of evidence to at least suggest this is what they are trying to do, I don't see the point in arguing over it.
I'm pretty sure what he means is that Safari is not a part of the system like IE for Windows. You want to delete Safari? Drag it to the trash. I have no doubt it will continue to function in this way after the beta period is over.
I agree that keeping track of the support that happens is important, as well as connecting this to the development of the software. Where I work we use CustomerFirst to do this. Not only are customer support issues well documented, but they are automatically integrated with bug fixing and product development. It might help to keep your support people and your developers on the same page.
I was under the impression that the cost of producing a CD *has* in fact gone down.
When is the cost of the average CD actually going to go down to what music used to cost?? I realize that there is inflation, but CDs were expensive at about $15 in the late 80s, and now CD player and discman prices have dropped dramatically over the years while the price of CDs has remained more or less constant.
Maybe if they would actually consider pricing CDs at an average of about $9-10 people would by a lot more. I know I would (honest!).
We used to have Welltris, and I played it a lot when I was about 10-12 years old. I thought it was a pretty cool game. It was a similar idea to Tetris, but making it 3D and having the option for 5-block pieces expanded the game. It was also pretty original to have a looking-down-a-well perspective.
I don't know... it was not a huge departure from Tetris, but I thought it was decent.
If you are telling the truth, you might want to have a look at this article about the most recent contractor who leaked sensitive Apple info on an Internet forum.
You mentioned biometrics would be good, but they only work in one direction. Well, the problem is the child getting out of the house, I assume, and you're never trying to keep him from coming in. So the biometric security needs only to be for the inside going out, and a normal deadbolt lock for the other direction.
But, like other people suggested, probably an alarm of some sort would be better than an actual locking mechanism, as far as safety is concerned.
Suck a polar bear's funky ass!
In that case, my computer should cost $90 trillion because it is millions of times faster than the supercomputers of the 50s that only nations could afford.
When a new type of medium or device is created, the cost is initially higher and then when the technology has matured, it usually becomes much cheaper to produce. If the music industry could make that argument about CDs, then just about every other industry could make similar claims. It's absurd.
My point is, no, they definitely don't have a point there.
I was pretty young when we first got that game, and I would play it with my older sister and dad. For some reason, the witch scared the living shit out of me. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that you had to search through her house, and she could appear at any time with scratchy, loud "witch" sounds, and you couldn't do anything about it.
I remember spending like a month trying to figure out what the magic mirror was. We wrote "pick up _____" with about a million things, like "shield", "rug", "board", "plaque", etc. Even if there was some place to get tips and stuff for games, it definitely did not occur to us at the time.
I'm 99% sure my parents still have that original King's Quest in the basement, and since the box was plastic, I think it should be in near perfect condition. We still have the PCjr as well... I wonder if it still works?
I do. I has this generic-looking knight on it. I'm pretty sure it was the very first version.
An addiction is where you continue the behavior even though it is detrimental to the rest of your life. There is no clear-cut boundary-- it's a matter of whether it is actually ruining your life or others' lives. If you want to stop but you can't, it's probably an addiction.
Not everyone has an addictive personality, or allows themselves to fall into addiction, and probably you are one of those people who does not. I also have trouble envisioning a situation where my willpower would be unable to take control.
Congratulations. You aren't addicted to video games at all. It's not hard for me to keep from gambling either. I guess gambling addicts are just being little babies about it, too. (Who knows, you might actually think that...)
It's an addiciton! If it was a matter of caring more about one or another it would be called a passion.
Who says that just because it is an addiction that the addict doesn't need to help him/herself, first and foremost? The reason for noticing the addiciton trends is so that you can maybe take measures to keep other people from falling into the same trap in the future.
If someone is buying a Lindows box at Wal-Mart, it's very unlikely they have the knowledge or desire to seek out the parts and figure out how to build their own PC.
Those are some good points.
For my interpretation of how the lipreading worked, I was looking at the sample on the website. It appeared to be that certain sounds had certain pictures. Anyway, it also had something that touched on what you were talking about. It had a little bit of extra information you can't normally see, like red dots on the cheeks for g and k type sounds, and a red nose for nasal sounds, etc. Extras like these might make up for some of the lacking facial cues.
The other thing I was thinking about was that the lipreading could be part of the understanding process. A good number of people (most?) who are legally deaf are not truly 100% deaf. If a person is able to get a bit of auditory information, plus this lipsynching information, it might be enough to make things a lot easier for these people, even if the lip-reading by itself were too simplistic.
Actually, now that I'm using OS X, I have less technical stuff to deal with. I do a lot of technical stuff for fun, but in terms of what I have to do... well I don't have to do anything. The system has never crashed before. Back in the OS 9 days, things would start crashing, and you'd have to go in and do extension troubleshooting and stuff like that. If you bought a peripheral, you'd have to install drivers.
I know you can get into much more confusing stuff with OS X, but like I said, that thing never crashes. On OS 9 it was an inevidability that you would regularly have to deal with tougher stuff.
There are a lot of applications for specialized speech recognition software that work much better because they have a narrower range of vocabulary to deal with. This makes an enormous amount of difference. Newscasters tend to have a certain "news" way of speaking, and they are reading from a prompter, so there is going to be a lot of consistency there. Also, sentence structure will be much more regular and subject matter is going to have a lot of common ground. I don't know your exact setup at work, but I would imagine that the speech recognition software is trained to the newscasters' voices. My guess is that there is more stuff going on than you think with this software.
Additionally, think about the factors in a cellphone conversation that would make things more difficult. In a phone conversation, there will be ums and uh wells, etc. There will be a lot of stuttering and informal speech. If the signal isn't perfect and all or part of a word is left out, that can change every other word in the sentence (due to the nature of speech recognition-- things aren't figured out one word at a time, but rather one utterance at a time). If someone's name is not in the dictionary, it can easily be replaced with one or several words.
When I was studying speech recognition, I tried varying the load on the processor and seeing how much that affected the speed. The speed started dropping dramatically right away. Your average desktop computer today is going to be able to handle speech recognition, as long as the processor has little to nothing else going on. But your average cellphone is going to have a LOT less processing power, and that will lead to an exponential slowdown in speed.
There are certainly subtleties in displaying lips, but they aren't as complicated. Displaying lips to read is only a portion of the steps you have to go through to do speech to text-- the easiest part. Both methods take the sounds and figure out which phonemes they represent. Speech recognition would be small and simple if it only had to spit out a string of phonetic symbols, not having to worry about separation between each word, the English language in general, etc. This is all the lip reading software has to do, but instead of spitting out symbols, each phoneme has a picture. Obviously, there are complications I'm probably not aware of, but I don't see how it could possibly be as complicated as the process of converting these sounds into proper English language sentences. The only complicated part I can think of is smoothing together each picture. On the other hand, converting into English is about the toughest thing you can possibly have to do with those phonemes.
Well, for comparison, see how well a speech recognition program does with the same sentence.
And unless you just randomly blurted out the sentence, you probably have context in the surrounding sentences (e.g. you are talking about fig newtons, food in general, newton's law, whatever).
I'd definitely put my money on the lip-reader, frankly.
With the accuracy of speech-to-text these days, the margin of error you get reading those lips might very well be smaller than if a computer tries to make those sounds into words and sentences.
Think about it like this.
If you have to say the sounds for the word "ow", what does that look like? There is a way for a computer to display this that would be pretty clear, and figuring this out would more or less require grabbing the "ow" picture group.
Now, what if you have to write something with a "ow" sound in it, but this "ow" sound might be in the middle, beginning or end of any word? The sounds all around it have an effect on it. It might be spelled "au", "ow", "ao", "ough", god-knows-what-else. There are dozens and dozens of situations where this sound might arise. Including ways you might not even consciously think about. Figuring all this out is really hard for a computer to do, because it has no AI. It doesn't know what is being talked about.
Probably mapping mouth movements isn't dead-easy, but I'd wager it is much easier than speech-to-text.
It's surprising how many people here don't realize that converting a sound to words is harder than converting a sound to pictures of lip movements.
Converting phonemes into sentences requires context. Right now, speech recognition software "simulates" context by having large word banks and using probability. It tries to guess from sample text what the most likely string of words was. This is really not easy. This is why you have to train with speech recognition software. It tries to build up a database of likely things you'll say. It's like Tivo, sort of. And it can get a sentence totally wrong sometimes (often?). If you have a slow processor, going through all this data can take a REALLY long time.
Speech-to-text might be out of the scope of today's PDA to do, whereas the lip-synching stuff wouldn't be.
Who says the latter is easier?
By doing the pictures, you're essentially leaving the last part (converting the phonemes into words and sentences) to the deaf person reading the lips, instead of a computer.
In order for the computer to do a more reliable job on this last part, it either has to take a long time or the processor has to be really fast. And even with that, the computer is still going to make a lot of mistakes.
This is certainly nowhere near as brain-dead as you make it out to be.
Actually, this is not so easily done.
You come across a number of ways to introduce errors. First, recognizing the speech and figuring out the phonemes, with some margin of error. Then, you have to convert these phonemes to text, which requires a lot of computing power to do in real time, and you introduce a lot more errors. Then you have to translate this text. We all know how babelfish is. So you'd end up with a very garbled (probably unintelligible) message.
I'm not saying this is impossible, just that this is no trivial task.
In the meantime, I think this technology we see in the article is a step in the right direction.