I think part of the problem is Flash Video needed Flash.
This is vague, and I suspect it misses the point. "Flash Video" is some fairly standard codecs (h263, h264, On2's vp6) being streamed through some streaming protocols (RTMP), played on a player that has been developed in Flash. The player could theoretically be developed in some development environment other than Flash, and as long as it supports the right codecs and protocols and DRM, it would still work. Adobe could make a browser plugin that is a pared down version of Flash, just enough to play those movies. The whole thing could probably be simplified even further, given that most video now is being distributed in h264, which OSX and Windows support with built-in codecs.
Meanwhile Adobe has been pushing Flash to be an entire application framework. When you have all the capabilities of a full application framework, including possible access to user files and hardware, you're necessarily opening some security holes, even if they're exploiting social engineering.
So Hortensia Patel's point, as far as I could tell, was that if we're really just keeping Flash around for DRMed video playback, then there should be an easier/safer way to achieve that. The metaphor was "It's like keeping a rabid rottweiler in your kid's playroom so that they'll have something to draw." Sure, a rabid rottweiler may serve as "something to draw", but there should be safer options that could serve just as well.
Maybe part of the point is that you shouldn't need a general-purpose applet platform just to create a distribution method for DRMed video? Like maybe you could create a more specialized DRM-video-player plugin that didn't have so many problems and security risks?
Why is it lock-in? It's not like going with IPv6 makes it impossible to go back and connect to a network using IPv4. From a user perspective, it should be a relatively transparent change. What am I missing?
If, however, you give appropriate credit through adequate citation, it is not plagiarism. If my big brother's essay was insightful, there is no reason to not use it as a reference point and cite him.
First, I'm talking about copying a whole essay. Second, they didn't cite the big brother's essay. Third, there's a good reason not to cite another high school student's paper in your own paper: it's a crappy authority to be pulling information from. Students aren't allowed to cite the Wikipedia, but you think citing "my friend's big brother" is going to fly?
If me and my friend both have a math problem to solve and my friend is having difficulties with it, how is it a bad thing for me to explain how I did it?
I'm not talking about explaining the problem and teaching each other. I'm talking about swapping papers, copying what the other student wrote, and the whole thing ends there.
If you let your friend copy your big brother's essay from 3 years ago, that's plagiarism. If you do the math homework and your friend does the history homework, and then you trade and copy each others' work, that's not really "collaboration" so much as "cheating".
Well part of the thing that may be misleading about my post: the "smart kids" who cheated generally didn't see what they were doing as "cheating". They were in denial or they'd rationalized it somehow. It was generally much more about copying each others' work, looking at it as "sharing". Actually smuggling answers into tests was less common, and then it was seen more as a game or a challenge. We'd do things like program our graphing calculators to store the equations we were supposed to have memorized, and there was almost a view that "If I'm smart enough to do this, then it's not really cheating because I deserve to do well on this test."
It wasn't even that secretive. They would sit around the lunch table and openly trade homework and copy. For all I know, some of the teachers knew it was happening and didn't care because it was the "good kids" doing it. It was viewed by the kids as "how you play the game".
Actually I was one of the smart kids. I didn't cheat, but the reason why I know that cheating was so rampant was because I was friends with all of those kids and I was in their classes. I didn't do as well as they did in class, i.e. I wasn't the valedictorian or anything, and the valedictorian was a little smarter than me outright, but I got through with a respectable GPA without participating in the cheating (at least not much) and got into every college I applied to.
So... yeah, there's that. Also, I wasn't making generalizations. I was talking about my actual recollections of being in school.
Memories can be tricky, but my recollection of high school was that the "smart kids" who got good grades were generally the most rampant cheaters. These were the kids who were in the honors society and went to ivy league schools, and they cheated every damned day so I wouldn't expect that the behavior changed when they went to college. It was almost an institution: They would copy each other's homework at lunch. They would help each other plagiarize the papers they wrote. They would get together and devise ways to sneak answers into tests. It was cooperative and competitive cheating, as much a part of the process as studying.
If you asked them about it, they'd tell you that it was because they were taking tons of AP courses, and they didn't have time to do it all. Of course, part of the problem was the school's approach to honors/AP coursework: it wasn't necessarily more advanced, it was often enough just *more*. More memorizing, more busywork, and more time consuming. There were kids going home with 10 hours of homework for the night, and so they'd cope by splitting up the work and copying each others' answers.
And I'll repeat: these were the "smart kids". They were the "good kids". In a sense, what they were doing *was* smart. They were stuck in a bureaucratic system, and so they gamed the system. They got what they wanted, even if it wasn't "fair".
Unfortunately for Microsoft, all the digital home stuff was way too early, they didn't actually have viable products to back it up at the time, and Nintendo and then Apple stole their thunder with the Wii, and iPhone and the iPad respectively.
I think people underestimate how much the iPod screwed up Microsoft's plans. Microsoft developed media formats (WMA/WMV) and created DRM to go with it. They made deals to use their formats and DRM on online stores. They had the XBox ready to stream that media to your TV, and they had media empires ready to make their formats the default format. This would have given them a lock over the consumption of entertainment products.
But there was one little problem: Apple absolutely refused to support WMA or PlaysForSure on the iPod. The iPod had already established a foothold, and it was *the* MP3 player, but if you bought WMAs, you couldn't play them on your iPod. Through that one little product, Microsoft was boned. They had to drop their play for entertainment dominance and instead support MPEG4 and AAC in their products, because those were the formats people were buying to play on their iPods.
I have always thought that to be primarily the fault of the students.
Honestly, when you're talking about a systemic education system that begins at age 4, I don't think you can ever blame the students for it's problems. You can blame parents, teachers, government officials, or the culture of the society at large, but the one group you can't blame are the students.
Blanket enforcement is far too chilling on free speech and fair use.
No only that, but AFAIK copyright enforcement is optional on the part of the copyright holder. What I mean is, I can copyright a work, and if it gets spread around the Internet for free, I'm fully within my rights to say, "Well I don't really care. I'm fine with people downloading it." I've established my rights to restrict copying/distribution, and technically people are violating my copyright if they make copies without a license, but as the copyright holder, I'm allowed to decide that I don't care and I'm going to permit the violation.
So putting responsibility on service providers is the wrong move. It's almost like having the police go around arresting people for driving cars that they don't own. Maybe they have permission to borrow the car. Maybe my brother borrowed my car without asking, but I don't mind. Let me file a police report that someone stole my car before you go and arrest the person driving it. (Ok, that might not be a perfect analogy, but I'm tired.)
I'm not sure what the whole sneering-at-nerds thing is on Slashdot
More like, "I am one, so I feel that I can point out our failures." Hopefully instead of being taken as a sneering attack from an outsider, people can understand that it's one of their own pointing out something that we tend to overlook.
Anyway, it's not true that nerds/engineers fail to understand.
No, really they do fail to understand. Not all of them, but a really large portion. Of course, one of the things that tends to happen when you don't understand something is that you fail to understand that you don't understand it.
Math/science nerds probably won't quite agree with me on this, but I think at least part of the problem isn't just that high school classes aren't rigorous enough, but that both high school and college classes are really bad at teaching math and science. It's actually similar to the way that we don't know how to teach history-- we teach history as a bunch of names, dates, and locations to be memorized.
Similarly, we teach math and science as a bunch of proofs and equations to be memorized, taking the fascinating subject of "how our world works," and boiling it down into the most boring and incomprehensible form possible. We don't necessarily teach the concepts behind these proofs and equations, or even how these things were discovered and developed. We don't generally teach real-world applications. We don't delve into the stranger or more interesting implications of natural laws, and we don't really teach about ongoing questions and controversies.
Sometimes I think there's a vast conspiracy to make education as inane, boring, and unpleasant as possible. But no wonder people drop math and science subjects in favor of studying literature or something-- at least when you're studying literature, someone will entertain an interesting conversation. Most of the math and science course I've had are set up so that only the semi-autistic could maintain interest.
I don't know why this always gets overlooked in these discussions. It's the elephant in the room that everyone ignores.
Android needs more standardization. A standard UI, a minimum resolution, and a minimum hardware set.
The problem is that you have a bunch of different manufacturers who are all trying to differentiate themselves. Motorola and HTC don't want to have the same interface and hardware as each other, because they're competing with each other and each is looking for an edge. Almost as importantly, each is looking for a way to establish their brand and inspire brand loyalty. Oh, and they also don't really want standardized accessories because they want to force you to re-buy all of your accessories when you buy a new phone.
And the reason they've shipped phones with too little RAM/CPU and poor quality screens is essentially that consumers often demand crap. It's kind of a general problem, not limited to cell phones, that people want stuff but they don't want to pay for quality. That's why we have McDonalds restaurants all over the place and Best Buys filled with eMachines computers.
It's because Android devices are marketed for nerds, by nerds. And nerds don't understand marketing or user experience.
I think the "not understanding user experience" is a big problem in the tech industry, and Apple seems to be the only company paying attention to the user experience. Nerds/engineers simply fail to understand; the whole thing goes over their heads.
I've had lots of conversations with nerds/engineers about this, and when I try to talk about how Apple focuses on "user experience", they insist that Apple just makes "prettier" interfaces. To a lot of the people involved in these things, there's a false dichotomy that research and development is either focused on "useful features" or "useless superficial things, like pretty interfaces". They don't understand that there can be such a thing as "too many features", making the user experience confusing and frustrating. They don't seem to understand that it matters how you organize programs, options, and settings in your UI, that it only matters whether the features are there, and not how you access them.
The reason usability is so important is that "features" are only useful if people can figure out what those features are and how to use them effectively. UI design is important, not just to make things pretty, but to give visual cues about how to use the Interface, and to provide intuitive organization. The fact is, smartphones and computers are about as powerful as they need to be to do the things we want to do, and improving usability is probably the most important challenge right now. That is, making it easier to do the things you want to do, and removing the obstacles that prevent you from being productive.
I'm of the opinion that iCloud may end up being one of the great underestimated advancements in computing of the past couple years-- comprehensive data syncing between an entire ecosystem of Internet-connected devices. However, it requires a sort of vertical integration that only Apple is positioned to achieve. In short, I'm probably going to be stuck being an Apple customer for the foreseeable future because Apple is the only consumer electronics company that hasn't stalled out in terms of developing more usable products.
I doubt that's it. If you think about it, this shouldn't be surprising at all. There are a lot of manufacturers of Android devices, and some of them are straight-up cheap. We're not comparing failure rates between iPhones and nice Android phones, we're comparing iPhones to *all* Android phones. some Android phones may be great, but I'm sure some are garbage.
To put it another way, let's say you compared the failure rate of Apple's computers to any laptop that runs Windows. I bet Apple's hardware failure rate would be much lower. Compare Apple's hardware failure rates to the failure rates of comparably-priced Dell computers, however, and you may see a completely different picture.
Can Siri do this? Is it clever enough to know what you only want to send the part after "tell her" and how does it know which of your contacts is your wife?
For the record, I just tested this and yes, Siri will do this. If you say, "text my wife and tell her I'm running late." Siri will create a text to your wife that says, "I'm running late." If Siri doesn't already know who your wife is, it will ask, and then it will remember from then on.
There has been controversy over the meaning of the name itself. In early versions of the UNIX Implementation Document from Bell labs,/etc is referred to as the etcetera directory,[24] as this directory historically held everything that did not belong elsewhere (however, the FHS restricts/etc to static configuration files and may not contain binaries).[25] Since the publication of early documentation, the directory name has been re-designated in various ways. Recent interpretations include Backronyms such as "Editable Text Configuration" or "Extended Tool Chest".
It's called "etc" for etcetera because it had random crap in it. Not only is that arguably a sloppy approach to begin with, but that's not really what it's used for anymore.
Yeah, as much as anything, the question is "What was HP's board thinking?" Why did they hire Whitman in the first place? I haven't heard anything to indicate that she's qualified.
I don't object to the idea that HP should get into tablets per se, but that doesn't mean that they should put out a tablet just for the sake of putting out a tablet. It's as though they've learned nothing from the past several years.
Well my point wasn't so general as "I want to buy an Adobe application in the App Store!" as though I don't care which application. My implied point (and I would expect some people got it) was that Adobe CS and Microsoft Office are not available in the App Store. Those are some very common and important applications, and you won't be able to limit "most users" to non-market apps until applications like these are available in the App Store.
And I suspect that the problem is not just Adobe's slow development. These are also expensive applications, which might make the App Store a less appealing market. Both Adobe and Microsoft seem fond of their own DRM schemes, and meanwhile the App Store allows you to install your application multiple systems.
Can Siri do this? Is it clever enough to know what you only want to send the part after "tell her" and how does it know which of your contacts is your wife?
Basically yes. It will learn which one of your contacts is your wife (Siri will ask and remember), and know that when you ask to "text her" it means to text her cell phone number. I haven't tried to put "Text [whoever] and tell him [whatever]." before-- not in that format. I can't test at the moment. However, I know you can do "Text my wife" and Siri will ask, "What do you want to say to your wife?" and then you can dictate your text message. It works well.
And though I haven't tested it, I wouldn't be surprised if it was smart enough to know that you only wanted to send the part after "tell her". That's the sort of interpretation that the system seems to do well. The problem with it is more that, for a lot of things you ask it, it will tell you it doesn't know and instead Siri will ask if you want to do a web search on the subject. I assume those things can be improved over time.
If the phone interprets what you have said slightly differently from the way you intended it then becomes a much bigger hassle than doing the task manually in the first place. Especially in a situation like using it while driving. Trying to frantically cancel a phone call to the wrong person, or respond to a confused text is not going to be very easy when driving.
It's handled pretty well in this case. If you ask Siri to place a call, text, or email for you, she'll confirm that she has the right person before executing the action. She'll confirm the text of the text message or email before sending. Ultimately, if I drove, I'd rather use Siri to send a text than try to type the message in while driving.
Can you configure it in any way to tell it how you want it to respond to certain commands?
There's almost zero configuration options. Either something works or it doesn't.
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I think part of the problem is Flash Video needed Flash.
This is vague, and I suspect it misses the point. "Flash Video" is some fairly standard codecs (h263, h264, On2's vp6) being streamed through some streaming protocols (RTMP), played on a player that has been developed in Flash. The player could theoretically be developed in some development environment other than Flash, and as long as it supports the right codecs and protocols and DRM, it would still work. Adobe could make a browser plugin that is a pared down version of Flash, just enough to play those movies. The whole thing could probably be simplified even further, given that most video now is being distributed in h264, which OSX and Windows support with built-in codecs.
Meanwhile Adobe has been pushing Flash to be an entire application framework. When you have all the capabilities of a full application framework, including possible access to user files and hardware, you're necessarily opening some security holes, even if they're exploiting social engineering.
So Hortensia Patel's point, as far as I could tell, was that if we're really just keeping Flash around for DRMed video playback, then there should be an easier/safer way to achieve that. The metaphor was "It's like keeping a rabid rottweiler in your kid's playroom so that they'll have something to draw." Sure, a rabid rottweiler may serve as "something to draw", but there should be safer options that could serve just as well.
Maybe part of the point is that you shouldn't need a general-purpose applet platform just to create a distribution method for DRMed video? Like maybe you could create a more specialized DRM-video-player plugin that didn't have so many problems and security risks?
Why is it lock-in? It's not like going with IPv6 makes it impossible to go back and connect to a network using IPv4. From a user perspective, it should be a relatively transparent change. What am I missing?
If, however, you give appropriate credit through adequate citation, it is not plagiarism. If my big brother's essay was insightful, there is no reason to not use it as a reference point and cite him.
First, I'm talking about copying a whole essay. Second, they didn't cite the big brother's essay. Third, there's a good reason not to cite another high school student's paper in your own paper: it's a crappy authority to be pulling information from. Students aren't allowed to cite the Wikipedia, but you think citing "my friend's big brother" is going to fly?
If me and my friend both have a math problem to solve and my friend is having difficulties with it, how is it a bad thing for me to explain how I did it?
I'm not talking about explaining the problem and teaching each other. I'm talking about swapping papers, copying what the other student wrote, and the whole thing ends there.
If you let your friend copy your big brother's essay from 3 years ago, that's plagiarism. If you do the math homework and your friend does the history homework, and then you trade and copy each others' work, that's not really "collaboration" so much as "cheating".
Well part of the thing that may be misleading about my post: the "smart kids" who cheated generally didn't see what they were doing as "cheating". They were in denial or they'd rationalized it somehow. It was generally much more about copying each others' work, looking at it as "sharing". Actually smuggling answers into tests was less common, and then it was seen more as a game or a challenge. We'd do things like program our graphing calculators to store the equations we were supposed to have memorized, and there was almost a view that "If I'm smart enough to do this, then it's not really cheating because I deserve to do well on this test."
It wasn't even that secretive. They would sit around the lunch table and openly trade homework and copy. For all I know, some of the teachers knew it was happening and didn't care because it was the "good kids" doing it. It was viewed by the kids as "how you play the game".
Actually I was one of the smart kids. I didn't cheat, but the reason why I know that cheating was so rampant was because I was friends with all of those kids and I was in their classes. I didn't do as well as they did in class, i.e. I wasn't the valedictorian or anything, and the valedictorian was a little smarter than me outright, but I got through with a respectable GPA without participating in the cheating (at least not much) and got into every college I applied to.
So... yeah, there's that. Also, I wasn't making generalizations. I was talking about my actual recollections of being in school.
Memories can be tricky, but my recollection of high school was that the "smart kids" who got good grades were generally the most rampant cheaters. These were the kids who were in the honors society and went to ivy league schools, and they cheated every damned day so I wouldn't expect that the behavior changed when they went to college. It was almost an institution: They would copy each other's homework at lunch. They would help each other plagiarize the papers they wrote. They would get together and devise ways to sneak answers into tests. It was cooperative and competitive cheating, as much a part of the process as studying.
If you asked them about it, they'd tell you that it was because they were taking tons of AP courses, and they didn't have time to do it all. Of course, part of the problem was the school's approach to honors/AP coursework: it wasn't necessarily more advanced, it was often enough just *more*. More memorizing, more busywork, and more time consuming. There were kids going home with 10 hours of homework for the night, and so they'd cope by splitting up the work and copying each others' answers.
And I'll repeat: these were the "smart kids". They were the "good kids". In a sense, what they were doing *was* smart. They were stuck in a bureaucratic system, and so they gamed the system. They got what they wanted, even if it wasn't "fair".
Unfortunately for Microsoft, all the digital home stuff was way too early, they didn't actually have viable products to back it up at the time, and Nintendo and then Apple stole their thunder with the Wii, and iPhone and the iPad respectively.
I think people underestimate how much the iPod screwed up Microsoft's plans. Microsoft developed media formats (WMA/WMV) and created DRM to go with it. They made deals to use their formats and DRM on online stores. They had the XBox ready to stream that media to your TV, and they had media empires ready to make their formats the default format. This would have given them a lock over the consumption of entertainment products.
But there was one little problem: Apple absolutely refused to support WMA or PlaysForSure on the iPod. The iPod had already established a foothold, and it was *the* MP3 player, but if you bought WMAs, you couldn't play them on your iPod. Through that one little product, Microsoft was boned. They had to drop their play for entertainment dominance and instead support MPEG4 and AAC in their products, because those were the formats people were buying to play on their iPods.
I have always thought that to be primarily the fault of the students.
Honestly, when you're talking about a systemic education system that begins at age 4, I don't think you can ever blame the students for it's problems. You can blame parents, teachers, government officials, or the culture of the society at large, but the one group you can't blame are the students.
Blanket enforcement is far too chilling on free speech and fair use.
No only that, but AFAIK copyright enforcement is optional on the part of the copyright holder. What I mean is, I can copyright a work, and if it gets spread around the Internet for free, I'm fully within my rights to say, "Well I don't really care. I'm fine with people downloading it." I've established my rights to restrict copying/distribution, and technically people are violating my copyright if they make copies without a license, but as the copyright holder, I'm allowed to decide that I don't care and I'm going to permit the violation.
So putting responsibility on service providers is the wrong move. It's almost like having the police go around arresting people for driving cars that they don't own. Maybe they have permission to borrow the car. Maybe my brother borrowed my car without asking, but I don't mind. Let me file a police report that someone stole my car before you go and arrest the person driving it. (Ok, that might not be a perfect analogy, but I'm tired.)
I'm not sure what the whole sneering-at-nerds thing is on Slashdot
More like, "I am one, so I feel that I can point out our failures." Hopefully instead of being taken as a sneering attack from an outsider, people can understand that it's one of their own pointing out something that we tend to overlook.
Anyway, it's not true that nerds/engineers fail to understand.
No, really they do fail to understand. Not all of them, but a really large portion. Of course, one of the things that tends to happen when you don't understand something is that you fail to understand that you don't understand it.
Math/science nerds probably won't quite agree with me on this, but I think at least part of the problem isn't just that high school classes aren't rigorous enough, but that both high school and college classes are really bad at teaching math and science. It's actually similar to the way that we don't know how to teach history-- we teach history as a bunch of names, dates, and locations to be memorized.
Similarly, we teach math and science as a bunch of proofs and equations to be memorized, taking the fascinating subject of "how our world works," and boiling it down into the most boring and incomprehensible form possible. We don't necessarily teach the concepts behind these proofs and equations, or even how these things were discovered and developed. We don't generally teach real-world applications. We don't delve into the stranger or more interesting implications of natural laws, and we don't really teach about ongoing questions and controversies.
Sometimes I think there's a vast conspiracy to make education as inane, boring, and unpleasant as possible. But no wonder people drop math and science subjects in favor of studying literature or something-- at least when you're studying literature, someone will entertain an interesting conversation. Most of the math and science course I've had are set up so that only the semi-autistic could maintain interest.
I don't know why this always gets overlooked in these discussions. It's the elephant in the room that everyone ignores.
Android needs more standardization. A standard UI, a minimum resolution, and a minimum hardware set.
The problem is that you have a bunch of different manufacturers who are all trying to differentiate themselves. Motorola and HTC don't want to have the same interface and hardware as each other, because they're competing with each other and each is looking for an edge. Almost as importantly, each is looking for a way to establish their brand and inspire brand loyalty. Oh, and they also don't really want standardized accessories because they want to force you to re-buy all of your accessories when you buy a new phone.
And the reason they've shipped phones with too little RAM/CPU and poor quality screens is essentially that consumers often demand crap. It's kind of a general problem, not limited to cell phones, that people want stuff but they don't want to pay for quality. That's why we have McDonalds restaurants all over the place and Best Buys filled with eMachines computers.
It's because Android devices are marketed for nerds, by nerds. And nerds don't understand marketing or user experience.
I think the "not understanding user experience" is a big problem in the tech industry, and Apple seems to be the only company paying attention to the user experience. Nerds/engineers simply fail to understand; the whole thing goes over their heads.
I've had lots of conversations with nerds/engineers about this, and when I try to talk about how Apple focuses on "user experience", they insist that Apple just makes "prettier" interfaces. To a lot of the people involved in these things, there's a false dichotomy that research and development is either focused on "useful features" or "useless superficial things, like pretty interfaces". They don't understand that there can be such a thing as "too many features", making the user experience confusing and frustrating. They don't seem to understand that it matters how you organize programs, options, and settings in your UI, that it only matters whether the features are there, and not how you access them.
The reason usability is so important is that "features" are only useful if people can figure out what those features are and how to use them effectively. UI design is important, not just to make things pretty, but to give visual cues about how to use the Interface, and to provide intuitive organization. The fact is, smartphones and computers are about as powerful as they need to be to do the things we want to do, and improving usability is probably the most important challenge right now. That is, making it easier to do the things you want to do, and removing the obstacles that prevent you from being productive.
I'm of the opinion that iCloud may end up being one of the great underestimated advancements in computing of the past couple years-- comprehensive data syncing between an entire ecosystem of Internet-connected devices. However, it requires a sort of vertical integration that only Apple is positioned to achieve. In short, I'm probably going to be stuck being an Apple customer for the foreseeable future because Apple is the only consumer electronics company that hasn't stalled out in terms of developing more usable products.
I doubt that's it. If you think about it, this shouldn't be surprising at all. There are a lot of manufacturers of Android devices, and some of them are straight-up cheap. We're not comparing failure rates between iPhones and nice Android phones, we're comparing iPhones to *all* Android phones. some Android phones may be great, but I'm sure some are garbage.
To put it another way, let's say you compared the failure rate of Apple's computers to any laptop that runs Windows. I bet Apple's hardware failure rate would be much lower. Compare Apple's hardware failure rates to the failure rates of comparably-priced Dell computers, however, and you may see a completely different picture.
You know, I'm never really in the situation of having a cell connection but not having 3G, so I can't comment on performance over GPRS/EDGE. Here's some information on Siri data usage, though: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars
Can Siri do this? Is it clever enough to know what you only want to send the part after "tell her" and how does it know which of your contacts is your wife?
For the record, I just tested this and yes, Siri will do this. If you say, "text my wife and tell her I'm running late." Siri will create a text to your wife that says, "I'm running late." If Siri doesn't already know who your wife is, it will ask, and then it will remember from then on.
None the less, Adobe CS and Microsoft Office are popular applications and vital to the success of OSX as a platform.
There has been controversy over the meaning of the name itself. In early versions of the UNIX Implementation Document from Bell labs, /etc is referred to as the etcetera directory,[24] as this directory historically held everything that did not belong elsewhere (however, the FHS restricts /etc to static configuration files and may not contain binaries).[25] Since the publication of early documentation, the directory name has been re-designated in various ways. Recent interpretations include Backronyms such as "Editable Text Configuration" or "Extended Tool Chest".
It's called "etc" for etcetera because it had random crap in it. Not only is that arguably a sloppy approach to begin with, but that's not really what it's used for anymore.
I'm reading more about it, and it looks like their Slate 1 is doing ok in business markets-- so maybe it's not a completely stupid move.
Yeah, as much as anything, the question is "What was HP's board thinking?" Why did they hire Whitman in the first place? I haven't heard anything to indicate that she's qualified.
I don't object to the idea that HP should get into tablets per se, but that doesn't mean that they should put out a tablet just for the sake of putting out a tablet. It's as though they've learned nothing from the past several years.
I think I'm giving up on HP altogether.
Well my point wasn't so general as "I want to buy an Adobe application in the App Store!" as though I don't care which application. My implied point (and I would expect some people got it) was that Adobe CS and Microsoft Office are not available in the App Store. Those are some very common and important applications, and you won't be able to limit "most users" to non-market apps until applications like these are available in the App Store.
And I suspect that the problem is not just Adobe's slow development. These are also expensive applications, which might make the App Store a less appealing market. Both Adobe and Microsoft seem fond of their own DRM schemes, and meanwhile the App Store allows you to install your application multiple systems.
Can Siri do this? Is it clever enough to know what you only want to send the part after "tell her" and how does it know which of your contacts is your wife?
Basically yes. It will learn which one of your contacts is your wife (Siri will ask and remember), and know that when you ask to "text her" it means to text her cell phone number. I haven't tried to put "Text [whoever] and tell him [whatever]." before-- not in that format. I can't test at the moment. However, I know you can do "Text my wife" and Siri will ask, "What do you want to say to your wife?" and then you can dictate your text message. It works well.
And though I haven't tested it, I wouldn't be surprised if it was smart enough to know that you only wanted to send the part after "tell her". That's the sort of interpretation that the system seems to do well. The problem with it is more that, for a lot of things you ask it, it will tell you it doesn't know and instead Siri will ask if you want to do a web search on the subject. I assume those things can be improved over time.
If the phone interprets what you have said slightly differently from the way you intended it then becomes a much bigger hassle than doing the task manually in the first place. Especially in a situation like using it while driving. Trying to frantically cancel a phone call to the wrong person, or respond to a confused text is not going to be very easy when driving.
It's handled pretty well in this case. If you ask Siri to place a call, text, or email for you, she'll confirm that she has the right person before executing the action. She'll confirm the text of the text message or email before sending. Ultimately, if I drove, I'd rather use Siri to send a text than try to type the message in while driving.
Can you configure it in any way to tell it how you want it to respond to certain commands?
There's almost zero configuration options. Either something works or it doesn't.
Does it work at all with non first party apps?
No, at least not yet.
Can I buy Photoshop?