Month / October 2011

by Alex

Advice to Youth, by Mark Twain

I can hardly wait for our upcoming daughter to be old enough to appreciate Mark Twain’s Advice to Youth. It’s some of the best advice I’ve read in ages. (I really do want her to read it, along with everything Oscar Wilde ever wrote, for starters…)

Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any, also to strangers, and sometimes to others. If a person offend you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick. That will be sufficient.

by Alex

Star Trek people talk about Siri

Ars Technica: Siri is iPhone 4S-only today; where will it be tomorrow?

The whole thing’s decent, but for now, skip right down to the bottom of the article and read that section calling out the potential problems:

Michael Okuda also noted that voice input is generally inefficient. “Imagine I’m looking at some photos, and I want to say, ‘Up, up, left, down one, photo number 3362, no, the one on the left.’—that’s much slower than just clicking or tapping,” he said. “Natural language is, I think, going to have some significant limitations.”

We currently interact with our computers and other devices in several different ways: direct and indirect touch, keyboards, mice, styli, voice, and more. I fail to see why people would suddenly interact solely by voice.

So, with Okuda’s photo example in mind, think about editing photos on a tablet, or on a big ol’ touchscreen monitor. You could tap a photo, mess around with it, do the detail work with your nice Wacom tablet, and then say, “Oh, yeah: Siri, enhance the section of this photo with John in it. That’s great. Now, remove Sharon’s redeye, and email it to Bob for review.”

These are Star Trek people, fer cryin’ out loud! Surely Okuda has more imagination than this.