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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

Holy shit, we live in the future!

I was at work today and decided to buy the new Halo game that comes out in three weeks. Paid in two taps, and was notified that my Xbox at home would be turned on immediately and the game would begin to download. Sure enough I got home and all 65GB had been downloaded.

I paid for a game that will be released in the future and it got to my house before I did. What?

It amazes me that the new Halo game is 65 GB.

As with most applications, it could be a lot smaller. But storage is so cheap and abundant that size is no longer really a constraint. Consequently, engineering for size is no longer a priority.

4 games would use up the "fair" and "more than enough" bandwidth cap my ISP set :-/

It's either OK internet with caps or vDSL that doesn't really work

Depends where you live.

I'm in the UK I pay for 100/10 I get 200/20 and I have zero bandwidth caps.

Is bandwidth not a concern? 65 GB could take weeks to download.

It could. But then where do you set the limit? At my parents house downloading 5GB of data would take a week. So what is the "reasonable" size? 1GB? 10GB? 50GB? Or maybe we can assume that only people with good enough bandwidth will buy a 65GB game online,and the rest will buy the disc?

> 65 GB could take weeks to download.

If someone lives behind a 1 Mbps home connetion, then yes, about 1 week.

It's possible for it to download compressed data and 323 used uncompressed textures/meshes/sounds/etc.

WOW, me too... I guess it's been a long time since I regularly played games

To be fair, the "new" Halo game is technically the first 4 games all redone for the Xbox One packaged together.

Texture mapping has come a long, long way. It's a shame AAA game mechanics haven't kept up, but, hey, that's a hard problem.

(I just bought Alien: Isolation the other day, and found it disappointing -- silly me, thinking I'd bought a game I could play as I pleased, rather than a movie which would punish me for trying to step outside the predefined narrative it wanted to relate.)

Play Thief Gold or Deus Ex, if you want that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZtBCpo0eU Obligatory.

We're definitely getting close. I wish Apple would take Siri to the next level. It should be easier to make corrections, for example.

I bought Dragon Dictate for my Mac a couple days ago just so I could try to do a little more with voice recognition. It'll be great to be able to program mainly with voice like in this video: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html

At the moment, I can simply say "open terminal, begin, rebuild, restart, push, pull, boom (combines pull, rebuild, restart). I'm just using simple shell aliases but I'll probably add shell functions.

How do you like it? I've been very interested (dictation in Mavericks leaves a lot to be desired) but the reviews on Amazon seem to savage it pretty good as buggy and not up to the standards of the Windows version.

I believe the Windows version is better. Integrates with Python so it's easier to customize, and I think it's easier to define your own "words". e.g. "Slap" could mean "new line". I got it on sale for $99. Now I've gotta get a good microphone.

David Pogue's review: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/hello-computer-speak-your-text-wi...

And the fact that John Siracusa writes articles like these with it, convinced me that I could make it useful with a little effort.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/23/

Thanks. I'm glad to see the David Pogue review, but it looks like it's not considered compatible with Yosemite and crashes for a lot of people. I guess I'll wait to see if they release an update later this fall.

I gather Yosemite brings Siri to OS X, which I expect will be an interesting evolution, especially once people start figuring out how to add new capabilities and integrations.

I saw Rudd's demo and have been tantalized by its possibilities ever since. More than the specific technologies in use, what really fascinated me was the way he invented what could almost be described as a shorthand language optimized for efficiently driving the editor via voice, with various unique (and otherwise meaningless) phoneme combinations to represent things not easily expressed in ordinary English -- for example, "lep" instead of "left parenthesis", one syllable in place of five. That's the real win, I think; the specific dictation pipeline in use hardly matters, so long as it supports the necessary interfaces and customization capabilities.

Some day I mean to find the time for a really deep dive into the subject, ideally one from which I'll surface with something I can distribute to others wishing to drive their editors the same way.

>I gather Yosemite brings Siri to OS X,

It's been around for a few versions.

Uh, what? Siri is not available on OS X at all.

Sorry, I was thinking of Siri's voice-to-text dictation. That's 99% of what I use Siri for. But yeah, you can't get the other stuff on mac yet.

> I gather Yosemite brings Siri to OS X

No. OS X has had voice-to-text for a while, actually, but that's all it is.

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