fuzzix

"I'd be very concerned if the US army decided to use Siri to control its nuclear missiles. Less so if someone uses Siri to change their thermostat or query their fridge contents"

Indeed... A command line for non-critical parts of the world.

For launching missiles? Nothing less than a bash script! ;)

"In terms of the voice recognition, that has been progressing steadily for 30 years too, and I imagine Siri will benefit from improvements to the technology base, as others will"

Will it progress to a point where ambiguity is reduced to nil? The strength of the command line abstraction is its completely unambiguous interface - do what I say.

The do what I mean interface of Siri could be limited to actions with insignificant consequences - the human brain incorporates the best speech recognition available and still makes mistakes. Any speech AI performing significant actions would need to outperform the brain.

edit: That is not to suggest AI speech recognition outperforming the brain is not possible. There are probably metrics and methods for disambiguating common sources of confusion which could be performed in the blink of an eye rather than the minutes, hours or weeks later you find yourself thinking "Oh, THAT'S what he said!"

I like the fact that the visual and musical aesthetic forced on early game designers by hardware limitations is now a desirable attribute in a new game. From the video the game looks and sounds great... In fact, I just bought it! Will report on my experience with the Linux version.

I don't know anyone under that age of 30, do the kids like the "8-bit" thing as well? :)

edit The Linux version is an Adobe Air package. Will try it out later.

Interesting that it still ship/s|ped/.

I am wondering why drive letters still exist. Was there a need for continuity across Windows platforms with different bases (3.1/NT/9x) or was the mania for backwards compatibility such that the model needed carrying forever?

Surely it is trivial enough to abstract \hd0 as C: for legacy applications.

This comes to mind because of the irritation of assigning a drive letter to a SMB map only to have it usurped by some multi-card reader USB thing which nabs drive letters up to H:

Surely a case for a class-based VFS - \hd, \usb, \opt(ical) ;)

edit I had momentarily forgotten about the 8.3 PROGRA~1/ mess. Please disregard any misguided attempt at an elegant "out" ;)

Indeed. I first encountered DOS in the 3.2-ish days. I'm pretty sure the manual did not include 'net' or 'ipconfig'...

But the current Windows command line that has taken on the guise of DOS is useful to me.

I could be pithy and answer "No", but in my maintenance of Windows in various contexts I rely on that shim of DOS emulation, Start -> Run -> cmd.

I feel like I get much of the quick info (e.g. ipconfig, net) I need here faster than I would get it from Control Panel -> Network (something) -> (forget the next bit).

Does Windows still rely on DOS? No. Do I? Sure.

They appear to have nothing on me... Only feature on the page is the Opt Out button. Have I missed something?

No idea why they'd have nothing, I am signed in on Google services all the time.

Operations to return string length or return characters from the end of the string become far less expensive.

You also have a fair idea of a reasonable sized buffer to move in duplication operations, avoiding single character move loops.

The magic character is in a known location, there's no need to iteratively scan for it.

The use of "magic" characters is not the problem, as I see it.

Also, how does a watermark act in a PDF?

Is it like those cases where documents requested under FOIA had black bars hiding sensitive text which could simply be moved/removed with the right tool set?

This website has been knocking around for some time (my human memory tells me at least a year) but I do not believe whoever owns the Commodore brand now has actually shipped any of these products.

http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_C64.aspx - the rendered images look like a machine significantly larger than the original C64.