interlagos

Is it that Siri is invaluable, or that basic voice controls are invaluable? I use my Android and its unlauded, no-big-hype voice controls to-

-navigate -map -send messages -set alarms -search

It has a very finite understanding, but it accomplishes literally everything I've ever needed to speak to my device (anything more complex would be inefficient to speak to it).

My original question should be reworded to question whether people are using the specific purported advantages of Siri. Most replies seen in here are bog standard basic voice functionality having nothing to do with the advanced natural language understanding of Siri.

A part of the reason my peers might not use it often is perhaps simply because they don't need to schedule very much. My wife I could imagine enjoying such functionality.

The thing about some of the more complex scenarios, however, is that for me it would have to be 100% reliable and trusthworthy. If it were only 99% reliable and trustworthy, or even 99.5%, the lack of faith and the need to double check would remove its utility.

Seriously question for the iPhone toters among HNers -- do you actually use Siri? Anecdotally I've found that many of my 4S equipped peers have already abandoned it. After that brief excitement over Easter eggs, it just doesn't excite them.

I use my Android's voice control daily. It follows a different philosophical model (as the Google guy said, it's the Star Trek versus the Star Wars model, which is a comparison that is apt), however the result is a device that does the majority of what I want perfectly. I am never guessing at the limits of its lingo (all current natural language systems have limits, which is why they are so uncommon) because I know the specific commands that do the things I want.

The real competition to Siri is that people don't want to treat their phone as a human. That the slow imprecision of spoken language is only a worst-case substitute for alternative options.

No. Google Navigation works perfectly in Canada, as do countless other voice-controlled navigation products.

It means that people pushing advice usually do so primarily for their own good. This is a universal truth that applies to many situations.

"So many times"...

Can you point at such a review? Because I don't think such a pre-ICS review exists, whether Gruber wrongly claims so or not.

Every prior Android review has been full of asterisks and disclaimers. Most tended to be negative. Sure, they talked about the positives (and there always have been positives), and they talked about the benefits over its Android predecessors, but I've never seen one that openly held it as the leader. Until now.

I think it's going to take a while for some people to realize where Android has come from and where we are today. The game has completely changed, and the dated narrative is gone.

When I first equipped up with a G1, there were almost no apps, and the few that existed tended to be horrendous. The performance and usability of the device was terrible.

But I knew where it was going.

Then I got a Nexus One and it improved some aspects of the platform, but I was still left out in the cold for a lot of things: No angry birds. A terrible market. No Skype. No Netflix. And on and on. iPhone-only apps appeared for mainstream services and products and organizations.

Today I have a Galaxy S II. It isn't perfect, but the experience with 2.3.4 is pretty damn good. I have Netflix, and Hulu, and endless games and countless top-rated apps (some of which are starting to lead on Android). This is a device I would recommend to a layman.

And all of the above was the foundation on which Android captured 55% of the market.

And ICS only improves that n-degrees more? Incredible. If Android got such acceptance and loyalty before, this is quite incredible really.

A modern website needs to be accessible on PCs, tablets, and smartphones. While there are arguable reasons for segmenting off the last option as an outlier (though some devices offer the resolution and capabilities exceeding some desktops), it is less justifiable making a distinct version for a tablet.

So you end up making a rich "HTML 5" version for tablet and smartphones.

Why, then, would you bother with Flash for the PC? If you have a modern simile for Tablets, Flash is just completely redundant.

Flash is a sign of a derelict site. It would be hard to justify its use for greenfield development.

Is there really any confusion? It has constructed the typical strawmen to make for easy competitors.

Your assumptions are completely wrong. This is nothing to do with whether an access point is public, private, encrypted or not. It is not used to populate a database of public wifi points.

Instead it's used to correlate publicly transmitted SSIDs with longitude and latitude. Such a database allows wifi-capable devices (including your laptop's browser) to somewhat reasonably geolocate without GPS (or, more common, more quickly but less accurately before a GPS fix is available).

Anyone outraged about this needs to extend the same outrage to Apple, Skyhook, among many others doing exactly the same thing. With no mechanism of opting out at all (because, really, opting out is ridiculous anyways).

HN, to some degree, is hijacked (including its own administration that hellbans people who hold contrary opinions). Somehow this useless rant by Siegler -- about a complete non-issue -- sits at #4. Another useless article, quoting Gruber, hit the front-page yesterday.

If I could exclude the votes of anyone who hit up arrow on either of those, HN would be a much more interesting site.

ARM is still a non-issue in the server market. Maybe in a couple of years, but today there are remarkably few applications of it.