Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Voice control

"It could only recognise a couple of other commands beyond 'call' and a name to match against whatever was in the address book "

Yes, my old Nokia could do that. Then again, even further back in time, I built a circuit from a book that was basically a few filters that clipped at 3 or 4 frequencies and output a digital signal to my TRS-80. The software could then store a pattern based on the sound and duration it "heard" and, with fairly limited parameters, recognise "words" and perform actions. One word at a time and you had to pronounce the word pretty close to the trained word to get a match to the stored pattern. It helped to make sure all the trained "action" words were not too closely similar. That was an 8-bit Z80 CPU running at 1MHz and, at the time I only had 16K RAM to work with. What the phone did was harder, because it has to match a spoke name with a string of letters, so it needs some smarts to analyse how that string of letters should sound. With my old Nokia, I had a to pronounce a Welsh colleagues name using the "rules of English" to get it to call him despite his name sounding utterly different to the "English" spelling :-)

Re: The same applies to tv series and games

"Instead, their "dialogue" consists of chapter-long political or military analyses."

Heinlein went through that phase too. Some of his books are little more than a series of short political or social comment essays with some "plot characters" added to make it seem like a novel. :-)

Re: Yeah, smart appliances are DUMB.

In this case, the generic "we" as in society. Some of this tech is becoming impossible to avoid simply by attrition. A device breaks, the only replacements available are "connected" or "smart" and, as documented in some cases, will only work when they are connected to the internet. Plain and simple "dumb" devices are getting harder and harder to find on sale anywhere. Most of us here know how to hold out, repair the older kit, avoid so-called "smart" kit from phoning home etc, but it's becoming a losing battle because the majority either love all this shit or simply don't care. Even on your ranch, there will eventually come a day when the only tractor you can get will be "smart" tractor. Although in that instance, it's probably a lot further away in time than for small electricals. (On the other hand, what if the use of ICE engines is banned in say 30 years time? Could be sooner than you think :-))

Re: Don't know.

"Unused, unloved and a complete waste of money."

Clearly, she doesn't listen to the exhortation of the BBC. They have always done "station idents" telling you the frequency to tune to. It used to be medium and long wave. Then it was medium wave, FM and, for Radio 4, also long wave. Then it was usually only FM and DAB. Nowadays, they ALWAYS start be telling us to "ask your smart speaker to play...", followed by DAB and maybe FM as a sort of afterthought. BBC radio is making an assumption that everyone has a smart speaker and implying "if not, why not?"

Two Four Seven Radiooooo Oneeeeeee! (Just showing my age!)

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

My car and phone does local voice dialling without connecting to anything. The car gets a copy of the phone book and call history. When I press the steering wheel button and say "call $name", the car speaks back to me with "Do you want to call $name?". I say yes, (assuming it got the correct name) and it the car send the Bluetooth commands to dial it for me, no Google or even Samsung speech assistants required . Neither the phone nor the car are high end models. Mid-range at best.

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

That's what Bluetooth is for. I've had a number android phones over the years and a number of different company cars. I've never had an issue with using the steering wheel controls to operate the Bluetooth connected Android phone.

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

"Alexa, add tomatoes to the shopping list" would be useful for me - as long as I could later review and change the list before placing an order.

Even more than a mic switch issue, the above is the defining action of all "assistive" technology. Despite the massive computing power, they NEVER work the way the user wants them to. You ALWAYS have to change what you do to suit "the computer". There are fewer and fewer customisable options from the OS to the programs and apps. Our way or the highway is the mantra from $corp.

Re: Just place a whole lot of them in a circle

As a "remoaner" I found that funny. A shame someone had to click a knee-jerk downvite :-)

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

Same applies to local councils. They are their own insurers in most cases for most things. They might have employee and public liability cover and maybe some other special or edge cases, but on the whole, it's cheaper to do it themselves than to pay exorbitant policy prices.

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

"Done. An hour or two DIY plus £15 for the switch, tops."

While I mainly agree with you, the OP did point out he was not especially "handy" at things like this. I know many people like that.

Re: Renovations

Topically, each layer add more insulation to the building :-)

"And all on autopilot, touchdown within 5 miles of the target!"

All things considered, ie speed, parachutes, weather etc, it's pretty amazing. On the other hand, we are getting accustomed to SpaceX coming down within 5" of their target spot :-)

Re: re: move to the Back Page

I just googled her. She's 64 now :-)

Either she looks good for her age or, being an actress, her PR people don't have recent pics of her to publish :-)

Re: JFC! do they actually test anything these days

Clearly they didn't even test it on their "latest and greats" Windows 10/11, which should be the absolute bare minimum of testing considering the size of the userbase.

Re: My eyes have been

IIRC, our employment contracts forbid discussing salaries. Of course, no one ever reads their entire contract/Ts&Cs and either don't know about that or don't care :-)

Re: Office

"And remember shared desk-phones? I'll stop, now – writing this post is re-traumatising me."

Maybe all those redundant telephone sanitisers could be retrained as mouse/keyboard sanitisers?

Re: NASA coverage is a joke

The Weekend? Is that important? Didn't James Webb Space telescope launch on Christmas day?

On a similar note, think about how useful building code inspectors and admin staff would be at halting the "child fentanyl" problem.

Re: Appeals

The appeals process is how justice is supposed to work. Changing that system would most likely adversly affect us, "the little people" who can't afford large teams of expensive lawyers.

"and don't change anything until we've exhausted that route"

Now that I can get behind. An appeal is against the decision of a court. That lower court has judged you guilty and convicted you. What you did IS illegal and must stop IMMEDIATLY. If you choose to appeal, that's fine, but you you are still convicted unless a subsequent appeal succeeds. Carrying on with an illegal practice after being convicted is contempt of court, even if later you do succeed in an appeal.

Re: Middle Passage

Which even China is now beginning to back-track on.

Re: Hang on a minute

I would speculate that it is speculation since there's no way to know if it true or not yet. On the other, it's less likely to be idle speculation since Musk will fire anyone caught being idle :-)

Re: "Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."

Much of what you describe is a parents job, not the educations systems job :-)

Re: "Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."

I once did a survey where, after the fact, we were informed the scale went 1-3, Poor, 4 Average, 5 Excellent. WTF? No distinction between 1-3 and sooo many people scored items as "average", ie 3 in the expected rather than actual scaling.