Posts by David Hood
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On Science and Technology and Communication, I thought I would pass on the link to my 12 year old daughter's Science Fair project, which has won "Best in Show" in the Otago contest.
website area
with the sheets that made up the project in meran_science_2010_complete.pdf -
My personal headline for this is:
Climate Sceptics Sue to Ignore Weather. -
In upcoming events, the main one our family has marked down is the Otago School's Science Fair (or, officially, the Aurora Otago Science & Technology Fair)
Otago Museum 16th to the 22nd August. -
My understanding is that the Washington Post story was an opinion piece from a man who was President Bush's chief speechwriter, so shouldn't necessarily be seen as the paper's stance on the matter.
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has the die been cast for applications to be in the single digit pricerange?
I think the peer pressure ceiling for stand alone apps is low tens of dollars, on the other hand if you can make the app a gateway to subscription or downloadable content, the sky seems to be the limit.
Rendering music takes a lot of effort, but what you can program relatively easily is things like multitracking, loop, and adjusting volumes using well documented libraries. Then you get harder, but possible, things like adjusting playback speed and pitch of the channels using poorly documented libraries. After that comes the 'too much effort' things of actually modifying the sound waves themselves.
So it depends on how much you'd want a DJing app to acheive.
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God, that sounds like an absolute nightmare. And all of my posts on PAS would start with "I'm originally from Italy, and..."
But if you'd typed "I'm or" and it figured 'You've started a sentence with I'm, this is the second word and starts with or, so based on your previous writing, I'll suggest originally as the word you would like me to autocomplete by pressing tab. And if the sentence starts with "I'm originally" there are only a few words you have ever used, and from is the most likely, so I'll over that as the next completion. And once we have "I'm originally from " there is only one word you have ever used next, so I'll offer that. All of which gets overridden if you actually keep typing.
Most contemporary spell-checkers are context sensitive- weighting results based on the grammar of the sentence and the point you are at in it. The next logical step is weighting by prior use. It's a bit like the assisted aim that console games get (compared to P.C. versions). -
I am not expecting anything much changing about input technology in the next while. What I do expect is machines to get a lot smarter about assisting us to our end point- we are only seeing the beginning of this with location based services.
Human beings are actually creatures of habit, so look out for the operating systems to do a lot more logging of our habits so that it can shortcut actions for us. Things like most people only use a very small subset of the total English language, and have a distinctive grammar and phrasing style. So a device can learn it's owner's writing patterns to make autocompletion a far more powerful tool (multiple words, favouring you personal lexicon). I note that to be accepted, OS companies would need to resist the temptation to obtain, and sell, the user profiles. I would also add, for future prior art patent cases, that I suggested this 4:14pm 26 July 2010 (New Zealand time). -
From the computers perspective, Morse code would be best (it's all 1s and 0s). For humans not so much.
As an aside, the visually impaired person I know who bought one rates it better than other smartphones they have owned, using voiceover + touchscreen.
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I can't think of any of the major browers that won't cannibalise the others bookmarks upon installation.
Because our broadband connection has been really flakey at peak times lately, the main thing I've valued in browsers are keyboard shortcuts for killing javascript, images, and styles (which means at bad times the pages will still load). -
I use Opera on the Mac when reading public address on my work machine (and I'll thank Russell not to list the usage stats of that particular combo :) mostly because it keeps my personal stuff separate from my work activities (Safari with occasional dips into Firefox +Web Developer Extension to diagnose site problems or Zotero for research).
As to why people use Safari (which I do at home) Top Sites is gorgeous, intuitive, and with my web history searchable in a similarly pleasant intuitive manner (Top Sites in Safari is also why I do my personal browsing at work on Opera).
At home I will also use Omniweb on occasion, and DevonAgent (which I got as part of a software bundle many years ago) when I need to research a topic area quickly. My daughter, with an old G3 Mac running 10.3, uses Camino as the best browser for her vintage of machine.
Having a PPC macintosh at home, I can't run Chrome, so will use Stainless for the websites that would clog the browser.
Finally, on those rare occasions that I want semitransparent web browser windows so I can see the webpage and something behind the web browser window at the same time, I use Sunrise.
The Macintosh is not exactly short of good web browsers.