LEHSYS

Google is really working the candle at both ends with trying to build a better mouse trap [per se] to compete with Apple‘s Siri. Google knows that it can’t do the things Siri does with out giving relevant answers to the questions at hand… or presented. Google’s voice recognition has made some vast improvements in the last 2 years. They improved the voice recognition of the service, and then added personalized voice recognition, sync’d with the persons Gmail/Google account. The personalization starts keeping track of what you say, how you say it and to make your device more accurate to you; building a database of your speech patterns. But with Siri, she answers your questions… You’re able to ask it questions in normal speech and she just does it. But Google is really playing catch up; now they need a brain for Majel [Google Assistant]. Majel is supposed to be the ‘answer’ to Siri…

If you’ve been around long enough to remember Apple vs. IBM. Or when Commodore C64‘s were better than TSR-80 [coco's]; from there, you can reference everything I’m going to say here. I’d presume this comes around with being in tech long enough to see it circle back around and repeat itself. It started with the PC’s. There was a whole work up on operating system’s, hardware specifications and then how small can you make them, and then how cheap can you make them… Having to watch the history of tech just wrap around again is kind of boring… The only difference is this time, it has to do with small portable devices. Small devices, running small operating system’s; operating system’s that can do just about everything.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in the process of scanning a bunch of documents and I realized how much work I was doing in scanning in lots and lots of documents. Doc imaging needs to be easier. In another post I talked about scanning documents in to the system; the importing of these documents has to have a good process and it has to be intuitive and easy for the users to do… The harder you make this process the less the users will want to use it. With the release of v14 for PaperPort it seems clear to me that PaperPort is just focused on the business users because no options offered at all for social sharing. PaperPort does have the ‘cloud’, but I’m not counting that; I’m referring to services like Twitter and Facebook. Anyway, so, I found this issue with PaperPort and I reported it to Nuance and I hope they do something with it…

So one of the interesting things about the pending release of the Windows 8 tablets; Microsoft has decided to not allow other browsers the same luxury as theirs. And a bigger question is, does Microsoft think that their release of a tablet [PC] with Windows 8 is going to be enough to sway people to not care? Talk about a white knight’s, with a sling shot, chances in Hell… this is going to be good. Microsoft has been desperately pushing Internet Explorer 9 as a stable and reputable web browser, but the fact is, it’s still a marsh pit of security loop holes and threats; one of the worst web browsers, if not the worst, out on the web. I say this because it bares repeating… Windows 7 is one of Microsoft‘s better releases of an operating system; everyone seems to love it— it’s being received like the XP of olden days. But also noting that as more companies adopt Windows 7, they are also adopting Internet Explorer 9 as the base browser… Is this really so hard to understand? The fact is that a lot of companies are locked in to Microsoft products and IT shops have to use…

This is a little bit of a rant, BUT… I believe everyone is aware that copying a DVD or a Blu-Ray disc is incorrect; it’s against the law… I rented me a DVD the other night, Underworld – Awakening, and I noticed that it had this new warning on it. Thank goodness for the Internet so that you can go online and research this new ‘information’. It’s almost to the point I really miss the days of VHS; at least with VHS you could fast-forward tape, jump past the crap and watch the movie that you paid for, but with DVDs and Blu-ray it’s a little harder… Over the years, the movie companies have been taking away people’s DVD players abilities to skip past the movie trailers, special notices and various other things.  From the earliest VHS movie, I can recall seeing the legal warnings about copying the movie— I think everyone has, but now the US government has added another set of notices that can be skipped over; each one being 10 seconds.