Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors? Microsoft ‘HoloDesk’ project takes us closer to Star Trek. It’s not nearly as big as the Holodeck, but a Microsoft Research project called “HoloDesk” will look very familiar to Star Trek fans. Except this is a real-life, working prototype that uses a Kinect sensor to let people interact with 3D virtual images as if they were physical objects. The project is out of the Sensors and Devices Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Writing about the project today, Microsoft blogger Steve Clayton points out that it’s not the only experiment in digital 3D interaction, but he notes that the use of beam splitters and a specialized graphics processing systems sets this Microsoft project apart. It’s the latest in a long series of Microsoft Research projects exploring the area of natural and alternative user interfaces.
For more detail on the HoloDesk, here’s the description from Microsoft Research … But it may be a while before you get to try something like this yourself. Kurzweil Responds: Don't Underestimate the Singularity. Although Paul Allen paraphrases my 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, in the title of his essay (cowritten with his colleague Mark Greaves), it appears that he has not actually read the book. His only citation is to an essay I wrote in 2001 (“The Law of Accelerating Returns”) and his article does not acknowledge or respond to arguments I actually make in the book.
When my 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, was published, and augmented a couple of years later by the 2001 essay, it generated several lines of criticism, such as Moore’s law will come to an end, hardware capability may be expanding exponentially but software is stuck in the mud, the brain is too complicated, there are capabilities in the brain that inherently cannot be replicated in software, and several others. I specifically wrote The Singularity Is Near to respond to those critiques.
Allen writes that “the Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR)… is not a physical law.” Dharmendra S. Android Chief Andy Rubin Says Your Phone Should Not Be Your Assistant - Ina Fried - AsiaD. Andy Rubin thinks there is a lot of potential for phones to be more useful companions, but says he is not interested in turning Android devices into personal assistants. “I don’t believe that your phone should be an assistant,” the Android chief said in an interview on Wednesday just after appearing on stage at AsiaD. “Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.”
Of course, several million people have already gone out and bought the iPhone 4S, which has as one of its chief selling points the voice-controlled assistant known as Siri. Rubin said the jury is still out on whether people will take to talking to their phones to control them. “To some degree it is natural for you to talk to your phone,” Rubin said, but historically that has meant talking to another person. “This isn’t a new notion,” he said.
Google+ Guru Bradley Horowitz on Products, Platforms, Pesky Memo - Ina Fried - AsiaD. While Google has struggled mightily in its early efforts to “get the social thing,” it has managed to get more than a few people to try out its latest effort, Google+. But the question of just how compelling the service will be long term remains to be seen. Bradley Horowitz, the project manager for Google+, joins the AsiaD stage to talk about where things are headed. Peter Kafka: So what is Google+? Bradley Horowitz: “It’s more than a product. It’s a project.” That means it will take longer and be bigger than a typical product. Kafka: The view outside of Google is that it’s the company’s response to Facebook. Horowitz: “There are parts of Google+ that will look very familiar” to people who have used social networks. 5:03 pm: Kafka: When will regular people use it?
Horowitz, to Peter: Are you a regular person? Kafka: No. Horowitz: Well, we have 40 million users; we’ve reached beyond the early adopters. It’s open to everyone now, and that’s only been the case for a couple of weeks. Horowitz: “Wow. The coffeeshop fallacy - Blog. Lots of people think they want to start a coffeeshop. They likely don’t. That’s like buying a minimum wage job for two hundred grand. What they want is to be a customer and sit in a cafe, drink coffee, be nice to people, and possibly curate an art gallery. We’re good at recognising when we receive pleasure from consuming a certain good or service.
But then we extrapolate incorrectly to the conclusion that owning said business will deliver even more pleasure. Max Levchin (paypal, slide) said something to the effect of: You you can’t be in love with a particular idea or business. It’s one of those quotes that has haunted me, in no small part because Max has been so successful in such a wide range of pursuits and because I both understand his reasoning and [somewhat] disagree with his conclusion. Here’s a working definition of the coffeeshop fallacy: The coffeeshop fallacy is a mismatch between the work one imagines to be involved in a pursuit and the actual day-to-day labour. Twitter Founder: Can’t Compete in China - Digits. Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps. In the beginning, there was the web and you accessed it though the browser and all was good.
Stuff didn’t download until you clicked on something; you expected cookies to be tracking you and you always knew if HTTPS was being used. In general, the casual observer had a pretty good idea of what was going on between the client and the server. Not so in the mobile app world of today. These days, there’s this great big fat abstraction layer on top of everything that keeps you pretty well disconnected from what’s actually going on.
Let me introduce you to the seedy underbelly of the iPhone, a world where not all is as it seems and certainly not all is as it should be. There’s no such thing as too much information – or is there? Here’s a good place to start: conventional wisdom says that network efficiency is always a good thing. Let me give you an example of where this all starts to go wrong with mobile apps. Why? But there’s also a lot of redundancy. But we’re only just warming up. Why? ‘Steve Jobs Sold Out,’ Says Performer Behind Powerful Drama of Apple’s History | Betabeat — News, gossip and intel from Silicon Alley 2.0. | Page 2. The sufferings of Saint Steve and the shame of FoxConn. By Ben Popper 10/18/11 6:49pm Share this: Mr. Daisey. Betabeat made the mistake of stopping by the Apple Store before work last week, forgetting it was the day the new iPhone 4S went on sale.
The line stretched down 14th Street. A stream of glowing customers were exiting the store, new phones clutched in their hands. As we walked back to the subway, we passed an Apple employee standing by a far door no had yet noticed. No one knows the lure of Apple products better than Mike Daisey. Mr. But over the past 14 months, as he has traveled the country performing his one man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, Mr. The play was a strange mixture. Check out the second installment of Betabeat’s new web: The Pitch. But the humor was a lure, a ruse to get the audience’s defenses down.
The FoxConn workers Mr. After the play, Betabeat stepped out onto the street and turned on our phone, a Droid Bionic from Motorola. By Taboolaby Taboola.