Apple's Siri is not necessarily 'State of the Art', but like just about everything Apple does... It just works. Siri is causing a splash because ... unlike Android. It works properly. I don't use voice on my Android because it is worthless to me. I say 'Call my wife' It says. 'Calling Lowes Home Center'. It NEVER EVER gets it right. I have several friends with Androids and only one friend with that perfect voice that can get it to understand him, and even he often has to ask it twice . My wife HATES my Android and never bothered with a Smart phone before because she did not really like them. Too big and bulky. Her phone finally broke and she bought the 4S.

Like everything else Apple does. It just works. She talks to it. It understands every word. I talk to it ... It understands every word. .. and it ALWAYS seems to say something appropriate in response. True that the Android voice can do more than Siri. But I would rather have a voice that can do less properly than one that can do lots of stuff wrong. The only thing I find the Android voice useful for is a good laugh. I fire it up occasionally and ask it something and get a chuckle with just how wrong it gets my request. When she got Siri, we had a house full of people that evening and we passed my Android around playing with the voice. It did not once get anything right anyone said. 7 different voices asking it stuff and not once was it even close. Siri understood everyone perfectly.

So the Android voice is useless. Siri is useful. Therein lies the difference.

As the CTO of a small startup. My first programming mistake would be to hire someone who would build a car with no lock because the original drawing had no dot where the assumed lock would go. My old boss would love you. He thought 'programming' meant writing a thousand page Word document that got debated and revised over several months of meetings and finally coded by a 'clerk typist' with a degree in languages. Our department was disbanded because in a year, we did not manage to produce anything but 5,000 pages of MS Word. I got dinged on my review because the only thing we produced in that time was one program I wrote where the users told me what they wanted and I wrote it in a few days. He thought I was writing Word. When I showed it working... he hit the ceiling. The user's loved it.

Dear developer at Mozilla,

If you guys keep screwing up the interface, it will soon not be for anyone. The world needs to stop dumbing everything down. My father finally figured out how to work the PC, and now it's all broken to him again because his menus go away, and the tabs keep moving around and the look and feel is different between every application. Kids today know how to work PCs and now even old people do. So naturally we all follow Microsoft's and Google's lead and break the user interface. Microsoft has the WORST track record in the industry for UI innovation, and Google is known for taking keep it simple to extremes. Firefox was fine. Stop fixing it. My father is calling me on the phone because he does not understand what happened to 'his pc'.

STOP IT! We don't need a new version every week with the user interface broken in a different way each time.

I have PCs, and Macs, and fix peoples PC problems, and their Routers and Droids and iPhones, and ... You name it, I am the geek with too many 'normal' friends.

All these comments say Motorola is to blame for crappy products, no updates, and crappy support. People this is a PHONE!!! there's no support! Not that there shouldn't be, but it is a fact of life. At least Motorola provided an update to the original droid to 2.2., and they even tested it first! What thanks did they get??? Script kiddies that got upset because it did not come out they day it was released. Even more that got upset because they said the hardware didn't support tethering. Sorry... it really doesn't. Motorola didn't lie. There are apps out that that fake out the Bluetooth to do pseudo tethering, but it's not done right. So Motorola did not back port broken tethering to a device that didn't have the right chip and some third party hacked it into partial submission. Again. Not Motorola's fault.

How many other vendors have provided ANY updates? very few. gee! Is my Droid loaded to the max with preloaded junk? no. Are many of the others? yes.

My droid works. It always has. It screws up with garbage apps that break it, and some apps drain the battery. Uninstall them. This is not a Motorola problem.

I am not saying there is not better hardware out there, but there is plenty of WORSE hardware out there, and I would go so far as to say MOST hardware out there is no better or worse, and most of the other vendors provide fewer updates, even worse support and bloatware you can't uninstall.

The iPhone is better hardware, and an easier to use interface, but you have to drink the Apple cool aid to have it. I like Apple's stuff, and I buy it, but their phone is missing some stuff I don't want to miss (like Google Maps and GMail integration).

Anyway.. I am not trying to say Motorola doesn't suck, but basically they all suck to some degree, and Motorola is not anywhere near the bottom of the pile.

2 cents.

um.. no actually they're dumber than that. AT&T went bankrupt, SBC bought them .. Who's SBC??? Then after marketing themselves for a year and impressing nobody. They got this great idea. "HEY WE BOUGHT AT&T!!! EVERYONE'S HEARD OF THEM!!!" So they changed their name with big fanfare. Any CEO that didn't think of that in the first 2 seconds of the acquisition should have been fired on the spot for incompetence. But the whole company is dumber than that.

... or change the drop-down box in Preferences->General->Import Settings to 'MP3' and buy real coasters instead of making your own.

Look at this. Is it any wonder Windows replaced /etc/init.d with a database, daemons with Services, and the syslog with EventViewer? Obviously unnecessary complexity is essential to any good modern unmaintainable OS design. Between David Cutler's idea that people belong to files and this guy... no Wonder Windows is such a mess.

I'm making dinner honey. It will be done in 2 weeks.

I use Ubuntu because it is the 'Apple' of Linux distributions. ... it just works... I even violate my Linux roots sometimes and configure stuff through the GUI. I think it is Steven Vaughan-Nichols who is not relevant. And it it were not for Debian, there would be no Ubuntu.

Yes, yes, I know that Red Hat works too, but it just doesn't DO anything. RPMs that won't install. An ugly incoherent out of date GUI. configured for security ... meaning you should consider yourself privileged that it actually lets you login.

Sorry Mister developer guy, but it really does not matter what you do with the status bar any more. Firefox started freezing three PC's in my house like a year ago if I left it open for more than a day. Chrome is an exercise in overdone minimalism, and IE stinks. So I was forced to switch to Safari, and gee... it just works like most of Apple's stuff. .. and it has a status bar.

It won't change usability at all. KDE is already unusable.

Never mind AT&T's data network. Normal telephone calls drop in their garbage network. I guess it surprised them that people actually wanted to make phone calls too. Their network has been horrible forever. When I lived in L.A. and had AT&T service. I complained to their customer service about the constant call drops and was told .. "but hey! We have the best coverage of any carrier in Barstow!". Nice to know that both families that live in Barstow can call each other, because user's who live in America's biggest cities cannot.

I just loaded Maverick Meerkat on my Linux machine last week, and despite the fact that my Nvidea video card did not have proper support. (Ubuntu should have posted a "NOTICE: Nvidea Users Do Not Upgrade At This Time!!!"), but anyway; the machine is long since too old to run Windoze at all, so I cannot complain too loudly that my ancient hardware is starting to have issues. I was really quite surprised at how usable Ubuntu has become. I have switched back and forth between KDE and Gnome over the years as each became too annoying to put up with for one reason or another, and abandoned Red Hat in favor of [K]Ubuntu because Solaris 8 was more user friendly. RhythmBox is broken, but overall. There is now a tool to do just about everything without a console. I am normally a 'just edit the file' kind of guy, and I find myself USING the GUI tools because they work. Open Office reads docs better than ever before, and most of the tools are really quite good.

In the end, I think Linux has FINALLY arrived. At least for the Debian team and Ubuntu in particular. Red Hat is dreadful today.

Yes Windows 7 sucks less than all of the other Operating systems they have ever released, and slightly less annoying than Vista to use. There's an achievement! Of course Linus wrote Linux because DOS sucked, and passed them YEARS ago even with all their money and resources. It is the commercial software support that keeps them in front. From what I can see from the outside looking in, it is the jewel in the crown of mediocrity. Oh and Steve Ballmer is a moron. Bill was a crook, but I could respect his savvy. He got tired of it, and gave it to Steve because he was next in line and Steve can't even be a competent crook. If he didn't know Bill, he would be one of those guys on America's Dumbest Criminals.

The earliest one I know of was by the smartest man I ever knew (and the strangest). He was my mentor. In the IBM 360 days this guy used to write code .. COMPLEX code in binary on the roller bars on the front of the console because he was too lazy to logon. He made IBM's code more efficient by eliminating all modularization. It was more efficient to just have one big super efficient kernel, so he redesigned their system, and got something like 140% efficiency out of the hardware (40% greater than theoretical possibility) by IBM's own benchmarks, and found a security hole in their code in the process .. as he put it "bit enough to drive an 18 wheeler through", which he reported to them. They told him it was his hacking, he broke something ... NOT OUR CODE!!! IBM CODE CAN'T BE BROKEN!!! So he went to their 'demo center' and fed in a deck of punch cards.

On the IBM Selectric console in the IBM demo center, it printed.

"May I please have a cookie?"

The operator ignored it.

8 hours later during shift turnover It printed

"I never got my cookie"

The two operators looked at it, shrugged, and ignored it. The dayshift operator went home.

4 hours later the console printed.

"You're not a very nice operator either, I never did get my cookie"

The operator thought the guys upstairs were fooling around and ignored it.

2 hours later.

"WHERE IS MY COOKIE!"

hummm...

1 hour later.

"Dammit give me a cookie!"

30 minutes.

"I WANT A COOKIE!"

15 minutes ... 7.5 minutes ... eventually we get to 32 cookies this second .. 64 cookies this second ... 128 cookies this second.

An IBM Selectric typewriter which is the main console for a 360/65 cannot print even the word cookie in a second, much less a whole sentence, and certainly not 128 of them! There was ONE way to crash a 360/65 .. Fill up the console buffer. The system considered console messages to be important, and if the system couldn't print all of them, it halted.

Reboot ... excuse me... Mainframe terminology here... "IPL" the system. First console message:

"You know, I never DIID get my cookie!" .. and the process starts over.

Finally IBM called my mentor...

um... did you submit a job to the demo center?

Yes, but don't worry, it was just a simple 'unprivileged' process, and as you said, your security is flawless, so I am sure there is no danger. :-)

Sir, I think we are prepared to acknowledge that there MAY BE a security hole in our system somewhere. It seems that your job never finished and yet it does not seem to exist in the system anywhere. Our experts tell us we have to re-install the operating system to fix it. Do you have any alternative suggestions?

Just one... Go get the best operator you have and put him on the console and call me back.

Yes sir... .. an hour later

Sir, this is king super operator, they just called me back in to work to assist you in solving our issue.

OK ... now listen carefully. I am only going to say this once. Type carefully, and don't screw this up .. are you ready?

Yes sir.

Good type this ... "c" "o" "o" "k" "i" "e" ... now press "Enter"

Console prints . "Thank you that was good", and the job ends.

After that IBM never ever questioned it if my mentor reported a problem with IBM software ever again.

Sheesh! This thing is a cross between a phone and a PDA. Who cares? it isn't a 'Computer' .. sure it has a computer in it, but so does my BMW and the GPS on my boat, but I don't feel any inescapable urge to hack into my GPS unit. I write software on my PC, my Mac, my Solaris box, and my Kubuntu box all the time, but I have no desire to hack on my Smartphone.

Apple is trying to build a reliable consumer device, and keeping it pretty standard is the best way to do that, so teach your kid to program his computer and tell him not to mess with the ABS system in your Toyota.