>Current Speech recognition technology is still at the babbling three year old stage

Hold on here, I agree that AI is in the gutter for the foreseeable future, but I use google voice recognition several times a day and its absolutely amazing. It seems to understand my context and gets my voice to text right a lot more often than it gets it wrong.

Its not perfect, but its way past the level of a three year old. Right now, it beats typing on the virtual keyboard. If apple matches this quality then I can really see a revolution in how people interact with their smartphones, at least when it comes to voice to text vs keyboards.

That includes dock failures. The laptop themselves have a better rate without the dock issues.

Its major faults were:

1. Drive failure. Not sure if we got a run of duds, but I think 5% alone here.
2. Fan failure. CPU fan would stick to 100% then die completely after a few days. Another 5%.

All of these machines save one or two are pampered and usually docked. No heavy loads or anything. Just bum hardware.

I have a couple of machines that don't use the standard image and its ridiculous how bad these HPs are. 3 ebook readers installed, tons of other shit, and a nice issue where if you uninstall one of these ebook readers, it decides to delete a system font. I'm done with HP.

I picked up a demo 8460p elitebook. Its about as thick and heavy as most contestants on the Biggest Loser. Its like something out of Dell's late 1990s lineup. Its faux MacBook casing isn't helping matters either.

For around the same price I'm switching to Lenovo, getting a much slimmer and nicer machine, and a heck of a lot less crapware on the standard image.

Considering how many elitebooks have failed for us in the past couple of years (25%) as well as their docks, I'm happy to get rid of HP. May you have better luck than me, but you won't. HP is the newest winner to the race to the bottom.

Hey, you don't get on the front page of slashdot without lots of bias. This crowd leans right/libertarian so you need to pander to them to keep the ads flowing.

Before we start deifying Mitchell as some kind of anti-government hero and genius, I'd like to point out that he's deeply into ESP, the paranormal, remote viewing/healing, and other woo. He started something called the Institute for Noetic Sciences in the 1970s. He's essentially the opposite of James Randi. I love to see these charlatans exposed in other parts of their lives too. Turns out he's not only a Uri Geller-level bullshitter but also a common thief.

>Hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers.

Stupid liberals with their non-discriminatory laws, weekends, and social safety nets. Stupid intellectuals who don't believe in god or starting a posse!

> Decent men who believed in a day's work for a day's pay

Funny how that didn't work out too well during the industrial revolution when the market was in charge and it took regulation and labor unions as well as massive protests before that was even possible.

Ugh, I love how Rorschach went from being a complete and utter right-wing psychopath to the posterboy of "common sense" in America. Wow, just wow.

None of that matters if you like to travel. Or if you like to actually own a phone and can swap out SIM cards to change phone numbers and carriers quickly.

Or if you like fast 3G (EVDO vs UMTS/HSPDA).

So CDMA is technically better, in theory but in practice its a lot of lock-in and slow ass 3G. There's more to deciding which is better than just tech specs on a piece of paper, but this being slashdot, we have the "TECHNICALLY CORRECT IS THE BEST KIND OF CORRECT" crowd.

This isn't about ports. I'm not sure how it suddenly became about ports (poor writeup?).

Iran uses packet inspection. They're getting good at it. They took down Tor for a little while before those guys found a work around. A lot VPNs don't work in Iran. Lots of things don't work. Simple work arounds like port numbers don't work.

In other words, when your country is a theocratic dictatorship, bad things happen. Considering how Iran is also a police state, there's little to no chance of anything stopping this anytime soon.

Ah religion. Your evil knows no bounds.

>It reads like an Al Gore infomercial, not a patent. More space is given to banging on about saving the planet than about the actual claims.

What? Are you saying Gore's global warming presentations were full of false information? Granted, his agenda was to popularize a marginalized message (which what it was when he started) but the facts were in line with IPCC.

Look, the broken patent system isn't being shut down in our lifetimes. I have a choice to buy from the company that shuts down competitors with patents or the company that bills competitors with patents. Guess who I'm going with.

There is no camera in any ipass system nor any intention of doing so. Camera tech is ancient, this could have been implemented 10 years ago. I know this is the kind of manufactured controversy that gets ad impressions for slashdot, but please, there are real problems in the world, and this isn't one of them.

Yep, the advice I always give is:

1. Uninstall java. Most end users never have a need for it and don't update it.

2. Use Chrome to read PDFs or Foxit. No need for Adobe, but to be fair Adobe's new sandbox model in version X is resistant to viral infections and exploits.

3. Update flash as often as it says or switch to Chrome.

4. Run MSE or some other AV.

First to file does not invalidate prior art. I really wish people understood this.

I don't believe in patents and want them abolished, but lets not spread fud. Thanks.

Its a security nightmare. Sun/Oracle haven't been able to secure their VM. End users never upgrade. You'll see people casually running java versions that are months or even years old. The little notifier in the tray is just ignored. Crimepack stats released by Brian Krebs shows that it is the number 1 vector for malware.

Considering how infrequently java is needed by end users, the idea that its sitting there ready to run any applet is crazy irresponsible. FF and the rest should refuse to let it run if its not the newest version and/or throw up a warning about java apps and maintain a java whitelist.

Or we can live in the status quo of massive malware infections.

>You can get 100GB drives for ~$150. How much cheaper does it have to be?

I wish SSD enthusiasts would accept this simple fact: SSDs are not that reliable yet. RAM is reliable, barring a power outage.

If you want reliability, you at the very least need to buy Intel. Now your "cheap" drive isn't so cheap. We can't cheaply RAID them either so because the storage industry is so set in its way, they still haven't released much in the way of TRIM enabled RAID cards.

So lets say I wanted to do this in any way that was remotely reliable. I'd have to pay for a TRIM enabled RAID1 card and two 160gb SSDs, preferably intel. Now your $150 solution is more like $1500 solution.

Depending on garbage like OCZ is really asking for a fall. Business as well as consumers have been burned by the current crop of "fast but highly unreliable SSDs."

Unfortunately, we're probably years away from a cheap AND reliable SSD storage solution that can run for 5 years with the fail rate of a spinning disk. In the meantime I'm running expensive Intel SSDs and not worrying. I can't imagine selling OCZ to Joe or Jan consumer, inflating the price of their computers $200 for a mild speed boost. Not to mention laptops don't usually have a second slot for another drive. Either SSD all the way or spinning disk. Half-assed caching solutions have historically been big failures.

No one needs calendar that isnt integrated with their email client. Yes, I'm sure there are edge cases, but for the most part, this whole project is odd. It should just be rolled up into Thunderbird and cancelled. Instead its a stand-alone with a thunderbird plugin.