1) Apple speech recognition is way too cool. The most amazing part is the
total lack of training that is needed. Anybody can just walk up to a Mac
equiped with this and start barking out commands and it will follow. I now
have it on my desktop and PowerBook. Contrary to Adam's belief that it
ships standard on every Mac it doesn't. PlainTalk which is Apple's text to
speech is what ships. English Speech Recognition is a separate component of
PlainTalk. One last note, if you want to use this, you really need to dig
up a PlainTalk microphone that ships with each new Mac. It seems that true
to Apple's nature, the Microphone jack input is "special" and you need the
PlainTalk mic or an adapter to use any normal High-Q mic.
2) PowerComputing is about to bite the dust. Seems they got a little too
big too fast and took themselves too serioiusly. Their fall is expected
soon. Some say this week, some this monoth. Seems they spent the $$$ from
their IPO before they offered it. Bad news for Be, Inc. Their line of
"blame it on Apple" is really stupid and Steve is not one to fuck with on
this level. An emergency meeting was held in Cupertino late last week, and
contrary to what everything everyone else is saying, I'm sure it was Steve
telling them to knock off the Apple bashing. Don't expect anyone to help
them out, because frankly, no one cares. Expect a rush line of NT
workstations.
3) Ran into an engineer from McDonald-Dougless now Boeing, HB at a friends
apt. jacuzzi. Seems he's one of the ones that will be working on the
Teledesic "birds." I believe he told me a little too much so I'm not going
to repeat it here, but suffice to say if it gets done as they plan it's
going to be incredible. The "birds" like Microsofts ad's, and packaging are
being designed on Mac's and some SGI's. What else is new?
Tim
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Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner.
-Toa Te Ching
<>tbyars@earthlink.net <>