I was told that the inventor came up with the idea while at the theatre with his wife. As the spotlights converged on a performer, the idea sprung to mind, and he yelped "I've got it!"
Quite possibly embellished, but plausible that should be the inspiration.
Clever and artful, with a little nostalgia thrown in.
1993 was the year I started my undergrad and would not see a "web browser" until the following year. It's nice to re-capture a little of the spirit of what computing was like back then.
Tip: Be sure to click on the virus and after what happens happens, fling the icons around. Moments of mindless fun.
Old timer here as well. The 'Virtual Girl' brings back memories of the 'personal assistant' fad from way back when. Funny how we've gone back to that now that the technology is more than a gimmick with Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and GNow. Sometimes I wonder about that peroid where so many things were possible (and tried!) but the technology and infrastructure just wasn't there to make it feasible. For all the lamenting about the loss of privacy, the reality is that assistants like these aren't possible without being able to dip into our emails and browse/purchase histories. That's something Bonzi Buddy couldn't do.
We live in an odd time where the promises of the late 90s and early 2000's are coming to fruition. Suddenly VR is amazing and relatively affordable. Suddenly digital personal assistants are here and they work. The promise of a less powerful Microsoft is here and with IE a now discontinued product. Very fast internet is here with many markets having or will soon have 1gbps (note: the first LAN I worked on was 10mbps). The promise of early yet clunky smartphone/PDA revolution has also been fulfilled.
I wonder if, from a networked/social/mobile computing, perspective that period was our 'Mother of All Demos.' So much was tried and promised back then and its only in the fast few years that its really practical.
A personal assistant may "dip into emails" but shouldn't phone home. Otherwise the personal assistant metaphor doesn't fit, and other, less pleasant descriptions apply.
Your emails are already at 'home' or a similar cloud solution with questionable privacy policies. These assistants don't actually run on your device, just their front ends are run on your device. I think you're making a distinction that doesn't really exist with common use cases.
As far as what is reported back to the home company, well, that pre-dates personal assistants. What gmail does with your email or dropbox with your files and any analysis your usage is a completely separate issue than personal assistants, aside from both of them having to do with privacy. It seems to me these assistants are just dipping into stuff 'home' has had access to for a decade plus. Instead of using that info to sell to marketers or whatever, its using that info to provide value to you by powering your assistant.
You can disable the 'always listening' option in most (all?) of these products and just have a press to talk option. I leave mine on for convenience. There's no law saying you need to if you want to use these technologies.
Ahh the Microsoft Bob failed experiment and comically-annoying Office Assistant "Clippy"... the good ol' days. IIRC you usually had to custom install Office without the Office Assistant, desktop Toolbar and remove some other optional component which always slowed down a computer to a crawl (the early multiuser text input IIRC on Windows NT/2k/95/98).
Interestingly, recently Apple and Google both missed out on acquiring Viv as Microsoft snapped them up... ostensibly, an assistant far more integrated into third-party services with better integration developer tools/support and smarter AI. Apple and Google gotta double down on either lifting up Siri/Google's equiv. to that playing field or acquire other talent/tech to keep up.
As an aside, Microsoft finally has Nadella at the helm, whom built Azure, whom seems a better/different engineer/businessman than perhaps even Gates (much needed after Balmer)... although you can't argue that Gates didn't break ground in lopsided EULA/SLSAs for extreme profiteering (which was "better" for stockholders but "worse" for users, probably unsustainably so).
> The promise of early yet clunky smartphone/PDA revolution has also been fulfilled.
Hardly. The "personal" in assistant should relate to the owner of the thing, not to the people pushing it. In that sense there are few enough "personal computers", but 99.999% of all smartphones in use out there are no more personal than the posters a prisoner might put up on their cell wall. Yes, there is none configured exactly as yours, but it's still not yours personally.
I was just doing that, when the girlfriend goes "oh I remember when the computer used to do that" - my response: "you had a virus then..." :D at least back then viruses had a bit of class to em
It makes me a bit of a luddite (and a heck of a curmudgeon), but it always makes me a little sad when good ol' ASCII smileys are rendered all fancy-like. There's something charming and hackerish about showing it as a 7-bit glyph.
I think the Internet fundamentally changed when that happened.
Tangentially-related, I can't fathom why someone would post YouTube videos of `telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl`.
My biggest problem with this is when the images auto-replacing your text emotes convey a completely different expression, and you have no control over it.
Skype is the worst offender, where for example the ":3" cat-face gets replaced by an image of a whole cat, without a face at all. If you disable this "feature" in your options, it's only disabled on YOUR end. The receiving client will still convert your text into images, so now you have NO clue at all how the receiving party interprets your expressions.
Telegram does this RIGHT, where the conversion is done BEFORE your message is sent. If you disable it on your end, the receiver will only receive the text you intended.
I think it's a cultural thing - or more precisely, a non-culture-specific thing, which should be as unoffensive as possible.
Honestly, I don't envy those that design and publish emojis, it's a cultural minefield. :-) has no color, gender, outfit or what-have-you. There's been a lot of debate about the skin tone of e.g. the thumbs up emoji (which now comes in half a dozen colors if the relatively ambiguous / non-human yellow isn't to your needs), the gender of emojis depicting jobs, and the color of outfits of emojis depicting jobs.
I was doubtful of emojis at first, but now I'm loving the concept. They really help me communicate emotions that I wouldn't put into actual words. Smileys can't really do that.
Culturally I see it as a the first universal (limited) language, using standardized ideograms. Maybe in a few decades we can express full sentences and we will have a written language for all Humans to use. 21st century hieroglyphs.
As a college student, I use emoji constantly to communicate all sorts of abstract sentiments, but in my experience they can also be irritatingly ambiguous and highly dependent on cultural norms and interpretation.
Take the thumbs up emoji - within my social circles, the exact same emoji can be interpreted both as a enthusiastic agreement ("Sure!") and also as a sarcastic affirmation ("Good for you.").
It's often difficult to infer the intended meaning, even with context, and in some circumstances I've found emojis have actually added significantly to the ambiguity and cognitive burden in parsing a text. That's not a problem I have often faced with simple smileys.
There have been attempts a universal language that are quite fascinating. There's an interesting RadioLab on the subject of Bissymbols. I suppose the one that sticks and evolves over time is the one that probably matters though.
That automatic emoji concept can be quite annoying sometimes.
For instance, Outlook 365 will automatically turn "B)" into the "smiling face with sunglasses" emoji. I cannot fathom this use case. Apparently someone at Microsoft thought that things like, oh, a fairly common styling of a simple lettered list (A) Do this B) Do that C) Etc.) and parenthesized words / sentences ending in capital B (abbreviations will get you there, like say BBB) are not very common in corporate communication. The need for a smiling face sunglasses clad emoji was much stronger. Go figure.
Which looks like a bald person without a mouth to me :-)
Somehow I've become accustomed to 'read' emoji as tilting your head to the left. Turning the emoji around always reminds me of German books, which often have the title upside down on the book spine compared to English / Dutch books.
Scheme does use ?, and you can in CL if you really want. But CL reserves ? as a programmable reader macro [1]. It is often used, for example, to designate a stand-in domain variable designation in, say an embedded Prolog.
Another reason that CL avoids the "?" convention is that it's "unpronounceable" [2]. CL is the only language spec I've seen that discusses pronunciation; they actually gave thought to how programmers might converse about their code unambiguously [3]. Another manifestation of this is CL's sort-of case-insensitivity [4].
--
[1] The other reserved characters are !, [ ], and { }
[2] Although at least one wag suggested pronouncing it as "eh?", like a good Canadian.
[3] CLtL2 provides quite a bit of this. My fav is a brief excursion into how some hackers pronounce "macrolet" to rhyme with Chevrolet. :)
[4] This is not actually the case, but appears to be true to new Lispers, until they understand that by default, the reader converts everything to upcase.
Did you miss the Hoon language and their pronunciation table that works for other languages too? http://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/ They suggest pronouncing '?' as 'wut'.
Canadians at Waterloo enjoy a heavily subsidized world-class education, at the tax-payer's expense, then leave to contribute nothing to the economy that produced them.
Interestingly, some also come back later in life to enjoy subsidized health care to which they've also never contributed.
I wonder if there's a way to structure post-secondary education subsidies as a sort of debt that you can pay off by either remaining employed in Canada, or in cash if you decide to leave.
Disclosure: UW Comp Eng '98 grad, still in Canada.
> Canadians at Waterloo enjoy a heavily subsidized world-class education, at the tax-payer's expense, then leave to contribute nothing to the economy that produced them.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Even foreign students who have no intention of remaining in Canada after university are still adding value.
Why? Because when they go abroad and do good work, they maintain and improve the image of UW. There's a reason it became a world class school, and you can think of former students doing work abroad as sort of like advertising.
Besides, foreign students pay more. Their tuition is not nearly as cheap as that of domestic students.
> Interestingly, some also come back later in life to enjoy subsidized health care to which they've also never contributed.
This is the case in many countries on earth which engage in socialism.
> I wonder if there's a way to structure post-secondary education subsidies as a sort of debt that you can pay off by either remaining employed in Canada, or in cash if you decide to leave.
That would suck, quite frankly. I'm a Canadian who moved abroad after university because I wanted to gain some perspective and see more of the world.
I'm not a resident of Canada currently, so you're saying I should be saddled with additional debt because I left Canada without contributing to the economy?
Why shouldn't education be a right? I had to pay for my education, as I assume you did. Yes, it was subsidized by tax payer money, but in the end I spent ~$35,000 CAD (total) on tuition for my B.Eng.
I had to work summers and internships to pay for my tuition, and housing expenses when I was in university.
Will I return to Canada? I don't know, maybe. I'm still having a blast working abroad, and I'm still in my 20s, so who knows what will happen.
What I can say though, is I'm really glad that Canada didn't charge me an additional tax for going abroad after my education. If I had any kind of significant debt, I wouldn't have been able to afford to move to Europe and look for work.
This is silly protectionism. UWaterloo students abroad has arguably what's built its reputation. So goes for everywhere else you hear "Keep all my <local resources> in my <local area>"
If you require students to spend X years working in Y, then it's not a subsidy anymore, it sounds a lot more like a scholarship. What you're suggesting would have to somehow be structured to let students choose not to accept the agreement, and at that point its not "for everyone" anymore.
This sort of agreement definitely does exist, though. My sister in law went to med school under one requiring her to work a number of years in rural parts of the state after residency.
Nifty little device to make a an important point.