Monday Links from the Bench Vol. XX

[TimberWolf]

Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition - Until somebody has a bright idea, speech recognition by computers is as good as it's going to get. "In 2001 recognition accuracy topped out at 80%, far short of HAL-like levels of comprehension. Adding data or computing power made no difference. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University checked again in 2006 and found the situation unchanged. With human discrimination as high as 98%, the unclosed gap left little basis for conversation."

Isn't the story similar with grammar checkers (on text never mind speech)? But with a somewhat less than 80% accuracy rate.

[NickFitz]

That looks pretty cool. But with only 4 commercial flights currently showing across the whole of Europe, it can't be entirely attributable to the ash cloud.

Ah, in the time I wrote the above and returned, a shed more flights appeared.

Yep, they seem to be having a few problems with their feed at the moment - they've got mainland Europe back, but all the planes that were over the UK and Ireland forty minutes ago seem to have dropped out of the sky

IIRC it was tracking over 800 flights when it was working properly; hopefully they'll get all their data working again soon - ah, and yes, it's back

[al_cam]

As I keep saying, there's sod all I can do about the football

Not sure what's going on with the anti-capitalisation thing, if it's a setting that can be changed then something can be done, but otherwise it'll be in a bit of code that it might be too tricky to modify

Is there a Bob who could do the needful?

[NickFitz]

Is there a Bob who could do the needful?

It wouldn't be a problem changing the code, except that's a third party product - whenever they release an update, the change would need to be done again. If their update happened to involve the code that had been modified, it would become a lot messier than just re-applying a patch.

To quote Robert L. Glass:

It is almost always a mistake to modify packaged, vendor-produced software systems.

... With vendor-supplied software, there are typically rereleases of the product, wherein the vendor solves old problems, adds new functionality, or both. Usually, it is desirable for customers to employ such new releases...

The problem with in-house package modifications is that they must be redone with every such new release. And if the vendor changes the solution approach sufficiently, the old modification may have to be redesigned totally to fit into the new version. Thus modifying packaged software is a never-ending proposition, one that continues to cost each time a new version is used.

- Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, 2003, p.53

(I don't know why Amazon have appended the words "Agile Software Development" to the title - they aren't on the book, and some parts of it are quite critical of certain aspects of Agile.)