Month: November 2016

Samsung to offer digital assistant service in their Galaxy S8 Smartphone

Dan Uff November 6, 2016 0

(The Associated Press): Samsung said Sunday it will offer an artificial intelligence assistant service in the upcoming flagship smartphone, as the South Korean firm seeks recovery from its global smartphone recalls.

The Galaxy S8 will let users order food or perform other tasks without going through a third-party application but by simply asking the phone's virtual assistant, Samsung said in a statement. The artificial intelligence service will also be made available in Samsung's other consumer electronics products, such as refrigerators.

The company declined to disclose what specific tasks the S8 phone will perform through its artificial intelligence feature.

Samsung is expected to unveil the next iteration for its flagship Galaxy device in spring as it has typically done in the past. Sales of the Galaxy S8 will be crucial for the recovery of Samsung's mobile business, which saw its latest quarterly profit nearly wiped out by two global recalls of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. Samsung estimates it has lost at least $5.3 billion as it discontinued the model, which overheated and caught fire.

The company said last month that it has not figured out what went wrong with the Note 7 phones.

The South Korean company joined the race to create the digital assistant service when it acquired in October Viv Labs Inc., a Silicon Valley startup launched by the same entrepreneurs who sold Siri to Apple. Past and current Samsung phones offer a voice assistant service called "S Voice" developed internally, but the feature did not gain much traction.

Samsung's acquisition of the Silicon Valley firm was seen as its taking another step to seek independence from Google, which offers its brand of virtual assistant service in Android-powered devices.

Executives at Samsung and Viv Labs said that the biggest difference between the existing digital assistant and the one they are jointly developing is that the latter will be an "open AI platform," meaning that third-party developers will be able to offer their services through Samsung's AI platform.

"Our Galaxy smartphones don't provide services that enable consumers to order pizza or coffee, but does provide third party applications. But the new AI platform will enable consumers to do things that they would usually do through a separate third party application," Samsung's statement said.

 Apple, Inc.

Test Network Connections via the Terminal

Dan Uff November 6, 2016 0

Every so often, you will want to check and see if a network is connected to the Internet. Their is a quick Terminal command that will let you do just that called ping. This command will work with all versions of Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, MacOS, and some versions of Microsoft Windows via the DOS prompt (Start > Run > Command.com).

Here's how to use it:

Open a terminal window (Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal).
Type: ping www.apple.com

The above command will send 10 packets of information to the above domain. If the computer is connected to a network, it will return detailed information about the response time. If, however, the computer is not connected to a network, then the packet information will return an error.

By the way, the ping command can include a name of a web site, or its IP address. It can also come in handy if you wanted to ping a local computer as long as you know its IP address.

Like so:

ping 192.168.0.5

The mentioned error rules would apply for the network computer's IP address.

 How to

How to show a Calendar via the Terminal

Dan Uff November 5, 2016 0

Even though all Macs come with a GUI Calendar, many times you don't want to bring that up just to look for a quick date or you're working in the Terminal and want to look up a date.

That's where a handy, small Calendar comes in. To use it, do the following:

Bring up the Terminal Window (Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal).
At the prompt, type: cal
The calendar (pictured above) shows up.
That's it.

Days before U.S. Election, DirecTV blocks Fox News Nationwide for 2 days (and counting)

Dan Uff November 4, 2016 0

According to a web site called The Proud Conservative, DirecTV for some unknown reason has blocked the Fox News Channel from its services for 3 days, and many of its subscribers don't think it is a coincidence since it is just days before the November 8th Election.

When customers turn on the channel, they are greeted with a message which says: