Siri is a bandwidth hog

[tangor]

We’ve used Siri to get directions, to make hands-free mobile calls and to fetch answers to trivia questions. Sometimes we just goof on Siri. “Siri, do you love me?” my daughter asked the other day. (Siri’s heartbreaking response: “I am not capable of love.”) Most ways you look at it, Siri is pretty magical.

But not in every way. Siri’s dirty little secret is that she’s a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.

To make your wish her command, Siri floods your cell network with a stream of data; her responses require a similarly large flow in return. A study published this month by Arieso, an Atlanta firm that specializes in mobile networks, found that the Siri-equipped iPhone 4S uses twice as much data as does the plain old iPhone 4 and nearly three times as much as does the iPhone 3G. The new phone requires far more data than most other advanced smartphones, which are pretty data-intensive themselves, The Post has reported.

[washingtonpost.com...]
Mainstream is beginning to "get it"... there is a limit (approaching quite rapidly) over spectrum.

We love our devices, our net, our pretty toys... at what... (supply an appropriate word!)

[Marshall]

We love our devices, our net, our pretty toys... at what...

At everyone else's inconvenience.

Marshall

[lexipixel]

Bandwidth (spectrum) is only limited by technical investment -- it will always expand, (or should I say "compact"), and in-turn, updated "technology" will always again use up all available bandwidth until it expands again.

We love our devices, our net, our pretty toys... at what...

...at the cost of our privacy; our ability to carry on meaningful real-life interpersonal conversations and relationships; our instinctive sense of direction; our vocabulary; our ability to remember important information; our circadian rhythm, ...oh yeah, and we each pay anywhere from $50 - $150 (US) per month for all this -- so, in effect, we also give up the time spent earning that money, and the recreational benefits that could have been enjoyed during that misspent time.

Give me a rotary phone, no answer machine and over-the-air 1970's t.v. and I'm good.

Please don't call on Sunday evenings though -- I'll be watching the Wonderful World of Disney, and Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, (Marlin: I'll wait here as Jim attempts to wrestle the 14 foot alligator).

[wildkingdom.com...]

[lucy24]

Please don't call on Sunday evenings though -- I'll be watching the Wonderful World of Disney

Can't handle these midstream name changes. "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" was good enough for my generation. Especially piquant when watched on a b/w TV, as we did. (Aside: Did you know you can no longer get 13" TVs? I was forced to replace mine recently, and there was no middle ground between the smallest "real" TV at 19", and the micro-TVs that you shove on your bathroom vanity or car dashboard or, I dunno, anyplace where you'd die if you couldn't watch your show. I didn't look, but they probably make Dick Tracy wristwatch TVs by now.)

Bandwidth and disk space work like highway expansion. You make it bigger to accommodate users, which invites more users, which requires further expansion, which...

Raise your hand if you can remember when one of the most appalling programming blunders was the unstopped memory leak. If your program started out taking up 800K of RAM and ended up using 1100, you were doing something seriously wrong.

[Rugles]

Odd place for people to be complaining about technology.

[lexipixel]

Bandwidth and disk space work like highway expansion.

I was going to use closet space as an analogy -- how people's junk expands to fill all available storgage space -- but then realized many people aren't so much of a pack rat as I am.

you can no longer get 13" TV

I am seriously starting to consider buying a newer t.v. -- my old CRT 27" is chopping off too much of the picture left and right now that 4:3 aspect has been replaced by 16:9. I just want to make sure any new format is going to be around for a while. I had a huge collection of vinyl and 8-track tapes, and as soon as I bought a few dozen cassettes, everything went to CD... Next thing you know, "tv's" will be replaced by "Parlor Walls", (one wall in a "TV Parlor"), as in Ray Bradbury's book Fahrenheit 451.

Odd place for people to be complaining about technology.

True. I realized how ironic it was that I referenced over-the-air t.v. from four decades aog, modern bandwidth issues, and linked to the online clips from the show... but this is Foo...

[piatkow]

Bandwidth and disk space work like highway expansion. You make it bigger to accommodate users, which invites more users, which requires further expansion, which...

My first 5 years of using PCs for work always involved disabling functions as every new application seemed to need all the available memory of the latest PC.