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KDE-2.2 is quite a lot (noticably) faster than KDE-2.1.1. Especially file management is a lot faster now, but also configuration dialogs and so on. Not as fast as Win95, but fast enough to feel snappy (on my P-ii-300).

If you are interested in startup speed, check out the objprelink hack for C++ projects, that was just recently done for KDE. It improves startup times of KDE apps by 30-50 % and might also be of use for OpenOffice, Mozilla and other large C++ applications. Of course it is just a hack until real (stable) prelinking in gcc is available. Note: This has not been included to KDE-2.2 by default, because it arrived during the feature freeze. Hopefully your packager will use this or just follow the step-by-step instructions yourself. It is easy and works like advertised. :-) Have fun KDE folks!

The direct link to the AT&T TTS research site (the group who developed this amazing TTS system) is here:

http://www.research.att.com/~mjm/cgi-bin/ttsdemo

We use this same system at work for our phone navigation system. Paired up with a natural language processor, it's quite easy to talk to as if a semi-sentient person. With a large phrase database, it's much more than an automated system.

I am glad AT&T is finally releasing a commercial product to the masses. I can't wait to get the developer version!

If you haven't already, listen to the AT&T Customized Voice Product Demo (U.S. English, Male: "Rich"), truly amazing.

With online news feeds coming in to the local radio station and the quality of the "Rich" custom voice, I have a feeeling a lot of announcers may be going bye bye. In these samples he's way better than our local guy. Plus, since Shoutcast and such already have all the song info, think of the cool DJ announcing you could have.

My roommate and I used the older online AT&T TTS to do our answering machine message for the dorm... It's did pretty will with "This is mack daddy JD and phat daddy John's room" that's the only message we've ever had that people would call back just to hear. With the old AT&T system you could adjust the pitch and various other settings to get it to sound good, I can't imagine what their new system will do!

If you don't think too good, don't think too much.

Their "customer care" line is also powered by TTS -- good example implementation of the product, but at $5,000 it won't be running in my house any time soon... (and sorry, there doesn't appear to be an option 7)

1-877-741-4321 (from the buy page)

I'd rather have some good software!

With apps like this (I got a PalmOS client 4 month ago) and maybe better displays and faster GPRS you could work from anywhere in the world.

Here's another place to try it out.

The site limits not only words, but the number of accesses. From the site FAQ:

One unfortunate result is that people sometimes hit the limits too early. We can only distinguish hubs, and not individual machines. If 40 accesses have already come from the same server at your ISP, you will unfortunately be blocked. If this happens, we apologize. Please try again (earlier) tomorrow.

This one will be slashdotted fairly quickly, at least for those people using large carriers.

Here are demonstrations of the new software. This URL is given in the article, but not highlighted / linked, so here is a more convinient way to go to it.

You can check out more information on their TTS project here and create your own samples here.

You can check out more information on their TTS project here and create your own samples here.

On AT&T Speech Labs website, they have a little demo where you can enter you're own text and have it play for you using their software (30 word limit). Way Cool!!

They also have recorded demos you can listen to, but I thought the interactive demo was pretty nifty.


--BEGIN SIG BLOCK--
I'd rather be trolling for goatse.cx.

On AT&T Speech Labs website, they have a little demo where you can enter you're own text and have it play for you using their software (30 word limit). Way Cool!!

They also have recorded demos you can listen to, but I thought the interactive demo was pretty nifty.


--BEGIN SIG BLOCK--
I'd rather be trolling for goatse.cx.

You can try out the "research version of Next-Generation Text-To-Speech (TTS) from AT&T Labs." here.

I'm sure it's not the same thing as the one mentioned in the article, but I'm pretty sure the one in the article is at least based on this one.

Try it out!

Single words are pronounced cool enough but the "melody" of the sentence is still totally wrong...

C++ may not be "timeless," but it's here now, and will be here for many years. Besides, improving yourself in one language helps reveal patterns and designs in other languages. C++ will be influencing language design for a long time.

So, here are a few C++ oriented books that I'm very fond of. All of them helped me improve as a programmer, not just in C++.

If you're working in C++, you probably want The Design and Evolution of C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup. If you're a C programmer considering C++, you need this book. It really helps get your mind wrapped around the language. C++ may be a mess, but at least you'll understand why it's a mess, and why it really couldn't have succeeded any other way. By understanding why C++ is C++ (and not, say, Java or C#), you'll write faster, cleaner C++. Even if you don't see C++ as the future, armed with the knowledge in this book you can better judge other languages.

For useful ways to improve your coding right away, I'm fond of Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code and Scott Meyer's pair Effective C++ and More Effective C++ . Both will give you little improvements that will improve your code tomorrow, next year, and in five years. Parts of all of these books apply to any language. (My copy of Effective C++ is going on 10 years old, and I still find it helpful to reread occasionally.)

For Acrobat there is DjVu

well, it's about time there was an open source alternative to the previously announced systems by at&t, dell and compaq.

the best part about an open source system is that by definition, it'll have an open architecture that lets it interoperate with other systems...not to toe the slashdot line, but the last thing we need is a proprietary voting protocol run by a big company.

last i heard as well, california and arizona were implementing this the way it sounds, i.e. voters can actually vote over the internet...i think it was using some sort of shared public-key security to encrypt the ballots, and the key for decrypting the ballots is shared among election officials, so that no one party can view the actual ballot.

and dont forget that ext2 has a 1TB limit.

There is a lot of good stuff here. Some of the more useful and general-purpose patches -- such as VLAN, TUX, and Software Suspend -- should get a chance to become mainstream. The various IPC and speed improvements should make it in, too.

There's currently a debate over which real-time scheduler is the best. Personally, I'd like to see it resolved in the same way as the other options with choices: let all of them be integrated into the mainstream, and let the user select which one to use, either at compile or boot time! I'd like to see an option in the kernel configuration, asking what real-time scheduler you wanted: MontaVista, RTLinux, RTSched, Linux-SRT, RTAI, DWCS, something else, or simply the default.

Linux needs a real-time scheduler today. Currently, things become choppy whenever it decides to service the system in some way, such as syncing the disk. Playing movies, audio/video recording, burning CD's, even playing games would benefit from real-time support. I hope that this can become mainstream in 2.6!

Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!

it may be a bit off-topic, but it's worth mentioning, esp. since the poster included cable modems/dsl in his question.

please please please use the AuthHosts setting if you have VNC installed on a publically accessible ip. it limits access by ip, ranges and wildcards are acceptable.

considering the relatively weak default password sceme in vnc (including no delay in missed password attempts and no default attempt logging), it's a good first step in securing access.

complex

Note: this is not based on any white papers, but rather years of usage. VNC server from experience is much more adept on UNIX servers than on Windows. Remember if you are running Windows you can always change the polling to change what part of the screen gets updated (use less bandwidth). Another option to reduce bandwidth (this works on all servers/clients) is reduce the color to 8bit. Also the speed of the connection at the server is more important than at the client end. I have used a client on a Dial-up (29.6 kbps) to connect to windows and unix servers on a T1 line. Remember to keep your software up to date, as they make improvements to handling regularly.
-OctaneZ

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

Note: this is not based on any white papers, but rather years of usage. VNC server from experience is much more adept on UNIX servers than on Windows. Remember if you are running Windows you can always change the polling to change what part of the screen gets updated (use less bandwidth). Another option to reduce bandwidth (this works on all servers/clients) is reduce the color to 8bit. Also the speed of the connection at the server is more important than at the client end. I have used a client on a Dial-up (29.6 kbps) to connect to windows and unix servers on a T1 line. Remember to keep your software up to date, as they make improvements to handling regularly.
-OctaneZ

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

Note: this is not based on any white papers, but rather years of usage. VNC server from experience is much more adept on UNIX servers than on Windows. Remember if you are running Windows you can always change the polling to change what part of the screen gets updated (use less bandwidth). Another option to reduce bandwidth (this works on all servers/clients) is reduce the color to 8bit. Also the speed of the connection at the server is more important than at the client end. I have used a client on a Dial-up (29.6 kbps) to connect to windows and unix servers on a T1 line. Remember to keep your software up to date, as they make improvements to handling regularly.
-OctaneZ

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

Mathematician/Economist Andrew Odlyzko has studied this sort of issue extensively from economical and historical viewpoints.

You might want to look at:

• Content is not king
• The bumpy road of electronic commerce
• Competitive pricing of information goods: Subscription pricing versus pay-per-use

"The bumpy road of electronic commerce" paper deals extensively with why micropayments won't happen.

Mathematician/Economist Andrew Odlyzko has studied this sort of issue extensively from economical and historical viewpoints.

You might want to look at:

• Content is not king
• The bumpy road of electronic commerce
• Competitive pricing of information goods: Subscription pricing versus pay-per-use

"The bumpy road of electronic commerce" paper deals extensively with why micropayments won't happen.

Mathematician/Economist Andrew Odlyzko has studied this sort of issue extensively from economical and historical viewpoints.

You might want to look at:

• Content is not king
• The bumpy road of electronic commerce
• Competitive pricing of information goods: Subscription pricing versus pay-per-use

"The bumpy road of electronic commerce" paper deals extensively with why micropayments won't happen.

Mathematician/Economist Andrew Odlyzko has studied this sort of issue extensively from economical and historical viewpoints.

You might want to look at:

• Content is not king
• The bumpy road of electronic commerce
• Competitive pricing of information goods: Subscription pricing versus pay-per-use

"The bumpy road of electronic commerce" paper deals extensively with why micropayments won't happen.

First off; the "size" doesn't really matter. A lot of the article focuses on how the qubits will be XYZ times smaller than modern implementations of regular bits. Well, of course they will be!! The whole thing about quantum computing is that it uses the properties of a single atom; if the infrasturucture were much bigger than that it wouldn't make much sense.

Almost as an aside, the article mentions the superpositioning of 1 and 0. This is HUGE . So what, you might say, what difference is it if a bit can hold a little more information? Think of this: Take 8 qubits. If these were normal bits they would be able to hold any one number from 00 to FF. When you have 8 qubits, they can hold ALL the numbers from 00 to FF. So you can run algorithms on all the numbers at once rather than just one at a time.

Of course, it can only return one number at a time (meaning it might contain both numbers, but when you test to see which number it holds it will return one or the other). There are ways to get around this, though. In the mid 90s Peter Shor at IBM developed an algorithm for prime factorization in polynomial time using qubits. Normally prime factorization is an exponential (or "hard") problem. RSA and almost all widely used public encryption algorithms rely on prime factorization for their security. This is important stuff.

Some proposals for quantum computing use the "tunneling" method described in the article, but my hopes are with the NMR crowd. This seems the most promising using current technology.

And as far as being able to buy this stuff at Radio Shack; I would be very surprised if that happened any time remotely soon. Think about it this way: unbreakable (by the laws of physics) encryption, and virtually instantaneous cracking of encryption, just for starters? Hmm, I can't think of any super-powerful world governments who would want to get their hands on that and keep it away from anyone else...

It dosen't take a rocket scientist to figure out that W. and crew won't do squat to pressure a large business to do anything pro-consumer. That would cost both of them money.

AOL/TW will be making money hand over fist up until the next election, at least, and probobly for years after that while the litigation chuggs through the courts. After which they will open up the market like they should have been required to do in the first place. Of course in the meantime a few extra billions (yes with a B!) won't hurt their stock price.

Why use X, when you can do VNC. Terminal for any platform and you can resume your session from anywhere. http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/

Check out Crowds from AT&T's research arm... the same people who did VNC. It's not encrypted, but it has the same pooling affect.
--

A big part of the problem is that systems like Gnome are written on such a primitive foundation (C/C++)

Just curious. What sort of higher-level tools do you suggest that they use. If you are going to call these two languages primitive you might as well call all other Procedural and Object Oriented languages primitive as well, since they all share certain common features.

Oh, I know we can implement the entire system in Perl or Python. Right. These languages are good for writing applications in, but I would not suggest writing your entire desktop environment in them. You could use Common Lisp or Scheme. Those, however, are basically dead languages in the Software Industry. Perhaps Java would be a good choice. Wait, I am wrong, it shares too much syntactically with C/C++ to be much of an improvement.

You have to face facts. C and C++ are induatry standard languages. They are two of the best that we have, as evidenced by their continued popularity. Currently this is the best that we can do. If you ask me we aren't doing that badly.


You should read Bjarne Stroustrup's paper Learning C++ As A New Language. It shows how C++ can be written in a style such that it looks very much like Perl or Python. It can be as high-level as you need it to be.

Remarkably, Nature doesn't appear to have talked to Andrew Odlyzko, who, over the last 5 years or so, has written a large pile of the best papers on the subject of the future of scientific publishing.

The approach is based on the idea of "blending into a crowd", i.e., hiding one's actions within the actions of many others. To execute web transactions in this model, a user first joins a crowd of other users. The user's initial request to a web server is first passed to a random member of the crowd. That member can either submit the request directly to the end server or forward it to another randomly chosen member, and in the latter case the next member independently chooses to forward or submit the request.

Would that have been the same if I started with Java? Try to explain memory allocation problems to someone used only to a garbage collector, the dinamics behind the pointer stuff that every compiler uses (even Vb!), the concept of a friendly class or a template. Some well-known patterns use some of these concepts, and if you're studying, well, you kindda ought to know at least some of these. Get some coredumps in life! :P

Recently Bjarne Stroustroup said in an interview that the problem with C++ is that no company has a decent compiler. They ALL USE C++, but they use it to produce other compilers to sell. You would gain more market value learning other language (say Java or Vb), but IMHO that wouldn't make you a better-formed programmer/analyst in the long run.

Hey! This is the first time I post something that could get moderated up!! (be nice ;)

Java isn't platform independent; it is a platform. Like Windows, it is a proprietary commercial platform. That is, you can write programs for Windows/Intel or Java/JVM, and in each case you are writing code for a platform owned by a single corporation and tweaked for the commercial benefit of that corporation. It has been pointed out that you can write programs in any language for the JVM and associated operating systems facilities. However, the JVM, etc., are heavily biased in favor of Java. It is nowhere near being a general reasonably language-neutral VM/OS.

Would you people please stop talking as if C/C++ were a language?

C and C++ are different languages. They obviously belong to the same family, and share a lot of syntax, but each has features the other does not. More importantly, they require different skills to use effectively. Much good C code would be bad style in C++, and vice versa.

Since the whole point of CS is to teach the underlying skills and not any one tool, this is kinda important. C and C++ are no more the same language than C++ and Java, or Java and C#. OK, forget the latter. ;-)

So, for goodness' sake, at least get the most basic information about these languages by reading some of the FAQs, before trying to comment. Pay particular attention to the last one, please; it was written by Bjarne Stroustrup, so it carries even more authority than the others.

You can safely assume that anyone posting about the "C/C++ language" here is neither an authority on C or C++, nor qualified to discuss the languages taught on a CS course.

Linux IDE Raid

I actually corresponded with the guy somewhat, he's very scientific, knowledgable, and motivated to make it work (its his job) so his results are credible.

I followed the pattern and now have a tower with 2 IDE channels on the mobo, 2 promise cards, and two cards with CMD IDE chips in them. I have a couple of CD drives as hda and hdb, then 9 81GB Maxtor drives, each one as the master disk on a primary or secondary interface.

Then I used software RAID 5 on Linux-2.4, and believe it or not (I haven't run the tests in a while, but they were rigorous), I can nearly saturate my 100baseT network with data while reading, or store data quickly enough to keep up with the network. Formatted with ext2, this is a 614GB array.

It looks like the page has been updated recently though, as the I75Raid machine he was working on (>1TB) now has screaming performance, where he was having some problems before.

Other than hot-swappable hard drives, there's simply no reason to pay for SCSI any more, that I can see. This guys performance looks like it stand up to a 1000baseT network and not suffer too badly.

Graphviz makes reasonably well sorted directed graphs.

http://www.graphviz.org for dev versions.
http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/ for release versions.

Optimal layouts with mimimum crossing edges for arbitrary directed graphs is a Very Hard Problem Indeed, so don't expect miracles.

Sadly, lack of a decent browser is what pushed me from using my nice NeXT cube with a 19" monitor to a Linux box with a 13" monitor around '96.

- Mike

• These forms

There was an old, much-heralded (in fact, many people used it to run Linux!) notebook called the Samsung Sens 810.
http://www.atd.ucar.edu/homes/burghart/SENS810.htm l
The keyboard split in the middle to make it similar to a Microsoft Natural Keyboard in functionality. While the days of Pentium-100 laptops are long gone, it's still a good design, and with 15" displays now prevalent, there's no reason some enterprising manufacturer couldn't integrate one.
If this kind of keyboard is a requirement on a laptop, you may be able to find a cheap Sens 810 on eBay (for the lazy, that link will do the search for you). It would probably make a good Linux box for basic word processing - and would definitely do well with VNC to that 1.3ghz Athlon beast you have stored away somewhere..
Ben

FOR RELEASE TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1993

Corning and AT&T offer new submarine fiber-optic components
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The microelectronics unit of AT&T has announced that it will make its next generation ultrahigh reliability undersea lightwave components available to system designers and integrators engaged in fiber-optic cable projects.
At OFC/IOOC '93, an optical conference here, AT&T Microelectronics displayed its key undersea lightwave products, including an ultrahigh reliability wavelength division multiplex (WDM) coupler for erbium doped fiber amplifier applications codeveloped with Corning Incorporated, and a pump laser module that incorporates the first commercial application of a revolutionary chemically vapor-deposited (CVD) diamond submount.

"When you place a critical communications device below the ocean you can't afford to take a risk of failure, and no one in the business has a better track record than AT&T," said Mark McGilvray, submarine lightwave product manager
[...]

As long as there is nothing that replaces the network transparence of X, it is not going to be replaced!

If your box is sitting on a network, try installing VNC.
I have several small networks that I support and I mostly use Linux on the servers and firewalls. Since I don't always have a monitor and keyboard that I can dedicate to a machine that is rarely used by a person (and usually stuffed into a closet somewhere), I install VNC and have it run on boot.
This will not solve your problem with how to auto-rip MP3's, however if your MP3 server goes down or stalls for some reason, you can just VNC into the machine and see what is happening and fix it.
Or perhaps this will solve your problem, since now you can have "user input" from any machine on your network.

If your box is sitting on a network, try installing VNC.
I have several small networks that I support and I mostly use Linux on the servers and firewalls. Since I don't always have a monitor and keyboard that I can dedicate to a machine that is rarely used by a person (and usually stuffed into a closet somewhere), I install VNC and have it run on boot.
This will not solve your problem with how to auto-rip MP3's, however if your MP3 server goes down or stalls for some reason, you can just VNC into the machine and see what is happening and fix it.
Or perhaps this will solve your problem, since now you can have "user input" from any machine on your network.

I think that a VNC client would be a good first step. It's a simple protocol that's easy to implement on the client side (although I concede I've never actually attempted to do so :). You can also actually run a VNC X-server and a VNC client on the same machine, effectively giving you an X server, so if vncserver could be coaxed into compiling (basically XFree86 with the display driver being the server side of the VNC networking stuff) you'd be coming along nicely...

Much better sounding text-to-speech from ATT

This could be done very much like Crowds, which is also an online privacy tool. It seems to be closed source though, so I havn't tried it. I predict the following extra features in the CDC program:

1) Strong encryption, ideally masquerading as SSL, to stop it being too easily blockable. Or better sill, MSN Messenger format messages.
2) Open source, and availiable on all platforms.
3) Something to allow all your HTTP traffic to be routed through the same machine for one session, so it is possible to access sites like Hotmail that forward you about a lot, and check your IP address.
4) More cow pictures.

Michael