Slashdot Mirror

Other than Linux, speech technologies are proving a hit at Comdex. Despite Microsoft's recent claims of "innovations such as speech recognition", the event is dominated by the three speech heavy weights: IBM (ViaVoice), Dragon Systems and L & H. L & H demonstrated their new Internet technology which enables a user to ask the computer a question in English. The computer finds the answer to the question on the web, and responds using voice synthesis. Meanwhile the recent announcement by Corel that the whole Office 2000 suite will be ported to Linux (and free to users) hopefully means Dragon's Voice Recognition technology will be ported. Indeed, Adam Cody pointed out that Linux is mentioned in one of their new job offers... For those that don't get Maximum PC (previously Boot), you might be interested to learn that in the comparison of WordPerfect 8 and SmartSuite Millennium to Word, only the Microsoft lacked voice recognition capabilities. Moreover WordPerfect scored a KickAss product award with a score of 9, while SmartSuite scored 8.

I was supposed to post Adam's link a long time ago, but I can't remember whether or not I actually got round to asking Dragon Systems for confirmation... so I'm posting it now anyway. If anyone from Dragon Systems feels like commenting, please email me.

Our network of informants let us in on this: Linus was recently interviewed by Boot Magazine, but the interview was only available in the print edition until now. Check out the interview. It's one of the best I've read in a long time. Also, Christopher Blizzard (a truly cool man) wrote in to remind us about the (free) conference between Linus and other prominent figures in the Linux community tomorrow. It will be held in Santa Clara, California, and will be hosted by The Sillicon Valley Linux User's Group.

John Ello wrote in to tell us " Apparently Redhat included a 'redneck' dialect option in Redhat 5.1. " Ya know, this is the stuff that makes me happy to be running linux. Sorta like when I use sudo and get an error message like "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.". Stuff like that just makes everything much more entertaining. It's the little things that make me happy I guess.

Bootnet has an article about Alex St John's position on all the recent Corel/Open Source hoopla. He sounds like he thinks it's more PR move than business decision. Personally, I'm itching to see Corel's new hardware at LinuxExpo, and even more so, waiting to see what additional Support Corel and Linux can give each other- I agree that the PR thing is key though- they went from 'just another non-ms company' to 'Open Source Heavyweight' overnight, bringing them to 1 notch under Netscape IMHO. Something big can work here, and I'm excited to see it happen.

Sam Rowe writes " Bootnet has 12 steps to installing Debain, with some nice words about Linux. They've also inclded Debain on their magazine CD. " I love when companies do that. It's one thing to get a CD of free software, but to get a CD of free software, it's just a warm fuzzy day.

Ok I've got tons of stuff worth posting, and we've already posted tons of stuff, sooo, here is a quick list of excellent linkage. This article about Competing Javas was sent in by Dan Marks. xtra sent us this story about 3com's Java work on the palm pilot. Kai Voigt wrote in to tell us that Turkmenistan is selling .tl domains for $50 just like Tonga. Costs more than interNIC? Hmm... Kurt Gray sent us a pair of articles, Bootnet is talking about Matrox's new OpenGL board that is better than VooDoo? And The Onion is running a humorous piece about MS Patenting ones and zeros. Now everyone go back to work!

Raju Tavadia wrote in to give us this link and this one to a pair of articles about the Palm III- with pictures of the beast.

Hans Cathcart wrote in to correct me on James Nicolson's comments yesterday about the 3com/Pilot/Linux port. Apparently The Linux/microcontroller Project is still doing the port, so I'm not sure what 3com's connection was in all this. The huge response that the article recieved on Slashdot is something that high ranking people at 3com should see. Geek appeal sold a lot of Pilots- Linux will sell even more. They should do everything they can to support this project (read:Big cash donations to TLMP).

Well Bootnet has posted an article about MSIE5... the funny thing is that their "Proof" is an httpd log entry frome tide11.microsoft.com formatted like IE5 most likely will. See Those strings are really easy to change (as proven by the zany stuff that you guys put into my agent logs each week). Will someone mail me a perl script or something that sets HTTP_USER_AGENT = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.66; Windows NT 6.66)" and does a GET off bootnet? If we each ran it once, we won't hurt their server at all and they'll notice the new browsers in the log files and maybe report wide scale beta testing has begun on IE6.66 and NT 6.66. Shhh... don't tell them *grin*. All kidding aside, BootNet is a Neato-Site(tm) and definately worth a regular gander. Thanks to Xces for letting me know.

Update:A few notes, Slashdot has recieved dozens of hits from tide*.microsoft.com in the last few weeks. Read whatever you want into that. Second, this script was sent to us by Vivek that will fake an agent. run it with an address, port and an agent string (like the one above) as parameters. Lynx users can set it already.

Redherring has a historical review of the markets that Microsoft tried to dominate... but failed. Unix and NetWare outnumber NT by 5 to 1, MSN did not become the dominant Internet provider, WebTV is somewhat of a flop, and Java (the other technology NASA actually uses) is extremely popular despite Microsoft's disparaging it. Meanwhile Alex St John proud architect of that abomination DirectX, explains why Microsoft chose it as API... The article in the print edition says: "What happens when folks such as ATI and nVidia, who never manage to make a working driver -- even when they are supplied with a DDK, sample code, and a testing procedure -- take it upon themselves to make up their own OGL drivers? BOOM! That's what." Perhaps it's got something to do with the whole driver running at ring 0? I wonder why those clever folks at the GGI-project decided to put the least stuff possible in kernel mode... perhaps security? Ah, yes, I forgot, they did not implement the first idea that gelled in their station-wagons. The article goes on to state that "The day Microsoft encounters a major competitor whose strength arises from the community of game developers is the day game developers will get Microsoft's full, undivided attention.": divide and conquer!

Finally, when confronted with a new threat, the best strategy to keep your sheep^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers is to frighten them. Somehow I'm not losing any sleep about security issues that others might add...

Redherring has a historical review of the markets that Microsoft tried to dominate... but failed. Unix and NetWare outnumber NT by 5 to 1, MSN did not become the dominant Internet provider, WebTV is somewhat of a flop, and Java (the other technology NASA actually uses) is extremely popular despite Microsoft's disparaging it. Meanwhile Alex St John proud architect of that abomination DirectX, explains why Microsoft chose it as API... The article in the print edition says: "What happens when folks such as ATI and nVidia, who never manage to make a working driver -- even when they are supplied with a DDK, sample code, and a testing procedure -- take it upon themselves to make up their own OGL drivers? BOOM! That's what." Perhaps it's got something to do with the whole driver running at ring 0? I wonder why those clever folks at the GGI-project decided to put the least stuff possible in kernel mode... perhaps security? Ah, yes, I forgot, they did not implement the first idea that gelled in their station-wagons. The article goes on to state that "The day Microsoft encounters a major competitor whose strength arises from the community of game developers is the day game developers will get Microsoft's full, undivided attention.": divide and conquer!

Finally, when confronted with a new threat, the best strategy to keep your sheep^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers is to frighten them. Somehow I'm not losing any sleep about security issues that others might add...

Last Christmas, Riven was the big seller, with Quake II coming in second, and Myst still sitting at number 4. I still haven't touched Riven- wish it ran under Dosemu. Thanks go to Minga for sending us this story over at Bootnet.

Last Christmas, Riven was the big seller, with Quake II coming in second, and Myst still sitting at number 4. I still haven't touched Riven- wish it ran under Dosemu. Thanks go to Minga for sending us this story over at Bootnet.