Slashdot Mirror

Actually, first implementations of generics come from the functionnal progrmming community, esp. Philip Wadler et al. So, the java genericity's genealogy would rather lead to Hindley/Milner type sytems, through Haskell

Your argument is no more credible than the curmudgeons who said that an electric piano sounds so unlike a real piano that it's a total waste, and nobody would ever perform a legitimate creative work using one.

Think "new tools at an artist's disposal", and "dawn of a new type of digital instrument" instead.

Yeah, except that as others have already pointed out, this is far from the first vocal synthesizer. It's at best an incremental improvement over the previous successes.

Besides VocalWriter, which has been around since 1997 (and hasn't been updated in that time, unfortunately), I'm not aware of any other easy-to-use singing synthesizers that are aimed at the average user or even average musician. But just about every speech synthesizer out there has been hacked to sing, e.g. Apple's Macintalk or Festival's
Flinger.

Yamaha's Vocaloid might sound better than those, but it's not about to fool anyone paying attention. Nor is it likely to be used as a musical instrument the way other synthesizers are. Why? Because there's no way to dynamically control what it says the way you can dynamically control a keyboard synthesizer or any other musical instrument, whether acoustic or electronic.

Thus the only way it could be used is in a recording studio, where it would have to be programmed carefully to "sing" a particular song.

Sorry about the rant. I love new technology, I just hate it when people claim things are the first ever or revolutionary when they're really just incremental improvements.

Or just google for "How to prove it"

Personally, I think the best examples to download are "The Easy Way" (song 15) and "K'ai - Eyes swim" (song 16).

While no where near perfect, Flinger and the samples really show where things are heading - I have said it before, but this type stuff (perfected, of course), plus tech like machinima (once again, as it becomes better) are truely going to alter what we think of movies, acting, etc - virtual actors, virtual singers, virtual movies...

XML checker results

The document appears to be well-formed. What gives?

Hmmm. I agree that it's hard to get excited about downloading from these particular onlines sources (nothing compares to the old emusic.com or just plain ripping from disc), but I have to disagree with the rest of what you're saying. CDs already seem kind chintzy to some of us who grew up in the era of vinyl. Gone are the days where you pull off the shrink wrap and out falls a lyric sheet, a booklet, pictures, other assorted gimcracks and geegaws. Gone are the days where cute tricks like locked grooves made listening to some vinyl a bit more interesting. Also gone: playing any 33 1/3 album at 45 for that Chipmunks sound, playing a wide hole 45 off center, picture discs, foldout covers, affordable indie singles, legible cover text, and probably a lot more.

To me, there is nothing less tactile than a smooth plastic disc. You can't even check the grooves to see how long the songs are! And those little booklets? Always printed on the same lame glossy paper, always printed with miniature type because that's the only way you can fit more than two words on a page. And those lame plastic cases. So easy to break, so annoying to attempt to replace.

For my part, I welcome the digital age. It means: custom playlists without changing physical media or time-consuming mix making, putting my mp3 server on shuffle and not hearing the same song twice for over a month, having Festival act as my own personal DJ, no more scratches, pops, dings on the physical media. The only thing missing is the packaging, which I've already pointed out has lost 99% of its enjoyment during the switch from vinyl to CDs anyway.

Anyway, that's my rant and I'm sticking to it. :)

Check out The Network CallerID Project, NCID. I've been using it for about a year, and it's very effective. You can use a simple user program to call festival (which I do), and voice announce the name of the caller (or not announce some callers, like telemarketers). If you turn the ringers on your phone off, you'll never be bothered again. The network capability lets my (802.11b connected) laptop display the information too, wherever I am in the house. Great software!

Why the need for a vertical take-off?

Any Harrier Jump Jet pilot in the Royal Navy will tell you that a heavier load can be lifted with the same amount of fuel if you take off horizintally and with a bit f help from the 'ski-jump' that was added to British Invincible-class aircraft carriers many years ago. A design for a horizontally launching/landing unmanned launcher called HOTOL was proposed to ESA by British Aerospace in the '80s but didn't get off the drawing board. There's another article here that describes the air-breathing ascent and the take-off trolley that would support it on the runway. Sounds a bit like Fireball XL5!

Penicillin couldn't be produced in commercial quantities until WWII.

It's quite easy to fit a spaceship inside a small blue box. Haven't you heard of transcendental engineering?

Perhaps you should read the TARDIS Manual, as such these elementary concepts are quite clearly spelled out.

Your question is directly answered here. ;-)

It's quite easy to fit a spaceship inside a small blue box. Haven't you heard of transcendental engineering?

Perhaps you should read the TARDIS Manual, as such these elementary concepts are quite clearly spelled out.

Your question is directly answered here. ;-)

This is not a hardware computing model, it's a new interconnect technology. So no.

As far as I know, any neural network is currently emulated on linear processing machines

The neural network group at Edinburgh University has been developing parallel neural network chips using analog technology for some time now. Because neural networks are very fault tolerant, the errors introduced by analog adders and multipliers is not important.

> 1. As a hiring manager, unless you go to a school I've heard of, in an English-speaking country, I'm probably not going to think very highly of your degree.

Your loss, but no offence. How many schools have you heard of?
A major difference between universities in the US and in some European coutries, is that European universities have to meet some standards to call themselves "University". The US has the best universities in the world as well as the worst. Countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium try hard to prevent self-proclaimed so-called universities from giving the official -- usually state sponsored -- universities a bad name. This knowledge may help unexperienced hiring managers to judge foreign degrees.

Of course, what ultimately matters is a person's skills - which are only indirectly related to the person's school. IMHO it's not too hard to get a degree on a "good" university with average skills while I've met several excellent techies with an MA degree from a "dubious" university.

If you're a techie already, go to a place where they don't teach "just" software engineering or computer science. Learn to do something useful with it. I'd go to one of the Edniburgh departments if I had a chance (sniff). Tubingen has a briliant group cognitive science / language. Amsterdam has rising star Johan van Benthem.

> 1. As a hiring manager, unless you go to a school I've heard of, in an English-speaking country, I'm probably not going to think very highly of your degree.

Your loss, but no offence. How many schools have you heard of?
A major difference between universities in the US and in some European coutries, is that European universities have to meet some standards to call themselves "University". The US has the best universities in the world as well as the worst. Countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium try hard to prevent self-proclaimed so-called universities from giving the official -- usually state sponsored -- universities a bad name. This knowledge may help unexperienced hiring managers to judge foreign degrees.

Of course, what ultimately matters is a person's skills - which are only indirectly related to the person's school. IMHO it's not too hard to get a degree on a "good" university with average skills while I've met several excellent techies with an MA degree from a "dubious" university.

If you're a techie already, go to a place where they don't teach "just" software engineering or computer science. Learn to do something useful with it. I'd go to one of the Edniburgh departments if I had a chance (sniff). Tubingen has a briliant group cognitive science / language. Amsterdam has rising star Johan van Benthem.

> 1. As a hiring manager, unless you go to a school I've heard of, in an English-speaking country, I'm probably not going to think very highly of your degree.

Your loss, but no offence. How many schools have you heard of?
A major difference between universities in the US and in some European coutries, is that European universities have to meet some standards to call themselves "University". The US has the best universities in the world as well as the worst. Countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium try hard to prevent self-proclaimed so-called universities from giving the official -- usually state sponsored -- universities a bad name. This knowledge may help unexperienced hiring managers to judge foreign degrees.

Of course, what ultimately matters is a person's skills - which are only indirectly related to the person's school. IMHO it's not too hard to get a degree on a "good" university with average skills while I've met several excellent techies with an MA degree from a "dubious" university.

If you're a techie already, go to a place where they don't teach "just" software engineering or computer science. Learn to do something useful with it. I'd go to one of the Edniburgh departments if I had a chance (sniff). Tubingen has a briliant group cognitive science / language. Amsterdam has rising star Johan van Benthem.

> 1. As a hiring manager, unless you go to a school I've heard of, in an English-speaking country, I'm probably not going to think very highly of your degree.

Your loss, but no offence. How many schools have you heard of?
A major difference between universities in the US and in some European coutries, is that European universities have to meet some standards to call themselves "University". The US has the best universities in the world as well as the worst. Countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium try hard to prevent self-proclaimed so-called universities from giving the official -- usually state sponsored -- universities a bad name. This knowledge may help unexperienced hiring managers to judge foreign degrees.

Of course, what ultimately matters is a person's skills - which are only indirectly related to the person's school. IMHO it's not too hard to get a degree on a "good" university with average skills while I've met several excellent techies with an MA degree from a "dubious" university.

If you're a techie already, go to a place where they don't teach "just" software engineering or computer science. Learn to do something useful with it. I'd go to one of the Edniburgh departments if I had a chance (sniff). Tubingen has a briliant group cognitive science / language. Amsterdam has rising star Johan van Benthem.

Here's a link" for other sad old geeks like me.

Maybe its stronger in the UK... both universities that I've studied/am studying at have had large scale deployements of linux to pretty much all computers used by researchers and students studying computer science related stuff... see here for example.

Besides how do you easilly find the volume name of a media with an unknown filesystem?

man 1 file

The 'auto' file system in Linux /etc/fstab does something similar.

So it goes like this: Detect that a disk has been inserted (most drive types provide a sense bit that can be polled twice a second), discover the type of file system, read the volume label (in some systems, it's the name of the root directory), and then create a symlink. Then, when the user holds down the eject button for more than half a second, sync and unmount the file system and kick out the disk. Notice that the last step won't work for disks that use completely mechanical ejects (e.g. 3.5" floppy), so I'd suggest syncing a second after a write and then unmounting based on polled drive door signals.

Gakh Nazgi Ilid/Albai/Golug - durub-uuri lata-nuut.
Udu takob-ishiz gund-ob Gazat-shakh-uuri. Krith Shara-uuri matuurz matat duumpuga.
Ash tug Shakhbuurz-uur Uliima-tab-ishi za, Uzg-Mordor-ishi amal fauthut burguuli.
Ash nazg durbatuluuk, ash nazg gimbatul,
Ash nazg thrakatuluuk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul,
Uzg-Mordor-ishi amal fauthut burguuli.

See the TolkLang mailinglist archive for the original source. I've got it formatted using the fonts described in the article here (MS Word docfile, sorry!).

See also this bracelet I engraved with the complete poem with a dremel. The copper under the gold plating gives an impression of fire. On the gift card I wrote "This doesn't work, which is probably a good thing."

You may ask why we 'shred' the genome in the first place? This has to do with current technical limitations of the size of a fragment that can be reliably sequenced at one time. It's as if our current 'scanners' only have flatbed areas of 1 square cm, making it necessary to do lots of individual scans of the large genome 'page' before re-assembly.

See, for example: http://nema.cap.ed.ac.uk/teaching/genomics/Genomic s3.html

There's a wind farm just outside Edinburgh which I've always thought looked pretty smart. Surreal but smart. The only crappy looking bits are the pylons carrying the power lines away.

Intel doesn't need to be defeated, just "competed".

Intel (and every other company) simply needs to be in competition, in a hotly-contested race to produce high quality products for the lowest price in a well-informed marketplace

Absence of competition permits, even encourages companies to produce lower quality products because they can charge high prices for them [1[PDF]][2[PDF]] and make a greater profit doing so.

If Intel hasn't done this so much yet, then it's to their credit, but without competition, nothing will prevent it from happening in the future.

I myself was thinking of using Debian, but I never heard of Festival... I'll definately look it up though.

Festival is a speech synthesis system. Under Debian, just type "apt-get install festival festival-doc" (and festival-dev if you want to use it in your own programs). It has a nice built-in Scheme-based command interpreter.

I think Debian is a great choice for vision impaired users. Take a look at the Debian Accessibility Project and Accessibility HOWTO. There are even speakup enabled boot floppies for Woody (Debian 3.0, the current stable version).

Also, take a look at BrlSpeak, a Braille and Speech Mini-Distribution of GNU/Linux. It is based on Debian, developed by Osvaldo La Rosa, visually impaired Debian user. Let me quote the website:

Objective:
BrlSpeak is here to make life easier for blind people who wish to install a GNU/Linux distribution on their computer WITHOUT ANY assistance from a sighted person. The objective is to create and develop a blindfriendly GNU/Linux distribution enabling a blind user:
a) To preconfigure the braille driver config file before running GNU/Linux
b) To compile the braille driver without having to see (or to hear)
c) To have the braille display immediately operational when booting GNU/Linux for the first time

BrlSpeak can be installed on a FAT partition. There's a 36MB .zip file or CD ISO9660 image for download.

There's also Free(b)deb, a Free(b)soft's specialized linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux. From the website:

The goal of the Free(b)deb project is to provide a specialized distribution of complete Debian GNU/Linux operating system including specialized software, which enables blind and visually impaired users to work with computer.

However I'm not sure how to install it and where to download it from.

(I don't talk about Blinux, as it has already been mentioned in the story.)

Good luck.

There was a space in your url. The real one is:
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/facts/socia l_effects.html

Bicicles are completely out of the question in any part of the world where the ground is coated with ice or snow for any significant part of the year. Bicicles are eather very slow or very dangerous. My english teacher in high school died just falling off of his. Falling off a bike or getting in an accident at any decent rate of speed can easily kill you.

We live in a specialized economy. We need to travel long distances to get to work. To get to my work's office on a bicicle would take about 3 hours. What is te economic impact of everyone only working a 4 hour day.

Bikes are certainly cheaper than cars but they only fill the needs of a very small population of people. How good are they at carrying your kids around town? Bringing your groceries home. Going to visit the relatives for christmas. Going to the beach. They are completely out of the question in any part of the world where the ground is coated with ice or snow for any significant part of the year.

People want money. If it could really save them lots of money, they would do it. It's just not realistic.

There was a space in your url. The real one is:
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/facts/socia l_effects.html

Bicicles are completely out of the question in any part of the world where the ground is coated with ice or snow for any significant part of the year.
Bicicles are eather very slow or very dangerous. My english teacher in high school died just falling off of his. Falling off a bike or getting in an accident at any decent rate of speed can easily kill you.

We live in a specialized economy. We need to travel long distances to get to work. To get to my work's office on a bicicle would take about 3 hours. What is te economic impact of everyone only working a 4 hour day.

Bikes are certainly cheaper than cars but they only fill the needs of a very small population of people. How good are they at carrying your kids around town? Bringing your groceries home. Going to visit the relatives for christmas. Going to the beach. They are completely out of the question in any part of the world where the ground is coated with ice or snow for any significant part of the year.

People want money. If it could really save them lots of money, they would do it. It's just not realistic.

dackroyd wrote:

England has weather that's quite unlikely to kill you.


Tell that to the hundreds of people who died from the "London Fog" of 1991, or the thousands from the one in 1952.

dackroyd wrote:

England has weather that's quite unlikely to kill you.


Tell that to the hundreds of people who died from the "London Fog" of 1991, or the thousands from the one in 1952.

As they state in the article, C. elegans have a life cycle of 7-10 days. As they also state in the article, the shuttle, at the end of its mission, crashed on Feb. 1. That was 89 days ago. But somehow they've only managed to go through 4-5 generations? It's a pretty simple calculation.

Also remember that life span is not equal to reproductive span. I.e., your average human can get to 75 or so, but can reproduce around 15. So a human could produce 5 generations before dying.

In addition, the page that's getting referenced here a lot says the life cycle takes 3 days, so I'm not sure where the article's author got his information.

With a life cycle of 3 days, 89 days later is almost 30 generations. But of course as other have pointed out the worms enter a dormant stage when they run out of food, which they may have done, leading us all the way back to: perhaps the article was correct. In number of generations, anyway; the lifecycle data appears to be off.

The lifecycle takes about 3 days at 20 deg.C.

Go here for more info (genetic) and a pic of them

# man cal
# cal 9 1752
September 1752
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

#

And Oregon Graduate Institute's CSLU Toolkit extends Festival with an implementation of Sable: an XML format that lets you mark up text with arbitrary timing, pitch and volume envelopes.

An of course there's Dictionaraoke!

Main Entry: dictionaraoke Pronunciation: 'dik-sh&-"ner-A-O-ke Definition: Audio clips from online dictionaries sing the hits of yesterday and today. The fun of karaoke meets the word power of the dictionary.

-Don

We were hoping AT&T would do a better job than IBM at supporting their voice synthesizer. IBM pulled the Linux version of ViaVoice off the market without so much as a peep to their adoring fans on Slashdot, and wiped all mention of the Linux version from their web server. (Goggle isn't even allowed to cache it.) After IBM milked the slashdot linux fanboy publicity for all it was worth, they appearently didn't see any purpose in actually SUPPORTING the product -- so once their libraries stopped working against the latest Gnu/Linux libraries (happy birthday RMS!), they dropped their Linux voice synthesizer product like a hot potato instead of bothering to recompile it and issue an update.

So we hoped AT&T would show more comittment to the promises they made on their web site about their flagship voice synthesizer product, but...

Has anyone actually tried buying a single user copy of Natural Voices from AT&T? YOU CAN'T ANYMORE! They used to sell the synthesizer for workstations and voices for competitive prices (in the 100s of dollars range). So we bought a few voices to evaluate, and sent some simple technical questions into the email address they provided for support, never receiving a reply.

After several weeks they never answered any of our questions, but we decided to buy some more voices to evaluate anyway. But by then, AT&T had pulled the consumer single user version of Natural Voices off of the market (and it took weeks of phone tag to find that out because they don't give out "technical" information on the phone, and they never answer their email support address).

Now if you want to buy a Natural Voice from AT&T, you have to buy the server edition for tens of thousands of dollars. Had their support not absolutely sucked, it might have been worth us paying such a high price, but no way we'd ever consider going with AT&T, after they demonstrated such horrible unresponsive service.

Actually it's a good thing we didn't go with AT&T's voice synthesizer, because we need support for voice authoring tools, and AT&T is incompetent in that regard, since they refuse to give out technical information over the phone, and never answer their email. No support whatsoever. Zilch. Nada. Forget about it.

Fortunately we found some excellent open source software that works together (and whose authors are MUCH more responsive than IBM or AT&T): the Festival Speech Synthesis System, the FestVox voice authoring tools, the small fast Flite runtime speech engine, the Edinburgh Speech Tools, the CSLU speech tools, the OGI Festival tools, and the MBROLA Multilingual Speech Project. This is state of the art research software, where IBM and AT&T got their ideas.

The quality of the commercial voices comes more from throwing lots of time and money into the production process -- the commercial software is not any more advanced than the open source research projects -- in fact the research projects inspired the commercial products!

-A speech synthesizer user who's been jerked around by AT&T and IBM, and is now happy to have no other choice but to use excellent open source software.

We were hoping AT&T would do a better job than IBM at supporting their voice synthesizer. IBM pulled the Linux version of ViaVoice off the market without so much as a peep to their adoring fans on Slashdot, and wiped all mention of the Linux version from their web server. (Goggle isn't even allowed to cache it.) After IBM milked the slashdot linux fanboy publicity for all it was worth, they appearently didn't see any purpose in actually SUPPORTING the product -- so once their libraries stopped working against the latest Gnu/Linux libraries (happy birthday RMS!), they dropped their Linux voice synthesizer product like a hot potato instead of bothering to recompile it and issue an update.

So we hoped AT&T would show more comittment to the promises they made on their web site about their flagship voice synthesizer product, but...

Has anyone actually tried buying a single user copy of Natural Voices from AT&T? YOU CAN'T ANYMORE! They used to sell the synthesizer for workstations and voices for competitive prices (in the 100s of dollars range). So we bought a few voices to evaluate, and sent some simple technical questions into the email address they provided for support, never receiving a reply.

After several weeks they never answered any of our questions, but we decided to buy some more voices to evaluate anyway. But by then, AT&T had pulled the consumer single user version of Natural Voices off of the market (and it took weeks of phone tag to find that out because they don't give out "technical" information on the phone, and they never answer their email support address).

Now if you want to buy a Natural Voice from AT&T, you have to buy the server edition for tens of thousands of dollars. Had their support not absolutely sucked, it might have been worth us paying such a high price, but no way we'd ever consider going with AT&T, after they demonstrated such horrible unresponsive service.

Actually it's a good thing we didn't go with AT&T's voice synthesizer, because we need support for voice authoring tools, and AT&T is incompetent in that regard, since they refuse to give out technical information over the phone, and never answer their email. No support whatsoever. Zilch. Nada. Forget about it.

Fortunately we found some excellent open source software that works together (and whose authors are MUCH more responsive than IBM or AT&T): the Festival Speech Synthesis System, the FestVox voice authoring tools, the small fast Flite runtime speech engine, the Edinburgh Speech Tools, the CSLU speech tools, the OGI Festival tools, and the MBROLA Multilingual Speech Project. This is state of the art research software, where IBM and AT&T got their ideas.

The quality of the commercial voices comes more from throwing lots of time and money into the production process -- the commercial software is not any more advanced than the open source research projects -- in fact the research projects inspired the commercial products!

-A speech synthesizer user who's been jerked around by AT&T and IBM, and is now happy to have no other choice but to use excellent open source software.

• dyphone-based synthesis where the database contains one dyphone (end of first sound + start of next sound) for each psossible sound combination. This approach is used in Festival. Dyphone-based synthesis will hardly sound better that in Festival because dyphones have to be modified artificially to fit every variation of pitch, duration and any other parameter that is needed to produce a given phrase.
• corpus-based synthesis takes a different approach where a large database of several hours of speech is recorded and manually labelled to mark the start and end of each sound. Such a database is used to extract the best and the longest sequence of dyphones during the production. This approach gives naturally sounding results for short sentences where intonation is not so important Given that the cost of developing a database for corpus synthesis may be orders of magnitude higher than for dyphone synthesis, there are very few companies that make them. Two companies offer a demo on the internet: ATT and Scansoft (former L&H) and

There is already freely available open source speech synthesis application for both linux and windows, called Festival created by The University of Edinburgh

There is already freely available open source speech synthesis application for both linux and windows, called Festival created by The University of Edinburgh

It sounds like Festival with a low-quality voice used. With open source, you get what you pay for.

cat document.txt | festival --tts!

I like using text to speech synthesis software such as Festival to have text read to me while I work. Granted it's not always the most articulate, it gets 99% of the job done just fine..

Try Festival from the University of Edinburgh. It's been available for years and the team continues to make improvements to the system all the time. Source is available here. In the past, the Systems Development Laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology has also experimented with using Festival for reading out documents in Indian languages, although I don't know the current status of the project.

Try Festival from the University of Edinburgh. It's been available for years and the team continues to make improvements to the system all the time. Source is available here. In the past, the Systems Development Laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology has also experimented with using Festival for reading out documents in Indian languages, although I don't know the current status of the project.

Have something like what Steven Hawking uses. It shouldn't be too complicated to build either.

What I can envisage is something that builds the words on screen, and outputs them to something like Festival. You could script this yourself with perl or python or something. Something like a Toshiba Libretto would be the perfect form factor.

The biggest problem would in fact be data entry. Obviously, any standard keyboard's keys would be too small to be usable, and any keyboard with 2" square keys would be too big. So the best bet would be to pry off the 80 odd existing keys, and replace them 10 to 20 large keys (making them is an excercise left to the reader), and set up some kind of key chording. If you get hold of a word list (and add any personal words, ie a names list, etc) you could also set up some kind of type ahead scheme.

All in all, very doable, and fairly inexpensive.

If you're using Linux on your iPaq, try Festival...

Key features of the Network Audio System include:

• Device-independent audio over the network
• Lots of audio file and data formats
• Can store sounds in server for rapid replay
• Extensive mixing, separating, and manipulation of audio data
• Simultaneous use of audio devices by multiple applications
• Use by a growing number of ISVs
• Small size
• Free! No obnoxious licensing terms

• Festival - The Festival Speech Synthesis System.
• mpg123 - a command line MP3 player
• GAIM - a free AOL IM client
• OpenOffice (StarOffice) - the (now opensourced) StarOffice Suite has built-in NAS support for the Solaris and Linux Platforms.
• The Qt Library - from Trolltech supports NAS natively. You will need to pass the '-system-nas-sound' to './configure' before building.
• libSDL - SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer library, now has native NAS support thanks to Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8}
• XAnim - the X Animation viewer
• XBoing - a blockout type X game
• XPilot - a multiplayer client/server space warfare game
• Xemacs - the best cross-plaform, cross-language IDE
• Alsaplayer - A NAS Output plugin written by Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8} is now supplied with the Alsaplayer distribution.
• X MultiMedia System (XMMS). A NAS Output plugin written by Willem Monsuwe is available at ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/willem/
• Wine. A NAS plugin written by Nicolas Escuder is now available with the WINE distrubution.

awk essential for pipe work.

you'll see it here used like
wget -O - http://domain/info.html | awk -f proc.awk | mysql -u news newsdb

rc shell and it's unix implmentation

Here is a great link if you want to visualize how this works.

Using remote controlled rats reminds me of those controversial military dolphin programmes that both the Soviets, and the Americans seemed to carry out.
Even though I'm not exactly an animal rights activist this still all sounds a bit... unnecessary. Especially when there are alternatives.

I worked briefly in a SAR robot project, while I was at Edinburgh University. Myself and two other MSc students got together and built 2 SAR robots, to participate in the SAR event at Robocup 2001, Seattle. Even though our project wasn't really ready in time (read, the heat-seeking robots rather chase the CNN cameraman than find victims, and didn't report at all to the base station) I did learn a lot from just being there.

For example, I learnt how difficult it is to remote control a robot using only its on-board cameras/sensors. One of Murphy's Urbies was due for repair when its human-operator managed to drive it down a flight of stairs, and I quote Murphy, "without ever touching the stairs". :)
And this difficulty is ever so larger when the robots go inside rubble, with lack of light, and the well known radio control problems/outages.
Human control also limits the number of robots you can deploy, assuming you need 1 operator per robot.

Autonomous robot swarms are only possible if the robots are small and cheap, so you can deploy dozens or hundreds and accept a number of 'losses'. But this approach has its own disadvantages, such as small size meaning less sensorial capabilities for example. What good are dozens of little crawlers that just step on top of the victim's heads without ever detecting them?

In the event debriefing meeting, where sponsored teams had to make a small presentation, this Few_Big_Expensive vs many_small_cheap issue was debated. I believe there must be a compromise, and whoever finds the right balance will be half-way there.

As far as rats... I'd rather hear about research into fluorescent heat-seeking 'intelligent' jelly, that is poured on top of the rubble, seeks victims, attaches itself around their body keeping them worm (but intelligent enough to stay away from eyes, hears, nose, and mouth) and nutritionally rich so the victim can eat it if required... ;)

He was a great speaker, his lecture was actually really funny in places. He joked about how rockets, by nature, tend to explode (just look at the early Chinese rockets centuries ago), so this one was really just fulfilling its mission prematurely. My favorite line was something like:

The primary navigation system failed at 37.126 seconds after take-off. The backup navigation system failed at 37.778 seconds after take-off for exactly the same reason. Reproducability is normally something scientists like to see - but not so much in this case.

1) Festival