Slashdot Mirror

celady writes: "From KurzweilAI.net, apparently DARPA, the main research and development center for the department of defense, is going to fund an all-terrain robot race . The robots will race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas completely without human intervention. This could prove useful in the battlefield someday. DARPA really has some interesting projects going on. This one is BORING compared to the Vortex Combustor and the Chip-Size Atomic Clock. Watch the DARPA site for updates."

Jadecristal writes: "From the contact info on the USB group contact page under Microsoft's record, one might get the impression that Tux worked for Microsoft. Perhaps he is being held against his will ... " Would any Microsoft employees care to disclose the whereabouts of a certain "Mr. Tux the penguin," and perhaps say which freezers he favors while in Redmond? Better yet, would any Microsoft employees like to comment on how many internal-to-Microsoft servers Mr. Tux currently powers?

Christian Winebrenner writes "RedHat seems to have seen the new licensing terms on rdist (background story: Pseudo-Free software...) and decided that the best solution to the problem is to recommend that users DOWNgrade to the previous version. Their RH 6.0 errata page offers the solution of ditching rdist 6.1.5 in favor of 6.1.0. Who knows how long it will be until we find that distributions will be riddled with "holes" from out of date non-free-for-commercial-use software? "

Adam Cody wrote in to note that this job on Microsoft's web site. It's a marketing position and the responsibilities include a competitive analysis of Linux. Should I apply?

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.