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Listen To Woz, And Perhaps Type Madly

Posted by timothy on from the beowulf-cluster-of-yourselves dept.

Shawn King of The Mac Show Live talked a few days ago with Apple co-founder and knowledge-omnivore Steve (The Woz) Wozniak. Shawn graciously agreed to post the interview, formerly Quicktime only (downloadable or streaming), as an MP3 file -- so now most anyone can listen. This is an interview worth listening to: Woz talks about his lifelong motivations, his years with Apple (up to the present), OS X, the Newton, and what the future holds for him. He also talks about building TV jammers and the only prank he got caught for in high school, one which might not fly so well right now. (The interview starts about 55 minutes into the show, and lasts for nearly an hour.) What's this got to do with typing madly? Well, since Shawn's program is all-audio (no pictures, and only the barest explanitory text), it's a lot less useful to those on text-only or just-plain-slow links than it could be. Read on below for your chance to change that with just a few minutes of your time. Update: 10/20 20:43 GMT by T : Thanks to everyone who's volunteered to transcribe, and to the several alternates who are already in line! No need for more voluneers right now :)

Transcribing an hour of text takes a long time. But if you (yes, you!) are willing to transcribe a 3-minute (well. 3:15) chunk of this interview, I will spend my putative day off gluing chunks of interview together. Shoot me an email with "WozScript" in the subject if you'd like to participate, and I'll give the first volunteers (it shouldn't take that many) a randomly-drawn three-minute segment to type up, as well as more instructions on how to format it. No compensation except your name in lights, and the knowledge that lynx users everywhere appreciate your efforts. I'll update this story if and when the transcription is complete. (And if anyone can suggest a good Quicktime audio --> .ogg converter, Shawn and I would both appreciate it.)

7 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. This guy has vision by CmdrTroll · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I've always been impressed with Steve Wozniak - ever since I was a kid. I remember reading his autobiography several years ago, and he was frighteningly accurate in predicting many of the trends that have since hit the PC industry.

    I found it interesting that in this interview, he acknowledges that the industry has shifted to cheap, commodity hardware and that Apple continues to suffer from it - but he was absolutely correct in pointing out that blind brand loyalty by "artsy types" was keeping them in business. Though Steve's strengths are obviously technical in nature, he possesses an innate understanding of a lot of issues on the business side of things that helped to keep him ahead of the curve.

    -CT

    1. Re:This guy has vision by phillymjs · · Score: 3, Interesting

      ...but he was absolutely correct in pointing out that blind brand loyalty by "artsy types" was keeping them in business.

      I'm not an "artsy" type in the least. I'm a system integrator. After a long day of work fixing the piece of shit that is Windows, for unappreciative clients that get mad at me because the software they chose is constantly getting fucked up, I want to come home, sit down, and use a computer that works right all the time. As long as Apple continues to make computers that fit that criteria, I will be loyal to them.

      Once a month I rebuild my desktop, and I run Norton Disk Doctor quarterly as preventative maintenance. A virus? What's that? I saw one once on my Mac, in 1992. (MDEF, IIRC, a non-malicious virus that could be removed by a desktop rebuild).

      Being artsy or not has little to do with why people choose Macs.

      ~Philly

    2. Re:This guy has vision by AragornSonOfArathorn · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I second this... I am a student (not for long, though... done in December! hell yeah) and for years I've been a PC guy, but then one day last year I just got sick of dealing with Windows crap after my PC died. (I have and still do use Linux but that can be a pain too) and bought a G4 tower and put OS X on it. (I never would have gone to the Other Side if it wasn't for OS X... I'm not a a huge fan of Mac OS < OSX, I need/prefer UNIX) I now also have a PowerBook G4 (bought a few weeks before Apple introduced the new PBG4s... should have checked those Mac rumor sites more carefully... D'oh! Oh well, not a big deal) and I love how everything "Just Works", even X windows when installed via fink and combined with OroborOSX windowmanager... Just my 2 cents, sorry if this is a little incomprehensible, I haven't had enough coffee yet today :-)

      --
      sudo eat my shorts
  2. Re:Speech to text recognition by rcs2 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    However, it does not have to operate in real time, so could it be just as (or even more) accurate as dictation software? Could you make up for crappy quality with longer analysis time?

    --
    This is not a signature.
  3. File Sizes - Slashdot Poll by paulywog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    OK. So someone explain why the MP3 file is 20MB of audio only, where as the QuickTime is 17MB of audio AND video...

    a) Quick Time quality sucks.
    b) MP3 compression sucks.
    c) Cowboy Neal sucks.

  4. Re:Speech to text recognition by Evro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Summer 2000 I worked for a company that was testing some software from IBM based on their ViaVoice voice recognition software that would allow you to feed in an mpeg (video or audio) stream and the program would output a transcript of it. Honestly it was pretty bad at the time, but that was a long time ago and I don't have any idea what kind of progress has been made since then. It also had some other features like taking snapshots of the video and indexing them to the text and all sorts of cool stuff.

    Ahh, here it is: It's called CueVideo and it's aimed at Multimedia indexing: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/cuevideo/

    ---

    Here's an almost unrelated article: http://www-4.ibm.com/software/speech/news/20000825 -iw.html

    http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigmm/MM98/electronic_proc eedings/ponceleon/

    --
    rooooar
  5. On Listening by sakusha · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm listening to the interview right now, and I can assure you that much will be lost if you convert it to text. You can't hear Woz's tone, as he gets excited about some things, and his serious tone on others. Come on, listen to the man's words, this is a guy who is talking about his youth when he could barely stand to speak to people from sheer shyness, and now millions of people can listen to his voice all across the world through the personal computers that he popularized. It's worth hearing his voice.