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.)
Slashdot Mirror
yeah !
VI
PS: Eminem's mom gives good head.
A) Go from the mp3 to a high-quality ogg file. There are plenty of mp3-->ogg converters. And don't bitch about the quality, it's a freaking interview, notMozart.
B) On a related note, this would be a fascinating job for a text-to-speech editor. I say, slap the
entire interview through one, and then just edit. I'll bet it takes less than half the time.
Mad propz to all my dead OOG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMANS
I'm much more impressed with Steve Wozniak, and his marketing assistant, Steve Jobs, working out of a garage, with spare parts and gleanings, coming up with a better little cruncher than the blue behemoth, then getting venture capital to put it into mass production (after being turned down by HP, TI, etc., when they offere to give the design to them). Of course, they owe a debt to XEROX for the Macintosh operating system, who, in turn, owe a debt to a quirky academic out east for the invention of the "mouse".
The day-to-day travails of the IBM programmer are so amusing to most of us who are fortunate enough to avoid being one. It is like watching Charlie Chaplin trying to cook a shoe. $$$
Why?
Didn't you just post a link to the MP3 version?
MP3 -> Ogg should be trivial!
Is in Audion, but I'm not usre if it can QT -> ogg.
And insert small goatse.cx references throughout your segment. Try not to make it obvious, though!
Janie's got a gun.
:o)
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
Woz was on Digital Village last week for the full hour. A good interview, especially his thoughts about M$.
"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."
Which bring the question. What are the alternatives for a voice recognition application that sould take a sound sample and convert it to text? Sort of like OCR (Optical Character Recognition) softwares does with a scanned image?
OK, OK, but when is the mac going to get more mouse buttons??
Is it just me or are people using the phrase "Make no mistake" waaay to much ever since the terorist attacks, sheesh.
"Make no mistake! i WILL order a pizza for lunch!"
"I am going to the store to get a cup of coffee! Make no mistake about it!!!"
"MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT!! I WILL TAKE A NAP AND THEN WATCH THE YANKESS GAME!!!!"
way for people to overuse a phrase...
"Make no mistake about it! this formkey is invalid!"
This post is dedicated to the Ku Klux Klan.
Or from Quicktime to wav to ogg.
"No compensation except your name in lights, and the knowledge that lynx users everywhere appreciate your efforts."
Well tell both of those two remaining lynx users to get with the program and install IE.
I sware to christ, if this is the best use of your time for a saturday afternoon nowonder Linux development is stagnating...
The interview with Woz starts at T = 55:27
--
Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not "Athens," but "The world."
I am a fucking nigger.
I would gladly give you a 3:15 chunk of my time, but it's not going to do any good without knowing exactly what chunk to do. We need a list of what's being worked on so we don't end up with say, 1,000 copies of the first/last ten minutes!
Shouldn't be that hard to put up a dynamic page that shows what still needs to be transcribed...
-- Shamus
Bleah!
I thought we were suppsed to be geeks? Come on guys. Transcribing an hour of audio into text should take one line to fire up a voice recognition code, and no more time than the wall time required to listen to the interview..
There's a huge group of people hear who would love to see a free variant of *NIX that can compete with windows for the desktop market. I think that before this happens you're going to need to sit down, spend some time in your local technical library researching voice, image, pattern recognition algorithms.. I'd love to be able to type:
and get a transcribed version of a speech, or lecture notes.. How about combining this with an answering machine app to record and transcribe messages then send those messages to the IMAP server or atleast place them in a searchable database for future reference..This is way off-topic but it's something I started thinking about when rumors bagan floating around concerning Apple's iPhoto app.. I thought it would be pretty incredible if Apple could piece together an app to project photos onto an empirical basis set and then use the coefficients from that projection to sort images.. Think of it like a generalized face recognition routine only more useful..
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that gnome and kde are nice, but to take over the desktop market you we really need to crawl out of the box, and burn it to the ground!
At the risk of being called a Troll, shouldn't anyone who is really interested in hearing The Woz talk about Apple have Quicktime installed? Maybe they're trying to win over us Linux geeks.
Kindly ask them to join the rest of us in the 21st century. Failing that, euthanize them. In all seriousness, you know the world would be a much better place if that were to happen.
He is almost the exact opposite of William Gates III. He is the Anti-Gates! :-)
Its good to see he's still around.
Tmiothy,
;-)
OK, I'll tpye.
How long do I have, BTW?
TIA
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
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.
I actually found some info on the Woz just the other day. I thought it was kinda cool, but the same thing he discusses on his website.
Eggplants!
Ace
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/aw.nsf/techbios/CCD7 B0622FAB2F1788256A1B0057D13F looks like IBM is giving it away for free, NT 4.0/2000.
rooooar
I know that Nolan Bushnell was a key player in Atari's early years, and that the Amiga and Atari ST were actually "swapped" between companies where execs "jumped ship" - but what about Commodore's early years?
I took a quick look for historical links, and came up pretty much empty-handed. Anyone have better resources?
db
Cig:
ôô
slashdot is fucked
Plenty of other references on Steve's site, as well...
db
Cig:
ôô
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.
Just 4 easy steps:
1) Pick up your phone and dial the voice transcription service (any number will do)
2) Give the transcription start command: "bin laden"
3) Play the sample to be transcribed
4) E-mail carnivore@fbi.gov to receive your free transcript!
At LinuxWorld in San Francisco, Geoff Harrison (sp?), co-author of the Enlightenment window manager, talked about text/speech conversion. If I recall his talk correctly, most proprietary voice recognition software is derived from the free sphinx system developed at Carnegie-Mellon University, which also has a sourceforge area. The web page at CMU talks about a sphinx3 program that is slower but more accurate, which sounds like a better fit for transcribing a previously recorded interview, but I did not see a link to the source code for it.
Geoff's employer, Cepstral, also claims to have released some related software under "relatively liberal" permissions. (Sorry, I could not find any download links or texts of the corresponding copying permissions.)
The sphinx2 copying permissions have an advertising restriction similar to the one that made the old BSD copying conditions GPL incompatible but "free" in the opinion of the Free Software Foundation. I do not know about the situtation with sphinx, sphinx3 or any Cepstral contributions.
I say it takes four times as long.
I have a woman and money. Life is good.
Sorry, I thought I checked all of my links. The sphinx2 sourceforge links should be http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/.
My girlfriend works here, they might have the job for you...
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Thanks for the opportunity to transcribe, Tim! Here is to hoping no one finds any glaring problems with my section!!
"...doesn't lead a multi-millionaire lifestyle"
Well he does drive a Hummer and likes to pay for things in stacks of two dollar bills...
The Quicktime clip was encoded using the QDesign Music 2 codec as a16 bit Mono recording at 22.05kHz.
Note: the sound is a little hollow.. I imagine the mp3 file sounds about the same, and the compression could probably be better if the signal had not been compressed on the fly, i.e. off-line compression can be better because the whole track is known and the optimization routine could be tuned to minimize the file size.
I have several machines at home (SGI Octane, Sun Ultra 2, several x86 PCs) though only two are Macs. One is an old PowerMac 8600, the other is a much newer iBook 500. I really haven't experienced the crashing so many folks are talking about. Back when my 8600 was running Mac OS 8.5 and Internet Explorer 4.0 it would freeze up on me every now and then, but overall both machines are very stable, even when running (gasp!) MS Mac Office 98, MS Mac Office 2001, and IE 5.0. Right now the 8600 is running Mac OS 8.6 and the iBook is running 9.1. My only real complaints right now are that IE 5.0 will sometimes stall for about 20 seconds while rendering a page. LPR printing to printers on my unix boxen is somewhat limited in flexibility. NFS clients for Mac OS 8.X/9.X are pricey. Hopefully OS X and OmniWeb will
:( But that's ok, I can't afford any more expensive ram for my 8600 anyway!
I have heard, though, some major horror stories about iMac/iBook/G3/G4 stability with versions of Mac OS prior to 9.1, especially when using USB devices. Luckilly 9.1 and 9.2.1 are a free upgrade to 9.X. 8.6 is the free upgrade to 8.5.X. There is no free upgrade from 8.X to 9.X.
If a hundred Slashdotters spend a thousand minutes typing out 20 million bytes worth of audio, will it be Shakespeare?
Or something like that...
-R
Me
Well that certainly scores a 5 on the Richter scale.
if they offered a trade in program for those who are interested. I mean, not everyone is going to want a computer, but those who do can trade up their computer and Ford can give those unwanted computers to charity. That gives Ford a nice tax write off. Furthermore, you look good to everyone. I mean, you are give to charity, you are upgrading your workforce's computers, and you make a little money back in the form of tax savings. Seems a little smarter to me. I wish my employer at least made the effort that Ford did.
Quicktime is a wrapper format. It works at a nigher layer than the actual codec, which can be be any number of format,s but is usually Sorenson.
Sorenson is exclusively licensed to apple. The Linux programs that play and make Quicktime fils do so with other codecs. You can play the films made on Linux back under Windows Quicktime, but 99.95% of the content avaliable on the web won't play under these Linux players, because they're Sorenson, and the players don't support Sorenson.
For Quicktime under Linux, use Codeweavers crossover
Woz's nephew from Gunn High School in Palo Alto was the biggest asshole around. He would go around telling everyone he demanded respect since his uncle was so rich. The short little fat prick used to go around advocating Apple as well.
See for yourself in this article. (You'll have to search for "Steve" or something...) In the famous words of Johnny Carson: "I did not know that!" ;-p
db
Cig:
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Nolan Bushnell hires Steve Jobs to create Breakout. Jobs joins with Steve Wozniak and design the game in five days. Bushnell pays Jobs $5,000; Jobs pays $350 to Wozniak, and takes sole credit for Breakout.
taken from The Atari Timeline
I'll catch up l8tr...goin for pizza...;-()
db
Cig:
ôô
This is a QuickTime AUDIO file. There is no Sorenson audio codec, therefore it's not likely to be encoded with Sorenson.
I record weekly speeches to post on a website. The best format for recording speech I found was Windows Media format. However, due to my aversion to MS, I switched to RealAudio, which was still good, but not quite as good as WMA. I use RealAudio 16KB/s, which is perfect quality for my needs. Is there an open-source alternative that offers comparable voice compression?
I've heard said that he usually keeps a couple virgin powerbooks in his trunk to give to people he meets who he thinks need to be evangelized.
Kevin Fox
"...and likes to pay for things in stacks of two dollar bills."
This is the mark of a multi-milionaire lifestyle? Eccentric? Yes, but I could go to the bank and use $2 bills instead of $20 yuppie food stamps. doesn't make me a millionaire, any more than using sacabucks.
Kevin Fox
....a part of the Guardian interview....
Do you have any favourite sites?
Macintosh hardware and software developers and the Geek Culture cartoon (see www.geekculture.com/)
what Woz thinks the "new thingy" by apple is going to be?
.avi).
/. fans camping out for tickets?
MP3 player (enuf of those) is one thought, but I personally think the kickin ass device would be a Portable DivX player...Imagine an iBook screen, with a (DPg3?), ffmpeg codec (divx.jamby.net for you X.1 users and get the "old player" divx.max.st to "doctor" the
DivX, maybe DVD, to go and music... Stripped down OS X...drool.
On a G4-400 DivX is *flawless* videowise.
Sound, depends on the datarate, it seems.
I liked when he called "Dr. Mac" an hourse' d'ourve..heh, cute...and Dr. Mac's comment about X.1 of "it's safe now. He recommend for 10.1 don't pay 129 bucks to beta test.
Moose.
ps. Does the lack of slash dot posts mean there is no enthusiams about these topics, or are all the LOTR
pps. See my rant in the LOTR topic if you feel the need to mod ppl down for joking around.
Get a grip/clue/BJ/sense of humor, something...if you can't appreciate my sense of humor...dammit, that is *your* problem.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
You don't have to be rich to pay for things with $2 bills. You just have to have a warped sense of humor, which Woz has. I happen to think that few things are funnier than watching your average 16 year-old Taco Bell counter-jockey's reaction to getting handed a few $2 bills as payment for your meal. Simply priceless.
~Philly
(if you want it)
In the interview he was asked about os X.
The response was he was "burned" pretty badly by the pre X.1, but Mail, utilities and such (with mention to Office for X, too) everything in X.1 "seemed 'good enough'".
Correct me if I am wrong, please, but is that not a statement normally associated with Microsoft's applications? Even in the Microsoft, Linux, Unix and Mac camp's I've heard this so much it stood out as if shouted from a rooftop.
Tell me honestly; Is that comment a compliment or a slap in the face?
I'm still mulling it over.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
The closest to a Woz that Commodore had was Chuck Peddle, who designed the 6502 which Apple, Atari, Commodore et al all used. He also built the PET.
commodorehistory.com omits quite a few useful details - for example, it talks about the Amiga and AmigaDOS but is silent on Dr. Tim King, whose team was responsible for the upper layers of AmigaDOS, and who was later involved in the Great Amiga Transputer Experiment. There's plenty of data out there, though.
i'd rather just talk to my friend who knows him personally =P
wouldn't have laughed - or was he still there?
db
Cig:
ôô
Anyone have a non-Fraunhofer conversion? The one they have out there is not working very well.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
... but don't you think there is a slight chance they'd use Quicktime instead of DivX;)?
A portable quicktime (and mp3) player would be interesting, with a case shaped like the software QT player.
DCMonkey
I scoured all the comments, and if the link to the transcribed text is there, I missed it.
So he leads the lifestyle of a GI.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
You're right. The audio track is encoded using the QDesign Music 2 codec
You can install 9.1 on the 8600 off of the CD you got with the iBook... it should work fine.
9.2.1 probably wont run on the 8600 however. We have 9.1 running on an old 7500 at work (updated with a 266 MHz G3 card) but 9.2.1 wont install on it.
If you can't run 9.1 on the 8600, consider running 8.6 (8.6.1), it was much faster and more stable than 8.5.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
When you are looking to get all that stuff included and have a complete system that can do a lot of things out of the box, you will pay less in the end and do more with a Mac. If you are looking for a bare-bones system to run Linux, then yes, Macs look expensive.
... it doesn't take into account "value" as opposed to just "sticker price".
Herein lies my objections to buying a Mac. Apple forces you to buy the kitchen sink in addition to their very limited set of hardware offerings. Perhaps I don't want a bare bones system but I don't want want the kitchen sink either. Why does Apple force me to buy all these additional peices? Most people want to buy the system that meets their needs and are unwilling to pay for what they think are extraneous features. Cos that's how Apple pads their bottom line of course! Tacking on all those extras that most people don't use adds to Apples bottom line and takes money needlessly out of my pocket. No thanks.
Saying that "Macs are expensive", though
You say that Macs are a good value but for most people they are not. In order for a computer to be a good value it must provide me with precisely the correct amount of utility. Apple adds lots of gadgets that while they may have a certain coolness factor the also add a lot to the price tag. It would be fair to say that Macs charge a reasonable price for the number of features that their computers have but to say that they're a good value isn't quite true in my eyes. As I stated earlier most people don't want or need all the extra features that Apple won't allow you to strip off. Until Apple opens their hardware offerings and making their machines much more configurable they are and most likely will remain be a niche player.
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
I try and use the best stuff available. For this I would use wma or mp3 (most likely mp3). I know people are averse to wma, but I don't mind as long as its on Windows Media Player 6.4 .
The rest of the media player are loaded with useless rubbish (ie skins) that just bloat the software unnecessarily. Real Player is the same with all its loaded rubbish. Ditto quicktime (although i really do like the format).
This is why I like MP3 - no unnecessary bloatware just to listen to something!
One can trick the installer to doing the update on an 8600 and then replace a few critical resources and get 9.2.1 up and running. There have been a few discussions on how to do it at xlr8yourmac and in the macfixit.com forums. I don't know what you good it does however.
I think that if you install Mac OS X on the 8600 (through a few nifty hacks availabe at Otherworldcomputing) and get 9.2.1 installed, the classic environment is supposed to be more stable. I have yet to get them both working on my 8600 with a G4 upgrade. 10.0.4 works fine with both the 8600/604e and the upgraded 8600/G4, but I haven't gotten 10.1 to install yet.
The best trick for this I have heard is to get yourself a copy of IBM ViaVoice and train it carefully for your voice. then, mike youself up, and play back the sound you want transcribed, and repeat it into the viavoice mike. It gets transcribed beautifully, becasue it is in your voice. This lets you do near real-time transcription This process is called 'Hullfishing' after its creator, Steve Hullfish
The fact that he was shafted by Jobs, and doesn't lead a multi-millionaire lifestyle is testament to this. He did it for the love.
This is a really ignorant comment... i think you COULD make the arguement that job's shafted him (even more than once if you know your apple history) but wozniak came out of apple with a TON of money, hundreds of millions of dollars.
The problem was that he blew it all, literally. The guy decided to fund all sorts of things, namely a company trying to make a universal remote... but i believe the thing that sucked away most of his money was when he got it into his head that he could be a concert promoter, and lost his shirt.
Speaking of which, why are so many pr0n .avi's "div2" codec, which doesn't exist?
Repeated reinstallations of whatever that 4.0 codec package is and that 3.11 alpha one (any order) do NOT work.
Win 98, what do I do?