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
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.
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?
The interview with Woz starts at T = 55:27
--
Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not "Athens," but "The world."
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!
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
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.
Sorry, I thought I checked all of my links. The sphinx2 sourceforge links should be http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/.
who, in turn, owe a debt to a quirky academic out east for the invention of the "mouse".
. So, it might be safe to say Xerox owes their GUI to someone SRI who owes Turing who owes Grunt for discovering fire.
The mouse and hypertext was invented by the Englebart team at SRI in Menlo Park, CA (on Ravenswood near a really good bar, coffee shop and book store).
The original 1968 presentation which includes the world's introduction to hypertext and windowing is available on video at: http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
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
If you don't like the Apple optical mouse, you can sell it for $40 on eBay, which is more than you paid for it with your system.
... they are not high. You just have to realize that Apple doesn't have any low-end machines. They all have 802.11 antennaes and slots (the high-end PowerBook has the $99 card included, too), they all have FireWire, they all have Mac OS X (equivalent to Windows XP Pro, not Home), they all have iMovie and iTunes software (best-of-breed software, not LE stuff), they all have TV out (except the PowerMac), they all have the best-quality displays. They all have Software Update, which is system software that checks once a day/week/user's-choice with Apple and updates everything that came with the box automatically, just asking the user for permission and an administrative password, including drivers, security updates, bundled apps. There are 10 other features like that, too, like CD/DVD burning in the Finder (4.5GB to a $6 DVD-R in 20 minutes in the background), or DiskCopy, which images any kind of disc to a file you can mount as if it were still a disk, so you can take game CD's with you on the road as a 300MB compressed file on your monster hard disk ($99 for a Windows software that does this). 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. Saying that "Macs are expensive", though ... it doesn't take into account "value" as opposed to just "sticker price".
... they want people to come in and see what you get for your money, to see that the PowerPC chips are very high performance, even though they are small, low-power, and low-clock-speed. It's a pleasure to buy and work with their stuff.
When you cross platforms, you realize that there are a lot of inherant assumptions in each platform. If you use your right mouse button all day long, it's hard to imagine a system where it's not needed. The Mac has a pervasive, context-sensitive, "infinitely-deep" menu bar (you can't overshoot it since it's at the edge of the display). It's easy to slam your cursor up there and hit any particular menu in no time at all. If the menu bar were smaller, and sitting between a row of buttons and a window title bar, then there would be more utility in context menus. It's just a different approach. Windows users go "right-click / New Folder" and Mac users go "File > New Folder". The Mac user will be faster, I guarantee it, if they have used a Mac for more than a week. And if you want to work the Windows way, that is available too. Plug the same USB mouse from your Windows machine into a Mac and it works just fine, with scroller and multiple buttons and context menus.
I love the Apple mouse I got with my PowerMac G4, and I just bought an identical mouse for $59 to use with my PowerBook G4. They are great mouses. Good to the hands, easy to use, easy to travel with because there are no pieces to fall off (the only moving part is an internal hinge).
> especially with high prices that Apple is
> already charging them
Check out today's Mac prices
That's why Apple is opening stores where all the display products are plugged-in, working, even with third-party software installed and ready to use, so you can try it out before buying