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Audio Download: Linux Kernel to be on Radio
cyber_rigger writes: "The Linux Kernel is to have a (spoken) reading on Radio Free Linux and some other regular radio station throughout the world.
http://radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux/
I guess this makes Linux offically 'free as in speech.'
'The Linux kernel contains 4,141,432 lines of code. Reading
the entire kernel will take an estimated 14253.43 hours, or
593.89 days. Free Radio Linux begins transmission on
February 3, 2002, the fourth anniversary of the term "Open
Source."'" If only the mysterious numbers stations would open their source as well.
This is done via computer generated speach. :-)
Will there be anyone listening?
Or will someone go and have a computer listen to the transmission and turn it back into code
George
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
Oh yeah, this is really useful :PPP
;P
Even art, if to be appreciated, has to be observed. If you can call this art.
How lame
Try http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=numbe r+stations for more info on number stations...
I'm not a karma whore I'm a karma whores mate and I'm only whoring karma cos tha karma whore is late
Excellent! now those little green men out there in other planetary systems will receive something useful in the radio transmissions from earth instead of endless daytime TV re-runs... but how many thousands of years will it take to get there?
Can they even generate speech fast enough to keep up with the huge patches?
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Is it going to try to read it off like words or will it spell everything out? And what about code comments?
Also, can we submit bug reports to the radio station now? Heh.
-- Dan
Will they also read patches while they arrive?
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
Can anyone think of any reason for this?
And does anyone plan to listen for more than 30 seconds?
Cruise TT
I dare someone to give me an explanation of why this isn't a total waste of time and effort. Shouldn't you geeks be jamming these spare cycles into some distributed whatchama-fuck, like SETI@home, protein research, or at least crypto?
And we thought Torvalds took a while to get the new kernals out!
I am Jack's HTTP Server
...the PI channel, a channel dedicated to dictating the sequencial numbers of pi, went off the air today. Apparently, their Neilson ratings dropped to zero five seconds after they went on the air. No later had the digits "1415926" been read before the plug was pulled.
"I don't understand," says Ira Tional, promotional manager of the PI channel. "I thought everyone loved pi, and they could now get it 24-7!" Tional thought that perhaps if they had started the channel with guest stars doing the reading, such as Drew Carey or Britany Spears, the PI channel wouldn't have come to such an abbrupt halt. "But for some reason, they told me I was being too irrational."
But it was in a machine readable form, so a little bit more advanced technology...
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
Why is the link for the 'numbers station' pointing to slashdot.org?
dave
Personally I think this is great. In a minimalist sort of way I really dig these sorts of things. I dig monitors in my room that show the airplanes in the skies. ... I dig 4 measure beat clips playing on a speaker in the corner in the bathroom really softly. ... I dig old laptops playing Sim City (black and white) with the time slowed down to real-time... or on normal and let people check on the village when they come over and visit. I could see myself setting up a little speaker somewhere just to play back the linux kernal. I am actually excited. :)
I am Jack's HTTP Server
slash kernel slash sched dot c slash asterisk line break asterisk (...) 1998-12-28 Implemented better SMP scheduling by Ingo Molnar
Dang! It's the vanilla kernel where are user mode Linux and Alan's cool toys ?
switches station
Silmarillion. Spoken. Again.
switches station again
eight dot three four six minus a dash greather than c zero wb zero yn dot eat...
Yay, they've got Reiser in this one, but they're still reciteing the console driver, it'll be 3 days before we get to the filesystem
switches stations frantically
hash include less-than linux slash config dot h NO NO GET OUT OF HERE WHAT ARE YOU DOING ?
Hello, I am Richard M. Stallman and you are being deceived, for it takes much more than a kernel to get a computer going. Here are 3 billion lines of GNU code that this radio hasn't read aloud yet. [DOOR SLAMS] Tee hee, and how do you think you get those tiny little icons on the screen ? Here's the XFree86 source to be read.
turns off radio, goes to slashdot, picks cowboyneal option on poll
How on Earth did they persuade regular radio stations to go along with this?
Kernel.org is down again?
You know what I'M gonna be listening to for the next year and a half.
Before this, it was test patterns. I consider this a lateral move.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Just how many people will be listening to this all day long, waiting to hear "fsck me gently with a chainsaw" (arch/sparc/kernel/ptrace.c) on public radio for the first time? ^_^
Also, how long will it then take before "concerned parents" get the project off the air? >_<
np: Phonem - Decay (Arovane/Phonem - Aer (Valid))
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
I listened in for a bit and it was very confusing. The punctuation marks especially have very confusing names and not enough pause between them. =( came out as: equals..... signpar-en-the-sis ... very confusing. And why "traditional hyphen"?
It also mispronounced "Linus Torvalds". How hard would it have been to sample Linus' name properly?
Of course, these are all things that can be improved as time goes on and I do hope they will actually do so.
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
disregard that post, I misread the /. page
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Is that radio station going to read the f*** word in the code or just bleep it out?
:)
I had a listen, and it's a bit bland. Hard to listen to.
It needs a bit of spice - a drum loop, some samples, and a bit of scratching. Give it a bit of 'old school' Hip-Hop.
f-f-f-for
LEFT paren
i-i-i-i
equals
z-z-z-zero
s-s-s-semicolon !
...
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
would have thought this is a x-rate channel when they hear this:
/* fuck me plenty */
arch/sparc/kernel/process.c:
I had a listen, and it's a bit bland. Hard to listen to.
It needs a bit of spice - a drum loop, some samples, and a bit of scratching. Give it a bit of 'old school' Hip-Hop.
[boom blat]
[bo-boom-boom-blat]
f-f-f-for [blat]
[bo-boom-boom-blat]
LEFT paren [blat]
[bo-boom-boom-blat]
i-i-i-i [blat]
[bo-boom-boom-blat]
equals [blat]
[bo-boom-boom-blat]
z-z-z-zero
[scratch-hctarcs-scratch-hctarcs]
s-s-s-semicolon !
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
593.89 days?!? I sure hope they have commercial/toilet breaks!
...should be a radio station that reads Windows binary hexcode.
That way they could prove that there are situations when there's no real difference between open source and closed source. It's both gibberish (as a radio show, that is).
(I know I'll get mod'ed down for this, but please don't just write this off as an anti-american troll before reading it. Some of my best friends are american.)
Only in the United States of America could anyone think that this is a good idea. How is it that anyone can think that a symbolic action like this could change the reality of whether the kernal is actually 'Free Speech' or not?
It strikes me as in some ways similar to those people who secretly walk along an overgrown and disused public right-of-way once every 20 years just to make sure it can't be closed down. It doesn't actually achieve anything - it's just fiddling about with legal technicalities.
Why only the United States? Well, similar things might happen here in the UK, but we have not yet become quite such a litigation- and legally-obsessed nation as the USA. Also, the US preoccupation with 'free speech' is something most Brits just don't get.
Ok, now watch all that hard-earned karma evaporate...
I was disappointed by the bad speech encoding. I had expected in 2002 you'd actually be able to synthesize a voice that sounds close to human or at least be understandable. The old amiga 500 had a utility that was much more understandable than this is.
I don't know about the Amiga but I had an old TI99-4A that had a speech synthesis module. It was quite good at reading most words but had a built in list of words it could read. You could get it to read other words but it meant that you had to express the word in a special way so that the module could pronounce it properly. That really defeats the point of text to speech.
I think text to speech has come on a long way since those days but it seems like slow progress which is due to the complexity of the subject. There is a good open source text to speech engine called Festival. You can test it with your own text here
.perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
i've decided that the kernel just doesn;t do what I want so I'm forking the broadcast.
/jk
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Eeeeek.....I was not expecting it to be a
computer-generated voice! That was creepy!
On the other hand, it would sound pretty interesting as background to industrial/techno songs or maybe some Pink Floyd (which I'm sure it will be used for in not too long a while).
I'd be more impressed if they steered the bot so it began reading out loud the DeCSS code and other forbidden code over and over. Then it really would be about free speech...
gzip'ed or bzip2'ed? (that's a joke BTW, for the dork who is going to no doubt take me seriously and reply at length.)
Perhaps if someone piped their radio through their speech recognition software, to get this transmission back into some compilable form, we might be able to finally get back to legendary Microsoft stability. (now this, is sarcasm.)
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
i don't know what the "numbers stations" link was supposed to be, but i'm pretty sure it's referencing the shortwave stations that are the subject of the conet project. If anyone knows of some online recordings of these, I'd love to hear them, but I'm not going to shell out $$ to listen to people read numbers.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Why the linux kernel???
Why not start reading from the Project Gutenberg files instead, something that would support 'open' and 'free' concepts, but at the same time be useful and improving...
It sounds like the new Radiohead album ;-)
Nobody believes the official spokesman, but everybody trusts an unidentified source. -- Ron Nesen
It's all codswallop this morning ... where's my goddamned newspaper!!??!!
:wq
... and I'm not sure what that bit about the Illodium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator was all about. That voice sounds familiar though ...
I'm surprised noone has notices that the station still hasn't been slashdotted! They are streaming with the experimental icecast2 server. I'd say that's pretty impressive.
Thanks to all who are making this possible. Especially Monty, Ogg/Vorbis rocks!
I believe that quote belongs to Tannenbaum.
Its from Computer Networks: Third Edition.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
See ERCB: Computer Networks X 2 for more info.
Anonymous posts are filtered.
Not mine, fortune(6) from OpenBSD 2.9, is that a bug Theo would like to hear about? *grin*
"Unix is not a "A-ha" experience, it is more of a "holy-shit" experience."
- Colin McFadyen in alt.folklore.computers
To fund it, their gonna hide advertising in the code - e.g. "printf("This kernel sponsered by Pepsi, for a coders everywhere");"
After the first month, all the advertisers will pull out because the listener base = 5.
When they've finished, someone will ring up telling them that they made a mistake in line 2,432,243 it was "x" instead of "y".
And Microsoft will probably have something to say about it all being evil...
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I gotta say, I'm all for cool and geeky ideas for their own sake. But this just strikes me as a major waste of time, effort, and especially bandwidth.
It'd take a lot of spam mail to equate to an audiobroad cast that long.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
In other news, TimepassTown placed signs outside Redmond stating that it urgently needed shorthand writers, who would work for about a year of two in twelve hour shifts.
That's the stupidest Thing I've heard in a long time.
What's the point?
Don't you all see, this is what it is going to take to prove to the rest of the universe that we actually are worth talking to.
/cvs/linux-2.4-xfs/linux/Makefile,v
The first interstellar message we receive will start out:
RCS file:
retrieving revision 1.146
diff -r1.146 Makefile
www.eFax.com are spammers
Just when I think I've finally, after much effort, understood how navel-staring and just plain stupid the Linux crowd can get, they prove me wrong.
It would be interesting to have a radio talk show, which could be carried on the web, that would take a single module per episode, and discuss it.
Today on Linux radio weekly we have the module blah.c for discussion, joining us are, so and so.
A bit of discussion, and open up to some questions. Could be quite educational
I was just thinking about the atomic time signal that is sent around the globe and how clocks set themselves to the signals.
Perhaps we could download and install new kernels and mods just by tuning in the channel. Perfect for newbies or the dialup-bandwidth challenged.
/*
USB support sponsored by
KFC - Try the Kernel's special recipe today
Pepsi - The Choice of a GNU Generation
Raid - Kills bugs dead
*/
Coding Blog
amen.
IMHO, this is a tremendous waste of resources.
What is with all of the background noise? It sounds like it is on a loop instead of being real noise. Are they just trying to make it sound like a cool "Contact" sort of transmission?
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I'll let you submit it. ;)
Anonymous posts are filtered.
OK, you could use this as a rather inefficient way of getting software to remote area - have a text-to-speech program "read" the code, broadcast it on the radio, and tape it at your location. Then, play the recording back to a voice-recognition program (should be easier if the speech was computer-generated). You could probably even do this a double speed or more, right? Only, how the heck do you implement error correcting?
---------------
Vpered na Mars!
I'm sure the people with various diabilities will love this.. Now they can start submitting patches and the like! Just will be a bit out of date, but lets see Windows have accessibility like this!
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
I want to play the part of a memory manager or an interrupt handler. That'd be SO COOL!
I can't help thinking this is really cool in a sick sort of way, but you'd hope they could have used a text-to-speech that sounded a bit nicer...
Anyone knows where to get the Lyrics and/or Tabs for this? I want to do a PunkRock-Cover of it...
X
Boycot? Blackout? Subscriptions?
I don't care!
vertical bar d vertical bar... f vertical bar f vertical bar f vertical bar ... plus sign hyphen minus plus sign hyphen minus plus sign hyphen minus plus sign hyphen minus vertical bar vertical bar veritcal b vertical bar b verictal bar...
No, that is not the transcript.
The transcript reads like this:
Three point one four one five nine two six... Oh, I've just been handed a note from our program director that we are to be preempted permanently by Loveline. This is John Doe signing off.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
What a nice gesture, for Stephen Hawking to read the whole thing!
This will be big. Soon loads of famous people will call in to read small parts.
sigfault. comment dumped.
WTF? :)
Are you serious? If not id mod you +1 troll if i could. But then againg you probably are serious...
People have made songs with DeCSS for lyrics
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
I was listening and it just started doing weird electronic beep beats and a guy starting talking in the background?! I think they are trying for the alien mysterious tranmission thing.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Geez, doesn't Steven Hawking have anything better to do with his time???? :)
On an aside, the voice just changed for me to some synthetic woman. Is Ananova moonlighting?
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!