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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.

41 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Number Stations on DMOZ by hardcode · · Score: 2

    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

    1. Re:Number Stations on DMOZ by Eil · · Score: 2


      No sites matching your query were found in the Open Directory.

      Try your search on one of these search engines that incorporate Open Directory data in their results:

      Netscape
      Google
      AOL
      Lycos

  2. What Kernel revision? by mESSDan · · Score: 4, Funny

    Also, can we submit bug reports to the radio station now? Heh.

    --

    -- Dan
    1. Re:What Kernel revision? by Lord+Sauron · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yeah. And instead of the top 10 hits, they have the top ten patches.

    2. Re:What Kernel revision? by Molina+the+Bofh · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yeah. I imagine some guy calling the radio station:

      DJ: Hi, you're live now. What's your name?

      guy: David.

      DJ: And what music do you want, son ?

      guy: I want the preemptible kernel patch.

      DJ: Oh, so you like low latency, uh ?

      guy: Yep. I sure do.

      DJ: Ok, here it goes. We'll now play Preemptible Kernel Patch Opus 1, No. 1. Trio Sonata in E Minor

      --

      -
      Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
  3. 593.89 days == 1.63 years == quite long by Shiny+Metal+S. · · Score: 2, Informative
    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.
    After 593.89 days it's going to be quite out of date...

    Will they also read patches while they arrive?

    --

    ~shiny
    WILL HACK FOR $$$

  4. Why ??? by JohnHegarty · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Can anyone think of any reason for this?

    And does anyone plan to listen for more than 30 seconds?

    1. Re:Why ??? by nusuth · · Score: 2
      That is, because in order to get access to this information you'll basically sign a document in which you give up certain constitutional rights like free speech. If I haven't signed such a document it's perfectly OK for me to publish them.

      So if you could get such information from a high rank officer and supply it to China, you wouldn't be a spy, right?

      --

      Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!

  5. And we thought Linus took a while. by minus23 · · Score: 2, Funny

    And we thought Torvalds took a while to get the new kernals out!

  6. In other news today... by Pollux · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...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."

    1. Re:In other news today... by wsloand · · Score: 5, Funny

      "I thought everyone loved pi, and they could now get it 24-7!"

      If only they had realized that people can only take pi about 22/7. 24/7 is just more than people want it.

    2. Re:In other news today... by Dwonis · · Score: 2

      22/7 is inaccurate after the second decimal place.

  7. Minimalist Art. by minus23 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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. :)

  8. what kernel ? by XPulga · · Score: 5, Funny
    turns radio on

    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

    ...Then Iluvatar arose, and the Ainur perceived that he smiled; and he lifted up his left hand, and a new theme began amid the storm...

    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

    1. Re:what kernel ? by Bios_Hakr · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I haven't tuned in as of yet (just woke up at work and cannot find the power supply for my speakers), but it seems to me that they would be reading the algorithym, not the code.

      Reading the code symbol for symbol would seem to me to be slightly, well, geeky. But not in that good way.

      On a side note, has anyone thought about calling Guiness ( the records guys, not the beer guys) for a note in The Book? This has to be the longest online reading ever.

      On second thought, call the beer guys too. It might be harder to understand, but it would be a hellava lot more fun. And I can always get the written transcripts later:)

      --
      I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
    2. Re:what kernel ? by pizen · · Score: 2, Informative

      On a side note, has anyone thought about calling Guiness ( the records guys, not the beer guys) for a note in The Book? This has to be the longest online reading ever.

      Just a little OT history lesson. The Guinness book guys are the Guinness beer guys. The idea came about when Sir Hugh Beaver, managing directory for the Guinness Brewery, went to a shooting party where he became involved in a discussion as to what was the fastest game bird in England. He had the idea for a book, Published by Guinness, that would provide the answers to these sorts of questions would be perfect. The first edition was published in 1955.

      "Wherever people congregate to talk, they will argue, and sometimes the joy lies in the arguing and would be lost if there were any definite answer. But more often the argument takes place on a dispute of fact, and it can be very exasperating if there is no immediate means of settling the argument. Who was the first to swim the Channel? Where is England's deepest well, or Scotland's highest tree, or Ireland's oldest church? How many died in history's worst rail crash? Who gained the biggest majority in Parliament? What is the highest point in our country? What is the greatest weight a man has ever lifted? And so on. How much heat these innocent questions can raise! Guinness in producing this book hopes that it may assist in resolving many such disputes, and may, we hope, turn heat into light."
      - Rt. Hon. the Earl of Iveagh, Chairman of Guinness.

  9. Whaaaat? by damas · · Score: 4, Funny

    Kernel.org is down again?

  10. Well hot shit! by Wakko+Warner · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?"
  11. I wonder... by Briareos · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

  12. Not that good by komet · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  13. Re:magic numbers + the synth sux by abdulwahid · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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);'
  14. What a waste of time... by weave · · Score: 4, Insightful
    This seems a horrible waste of resources. And what do they hope to gain or prove by this?

    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...

    1. Re:What a waste of time... by AnalogBoy · · Score: 2

      Apparently Linux Zealots like to think they are being persecuted.

      By the time this code is finished, the kernel will be quite obsolete.

  15. Will it be... by Shanep · · Score: 2

    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?
  16. numbers stations by discogravy · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:numbers stations by Beautyon · · Score: 2

      Goto:

      http://www.ibmpcug.co.uk/~irdial/catfix.htm

      Where you can download the entire Conet Project. Be sure to buy a t-shirt or a physical copy if you liked it.

      --
      ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
  17. Re:Only in the USA... by Howie · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As far is I know, speech isn't legally protected in the UK. The 'preoccupation' is that the constitution of the US is one of very few constitutions that works by restricting the government rather than the people, as I understand it (I'm neither an American or a political scientist) - this make it interesting, and worth following.

    Similar things do happen in the UK, and what happens is everyone grumbles about it for a while but not enough for things to change. Witness the handful of privacy/freedom restricting ("criminal justice/public order") laws of the last 10 years or so.

    --
    "don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
  18. Why not Gutenberg? by heyetv · · Score: 4, Interesting



    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...

  19. I listened for a bit ... by pyramid+termite · · Score: 2

    ... and I'm not sure what that bit about the Illodium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator was all about. That voice sounds familiar though ...

  20. Icecast2 is pretty impressive by Querty · · Score: 3, Informative

    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!

  21. What the hell is the point?? by t_allardyce · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  22. Wasteful? by PhotoGuy · · Score: 2

    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.
    1. Re:Wasteful? by PhotoGuy · · Score: 2

      D'oh! The new touchpad driver on this laptop is a little sensitive; I submitted before finishing :-)

      I was going to say that they could have devoted the same time, effort, and bandwidth to something like broadcast text from the Gutenberg project, and done something useful (as well as novel).

      -me

      --
      Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
  23. Re:General public by be-fan · · Score: 2

    Dude, what is it about the SPARC maintainer? All the obscene stuff in the kernel is in arch/sparc.

    --
    A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
  24. God by mindstrm · · Score: 2

    That's the stupidest Thing I've heard in a long time.
    What's the point?

  25. Finally, we prove ourselves by wowbagger · · Score: 2

    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.

    The first interstellar message we receive will start out:

    RCS file: /cvs/linux-2.4-xfs/linux/Makefile,v
    retrieving revision 1.146
    diff -r1.146 Makefile

  26. /* Kernel Marketing Patch */ by Grax · · Score: 3, Funny

    /*
    USB support sponsored by
    KFC - Try the Kernel's special recipe today
    Pepsi - The Choice of a GNU Generation
    Raid - Kills bugs dead
    */

  27. Background noise? by Refrag · · Score: 2

    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.
  28. A silly idea.... by Fenris2001 · · Score: 2

    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!
  29. I'm auditioning for this!!! by erroneus · · Score: 4, Funny

    I want to play the part of a memory manager or an interrupt handler. That'd be SO COOL!

  30. Lyrics/Tabs? by XRayX · · Score: 2

    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!