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Speech Synthesizing the Linux Kernel for Arts Sake
ungulation writes "A joint project of SFMOMA, The Goethe-Institut, ZKM Karlsruhe, and the Walker Art Center, a group called CrossFade broadcast the entire linux kernel 2.4.18. From the CrossFade website: "In Free Radio Linux, the entire source code of the Linux kernel will be webcast over the Internet. A speech synthesizer will convert into talk radio the 4,141,432 lines of code, which will take about 600 days to read." According to the Free Radio Linux website the stream is only available in ogg-vorbis format."
Am I the only person that thinks this is a massively stupid waste of time?
In related news, a tree has fallen in forest. Did anybody hear that as well ?
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Definitely not. This goes beyond geeky. It's beyond weird even. And definitely a complete waste of time. Why this was posted as a /. story is beyond me.
The only problem is that they will keep interrupting the stream each time a new kernel is released.
I'm anispeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.
According to the Free Radio Linux website the stream is only available in ogg-vorbis format.
Microsoft understands and now finally the open source community does too! It's not about having a better codec (ogg vs. wma), but making the hot content that people want avaliable. Well, I think it's obvious to everyone that with ogg's virtual monopoly on voice synth spoken linux kernel broadcasts, wma's days are numbered.
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
Geez, folks... It's performance art. If everything had to be practical, this'd be one hell of a dull world. I mean, what practical use does a performance of The Nutcracker Suite (for instance) have?
As geeky as we geeks are, artists are at a whole other level of weird. Accept it and stick to what you're good at, huh?
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
I use Linux, and have used it for years. I enjoy its flexibilty and the ease I can "open the hood" and see how things are working.
But something like this.... Does this make people think "Wow, Linux is Free Speech and Good" or "Wow, Linux users are a bunch of loonies with a religious bent and more concerned with ideals rather than developing a serious OS my business can depend on."
I don't see how this is useful or good in any way. 600 days? I just say, "Why?"
...
Come on... is there any point to this? Yes, I know it is hard to have a discussion on the merit or quality of works of art, but I will say this: (modern) art is not just about having a neat idea.
For those who are wondering about the title of my post, this is from the movie Nothing lasts forever by Tom Schiller. Life Walk 5000 was an installation of an artist walking on a threadmill and counting to a million (obviously mocking modern art)
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I'm pretty sure this is not new. I've heard of such a thing before, and even heard a bit of it. I think the point was to establish that source code is speech.
if it takes 600 days to listen to it, too. My dialup ISP might not like that. OTOH, who reads that slow?
C|N>K
...does a creepy disembodied voice chant "Microsoft developers are weenies"?
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
what practical use does a performance of The Nutcracker Suite (for instance) have?
To some people it's entertaining. Last time I checked entertainment was a pratical use. Look at games, movies, music. All for entertainment. They have a hell of a lot more use than the Linux Kernel being read off line by line.
A performance of the Nutcracker Suite, and art in general, has a very important practical use: it affords enjoyment to the spectators. Of course this does not necessarily have to be the goal of the artist, nor is it what defines good art. In this case I doubt anyone would derive any enjoyment from this (it would be a bit impractical as well).
The (IMHO) more bollocksy modern art does not afford enjoyment in itself, it is more the idea behind the work of art that interests people and offers them enjoyment. Somewhat like that artist that sold cans of his own faeces. Interesting idea, sure, and it makes for a great news item on TV, but I wouldn't care much to own one of those cans myself. Oh well, for some people this is good enough to be called art and who am I to gainsay them? As long as they don't get a g..damn state subsidy for it...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Just released: Polygram Records is proud to announce the release of the COMPLETE reading of the Linux kernel on CD or cassette! This 14,000 volume release has been digitally mastered for optimum listening enjoyment in wonderful stereo! Recorded at the world-famous Sun Studio, Linux joins timeless legends like Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. Order Now!
Linux 2.4.18 on CD:
$31,000 (s&h 780$)
Linux 2.4.18 on Cassette:
$28,458 (s&h 780$)
NO COD'S!
Visa and Mastercard Accepted!
Abuse my rationalization of rhetoric as either metaphor or monotomy.
Apparently, the Linux source code consists entirely of 300 megs worth of "La-losinge base line double quote"..
Bowie J. Poag
I don't know of anyone who would could listen to this 24/7 for 600 days. Perhaps a download edition will be avaliable? Also, consider the fact that the kernel is constantly changing, and that this is only a snapshot in time. Nearly two years from now the kernel will be vastly different and this will be obsolete.
C:\>
A waste of bandwidth? A waste of resources?
Maybe, but dont flame the guys for having fun :-)
Am I the only person that thinks this is a massively stupid waste of time?
You're not.
Microsoft paid the 100 most popular Hollywood actors to read aloud the contents of Windows XP installation CD image. "That will clearly demonstrate the superiority of closed source software" says the new Microsoft CEO, Mickey Mouse.
FWIW, I have a system that talks hostnames hitting my web site.
- Just because you can't, doesn't mean you shouldn't
What, to get around US export restrictions, like PGP used to?
(they would print out their source code, export it in paper form and OCR it in switzerland to make the PGPi codebase. at least so I've heard.)
Why on earth is it babbling the same nonsensical stuff over and over again? And sense when is "Lozenge" part of the linux source code?
This is awesome! Now, does anyone have a speech-to-text program that accepts ogg streams as input?
"This function is void, it takes two args/The first is sec a pointer to 2048 unsigned bytes/That are the encrypted disk sector and will be decrypted"
I'd like to know because it'd be interesting to see how much people are willing to waste to be 'original'.
And as for all the posts here going on about this being performance arts, go get a law degree; you seem to be good at arguing for arguments' sake; no matter if you don't specifically agree with what you yourself are saying.
This is almost the kind of wanton displays of plenty and wealth that one sees from developed nations that makes one think of hungry Somali children or AIDS-stricken Thai youth.
Pardon the melodrama; it is not intended.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
I've seen lots of comments about how this is a waste of time, or a waste of bandwidth, or what have you.
I venture to guess that the real purpose behind this is to speak the entire Linux source tree so there's no question that it is protected speech. Thus, any efforts to supress it via mechanisms like the DMCA or CBDTPA (or whatever the fuck it's called) would be much more clearly in violation of the first amendment.
Of course, there's no guarantee that this approach would be worth a damn, since patents/copyright already supersede free speech rights in lots of cases, but it's not completely pointless.
[ home ]
Now, you could certainly argue that in today's "postmodern" (whatever the hell that means) world, we must expand our definitions of art and performances, and take an "artist's" word for it when they claim that the landscape around them is their work of art, or that speech-synthesizing kernels is a "performance" of some sort, but I just don't buy it in this case.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
This is just as pointless as Distributed.net's RC5-64 effort. Yes, they managed to crack the code, and yes, they showed that (a) with enough computing power you can brute force RC5-64; (b) the now-outdated RC5-64 is very hard to brute-force; and (c) the same system at a much higher keysize would be safe from brute-force attacks this side of World War III.
Well worth knowing, I'm sure. But they spent 1,757 days to do it. Nearly half a decade. Surely it didn't require FIVE years to "learn" what was obvious within a month of the project starting!
Like RC5-64, this "Speech Synthesized Kernel WebCast" is another such example of "there's absolutely no doubt it can be done, it'll take a whole bunch of resources to pull off, it won't be finished for two years, it'll be completely irrelevant when it does finish, and we won't learn anything in the process."
This isn't art, it's just pointless. Calling it "art" is a patently weak justification.
Hey, don't get me wrong -- I couldn't care less whether they do it or not, it just makes me wonder how nuts these people are.
Seriously, the only way this thing's going to achieve any more than a cursory listen by a small number of bored Slashdot readers is if the synthesized voice is set to "breathy, seductive woman"...
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
[jpj@soul linux-2.4]$ find . -type f -exec grep -Hi fuck {} \; | wc -l
28
[jpj@soul linux-2.4]$ find . -type f -exec grep -Hi shit {} \; | wc -l
75
Feh.
Are you kidding--those guys aren't real Linux fanatics. Real Linux fanatics look through Linus' trash! And I can tell Linus understands me, because the restraining order is only set at 50 feet.
Check this infomative link
Sigged!
A friend at an open-source-based software company mentioned the possibility of having a sound-based art installation at the offices. What I came up with was /home/user/mail/$USER/$LIST as the source (given that splitting messages to folders is trivial with procmail).
use textto speech conversion.
One voice recites the linux kernel source,
Another reads "the cathedral & the bazaar", the original halloween documents, other open source core docs, etc.
Another recites a local User Group maillist, by using
Another recites the kernel maillist.
Find some way to change voices, either to other voices or add/remove effects on the lists at "To" headers.
The point was to represent the community of open-source. However, I had no intention of broadcasting the result. Thanks to these guys I know it'll take two years to finish voice/channel 1: so it's unlikely it'd be there for two years, but that's not the point.
I haven't worked on this for a bit, but should get back to reading the Linux sound docs and developing specs to do text-to-speech conversion on four text streams simultaneously and output on four mono audio channels. Then I want to try doing this kind of thing on an OS X platform.
Well, I heard on radio (Ö1 broadcasted it a while ago), and it was quite fun. I even was able to find which file they were currently broadcasting. :-))
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
I wouldn't call it performance art either. I think of it more as an installation piece. The other posters miss the point; it's not that the piece is entertaining -- reading the source code might be, but listening to synthesized speech reading it sure isn't -- but what questions the piece is putting in front of you.
Source code is art?
Source code is speech?
Source code is free speech?
I'm not going to listen to this for more than a minute, and I'm sure many other will do the same. The fact that no one will consume the entire piece doesn't make it any less meaningful. The point of the piece is that someone actually went out to do it.
If it helps, think of it in terms of DeCSS.
Is there an mp3 setting that is essentially just a wave file?
Heh, yeah, it's called "Write to disk"
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
lots of people questioning, "why?"
well, it certainly challenges what we think of as art and what we think machines are capable of. the fact is that hundreds of people wrote the code to make this "computer created" art so is it truly even "computer created?"
it's also a great way to test ogg streaming clients. for 600 days we'll have a url we can always connect to and test.
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Well, I have to disagree. If anyone thinks that they'll be able to use this as part of some legal argument, I suspect they're out of their minds. I admit that there's a bit of geeky funness to the whole thing, but what is this supposed to prove about DeCSS? Or free speech issues? So they're trying to point out that source code is free speech. And they'll broadcast it using a speech synthesizer. Big whoop. I could set up a speech synthesizer and broadcast Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_ if I wanted, that doesn't make it public domain. I could set up a speech synthesizer to rattle off the machine code for Windows, that doesn't make it free software. And just because I set up a speech synthesizer to plod through the Linux source code doesn't somehow make it "free speech," no matter how much someone's trying to convince us it's "art."
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
We should broadcast this audio stream into space.
;>
What better way to show any potential aliens that there is intelligent life on earth.
Just don't broadcast the Windows source into space; aliens might launch a full assault immediately.
....move along....nothing to see here....
Here's an alternative: Spamradio.
Quoting from their site:
"Spamradio is serving up delicious helpings of spam each hour of every day to all who are hungry.
Using a complex arrangement of pipes and funnels we turn the junk mail that we receive into a streaming audio broadcast that can be enjoyed from anywhere on the Internet."
I sometimes listen to it during coding sprees late at night; eerie but worth a listen.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
The really interesting question is to see what kernel we're on by then. (600 days later.)
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
I don't believe I wasted the time even reading the article.
I might as well post about my server monitoring software that talks too. Some days he just doesn't shut up, but at least he's more entertaining, where he'll randomly insult people.. Who would listen to spoken code all day? Maybe if they just did the funny comments, but not all the code..
I can think of better things to do for two years with my computers..
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
This reminds me of a book I saw at Borders once. Someone had printed one of the kernels (2.4.x). It was a monster. It just had occasional commentary in it. Like after a few hundred pages of code, and then one page that says stuff like "That section was for filesystems. It's used to store data on media." Sad thing is, he suckered some publishing company into actually printing it!
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
So they're trying to point out that source code is free speech.
You totally missed the point. The point is not the words "free", "public domain", or "free software". The point is the word speech. There's a big legal fight going on right now over whether software is speech at all, let alone "free" or "public domain" speech.
Your quote should say "So they're trying to point out that source code is speech." The rest of the message following that is just pointing out stuff unrelated to artwork.
Yes - it is a waste of time - but in a geeky/cool way.
What it truly is - is a waste of bandwidth.
www.sjbaker.org
I mean, what practical use does a performance of The Nutcracker Suite (for instance) have?
You may not know it, but ballet is actually an ancient european martial art. If you doubt this, go fight a dancer, you'll see.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Is it still art if no one listens to it?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Why not broadcast something good, like all of Plato's works or something. The linux kernel? I really wonder about some of you geeks.......that is totally a waste of time in my opinion. What's next, the whole BSD Kernel? Windows XP source?
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Of course I accept it. Just because I believe it's one of the biggest wastes of perfectly good bandwidth ever thought up doesn't mean I don't accept it.
I am a computer scientist and have worked with and done some collaborative pieces with several different artists so I'll try to give my perspective on this:
Many of the artists I have worked with start out with an idea that they think is "cool", or is "aesthetically pleasing", or reflects some sort of social phenomenon, etc. The beginning of the piece is usually very shallow. After longer thought, more and more philosphical justification is caked onto the original idea until it finally carries some weight in the mind of the artist(s).
The problem is that most of us "laypeople" see the end result and only understand the same shallow meaning (or lack thereof) that originally instigated the piece, and quickly write it off as stupid. In my opinion, however, it is the artists RESPONSIBILITY to make the piece compelling enough to be necessarily thought provoking. Like others have mentioned, most people are going to look at (listen to) the broadcast and just go: "duh, that is really lame." There may be a tiny circle of pretentious art critics that will bother to crack the surface of the piece and get to what the artists intended, but then the effect of the piece is totally lost.
But that brings me to another (and somewhat annoying) element of pieces like this. If I am going to spend my time thinking about the meaning behind the piece I want to KNOW that the artists did the same. And that there is some conclusion to be drawn (or at least an interesting journey in the exploration of the meaning). The idea that an artist shouldn't "explain" their work is ludicrous. I have seen so many times that this is an excuse to protect the weak meaning and feeble thought behind the work. (I am not implying that all art/artists are so, as there are many who spend great effort to express well thought out and profound ideas in interesting ways. But the opposite is also true.)
So I guess my statement is this: I would like to see a summary of the ideas that the artists are addressing in this broadcast...at the very least. I don't think it is a waste of time unless there is no meaning...but at the same time, even if there is meaning, I presume it will be lost on the majority of viewers because of poor execution (lack of necessary connections to the meaning) and will therefore still be a waste of time.
But we'll see...
Now, I'm not saying that source code is or isn't speech, but simply reading a bunch of it off on some ridiculous webcast isn't proof one way or another, and anyone who uses a webcast like this in any court of law as evidence one way or another is going to get laughed out of the room.
I'm also not saying that the webcast is a completely stupid idea. Like I said in another post, there's a certain geeky flair to it that makes the whole thing sort of fun. But if the people putting it together think they're going to prove that code is speech by doing so, they're delusional.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
The only thing this piece needs is Yoko Ono rhythmicly chanting "number nine, number nine, number nine..." in the background. IIRC, it was John Lennon who did it originally, but he's gone so Yoko seems like the ideal stand-in for this. Bonus points if Yoko will do it live for a full 24 hours at least one day; as opposed to simply sampling an endless loop of chants.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Yes, it's waste of time. Unlike participating in Slashdot discussions about topics, in which you have no interest at all, and posting questions like the above. Now, that's what I call a productive use of your time. Now, will you excuse me, while I'll be stupidly wasting my time playing Go. Fortunately, I haven't wasted all of my time today, since I answered to your comment.
OK, I've said it. Good bye, my precious karma.
Have a nice Xmas.
root@aio:~# nmap -sX -iR -p1- # Ho, ho, ho! Merry Xmas, everyone!
What practical use does a nutcracker suite have?! Well, duh, cracking nuts maybe?
(Sorry, I couldn't resist! I am a great fan of Tchaikovsky's music, by the way. I'm listening to the Waltz from Swan Lake right now.)
root@aio:~# nmap -sX -iR -p1- # Ho, ho, ho! Merry Xmas, everyone!