Slashdot Mirror
Launching Gutenberg Radio - Public Domain Audiobooks
tgbg writes "We are proud to announce the launch of "Gutenberg Radio". On these broadcast channels,
you can hear the Gutenberg Library and anything else the Gutenberg
family cares to share with its public."
A truly brilliant idea. Now if only we didn't have to wait indefinitely for copyrighted works from after the 1920s or so to be released into the public domain...
Does anyone find it weird that they're using Gutenburg in a phrase related to sound, not sight? Gutenburg helped end the need for everything to be said...
Some of us don't have the connection to be able to listen to this. I would rather download this into (insert favorite audio codec here).
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
Imagine being blind and being able to access (maybe in a not far away future)
the entire Gutenberg ebook library by internet. No need to read the whole book
with some kind of Braille device, no need to -own- a text-2-speech program
and, maybe, no need to own a computer if the stream is broadcasted with some other equipement.
Blind people will -love- this and I can't but be happy for them.
I don't know what they are doing, but one example would be for someone to go through the text and add in markers for how the computer should say things (angry, loud, etc), so you get the right inflections and voices etc.
If you're willing to do this, why not just read it into a microphone. Yes, Joe Blow isn't going to sound like Larry Olivier, BU TIT... <inflection="emphasis"> MUST BEE </inflection=monotone> BET TER THAN A SYN THE SIZED VOICE.
Or, better, just convince a starving actor / voice-over announcer that it's a great way to get free exposure in bewtween auditions and that waiter job that pays the rent.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
The site seems to be dead currently, but that's undoubtedly just the Slashdot Effect.
I have no idea what they're using, but for the sake of accessibility and future-compatibility, I hope they're following the standards of the DAISY Consortium. DAISY has devised a standard for talking books which deserves support, especially as it's been specifically designed to provide accessibility for people with disabilities.
Learn more about the DAISY Consortium here, and in the FAQ here.
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
I see you're neither a linguist or historian. I'm both.
An "inefficient" "alphabet" can not stunt a society's growth. This cast is most easily proven by China's current development. They are using Chinese ideograms, are developing rapidly, are developing cutting edge ideas, and have good literacy rates.
Historically speaking the slow down of development can most easily be tied to politics, Confucianism, and society. You have to remember -- in 1300 they had 1000 foot-long boats and may have even curcumnavigated the globe (it seems Zhenghe was a pretty amazing guy.)
So don't blame a language for limiting a people's potential. We, as global citizens, could be eons ahead of where we are now if we could erase history and social stigma (and preference) in an exact way. In 1000 years someone will make a comment about why we didn't. It will be clear then, as it is now, what we are/did wrong. The Chinese of 1300, for whatever reasons, decided that they didn't need to keep going forward in the sciences, so they didn't. I wish they hadn't, but they did.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Over expansion and a power void left by Alexander. After Alexander died, his followers fought vicious civil wars, totally destroying whatever cuture was built up. Macedonian men divorced their foreign wives, and decided that rather than having an integrated nation, they'd prefer to be emperors. Any hope for a long term stable nation was dashed. Feeding into my earlier point, much of the Greek learning was known only to a few academics, and so was lost for centuries, until the printing press enabled (translated) Greek works to be widely distributed.
What about Germany?
Well, when WWI broke out, Germany was stuck with the weakest ally among the major European powers: Austria-Hungary. Given its situation, Germany did about as well as could be imagined in a war of attrition fought against the combined might of the UK, France, and either Russia or the USA (first the former, then the latter). After that, France demanded that Germany be punished severely, so the Weimar Republic was saddled with enormous debts. Hitler was able to use people's resentment at the situation to rise to power, and hence began WWII. This was, perhaps, even more costly than the first war. After such devastation, it's not surprising that Germany lost its edge. However, note that in contrast to the pre-printing press era, none of Germany's advancements were lost, and indeed Germany has rebounded nicely, and is currently one of the major European powers.
All of this is fairly tangential to the point I'm really trying to make. Empires and nations may come and go, but there is one constant. No region in the world showed consistent, steady technological advances until Europe got the movable type printing press. Previously, one dynasty might be more or less advanced than the previous one, and very little learning was retained from one century to the next. After the introduction of Gutenberg's press began a period of technological and scientific innovation such as the world had never seen before, and which has not yet abated. China, though in possesion of the exact same technology, was not able to exploit the power of printed text until Europe broght the industrial revolution to Asia.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD