I have been working with Mary TTS, an open source research TTS tool developed in Germany. It did not have any American voice at all like James Earl Jones, which is why I build a new voice, cmu-rms-hsmm. It's based on recordings from the artic CMU database. I do feel this guy has a deep resonant voice, somewhat James Earl Jones. It's a wonderful voice for high speed listening. Its included in the latest release of Mary TTS, version 4.1, which you can get at http://mary.dfki.de/Download. I use it with NVDA, through an open source project called Speech-Hub, which makes it easy to incorporate TTS engines with screen readers. You can download it at: http://www.speechhub.org/SpeechHub/install-w.
I use this voice 100% of the time with NVDA, but it has some drawbacks. Mainly, Mary TTS is a CPU hog, and is too laggy. However, with a fast CPU (you really want an i5 or better) and a couple gig or more of memory, it's quite usable. Still, it's 10X less efficient than any other TTS system I've worked with, which is why I want to spend some time over the coming year looking into a light version that is faster and needs less memory. I listen to e-books I translate to audio books with this voice, using Astro Nova Player on my Galaxy Nexus phone. It allows me to speed up to 6X speed, though only some blind people seems to be able to listen that fast.
http://dev.vinux-project.org./ It has links to my speech speed-up work, sonic, my work with Mary TTS, VInux, and some ideas about improving speech recognition front ends with better speech spectrograms.
Yeah, I have to believe this guy is going for those Chinese government dollars that they give posters for pro-Chinese posts. How much do you think he just made? $0.25?
The John Stewart show that started this whole thing stated some pretty ugly figures about suicide rates. Workers get a bunk in a small room with seven other workers they don't even know. Around high places where you could jump to your death, they've installed nets to catch jumpers. If you talk to other employees about forming a group to negotiate for better wages or working conditions, you get 12 years in jail.
China has people to spare, and not enough resources to go around. That's one reason why labor is cheap and may remain that way for generations. Here in the US, we have resources to burn but not enough people to make use of them. That's one reason labor here is expensive, and why some politicians want to make children of illegal immigrants non-citizens: this would create a whole new class of non-Americans, living for generations in the US with no rights, ripe for exploitation as cheap labor, just like their illegal immigrant ancestors. We're not alone in the world in wanting a large population of near slave laborers to do the hard work for us (seen any Americans picking strawberries lately?). Qatar, for example, allows citizens to "sponsor" foreign workers, who once in the country aren't even allowed to leave without their employer's permission, or change jobs or complain about working conditions or wages... Remember all those black Africans trapped in Libya when war broke out? This is typical of what happens around the world when bad governments allow exploitation of the weak.
If we can make a small difference through educating Americans about working conditions in the factories where our stuff is made, I think it's an effort well worth pursuing.
If any of them talk to each other about the possibility of starting a union, they serve 12 years in jail. I heard this from the source that started this whole Apple Foxconn thing... the John Stewart show. The reason we're picking on Apple is because John picked on Apple, and because they really do have the margins to increase worker wages, unlike say Dell or HP. Actually, it was a terrific show, one of the best he's done, IMO. The whole point was of course bashing Republicans on the campaign trail as usual. This time he was highlighting the common theme about making America a more "business friendly" place for corporations, something Mitt talks a lot about. So, he said let's take a look at the world's most business friendly economy - China! His point was if you take the business friendly logic to it's natural extreme, you wind up with a near dictatorship oppressing the people for the good of big business.
I'm in a slightly different situation than the original poster. I've probably got a bigger mortgage, country club monthly dues, an Infinity G37 (though I always wanted a red Corvette), and the boat's not entirely cheap. I consider this compensation for living in North Carolina rather than my home turf of Silicon Valley, where I could only afford a crappy condo (which I loved and miss dearly), and where I was unwilling to raise my kids. I started a tiny EDA software company here, filed several patents, wrote some very interesting code, and sold the company last year. It should all be supper cool with no complaints. However, I started losing central vision, much like older people with age related macular degeneration. It turns out I have late onset Stargart's Disease and soon wont be able to read the screen well at all, at least with my eyes. So, keeping a job where I can pay the mortgage and all the other stuff suddenly seems a whole lot more important than it used to.
Here's the weird part. Because of my vision loss, I discovered something I love more than what I devoted my career to. I decided to take on this problem by the horns. I checked out the software for the blind, the best of which is JAWs, and it's impressive, but not good enough. Not only that, being closed source, I can't contribute to making it better. So, I decided to write my own, and was the tech lead for Vinux 3.0, which is Linux for the Vision Impaired. I've also developed algorithms for high speed listening, and just yesterday I found that the latest Audible.com app for Android either includes my code (which is LGPL, and they are more than welcome) or they invented something like it. It's freaking amazing at 3X speed, and it's only problem is they don't have a 4X button. I also built an open source voice last Thanksgiving which I now listen to exclusively, and I do it at 4X speed normally.
So... it turns out I love writing code to help the blind and people with low vision. I have a certain talent for it, and I'm not sure I can even describe the satisfactions it gives me. I love it more than any other creative activity I've ever engaged in. If I could make that the work of the rest of my life, here's no question it's what I'd do. Here's the rub. I get paid a bit more than double than the most highly paid accessibility software geek I know. If I accepted a job doing I what seem to love most, two things would happen. First, my family would go through major changes, as we could not afford my house, much less the country club. Second, I'd wind up working for some poor guy who is also under paid, and probably because he's too dumb to get a better paying job. I'd have to write stupid code determined by government officials or doners, who while well meaning, have little clue about what code people with vision impairments need developed. In short, it would almost certainly suck compared to doing it for free.
So... I'm with the other posters who suggest keeping the stable job, at least while the kids need you. Unlike the original poster, I do love my job. For me it's a matter of choosing between a great job that pays really well, and a job that feeds my soul like none other, but pays student wages. I'm not sure my kids will ever appreciate my sacrifice here... However, my boss seems willing to let me do a Google style 20% thing. That's what I'm doing.
First of all, Atom has an edge? Really? My dual-core ARM smart-phone has more juice than my Atom based netbook. What I've been wondering for about 15 years is why the heck doesn't Intel buy Arm? It's the no-brainer way to protect your #1 status - buy out all competitors that show any signs of being a threat -- and do it before they're big enough to attract any anti-trust scrutiny. Intel is at least 10 years over due here. Are they being incredibly super stupid, or was there any valid reason ARM is still independent? ARM has been the biggest threat to Intel for many years. What's up?
What I have to wonder is a) Why does Sony care about rewriting busybox? With it's GPL 2 license, Sony is free to screw us over all they want with devices we can't hack. b) Why do we care about Sony? A bigger downfall in corporate stature hasn't happened during my lifetime. At this point, not only are they a-holes who we should ignore, but why do they deserve more slashdot time than say GE? They're losers. Let's ignore them.
Well, this is a lame place to post, but I read the next 200 posts, and they're all lame places! I thought I'd bring up the fact that at the center of the earth, gravity is zero. TFA talks about gravity pushing out all the non-uranium due to it's mass, creating a 5-mile diameter ball in the center that acts like Earth's interior natural reactor. Even at 2.5 miles from the center, that gravitational attraction to is going to be pretty tiny. I would expect random weather-like currents to blow away such a core, unless the core really is solid, in which case, how did the uranium migrate through solid steel under almost no gravity to the center? Is there a shrinkage joke that applies?
I love posts on slashdot by people who have more than the average clue about what's going on. Thanks for the info. I've been using openjdk for the last year, and I think it is finally something close to a real free software alternative for most Java programs. I also use Android's Java. Pretty much, I think we should be using any viable alternative to Oracle. They simply can't be counted on.
Did the guy mention that he copyrighted his work? If he put it out there with nothing indicating that, there's an argument that he put it into the public domain, but if he copyrighted the project in a README file or in the core code files, he's covered. If someone is violating the GPL license and selling a modified version of his work, I'd recommend he contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who can help defend him, most likely free of charge.
Short answer: Selling GPLed software (even software you did not personally author) is okay.
Jesus... It's amazing what crap a first poster can say. No, you can not sell GPLed software you didn't write, though you may charge a distribution fee, and you must provide a way to access the source code you're distributing. If some a-hole is charging $50-ish bucks for your software, take him down.
Without gravity, we'd die. That's only part of what kills me about the whole manned space settlement concept. I love reading sci-fi where we live on lot's of planets and in space stations, but the fact is we're made of meat grown in a biological soup unique to Earth.
So, here's what it take to populate the galaxy. First, you need patience. If you have a problem taking a few hundred years getting from place to place, you'll never make it. Second, you need to be made for deep space. Rather than meat, you need a body made of high-tech materials. Instead of a worrying about radiation damage, you should feel comfortable living near a radiation source that can power you trip from star to star. You should work well at liquid nitrogen temperatures to well above boiling. You should be able to shut down and go into sleep mode for many years at a time, cooling as low as 3 degrees Kelvin. In other words, it's not us meat-based creatures that will populate the galaxy, but the machines we create. Probably some sexy decedent of Siri. I hope she doesn't turn out to be a bitch.
This has not been my experience so far. True, there are few black engineers, programmers, and people starting businesses in Silicon Valley. However, those I have met have generally been outstanding at their work, and gained plenty of respect as well as responsibility. I believe engineering in Silicon Valley is as close to a meritocracy as the world has ever seen. There are all races, religions, and frankly no one cares so long as you are good at what you do.
Now just some rough estimates... about 1 in 10 Americans are black roughly. American born engineers make up maybe 1 in 2 in Silicon Valley. The vast majority of these people did well at well respected universities. I'm going to guess that reduces the potential population of black men to hire by a factor of four, just because the black community is so much poorer and parents are typically not college educated. Multiply all that and I'd guess we come up with a pretty good estimate of why blacks are under represented in Silicon Valley. For one thing, white men are also under represented. Americans in general have for some reason decided to avoid real science, math, and engineering.
"Cluby"? Give me a break. You can be a black Jewish lesbian and get a great job if you have engineering talent in Silicon Valley.
I find that writing code to help other people, even if I have to do it for free, keeps my enthusiasm sky high. I have interesting code to write at work, but contributing to open-source projects for the blind is where I get really excited.
Of course, this isn't really what people are thinking of, but what if we went to a BitCoin model? If all we are trying to do is prove who we are, which is much different than proving we are trustworthy, then a P2P system based on proved work should fit the bill.
In case you're like most slashdotters and don't know how these systems work, well it's super cool. All they do is sign ledgers of transactions with a special proof of work, which is simply a random number attached to the transaction log which causes the SHA-256 signature to start with a bunch of zeros. Obviously, you'd have to look damned hard to find such a random number, thus you've proved you worked hard. Can't we use a system like that which has proven secure for million dollar transactions?
Actually, I rather like the latest incarnation of Unity. A nice improvement over Gome 2 Shell, IMO. That's not why people don't write Linux apps. Imagine trying to write the super-popular "Fart" application, which prints money on Android, for Linux. First you write it. Take maybe a week to do it well. No biggie. Now what? You can put it on Sourceforge and watch 10 users per month download it, or publish it on Freshmeat.net, and watch downloads go to 10 per day for a couple of days. What if you want real exposure? Well, the distros are binary incompatible and massively fragmented, but there's a decent number of Ubuntu users. If you want to reach them, the easiest way is to get into the Debian disto and wait a very long time for it to show up in Ubuntu. Now this will naturally turn off your Fart app developer, but even if he wanted to be in Debian, he now has to go through hoops that take more effort than developing the app did. And even after that, there's no way the Fart app will attract a Debian sponsor.
So, the real reason there aren't many Linux apps is because in most cases it's literally impossible to get them to users. Pretty simple, really. Maybe someday soon someone in GNU/Linux land will wake up and realize they have a problem. What we need is a cross-platform app-store that includes a packaging solution that automates building packages for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android (sorry iOS...). Users should be able to use the same app store on all platforms to find and install the apps they want, whether paid or FOSS. If that happens, Linux apps would skyrocket.
Well, I run on a small screen and have poor eyesight, so Unity in 11.10 is a welcome release. The auto-hide feature in Gnome 2.0 always sucked so badly I always had to turn it off. A large icon bar on top and a large bar for app icons on the bottom really squeeze the vertical usable area, especially when we we haven't even added the window frame, menu tool bars and status bar. Having it on the left and with a decent auto hide is awesome. They even integrated the menu bar into the window title bar, and integrated that into the top bar with the system menu and system tray icons. Very well done, IMO. I'm able to launch apps faster than ever, by typing the Windows key and then one or two letters and hitting enter, just like I can in windows. If Unity didn't include this feature, i would have sorely missed this from Windows 7. Instead, Unity added the dash, which is as far as I can tell, a nice improvement over what Windows does. With this desktop, I can use the same window manager on a netbook as on a desktop. Kudos to Ubuntu for a decent unity in 11.10, IMO. They even have a decent effort for accessibility in progress, and so far as I can tell are taking community feedback, bug reports, and patches very seriously. The port to Qt paves the way for a decent tablet play, though GNU/Linux has many bigger problems to fix to before they'll have much presence there.
I hated Unity in 11.04 and am glad to be rid of that version. I currently use Unity 11.10 2D, with the Compiz window manager and a couple of config hacks to make it work better with Unity 2D. Honestly, it's pretty cool. It's annoying having yet again to learn all the new keystrokes to launch stuff, but oh well... at least the new system looks pretty good.
Ok, so I get SONAME must match exactly. I'm only advocating doing what Android does today, but in a way that saves even more disk space. Android today makes every app have it's own copy of every library it uses, whether a.so file or statically linked, other than base libraries that are part of Android. The resulting bloat isn't even enough for Google to feel like bothering to minimize it, though it bothers me. So, just have apps run in chroot (and additional permission) jails where they see their own copy of / exactly as it was when the developer built and tested it. As an exception to this, the developer could specify which libraries he wants to allow updates to, and if there is some crazy security bug that impacts this app, then force an upgrade. IMO, Linux security is pretty flawed today, even compared to Mac OS X, Windows, and Android. This is partly why we have to carefully review source and hate trusting binary only apps. With better jails and app monitoring, I think we could reduce the required review process considerably.
I don't understand why you keep bringing up SONAME when I mention hard links. If I have 20 identical files on the disk that are all read-only, making them 20 hard links to the same file is just to save disk space and memory. The SONAME mechanism is still in place and works as before. It's not an either/or thing. Hopefully the Linux kernel is smart enough to load the same file only once, even if it is linked to in different directories, but it's a corner case that may not yet have been optimized.
As for wanting higher quality FOSS apps, I have some bad news, though RMS would refuse to believe it. While there are rare and often noble exceptions (like gcc), the general rule is that if a programmer can sell his program, he will. Most of us like open source and we like to contribute, but we like money, too. Photoshop, from what I hear, has lots of functionality users are willing to pay for, and few if any worthy competitors. This means the next worthy competitor could print money by offering a product just as good for half the price. So, given how much people like money, don't hold your breath for that open source Photoshop.
The point when most stuff becomes open source comes when there's no money to be made by keeping it closed source. That's how we got Open Office and Mozilla. These markets where so dominated by Microsoft's monopoly, there was no money left to be made. The Microsoft monopoly on OSes forced Linus to write his for free. If someone had said, "Linus, here's a lot of money for writing our next proprietary kernel", I suspect instead of Linux, we would have had to wait for the next guy who wanted to write his own kernel so bad he'd even do it for free. How much better would it be to write your own kernel and get rich at the same time? Eventually, even for free or low cost, open source projects can catch up to teams of paid developers, but only if those developers stop innovating. This happens naturally sometimes when a market niche has matured.
The most noble exception I know of is RMS himself. Until the world starts pumping out more people like RMS, we're not going to see all that excellent free software we want.
You still don't get it, so I'll try again. So, according to you, if we have 2 applications, then it's ok to have 2 times the same library stored twice, and using twice the amount of RAM that they should.
You do realize that with hard links, a file can be in multiple directories and stored on both disk once? If the Linux kernel doesn't detect that we're loading the exact same shared library twice, that bug should be fixed. There should be zero impact on RAM and very little on disk space (you still have to represent the directory structure multiple times). However, if two applications downloaded and installed through an App Center were compiled with different versions of libc, then yes, have two on the disk. How many are we realistically talking about, given that we're not talking about the stuff that comes pre-installed or anything in any.deb file? Several megabytes? In an extreme case maybe a gigabyte of disk space?
What if that's the case for let's say 1000 apps instead of 2?
If a user actually donwloads and installs 1000 apps, there's likely to be some bloat. My phone has 32 gigabytes. Even the gigabyte of bloat this is likely to cause with 1000 user downloads is a minor problem.
What if all apps where carrying their own version of libc6, which makes about 20 000 packages in Debian holding their own version of libc6? What if there was a security issue in libc6? Will we have to update ABSOLUTELY ALL the 20000 packages?
Since apps would run in jails, you'd only want to upgrade the apps needing the functionality that's broken. For example, if my app does not have permission to use the network, you should not upgrade my copy of libc6 to fix a major network security bug. Again, we're talking about user apps, not the base shipped by Debian. How many packages are we likely talking about? 10 mabye?
Please don't tell that libc6 isn't a good example: you'll find some others, I'm sure. I could say gtk, qt, alsa, or whatever, there would be just less "users" but the point would be the exact same one.
I didn't want to get into this much detail, but you are right. Libc isn't a representative case. If I make a simple command line utility, it should by default link against an older libc to be compatible with as many distros as possible. High level packages like Qt should be published by the developers in occasional stable releases not only in source form, but in binary, all the way down to libc. When building a Qt app, I should be able to specify that I link against an exact version of Qt, which of course could mean users have do to a major download if they don't have it already, or I could specify that it must be a version of Qt 4.x, where x >= 7. It should also indicate that it was built and tested with Qt 4.7 with the full SHA-256 hash code of the Qt library used, so if users have trouble running it with Qt 4.9, they can run it instead with the original 4.7. This could mean I have three versions of GTK+ and four of Qt if I'm a user who loves running old apps that don't have newer releases. So what? Why not let the program author and end user do that. Again, I'm not recommending Debian abandon the debian package manager or how they build their distro. They just need to add a layer on top for downloading and sharing apps that work cross-distro. In more detail, there also needs to a way to share libraries among developers without going through the whole debian package/review process, and it could leverage the work for done for sharing apps.
Funnily, I think the opposite way. I think Linux needs more very complex and full application like Photoshop (and not the stupid Gimp) to be able to be saved. Lucky, in some areas, it's getting better (have you ever tried Rosegarden, for example? It's really close to using Cubase now...). It would also need games.
Hackers love to share. GNU/Linux should embrace this. If they do, they'll increase FOSS development in GNU/Linux tenfold. That's the entire point of my argument.
I see you're very knowledgeable about Debian and that was a long and thoughtful reply. Of course this is slashdot, so I don't mind playing devils advocate, but I'm actually a big fan of Debian. It is some of the most important software ever written. It's changed the world in amazing ways. I've used it as my main OS on my main machine, and we do on our severs at work, and the Ubuntu distro I use now for various reasons is based on Debian.
That said, my goal is to get GNU/Linux developers and the Debian devs in particular to wake up to the fact that we've built a cathedral when we need a bazaar. As you've likely read in the paper by that title, Emacs was developed in a manner where ever bit was laid by expert craftsman under the watchful eye of RMS. Contributors were not allowed to add to the cathedral willy-nilly. GNU was going to be built right, even if RMS had to do it himself. Meanwhile, Linux Torvalds threw out his kernal and encouraged everyone to use it and people started building all sorts of stuff. Anyone could write a program today, and have it shared on the list tomorrow. That was the bazaar, and it's where the heart and sole of GNU/Linux was created. Then came the Debian package manager, and the whole scene changed. It is wonderful to have pre-compiled repositories of verified code compiled from source, and that's the foundation that made Debian great. The problem is that this binary repository is managed lovingly by devoted monks. Every brick is carefully examined by experts and nothing gets included unless it passes the high standards of the Debian monastery. The good news is that it's no longer just one man in charge. The bad news is there's now a group of devoted monks in charge. The process of carefully examining every brick and excluding most has not changed since emacs.
The magic happening in Android, and I hate to admit but iOS too, is they've gone back to the bazaar model where anyone can share any app they like. Sure, most of it is crap. In fact they probably have an app for crap. Part of it is driven by developer greed, which is counter to what Debian stands for, but most of it is just hackers enjoying their new found freedom to share. Sure, the base is solid, and carefully crafted and built at Google. You can't just write any old crud and expect it to ship installed on every phone by default. You need the default code base to "just work". However, anyone is enabled to share whatever crap they like as an app in the market. That freedom to share is missing in Debian.
Now, back to the technical points we talked about. I'm not recommending sym links, but hard links to shared libraries, and I'm recommending that apps run chrooted in an app jail, and that they install in an application directory where every library they need has a hard link. They could have their own/usr/lib directories for their shared libraries, but on the actual disk it should be/Apps/MyStupidFartApp/usr/lib/libsndfile.so.whatever. This would keep MyStupidFartApp from colliding with my friend's competing BiggerAndBetterFarts app, as we're likely to want to install a/etc/fart.conf. Because my fart app has deeper tones, it wins and my friend's loses, but later he submits a patch to libsndfile while gets included in Debian but totally breaks my poorly tested fart app. Why should my popular fart app suffer because it has bugs that were sensitized by a new libsndfile shared library? If we just run them in their own jails, and never upgrade their shared libraries (except in sever security situations), that fart app should continue to run for decades. Why should I go through the Debian packaging and review process to share a stupid buggy fart app? Why does Debian stand in my way?
What you really need is shared libraries that never change, unless there's a major security flaw detected. When you install, you get hard links in your app's directory to all the exact versions of each shared library they depend on. Any application using the same shared library also has a hard link to it, so it's only on the disk once. With this scheme, while it takes more space, testing requirements drop a ton, you don't break when you upgrade, and you can have multiple versions of apps and libraries installed at the same time. Also, running apps in a jail is the way to go. Not that it eliminates threats, but it's a lot better than letting an app see the whole system. The truth is even on phones space requirements are rapidly becoming a non-issue, and the ease of developing applications is more important than ever. Just look at Android, with now over 300K apps, vs Debian with around 30K packages.
If there is ever going to be a year of the Linux desktop, it's going to take a lot more freedom to develop and publish apps. Just try to get your app into Debian that you write in a couple of days. I did manage to get one in, and I'm glad it's there because it will help a certain class of people, but the effort required was higher than writing the app, and most apps never find a sponsor. The root cause of all this red tape is how we represent apps in Linux. Having a single version of any given shared library was a good idea the year they thought of it, but it's not any more.
Calling them, current UNIX/Linux filesystem hierarcy, "arcane", baffles me.
The Unix files system is pre object oriented programming. It was developed back when we organized function calls by the purpose they served, rather than the class of object they belong to. So, you get/usr/share/doc where all applications in theory put some documentation, and/usr/bin where they put executables, and/usr/lib where they put libraries. It was just an extension of how C programmers coded (and I am one). Now days, the proper way to organized files is to keep all the files of a given object together in one place, meaning you need a/Apps directory or/Program Files where one directory == one application. Every file an app needs should be there, other than base libraries provided by the OS, which should be few and stable. Sure, there are quite a few exceptions, like device drivers, system information like menus and icons, and such. The Zero Install guys have the right idea.
The Gnu/Linux file organization is one of the main obstacles to FOSS development. If I want to publish an Android app, I write it this week, and it's in the Market next week. This is because my app will run in a jail where it can only find the files it really needs, in it's own application directory. If I want to provide an Android library (which I have), you just publish your code and people link to it statically. In Debian, you have to do a shared library, meaning you have to do extensive testing for any new release. It's total BS red tape, and it's killing Linux FOSS efforts. It's actually easier to develop FOSS for WIndows.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been working with Mary TTS, an open source research TTS tool developed in Germany. It did not have any American voice at all like James Earl Jones, which is why I build a new voice, cmu-rms-hsmm. It's based on recordings from the artic CMU database. I do feel this guy has a deep resonant voice, somewhat James Earl Jones. It's a wonderful voice for high speed listening. Its included in the latest release of Mary TTS, version 4.1, which you can get at http://mary.dfki.de/Download. I use it with NVDA, through an open source project called Speech-Hub, which makes it easy to incorporate TTS engines with screen readers. You can download it at: http://www.speechhub.org/SpeechHub/install-w.
I use this voice 100% of the time with NVDA, but it has some drawbacks. Mainly, Mary TTS is a CPU hog, and is too laggy. However, with a fast CPU (you really want an i5 or better) and a couple gig or more of memory, it's quite usable. Still, it's 10X less efficient than any other TTS system I've worked with, which is why I want to spend some time over the coming year looking into a light version that is faster and needs less memory. I listen to e-books I translate to audio books with this voice, using Astro Nova Player on my Galaxy Nexus phone. It allows me to speed up to 6X speed, though only some blind people seems to be able to listen that fast.
http://dev.vinux-project.org./ It has links to my speech speed-up work, sonic, my work with Mary TTS, VInux, and some ideas about improving speech recognition front ends with better speech spectrograms.
Yeah, I have to believe this guy is going for those Chinese government dollars that they give posters for pro-Chinese posts. How much do you think he just made? $0.25?
The John Stewart show that started this whole thing stated some pretty ugly figures about suicide rates. Workers get a bunk in a small room with seven other workers they don't even know. Around high places where you could jump to your death, they've installed nets to catch jumpers. If you talk to other employees about forming a group to negotiate for better wages or working conditions, you get 12 years in jail.
China has people to spare, and not enough resources to go around. That's one reason why labor is cheap and may remain that way for generations. Here in the US, we have resources to burn but not enough people to make use of them. That's one reason labor here is expensive, and why some politicians want to make children of illegal immigrants non-citizens: this would create a whole new class of non-Americans, living for generations in the US with no rights, ripe for exploitation as cheap labor, just like their illegal immigrant ancestors. We're not alone in the world in wanting a large population of near slave laborers to do the hard work for us (seen any Americans picking strawberries lately?). Qatar, for example, allows citizens to "sponsor" foreign workers, who once in the country aren't even allowed to leave without their employer's permission, or change jobs or complain about working conditions or wages... Remember all those black Africans trapped in Libya when war broke out? This is typical of what happens around the world when bad governments allow exploitation of the weak.
If we can make a small difference through educating Americans about working conditions in the factories where our stuff is made, I think it's an effort well worth pursuing.
If any of them talk to each other about the possibility of starting a union, they serve 12 years in jail. I heard this from the source that started this whole Apple Foxconn thing... the John Stewart show. The reason we're picking on Apple is because John picked on Apple, and because they really do have the margins to increase worker wages, unlike say Dell or HP. Actually, it was a terrific show, one of the best he's done, IMO. The whole point was of course bashing Republicans on the campaign trail as usual. This time he was highlighting the common theme about making America a more "business friendly" place for corporations, something Mitt talks a lot about. So, he said let's take a look at the world's most business friendly economy - China! His point was if you take the business friendly logic to it's natural extreme, you wind up with a near dictatorship oppressing the people for the good of big business.
I'm in a slightly different situation than the original poster. I've probably got a bigger mortgage, country club monthly dues, an Infinity G37 (though I always wanted a red Corvette), and the boat's not entirely cheap. I consider this compensation for living in North Carolina rather than my home turf of Silicon Valley, where I could only afford a crappy condo (which I loved and miss dearly), and where I was unwilling to raise my kids. I started a tiny EDA software company here, filed several patents, wrote some very interesting code, and sold the company last year. It should all be supper cool with no complaints. However, I started losing central vision, much like older people with age related macular degeneration. It turns out I have late onset Stargart's Disease and soon wont be able to read the screen well at all, at least with my eyes. So, keeping a job where I can pay the mortgage and all the other stuff suddenly seems a whole lot more important than it used to.
Here's the weird part. Because of my vision loss, I discovered something I love more than what I devoted my career to. I decided to take on this problem by the horns. I checked out the software for the blind, the best of which is JAWs, and it's impressive, but not good enough. Not only that, being closed source, I can't contribute to making it better. So, I decided to write my own, and was the tech lead for Vinux 3.0, which is Linux for the Vision Impaired. I've also developed algorithms for high speed listening, and just yesterday I found that the latest Audible.com app for Android either includes my code (which is LGPL, and they are more than welcome) or they invented something like it. It's freaking amazing at 3X speed, and it's only problem is they don't have a 4X button. I also built an open source voice last Thanksgiving which I now listen to exclusively, and I do it at 4X speed normally.
So... it turns out I love writing code to help the blind and people with low vision. I have a certain talent for it, and I'm not sure I can even describe the satisfactions it gives me. I love it more than any other creative activity I've ever engaged in. If I could make that the work of the rest of my life, here's no question it's what I'd do. Here's the rub. I get paid a bit more than double than the most highly paid accessibility software geek I know. If I accepted a job doing I what seem to love most, two things would happen. First, my family would go through major changes, as we could not afford my house, much less the country club. Second, I'd wind up working for some poor guy who is also under paid, and probably because he's too dumb to get a better paying job. I'd have to write stupid code determined by government officials or doners, who while well meaning, have little clue about what code people with vision impairments need developed. In short, it would almost certainly suck compared to doing it for free.
So... I'm with the other posters who suggest keeping the stable job, at least while the kids need you. Unlike the original poster, I do love my job. For me it's a matter of choosing between a great job that pays really well, and a job that feeds my soul like none other, but pays student wages. I'm not sure my kids will ever appreciate my sacrifice here... However, my boss seems willing to let me do a Google style 20% thing. That's what I'm doing.
First of all, Atom has an edge? Really? My dual-core ARM smart-phone has more juice than my Atom based netbook. What I've been wondering for about 15 years is why the heck doesn't Intel buy Arm? It's the no-brainer way to protect your #1 status - buy out all competitors that show any signs of being a threat -- and do it before they're big enough to attract any anti-trust scrutiny. Intel is at least 10 years over due here. Are they being incredibly super stupid, or was there any valid reason ARM is still independent? ARM has been the biggest threat to Intel for many years. What's up?
What I have to wonder is a) Why does Sony care about rewriting busybox? With it's GPL 2 license, Sony is free to screw us over all they want with devices we can't hack. b) Why do we care about Sony? A bigger downfall in corporate stature hasn't happened during my lifetime. At this point, not only are they a-holes who we should ignore, but why do they deserve more slashdot time than say GE? They're losers. Let's ignore them.
Well, this is a lame place to post, but I read the next 200 posts, and they're all lame places! I thought I'd bring up the fact that at the center of the earth, gravity is zero. TFA talks about gravity pushing out all the non-uranium due to it's mass, creating a 5-mile diameter ball in the center that acts like Earth's interior natural reactor. Even at 2.5 miles from the center, that gravitational attraction to is going to be pretty tiny. I would expect random weather-like currents to blow away such a core, unless the core really is solid, in which case, how did the uranium migrate through solid steel under almost no gravity to the center? Is there a shrinkage joke that applies?
I love posts on slashdot by people who have more than the average clue about what's going on. Thanks for the info. I've been using openjdk for the last year, and I think it is finally something close to a real free software alternative for most Java programs. I also use Android's Java. Pretty much, I think we should be using any viable alternative to Oracle. They simply can't be counted on.
So... you're saying, that other than charging a distribution fee, that anyone may sell GPL software for a profit for themselves? What a total crock.
Wow... "Because usin the GPL, if the guy actually did, gives this person the legal right to sell it..."
Are you one of those slashdot plants who gets paid to spread fud? Enough said.
Did the guy mention that he copyrighted his work? If he put it out there with nothing indicating that, there's an argument that he put it into the public domain, but if he copyrighted the project in a README file or in the core code files, he's covered. If someone is violating the GPL license and selling a modified version of his work, I'd recommend he contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who can help defend him, most likely free of charge.
Jesus... It's amazing what crap a first poster can say. No, you can not sell GPLed software you didn't write, though you may charge a distribution fee, and you must provide a way to access the source code you're distributing. If some a-hole is charging $50-ish bucks for your software, take him down.
Without gravity, we'd die. That's only part of what kills me about the whole manned space settlement concept. I love reading sci-fi where we live on lot's of planets and in space stations, but the fact is we're made of meat grown in a biological soup unique to Earth.
So, here's what it take to populate the galaxy. First, you need patience. If you have a problem taking a few hundred years getting from place to place, you'll never make it. Second, you need to be made for deep space. Rather than meat, you need a body made of high-tech materials. Instead of a worrying about radiation damage, you should feel comfortable living near a radiation source that can power you trip from star to star. You should work well at liquid nitrogen temperatures to well above boiling. You should be able to shut down and go into sleep mode for many years at a time, cooling as low as 3 degrees Kelvin. In other words, it's not us meat-based creatures that will populate the galaxy, but the machines we create. Probably some sexy decedent of Siri. I hope she doesn't turn out to be a bitch.
This has not been my experience so far. True, there are few black engineers, programmers, and people starting businesses in Silicon Valley. However, those I have met have generally been outstanding at their work, and gained plenty of respect as well as responsibility. I believe engineering in Silicon Valley is as close to a meritocracy as the world has ever seen. There are all races, religions, and frankly no one cares so long as you are good at what you do.
Now just some rough estimates... about 1 in 10 Americans are black roughly. American born engineers make up maybe 1 in 2 in Silicon Valley. The vast majority of these people did well at well respected universities. I'm going to guess that reduces the potential population of black men to hire by a factor of four, just because the black community is so much poorer and parents are typically not college educated. Multiply all that and I'd guess we come up with a pretty good estimate of why blacks are under represented in Silicon Valley. For one thing, white men are also under represented. Americans in general have for some reason decided to avoid real science, math, and engineering.
"Cluby"? Give me a break. You can be a black Jewish lesbian and get a great job if you have engineering talent in Silicon Valley.
I find that writing code to help other people, even if I have to do it for free, keeps my enthusiasm sky high. I have interesting code to write at work, but contributing to open-source projects for the blind is where I get really excited.
Of course, this isn't really what people are thinking of, but what if we went to a BitCoin model? If all we are trying to do is prove who we are, which is much different than proving we are trustworthy, then a P2P system based on proved work should fit the bill.
In case you're like most slashdotters and don't know how these systems work, well it's super cool. All they do is sign ledgers of transactions with a special proof of work, which is simply a random number attached to the transaction log which causes the SHA-256 signature to start with a bunch of zeros. Obviously, you'd have to look damned hard to find such a random number, thus you've proved you worked hard. Can't we use a system like that which has proven secure for million dollar transactions?
Actually, I rather like the latest incarnation of Unity. A nice improvement over Gome 2 Shell, IMO. That's not why people don't write Linux apps. Imagine trying to write the super-popular "Fart" application, which prints money on Android, for Linux. First you write it. Take maybe a week to do it well. No biggie. Now what? You can put it on Sourceforge and watch 10 users per month download it, or publish it on Freshmeat.net, and watch downloads go to 10 per day for a couple of days. What if you want real exposure? Well, the distros are binary incompatible and massively fragmented, but there's a decent number of Ubuntu users. If you want to reach them, the easiest way is to get into the Debian disto and wait a very long time for it to show up in Ubuntu. Now this will naturally turn off your Fart app developer, but even if he wanted to be in Debian, he now has to go through hoops that take more effort than developing the app did. And even after that, there's no way the Fart app will attract a Debian sponsor.
So, the real reason there aren't many Linux apps is because in most cases it's literally impossible to get them to users. Pretty simple, really. Maybe someday soon someone in GNU/Linux land will wake up and realize they have a problem. What we need is a cross-platform app-store that includes a packaging solution that automates building packages for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android (sorry iOS...). Users should be able to use the same app store on all platforms to find and install the apps they want, whether paid or FOSS. If that happens, Linux apps would skyrocket.
Well, I run on a small screen and have poor eyesight, so Unity in 11.10 is a welcome release. The auto-hide feature in Gnome 2.0 always sucked so badly I always had to turn it off. A large icon bar on top and a large bar for app icons on the bottom really squeeze the vertical usable area, especially when we we haven't even added the window frame, menu tool bars and status bar. Having it on the left and with a decent auto hide is awesome. They even integrated the menu bar into the window title bar, and integrated that into the top bar with the system menu and system tray icons. Very well done, IMO. I'm able to launch apps faster than ever, by typing the Windows key and then one or two letters and hitting enter, just like I can in windows. If Unity didn't include this feature, i would have sorely missed this from Windows 7. Instead, Unity added the dash, which is as far as I can tell, a nice improvement over what Windows does. With this desktop, I can use the same window manager on a netbook as on a desktop. Kudos to Ubuntu for a decent unity in 11.10, IMO. They even have a decent effort for accessibility in progress, and so far as I can tell are taking community feedback, bug reports, and patches very seriously. The port to Qt paves the way for a decent tablet play, though GNU/Linux has many bigger problems to fix to before they'll have much presence there.
I hated Unity in 11.04 and am glad to be rid of that version. I currently use Unity 11.10 2D, with the Compiz window manager and a couple of config hacks to make it work better with Unity 2D. Honestly, it's pretty cool. It's annoying having yet again to learn all the new keystrokes to launch stuff, but oh well... at least the new system looks pretty good.
Ok, so I get SONAME must match exactly. I'm only advocating doing what Android does today, but in a way that saves even more disk space. Android today makes every app have it's own copy of every library it uses, whether a .so file or statically linked, other than base libraries that are part of Android. The resulting bloat isn't even enough for Google to feel like bothering to minimize it, though it bothers me. So, just have apps run in chroot (and additional permission) jails where they see their own copy of / exactly as it was when the developer built and tested it. As an exception to this, the developer could specify which libraries he wants to allow updates to, and if there is some crazy security bug that impacts this app, then force an upgrade. IMO, Linux security is pretty flawed today, even compared to Mac OS X, Windows, and Android. This is partly why we have to carefully review source and hate trusting binary only apps. With better jails and app monitoring, I think we could reduce the required review process considerably.
I don't understand why you keep bringing up SONAME when I mention hard links. If I have 20 identical files on the disk that are all read-only, making them 20 hard links to the same file is just to save disk space and memory. The SONAME mechanism is still in place and works as before. It's not an either/or thing. Hopefully the Linux kernel is smart enough to load the same file only once, even if it is linked to in different directories, but it's a corner case that may not yet have been optimized.
As for wanting higher quality FOSS apps, I have some bad news, though RMS would refuse to believe it. While there are rare and often noble exceptions (like gcc), the general rule is that if a programmer can sell his program, he will. Most of us like open source and we like to contribute, but we like money, too. Photoshop, from what I hear, has lots of functionality users are willing to pay for, and few if any worthy competitors. This means the next worthy competitor could print money by offering a product just as good for half the price. So, given how much people like money, don't hold your breath for that open source Photoshop.
The point when most stuff becomes open source comes when there's no money to be made by keeping it closed source. That's how we got Open Office and Mozilla. These markets where so dominated by Microsoft's monopoly, there was no money left to be made. The Microsoft monopoly on OSes forced Linus to write his for free. If someone had said, "Linus, here's a lot of money for writing our next proprietary kernel", I suspect instead of Linux, we would have had to wait for the next guy who wanted to write his own kernel so bad he'd even do it for free. How much better would it be to write your own kernel and get rich at the same time? Eventually, even for free or low cost, open source projects can catch up to teams of paid developers, but only if those developers stop innovating. This happens naturally sometimes when a market niche has matured.
The most noble exception I know of is RMS himself. Until the world starts pumping out more people like RMS, we're not going to see all that excellent free software we want.
You do realize that with hard links, a file can be in multiple directories and stored on both disk once? If the Linux kernel doesn't detect that we're loading the exact same shared library twice, that bug should be fixed. There should be zero impact on RAM and very little on disk space (you still have to represent the directory structure multiple times). However, if two applications downloaded and installed through an App Center were compiled with different versions of libc, then yes, have two on the disk. How many are we realistically talking about, given that we're not talking about the stuff that comes pre-installed or anything in any .deb file? Several megabytes? In an extreme case maybe a gigabyte of disk space?
If a user actually donwloads and installs 1000 apps, there's likely to be some bloat. My phone has 32 gigabytes. Even the gigabyte of bloat this is likely to cause with 1000 user downloads is a minor problem.
Since apps would run in jails, you'd only want to upgrade the apps needing the functionality that's broken. For example, if my app does not have permission to use the network, you should not upgrade my copy of libc6 to fix a major network security bug. Again, we're talking about user apps, not the base shipped by Debian. How many packages are we likely talking about? 10 mabye?
I didn't want to get into this much detail, but you are right. Libc isn't a representative case. If I make a simple command line utility, it should by default link against an older libc to be compatible with as many distros as possible. High level packages like Qt should be published by the developers in occasional stable releases not only in source form, but in binary, all the way down to libc. When building a Qt app, I should be able to specify that I link against an exact version of Qt, which of course could mean users have do to a major download if they don't have it already, or I could specify that it must be a version of Qt 4.x, where x >= 7. It should also indicate that it was built and tested with Qt 4.7 with the full SHA-256 hash code of the Qt library used, so if users have trouble running it with Qt 4.9, they can run it instead with the original 4.7.
This could mean I have three versions of GTK+ and four of Qt if I'm a user who loves running old apps that don't have newer releases. So what? Why not let the program author and end user do that.
Again, I'm not recommending Debian abandon the debian package manager or how they build their distro. They just need to add a layer on top for downloading and sharing apps that work cross-distro. In more detail, there also needs to a way to share libraries among developers without going through the whole debian package/review process, and it could leverage the work for done for sharing apps.
One
Hackers love to share. GNU/Linux should embrace this. If they do, they'll increase FOSS development in GNU/Linux tenfold. That's the entire point of my argument.
I see you're very knowledgeable about Debian and that was a long and thoughtful reply. Of course this is slashdot, so I don't mind playing devils advocate, but I'm actually a big fan of Debian. It is some of the most important software ever written. It's changed the world in amazing ways. I've used it as my main OS on my main machine, and we do on our severs at work, and the Ubuntu distro I use now for various reasons is based on Debian.
That said, my goal is to get GNU/Linux developers and the Debian devs in particular to wake up to the fact that we've built a cathedral when we need a bazaar. As you've likely read in the paper by that title, Emacs was developed in a manner where ever bit was laid by expert craftsman under the watchful eye of RMS. Contributors were not allowed to add to the cathedral willy-nilly. GNU was going to be built right, even if RMS had to do it himself. Meanwhile, Linux Torvalds threw out his kernal and encouraged everyone to use it and people started building all sorts of stuff. Anyone could write a program today, and have it shared on the list tomorrow. That was the bazaar, and it's where the heart and sole of GNU/Linux was created. Then came the Debian package manager, and the whole scene changed. It is wonderful to have pre-compiled repositories of verified code compiled from source, and that's the foundation that made Debian great. The problem is that this binary repository is managed lovingly by devoted monks. Every brick is carefully examined by experts and nothing gets included unless it passes the high standards of the Debian monastery. The good news is that it's no longer just one man in charge. The bad news is there's now a group of devoted monks in charge. The process of carefully examining every brick and excluding most has not changed since emacs.
The magic happening in Android, and I hate to admit but iOS too, is they've gone back to the bazaar model where anyone can share any app they like. Sure, most of it is crap. In fact they probably have an app for crap. Part of it is driven by developer greed, which is counter to what Debian stands for, but most of it is just hackers enjoying their new found freedom to share. Sure, the base is solid, and carefully crafted and built at Google. You can't just write any old crud and expect it to ship installed on every phone by default. You need the default code base to "just work". However, anyone is enabled to share whatever crap they like as an app in the market. That freedom to share is missing in Debian.
Now, back to the technical points we talked about. I'm not recommending sym links, but hard links to shared libraries, and I'm recommending that apps run chrooted in an app jail, and that they install in an application directory where every library they need has a hard link. They could have their own /usr/lib directories for their shared libraries, but on the actual disk it should be /Apps/MyStupidFartApp/usr/lib/libsndfile.so.whatever. This would keep MyStupidFartApp from colliding with my friend's competing BiggerAndBetterFarts app, as we're likely to want to install a /etc/fart.conf. Because my fart app has deeper tones, it wins and my friend's loses, but later he submits a patch to libsndfile while gets included in Debian but totally breaks my poorly tested fart app. Why should my popular fart app suffer because it has bugs that were sensitized by a new libsndfile shared library? If we just run them in their own jails, and never upgrade their shared libraries (except in sever security situations), that fart app should continue to run for decades. Why should I go through the Debian packaging and review process to share a stupid buggy fart app? Why does Debian stand in my way?
What you really need is shared libraries that never change, unless there's a major security flaw detected. When you install, you get hard links in your app's directory to all the exact versions of each shared library they depend on. Any application using the same shared library also has a hard link to it, so it's only on the disk once. With this scheme, while it takes more space, testing requirements drop a ton, you don't break when you upgrade, and you can have multiple versions of apps and libraries installed at the same time. Also, running apps in a jail is the way to go. Not that it eliminates threats, but it's a lot better than letting an app see the whole system. The truth is even on phones space requirements are rapidly becoming a non-issue, and the ease of developing applications is more important than ever. Just look at Android, with now over 300K apps, vs Debian with around 30K packages.
If there is ever going to be a year of the Linux desktop, it's going to take a lot more freedom to develop and publish apps. Just try to get your app into Debian that you write in a couple of days. I did manage to get one in, and I'm glad it's there because it will help a certain class of people, but the effort required was higher than writing the app, and most apps never find a sponsor. The root cause of all this red tape is how we represent apps in Linux. Having a single version of any given shared library was a good idea the year they thought of it, but it's not any more.
The Unix files system is pre object oriented programming. It was developed back when we organized function calls by the purpose they served, rather than the class of object they belong to. So, you get /usr/share/doc where all applications in theory put some documentation, and /usr/bin where they put executables, and /usr/lib where they put libraries. It was just an extension of how C programmers coded (and I am one). Now days, the proper way to organized files is to keep all the files of a given object together in one place, meaning you need a /Apps directory or /Program Files where one directory == one application. Every file an app needs should be there, other than base libraries provided by the OS, which should be few and stable. Sure, there are quite a few exceptions, like device drivers, system information like menus and icons, and such. The Zero Install guys have the right idea.
The Gnu/Linux file organization is one of the main obstacles to FOSS development. If I want to publish an Android app, I write it this week, and it's in the Market next week. This is because my app will run in a jail where it can only find the files it really needs, in it's own application directory. If I want to provide an Android library (which I have), you just publish your code and people link to it statically. In Debian, you have to do a shared library, meaning you have to do extensive testing for any new release. It's total BS red tape, and it's killing Linux FOSS efforts. It's actually easier to develop FOSS for WIndows.