I used ears (word recognition) and festival+mbrola (speech synthesis) to make a car mp3 player last summer. You could select a playlist, and it would then pick random songs from the playlist. After saying the name it would listen for a command (stop, play, or skip) and would then exit to select another playlist, play the current song (which was the default if nothing was heard for a few seconds) or skip the song and pick another.
Ears doesn't have a very good success rate. Festival works well, though. I kept everything mounted read-only or on a ramdisk so I didn't have to fsck. It was pretty cool. I got to talk to my car.:-)
This summer I plan on using ViaVoice, and enhancing the interface.
I don't think that the government is the large totalitarian threat nowdays.
It's large corporations.
In 1984, the key to the regime was that the government controlled the information. The Ministry of Truth controlled exactly what everyone saw and heard about events, past and present.
For the most part, we don't have our government controlling what we see and hear, or what we can read. We do, however, have AOL/TimeWarner, MS/NBC, and a handfull of others controlling what we see and hear about current events. How badly does MSNBC want to talk about the ways in which it has used its monopolistic powers? How badly does AOL/TimeWarner's CNN want to talk about how badly AOL sucks?
And true, privacy concerns are largely a government thing right now, but we also see private companies Scanning Hard Drives and sending information back to the corporate HQ. I have no doubt that private companies will continue to be a privacy threat.
So, is the Government really your threat, or is it corporations who control the media?
Doing heavy math in real-time isn't what you want to do, probably.
Most math problems take a variable amount of time to do. And if you don't want to always use the worst case, you can't do it in a garunteed amount of time.
The best solution, in my opinion, for a system that, say, collects data in real-time and does analysis on them is to have a machine (or part of the machine -- wait a minute) running on a garunteed real-time operating system and the math stuff queued up and done later on another machine. For instance, have one machine do measurements and spit out data over a serial port, and another machine that reads from the serial port and does the fourier transforms or whatnot.
You don't necessarily need another machine, however. Real Time Linux allows you to have garunteed processor time / time interrupts... all the things you need for Real Time tasks... and you run all the rest of the Linux stuff after all the real time stuff finishes. This means you could use the same machine for reading as for analysis. Have the data collection as a real-time thread, do the analysis and other stuff in normal mode. I bet other OSs have this too, but I'm only familiar with RTLinux.
If you really need to do the heavy math in real-time, I'd test how fast the math stuff runs on it, and make sure that it runs in roughly 1/4 the time you need. That should leave you with enough leeway so that you don't have to worry about caching, etc. as much, but can still leave the caching on (because caching really helps). Unless it's something where you can never fail, ever, like where human lives are at stake. But then you shouldn't be using plain-vanilla PC stuff anyay. In any case, you'll have to run Real-Time software (like Real Time Linux or no OS and do interrupt stuff).
I still find that the best solution for doing real-time stuff is some nice microcontroller code, if it doesn't involve too much heavy processing power. Stick a PIC in there, you can count up exactly how long it will take really easy.
Well, you see, you're wrong. Red Hat, debian, slackware, and others have contributed lots of code and typically hire developers to work on products. Red Hat has been a big supporter of gnome, among other things. At the very least they've done lots of good work on install programs. Have you ever tried installing Linux using a cross-compiler? Not fun. Try downloading all the sources and using an NT cross-compiler and see if you can build a linux system. It's non-trivial to say the least. Much easier to install Red Hat, Slackware, or any other distribution.
I know several people who much prefer *nix systems (they tend to use emacsspeak, as another poster pointed out). It's much easier to interface with a computer on the command line where you can have your command line read back to you then try to deal with a GUI.
From what I understand, it's that the concept of having an ``area''.. your desktop area where things are arranged in different places... isn't the most native way to interface with things for the blind. Having a stream of sound, and then sending input, and getting more audio feedback is much more natural. It's the way that they interface with most other things in real life.
A lot of clunky windows solutions exist for reading different parts of the screen. For the most part, they're horrible. Because they have to try to figure out how to deal with areas. I mean, I'm looking at this posting window right now, and if I was a program trying to read the screen, I'd have to figure out the difference between the stuff in the boxes on the left frame and the stuff on the right. Not to mention I'd have to figure out that the left hand parts of the main table were labels for the text boxes on the right hand part. Things like that. It's much easier when it's a stream of text.
From what I have heard, Intel is willing to give MS the chips for free just for the little ``intel inside'' sticker on the outside of the box.
I guess it sort of makes sense... you give MS your chips that are at the bottom of the line (the equivelant of P5's now) and you get free advertising every time the box is fired up.
Okay, there are some interesting things about the X-box.
It might very run existing PC games, but those aren't quite as easy and fun for the typical 8-year-old as sticking in a Playstation disk. However, the PSX2 will also come out with lots of pre-existing games, 'cause it will run normal PSX games. Having lots of games available the moment it becomes available, especially the games you currently have, is a very nice feature, and one that will help the PSX2 sell.
Many game companies port once for console, once for PC. Don't you think it would be attractive to just port once, for DirectWhatever?
The X-box has a hard drive. While this allows you to have lots of save games, it also allows games to add complexity, interfere with each other, and so on. Also, if the OS will go on the hard drive, there are opportunities for MS to fix bugs/introduce new ones... which will cause a moving target for game developers... something they don't want.
and, perhaps the most important thing that might help the X-box
When have you seen MS go into a new market at less than full-force? If they're dumping billions into the console, making it cheaper than PSX2/Dreamcast/NextNintendo, and dumping billions in convincing companies to port to them (and maybe exclude other systems), and dumping billions to sell the games for cheap... it's going to hurt competition. And we've seen this happen before. And they can do this.
By the way, did you hear why they are using Intel chips rather than Athlons? Intel is giving MS the chips for free. AMD wouldn't give the chips away.
Perhaps the best (maybe not moral though) is to fight the big corporations with FUD. Ask Coca-Cola(tm) if they really want to be known as a company that takes down web sites that help people with their addiction to cocaine. I'll bet they back off really quick. PR is really imporant, esp to soft drink companies.
Someone gzipped up the source, basically did some hex encoding with addressing, and then made hostnames out of them. The code grabs all the hostnames, sorts them into the right order, grabs out the right hex characters, unhexes them, and ungzip's back to the origional source.
Even NFS, which can be implemented using very little memory for the application size, the computer doing the serving can really use lots of RAM. Why? Cache. Disks are much slower than modern networking. If you have four gigabit ethernet connections coming out of a host, that's a maximum throughput of 500M/sec. MAXIMUM SCSI rates are in the 160M/sec rate nowdays. And that's not taking into account latency and stuff. On the server side, cache really, really helps out. So, many times it's beneficial to stick several gigs of ram into the machine. Even if you're only using, say, 64M for program space, having the additional 15.9 G for cache can really help out.
This is a cool idea, but is it compatible with either the letter or the spirit of the GPL? I'd say no, at least on the second count. And krealplayer, if it was linked against Qt 1.x, would have to be GPL. I don't care to start a license flamewar, but this is one of the unfortunate side-effects of the GPL, and why I (generally) won't use it in my own projects.
A GPL'd program can link to propriatery libraries. For instance, the Linux Kernel can link to propriatery VMware modules, or xanim can link to quicktime codecs.
Or, as a better example, you can compile GPL'd software on a Solaris machine, which has a propriatery libc.
The Application would not necessarily be a RealPlayer application, it would probably be a general-purpose media application, able to link with lots of different codecs (mpeg, realplayer, avi, etc), both propriatery and not.
because they're not going to get too many people switching from Media Player to RealPlayer on the Windows side. Mac and Linux are probaby the markets in which they can grow the most. And maybe not on the Mac.
Well, maybe if they've hugely improved the user interface, stability, and performance since the last version, they can gain market share under windows. But nobody I know of with windows prefers RealPlayer to Windows Media Player.
Are the specifications available for using the RealPlayer shared objects? Probably the best thing RealPlayer could do (presuming they don't want to release source for their protocol) is release the shared objects and documentation on how to use them, and let the community make grealplayer and krealplayer. This would save them having to keep up the whole interface side of the application, they'd just need to release the codecs.
There are a couple of reasons (I feel like I can answer this, I know the guys who made the new page). First, and maybe most importantly, one of the guys who made the web page is colorblind.:-) But in general, it seemed that the grayscale seemed like slackware... simple, elegant, efficient.
I think it's really too bad that there are so many 8086's and 286's (and 68000s) with 2400 baud modems in landfills.
With an 8086 and a floppy disk you get a beautiful dumb terminal. Imagine how many people could benefit if all those old, mostly-dead computers could be hooked up with a modem (or for places without modem access, some sort of cheap ham radio packet network or other cheap networking). Anyone could get email and use lynx for web browsing.
I guess the biggest problem is the infrastructure though... if there are no land lines for phones in everyone's living space (or even no electricity!) it's hard to have any sort of computer stuff. Perhaps a cluster of dumb terminals in the center of a community? You can run lots of dumb terminals pretty well off of a single reasonably-fast modem...
They could even write it off on their taxes, maybe.... oh, wait, they're the government.
Seriously, though, most of the time when government stuff stops being used it goes into a warehouse, in case another department needs it... that's what it's like here in Georgia, anyway. There's this depot with unused 286's, NeXTStations, Sparc IPCs, 20meg 5.25" RLL drives, and so on... I think they keep stuff for like 10 years. It's sort of absurd, nobody is going to use some of that stuff. Oh well. That's government for you.
AMD is going to build ``normal'' x86 chips with special 64 bit instructions, while Intel is trying to push IA64... which hasn't been released in a commercial version, and which many people think won't be popular until 2003 or so. AMD has a brand new Athlon core to work with, but Intel is doing all they can to s t r e c h the PPro/PII/PIII core to faster speeds by increasing the length of the pipeline everywhere they can. Will Intel make a re-designed new core (I'm a big fan of calling the chip the Sexium if they do...)? Do they have to to compete with AMD?
And then there's the issue of other people... will we finally see a board capable of running new PowerPC chips that doesn't come from Apple? Will the portability of Linux allow other chip makers to enter the playing field? Maybe the Digi... er, Compaq Alpha people will get someone to fab their ``old, slow'' 21164s for really cheap.
Anyway, where is technology heading? Certainly low-power-consumption chips are a booming industry, microcontrollers are everywhere, but for the desktop, what will the landscape look like in 4 years?
The first person who starts talking AppleSpeak about Gigaflops and Apple and the G4 and how Macs are *sooooo* cool gets the death of a thousand swords!
We're talking about processing units that are orders of magnitude beyond what a typical workstation can do, not processing units that are several percent beyond what a typical workstation can do.
Therein lies a lot of the minor niggles I had with F2K; it was essentially American, not universal.
You must remove yourself from the piece of music. For instance, Pomp and Circumstance may be used in the US as a graduation march, however the music can be used for it regardless of whether it is known for that purpose or not.
The Nutcracker isn't about dancing mushrooms, but that fit in there pretty well, anyway.
Anyway, the difference may be the main difference between Classical and Romantic theory... the Classical musicians believed that music has an innate beauty, whereas the Romantics believed that music was an extension of the emotions of the composer.
Current combustion engines using petrochemicals also cause large amounts of NO_{x}. It comes from the nitrogen in the air and the heat of the combustion process (iirc). Anyway, from what I remember H2 combustion engines (rotary engines seemed to work the best for H2 combustion) had less NO_{x} and much less SO_{x} product.
And the bad emmissions are drastically reduced even from there if a fuel cell is used (and they make H2/O2 fuel cells that are really efficient... like 98%).
H2 is really good, there have been lots of strides in different ways to store it... especially metal hydride storage.
And the ability to drink what comes out of your tailpipe is just cool cool cool.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Ears doesn't have a very good success rate. Festival works well, though. I kept everything mounted read-only or on a ramdisk so I didn't have to fsck. It was pretty cool. I got to talk to my car. :-)
This summer I plan on using ViaVoice, and enhancing the interface.
It's large corporations.
In 1984, the key to the regime was that the government controlled the information. The Ministry of Truth controlled exactly what everyone saw and heard about events, past and present.
For the most part, we don't have our government controlling what we see and hear, or what we can read. We do, however, have AOL/TimeWarner, MS/NBC, and a handfull of others controlling what we see and hear about current events. How badly does MSNBC want to talk about the ways in which it has used its monopolistic powers? How badly does AOL/TimeWarner's CNN want to talk about how badly AOL sucks?
And true, privacy concerns are largely a government thing right now, but we also see private companies Scanning Hard Drives and sending information back to the corporate HQ. I have no doubt that private companies will continue to be a privacy threat.
So, is the Government really your threat, or is it corporations who control the media?
Most math problems take a variable amount of time to do. And if you don't want to always use the worst case, you can't do it in a garunteed amount of time.
The best solution, in my opinion, for a system that, say, collects data in real-time and does analysis on them is to have a machine (or part of the machine -- wait a minute) running on a garunteed real-time operating system and the math stuff queued up and done later on another machine. For instance, have one machine do measurements and spit out data over a serial port, and another machine that reads from the serial port and does the fourier transforms or whatnot.
You don't necessarily need another machine, however. Real Time Linux allows you to have garunteed processor time / time interrupts... all the things you need for Real Time tasks... and you run all the rest of the Linux stuff after all the real time stuff finishes. This means you could use the same machine for reading as for analysis. Have the data collection as a real-time thread, do the analysis and other stuff in normal mode. I bet other OSs have this too, but I'm only familiar with RTLinux.
If you really need to do the heavy math in real-time, I'd test how fast the math stuff runs on it, and make sure that it runs in roughly 1/4 the time you need. That should leave you with enough leeway so that you don't have to worry about caching, etc. as much, but can still leave the caching on (because caching really helps). Unless it's something where you can never fail, ever, like where human lives are at stake. But then you shouldn't be using plain-vanilla PC stuff anyay. In any case, you'll have to run Real-Time software (like Real Time Linux or no OS and do interrupt stuff).
I still find that the best solution for doing real-time stuff is some nice microcontroller code, if it doesn't involve too much heavy processing power. Stick a PIC in there, you can count up exactly how long it will take really easy.
Irix scales well as well. Mmm... Origin 2000...
From what I understand, it's that the concept of having an ``area'' .. your desktop area where things are arranged in different places... isn't the most native way to interface with things for the blind. Having a stream of sound, and then sending input, and getting more audio feedback is much more natural. It's the way that they interface with most other things in real life.
A lot of clunky windows solutions exist for reading different parts of the screen. For the most part, they're horrible. Because they have to try to figure out how to deal with areas. I mean, I'm looking at this posting window right now, and if I was a program trying to read the screen, I'd have to figure out the difference between the stuff in the boxes on the left frame and the stuff on the right. Not to mention I'd have to figure out that the left hand parts of the main table were labels for the text boxes on the right hand part. Things like that. It's much easier when it's a stream of text.
I guess it sort of makes sense... you give MS your chips that are at the bottom of the line (the equivelant of P5's now) and you get free advertising every time the box is fired up.
- It might very run existing PC games, but those aren't quite as easy and fun for the typical 8-year-old as sticking in a Playstation disk. However, the PSX2 will also come out with lots of pre-existing games, 'cause it will run normal PSX games. Having lots of games available the moment it becomes available, especially the games you currently have, is a very nice feature, and one that will help the PSX2 sell.
- Many game companies port once for console, once for PC. Don't you think it would be attractive to just port once, for DirectWhatever?
- The X-box has a hard drive. While this allows you to have lots of save games, it also allows games to add complexity, interfere with each other, and so on. Also, if the OS will go on the hard drive, there are opportunities for MS to fix bugs/introduce new ones... which will cause a moving target for game developers... something they don't want.
and, perhaps the most important thing that might help the X-box- When have you seen MS go into a new market at less than full-force? If they're dumping billions into the console, making it cheaper than PSX2/Dreamcast/NextNintendo, and dumping billions in convincing companies to port to them (and maybe exclude other systems), and dumping billions to sell the games for cheap... it's going to hurt competition. And we've seen this happen before. And they can do this.
By the way, did you hear why they are using Intel chips rather than Athlons? Intel is giving MS the chips for free. AMD wouldn't give the chips away.Perhaps the best (maybe not moral though) is to fight the big corporations with FUD. Ask Coca-Cola(tm) if they really want to be known as a company that takes down web sites that help people with their addiction to cocaine. I'll bet they back off really quick. PR is really imporant, esp to soft drink companies.
Pretty clever, really.
Even NFS, which can be implemented using very little memory for the application size, the computer doing the serving can really use lots of RAM. Why? Cache. Disks are much slower than modern networking. If you have four gigabit ethernet connections coming out of a host, that's a maximum throughput of 500M/sec. MAXIMUM SCSI rates are in the 160M/sec rate nowdays. And that's not taking into account latency and stuff. On the server side, cache really, really helps out. So, many times it's beneficial to stick several gigs of ram into the machine. Even if you're only using, say, 64M for program space, having the additional 15.9 G for cache can really help out.
calvin:~$ ./pointlessgadget
Okay. This can set several things. But there are lots of things it can't do:
I guess it could do something like spawn a new shell. That might be trickier to notice.
'Course, if you ask me, it's your own damn fault for running games as root. :-)
A GPL'd program can link to propriatery libraries. For instance, the Linux Kernel can link to propriatery VMware modules, or xanim can link to quicktime codecs.
Or, as a better example, you can compile GPL'd software on a Solaris machine, which has a propriatery libc.
The Application would not necessarily be a RealPlayer application, it would probably be a general-purpose media application, able to link with lots of different codecs (mpeg, realplayer, avi, etc), both propriatery and not.
Well, maybe if they've hugely improved the user interface, stability, and performance since the last version, they can gain market share under windows. But nobody I know of with windows prefers RealPlayer to Windows Media Player.
Are the specifications available for using the RealPlayer shared objects? Probably the best thing RealPlayer could do (presuming they don't want to release source for their protocol) is release the shared objects and documentation on how to use them, and let the community make grealplayer and krealplayer. This would save them having to keep up the whole interface side of the application, they'd just need to release the codecs.
There are a couple of reasons (I feel like I can answer this, I know the guys who made the new page). First, and maybe most importantly, one of the guys who made the web page is colorblind. :-) But in general, it seemed that the grayscale seemed like slackware... simple, elegant, efficient.
As it turns out, there isn't that much support for it.
With an 8086 and a floppy disk you get a beautiful dumb terminal. Imagine how many people could benefit if all those old, mostly-dead computers could be hooked up with a modem (or for places without modem access, some sort of cheap ham radio packet network or other cheap networking). Anyone could get email and use lynx for web browsing.
I guess the biggest problem is the infrastructure though... if there are no land lines for phones in everyone's living space (or even no electricity!) it's hard to have any sort of computer stuff. Perhaps a cluster of dumb terminals in the center of a community? You can run lots of dumb terminals pretty well off of a single reasonably-fast modem...
It has some different flags than gcc though, so be careful.
the typical -o and -c should still work though.
Doing a test povray image, povray compiled with gcc finished in 12 minutes, with their Alpha compiler, just over 4!
This compares with 15 on my Celeron 300a.
The Compaq compiler was available on the Red Hat machine, I hope it is available under the debian one, too. If it isn't, ask for it!
Please send all the computer stuff to:
Erich P.
Georgia Tech Station
Atlanta, GA
30332
They could even write it off on their taxes, maybe.... oh, wait, they're the government.
Seriously, though, most of the time when government stuff stops being used it goes into a warehouse, in case another department needs it... that's what it's like here in Georgia, anyway. There's this depot with unused 286's, NeXTStations, Sparc IPCs, 20meg 5.25" RLL drives, and so on... I think they keep stuff for like 10 years. It's sort of absurd, nobody is going to use some of that stuff. Oh well. That's government for you.
AMD is going to build ``normal'' x86 chips with special 64 bit instructions, while Intel is trying to push IA64... which hasn't been released in a commercial version, and which many people think won't be popular until 2003 or so. AMD has a brand new Athlon core to work with, but Intel is doing all they can to s t r e c h the PPro/PII/PIII core to faster speeds by increasing the length of the pipeline everywhere they can. Will Intel make a re-designed new core (I'm a big fan of calling the chip the Sexium if they do...)? Do they have to to compete with AMD?
And then there's the issue of other people... will we finally see a board capable of running new PowerPC chips that doesn't come from Apple? Will the portability of Linux allow other chip makers to enter the playing field? Maybe the Digi... er, Compaq Alpha people will get someone to fab their ``old, slow'' 21164s for really cheap.
Anyway, where is technology heading? Certainly low-power-consumption chips are a booming industry, microcontrollers are everywhere, but for the desktop, what will the landscape look like in 4 years?
We're talking about processing units that are orders of magnitude beyond what a typical workstation can do, not processing units that are several percent beyond what a typical workstation can do.
You must remove yourself from the piece of music. For instance, Pomp and Circumstance may be used in the US as a graduation march, however the music can be used for it regardless of whether it is known for that purpose or not.
The Nutcracker isn't about dancing mushrooms, but that fit in there pretty well, anyway.
Anyway, the difference may be the main difference between Classical and Romantic theory... the Classical musicians believed that music has an innate beauty, whereas the Romantics believed that music was an extension of the emotions of the composer.
And the bad emmissions are drastically reduced even from there if a fuel cell is used (and they make H2/O2 fuel cells that are really efficient... like 98%).
H2 is really good, there have been lots of strides in different ways to store it... especially metal hydride storage.
And the ability to drink what comes out of your tailpipe is just cool cool cool. :-)
FireWire has some nice features, but in the end, it's still a lot slower than SCSI and more expensive than the IDE stuff.
Now, I agree that USB is inappropriate for lots of things it's used for (esp. scanners and drives). And maybe firewire will succeed.
But, I'm not holding my breath.