Hehe, best argument I heard yet. It is well known that all computer progress comes from porn: why else would people need more bandwith, better monitors and larger harddrives? To store Word documents? I thought so;-)
What worries me is that in the event of such an impact, many countries would be unable to distinguish it from a real nuke. Can you imagine what India or Pakistan would do if one of these babies landed on one of their cities?
SAP goes OpenSource
The SAP wants to care after c't-Informationen for the LinuxWorld in Frankfurt known tomorrow that she/it
her/its/their data bank SAP DB under the GPL respectively LGPL will put. The SQL-Datenbank
come in the connection with the flagship of the Walldorfer company, him/it, until now mainly
Merchandise-economic system SAP R3, to the usage. R3 offers however also matching units for others
Data banks like Informix, Oracle or DB2. With SAP DB, the SAP gives a bigger for the first time
Software-project in the source code free.
A lot of people seem to forget that the idea behind this SDMI scheme is not to stop Joe Sixpack from writing the audio to a file, or use a loopback recording scheme with his soundcard, but to be able to point the finger at him later.
Go ahead! Buy a Britney song online and download it in SDMI format. Sure, toss it in your Napster share directory! Hack away at it too, and re-record it all you want...
But when the RIAA then scans Napster files, it will be very easy to find out whose copy it is that is floating around there (providing the watermark is still discernible). You did pay for your original download with your credit card, didn't you? Who's 31337 now, when they charge a gazillion bucks in damages to you?
In a way, this is just like DeCCS: the watermark will not prevent copying, but is supposedly meant to stop piracy, while in reality pirates will circumvent it. All it will do will be limiting users choice (eg. no Linux player).
Pshah... here in Belgium even 16 year olds get beer, and often even younger people drink. Nobody ever asks for ID here in order to get beer. And we're right next to The Netherlands, so getting that other stuff is no problem too;-)
Erm... there is no Belgian version of Survivor. In the fall we will get something called 'Big Brother' in which a bunch of people will be locked inside a house for a couple of months under the all-seeing eye of a bunch of cameras, but that's still to be taped so nobody's dead (yet).
We did have a show called 'De Mol' (the mole) in which ten contestants had to work as a team win challenges to earn money (for the final winner), but one of them was a mole and tried to sabotage them. At the end of each episode everyone had to answer questions about the mole, and whoever knew the least about who it was and what he had done was booted out. In fact that show ended its second season a few months ago. But again, nobody died.
Well, I get/. headlines evey few hours to my cellphone through the text (SMS) system, it is great, now I only check/. when something I want to hear about is on it, which in turn reduces the load on the server, which in turn makes the world a better place:o)
Same here... only I get these messages within fifteen minutes of the story appearing. Perl is cool;-)
When you can have a script that actually sends you some usefull stuff on your cellphone ? Check out the script in my sig...
Anyway, this was bound to happen, with all the SMS gateways springing up everywhere. Does anybody know of global SMS gateway sites besides Quios ? I was trying yesterday night to get my slashsms.pl script to work with it, but they use a very clever method to spoof the location of their cgi for every session, and I didn't have the time to work around it.
I've seen the Game Commander in action last year, but with MechWarrior II or III (sorry, I'm no gaming buff). It certainly looked cool, the way the guy controlled the Mech by joystick, but used voice commands to handle targetting, speed, weapon selection, firing... Especially since the computer talked back a little too (eg. "Acquire target !" - "Target locked !"). And the recognition was real good too (not surprising, seeing the rather small vocabulary being used). But I think it would be mightily annoying to be in the same room with a guy playing this game all day.
BTW, I believe this product uses Lernout & Hauspie's speech recognition technology, for all you Flemish Slashdotters out there...
For those of you that don't have WAP phones yet, I have a script that sends SlashDot headlines to a regular GSM phone, via the SMS system. Most of Europe uses GSM, but if I remember correctly the US doesn't. Check the link in my sig for more info...
Very good point about the title : I wrote myself a little script which culls the headlines off/. every fifteen minutes and sends new ones to my cell phone using SMS (I'm in Belgium, and I use Proximus - if you're interested in the script drop me a note). I've only been running the script for about two or three weeks now, and sometimes I really have wondered what an article would be about because the headline was so cryptic. In this case the headline might have been a tad too sensationalist to cover the well-researched article.
OT : Sometimes I also got the same headline twice, because someone made a little change to spelling or punctuation. So some people's spelling flames really help;-)
I don't know about those products, but for L&H Voice Xpress you need at least 64 Mb of RAM, and preferably even more. So I think those other software packages would need at least as much. Voice recognition isn't easy, ya know;-)
And it's not running on a Palm, it's running on a Strongarm II.
First off, I work for L&H, so if I sound biassed, hey, they pay for my bandwith... But at least I am an engineer and not a salesperson;-)
I saw a demo of this thing a couple of weeks ago. Basically what they did was port the Voice Xpress engine to linux, and make it work on a Strongarm II processor. Right now all that was built was a single prototype, and some issues like battery usage are still to be worked out before the thing goes into production. (Estimate : end of this year)
What was also done, was building in the L&H Realspeak synthesized voice. This allows real dialogues to be held with this device. For instance : -Check mail ! -You have five new messages -Summarize ! -Message one, sender is J. Random Hacker, Subject : kernel hack. Message two, sender is Bill Gates, Subject is Make money Fast... -Read the first message ! -Hi there... I just finished a patch for the latest kernel update... blablabla... -Reply !
You could then use this to dictate an e-mail (because it uses a full Voice Xpress engine), or order books on Amazon (If you wanted to shop there) using WAP. All in all, a pretty nifty device. I want one myself;-)
And no, it was not vapourware, it really works : with the VX engine you can already get 95% accuracy if you want to, with a large vocabulary. The smaller the vocabulary, the better the recognition. How many commands do you need to read your e-mail ? You do the math.
Oh, yeah, it also has a stylus and screen that fold away into it, just in case you really wanted to read or write stuff.
Well, Microsoft owns 7 or 8 % of the stock in L&H. The fact that it runs on linux has to do with the fact that it was attempted on WinCE first, but didn't work, in fact. (I happen to work there, and the guy who led the project told me).
Well, I've been reading Slashdot since I joined the workforce, and I must say you probably cost me more than 10.000 hours of work-time. Not that I mind, of course;-)
Keep up the good work guys, and don't let the naysayers distract you. There are a lot of us out there that just like Slashdot the way it is, but since we've got nothing to complain about we're a rather quiet bunch.
This article is fluffy, indeed... I read a couple of much better ones on the subject, and they said this new product is going to use the Voice Xpress engine for recognition, and that works with speaker profiles. But anyway, it's the same with keyboards : they don't check the finger prints of the person who is typing either (you need a password). Granted, saying your password out loud in public probably isn't a good idea either:-)
I work for L&H, and I do remember at least one colleague who was testing stuff with Voice Xpress, and he said "Select all", and then "Delete" while trying some text processing commands. Unfortunately his active window was his e-mail program, more precisely his inbox... More than a year of e-mail gone:-)
So, it's not a Dilbert joke anymore, it happens for real...
think I remember a demo of L&H's text to speech, and it wasn't much of an improvement over the ancient typical monotone voice. I don't remember if it was them or someone else. Does anybody have info on them?
I do, as a matter of fact, because I work there;-)
The voice in Voice Xpress is indeed the typical monotone voice. But the latest and greatest voice synthesis technology is our RealSpeak. A demo can be found here. You can type in anything you want (up to 30 english words), and RealSpeak sends you a.wav file. I think you will agree that it sounds much better than the older computer voices (who sounded like a guy with a cold talking in a tin can).
Ok, I might sound stupid here, but... "[the matrix] didn't have the kind of crypto-fascist subtext that one might expect with that kind of money. "
Does anyone know what he means by that?
Since the movie was produced by Warner Brothers, and they are part of MegaTimeAOLWarnerBigEvilCompany(tm), he would have expected it to look a lot more negative at 'evil hackers'. But contrary to what Gibson expected from such a big corporation, they actually produced a movie in which 'hackers' who fight the existing order are portrayed as positive, even as heroes.
Of course, that's my interpretation, Gibson might have meant something completely different.
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe, best argument I heard yet. It is well known that all computer progress comes from porn: why else would people need more bandwith, better monitors and larger harddrives? To store Word documents? I thought so ;-)
What worries me is that in the event of such an impact, many countries would be unable to distinguish it from a real nuke. Can you imagine what India or Pakistan would do if one of these babies landed on one of their cities?
Doesn't the Space Shuttle use solid fuel? Or is that only in the boosters?
And what about:
666.1
The upgrade of the Beast
With iTranslator I get this translation...
SAP goes OpenSource The SAP wants to care after c't-Informationen for the LinuxWorld in Frankfurt known tomorrow that she/it her/its/their data bank SAP DB under the GPL respectively LGPL will put. The SQL-Datenbank come in the connection with the flagship of the Walldorfer company, him/it, until now mainly Merchandise-economic system SAP R3, to the usage. R3 offers however also matching units for others Data banks like Informix, Oracle or DB2. With SAP DB, the SAP gives a bigger for the first time Software-project in the source code free.
A lot of people seem to forget that the idea behind this SDMI scheme is not to stop Joe Sixpack from writing the audio to a file, or use a loopback recording scheme with his soundcard, but to be able to point the finger at him later.
Go ahead! Buy a Britney song online and download it in SDMI format. Sure, toss it in your Napster share directory! Hack away at it too, and re-record it all you want...
But when the RIAA then scans Napster files, it will be very easy to find out whose copy it is that is floating around there (providing the watermark is still discernible). You did pay for your original download with your credit card, didn't you? Who's 31337 now, when they charge a gazillion bucks in damages to you?
In a way, this is just like DeCCS: the watermark will not prevent copying, but is supposedly meant to stop piracy, while in reality pirates will circumvent it. All it will do will be limiting users choice (eg. no Linux player).
Pshah... here in Belgium even 16 year olds get beer, and often even younger people drink. Nobody ever asks for ID here in order to get beer. And we're right next to The Netherlands, so getting that other stuff is no problem too ;-)
Erm... there is no Belgian version of Survivor. In the fall we will get something called 'Big Brother' in which a bunch of people will be locked inside a house for a couple of months under the all-seeing eye of a bunch of cameras, but that's still to be taped so nobody's dead (yet).
We did have a show called 'De Mol' (the mole) in which ten contestants had to work as a team win challenges to earn money (for the final winner), but one of them was a mole and tried to sabotage them. At the end of each episode everyone had to answer questions about the mole, and whoever knew the least about who it was and what he had done was booted out. In fact that show ended its second season a few months ago. But again, nobody died.
Well, I get /. headlines evey few hours to my cellphone through the text (SMS) system, it is great, now I only check /. when something I want to hear about is on it, which in turn reduces the load on the server, which in turn makes the world a better place :o)
;-)
Same here... only I get these messages within fifteen minutes of the story appearing. Perl is cool
When you can have a script that actually sends you some usefull stuff on your cellphone ? Check out the script in my sig...
Anyway, this was bound to happen, with all the SMS gateways springing up everywhere. Does anybody know of global SMS gateway sites besides Quios ? I was trying yesterday night to get my slashsms.pl script to work with it, but they use a very clever method to spoof the location of their cgi for every session, and I didn't have the time to work around it.
I've seen the Game Commander in action last year, but with MechWarrior II or III (sorry, I'm no gaming buff). It certainly looked cool, the way the guy controlled the Mech by joystick, but used voice commands to handle targetting, speed, weapon selection, firing... Especially since the computer talked back a little too (eg. "Acquire target !" - "Target locked !"). And the recognition was real good too (not surprising, seeing the rather small vocabulary being used). But I think it would be mightily annoying to be in the same room with a guy playing this game all day.
BTW, I believe this product uses Lernout & Hauspie's speech recognition technology, for all you Flemish Slashdotters out there...
For those of you that don't have WAP phones yet, I have a script that sends SlashDot headlines to a regular GSM phone, via the SMS system. Most of Europe uses GSM, but if I remember correctly the US doesn't. Check the link in my sig for more info...
Very good point about the title : I wrote myself a little script which culls the headlines off /. every fifteen minutes and sends new ones to my cell phone using SMS (I'm in Belgium, and I use Proximus - if you're interested in the script drop me a note). I've only been running the script for about two or three weeks now, and sometimes I really have wondered what an article would be about because the headline was so cryptic. In this case the headline might have been a tad too sensationalist to cover the well-researched article.
;-)
OT : Sometimes I also got the same headline twice, because someone made a little change to spelling or punctuation. So some people's spelling flames really help
Which means that Bill will wait for them to make something cool and then make a half-baked port of it to Windows ;)
:-) What we did now was port it to Linux...
Ehm... L&H already does cool stuff on Windows
I don't know about those products, but for L&H Voice Xpress you need at least 64 Mb of RAM, and preferably even more. So I think those other software packages would need at least as much. Voice recognition isn't easy, ya know ;-)
And it's not running on a Palm, it's running on a Strongarm II.
First off, I work for L&H, so if I sound biassed, hey, they pay for my bandwith... But at least I am an engineer and not a salesperson ;-)
;-)
I saw a demo of this thing a couple of weeks ago. Basically what they did was port the Voice Xpress engine to linux, and make it work on a Strongarm II processor. Right now all that was built was a single prototype, and some issues like battery usage are still to be worked out before the thing goes into production. (Estimate : end of this year)
What was also done, was building in the L&H Realspeak synthesized voice. This allows real dialogues to be held with this device. For instance :
-Check mail !
-You have five new messages
-Summarize !
-Message one, sender is J. Random Hacker, Subject : kernel hack. Message two, sender is Bill Gates, Subject is Make money Fast...
-Read the first message !
-Hi there... I just finished a patch for the latest kernel update... blablabla...
-Reply !
You could then use this to dictate an e-mail (because it uses a full Voice Xpress engine), or order books on Amazon (If you wanted to shop there) using WAP. All in all, a pretty nifty device. I want one myself
And no, it was not vapourware, it really works : with the VX engine you can already get 95% accuracy if you want to, with a large vocabulary. The smaller the vocabulary, the better the recognition. How many commands do you need to read your e-mail ? You do the math.
Oh, yeah, it also has a stylus and screen that fold away into it, just in case you really wanted to read or write stuff.
Well, Microsoft owns 7 or 8 % of the stock in L&H. The fact that it runs on linux has to do with the fact that it was attempted on WinCE first, but didn't work, in fact. (I happen to work there, and the guy who led the project told me).
Erm... I work at L&H, and last tuesday, we bought Dragon... So we're not "generations ahead", Dragon simply doesn't exist anymore ;-)
Well, I've been reading Slashdot since I joined the workforce, and I must say you probably cost me more than 10.000 hours of work-time. Not that I mind, of course ;-)
Keep up the good work guys, and don't let the naysayers distract you. There are a lot of us out there that just like Slashdot the way it is, but since we've got nothing to complain about we're a rather quiet bunch.
Anyway, on to the next 10.000 !
This article is fluffy, indeed... I read a couple of much better ones on the subject, and they said this new product is going to use the Voice Xpress engine for recognition, and that works with speaker profiles. But anyway, it's the same with keyboards : they don't check the finger prints of the person who is typing either (you need a password). Granted, saying your password out loud in public probably isn't a good idea either :-)
For slightly better articles, try here and here.
I work for L&H, and I do remember at least one colleague who was testing stuff with Voice Xpress, and he said "Select all", and then "Delete" while trying some text processing commands. Unfortunately his active window was his e-mail program, more precisely his inbox... More than a year of e-mail gone :-)
So, it's not a Dilbert joke anymore, it happens for real...
think I remember a demo of L&H's text to speech, and it wasn't much of an improvement over the ancient typical monotone voice. I don't remember if it was them or someone else. Does anybody have info on them?
;-)
.wav file. I think you will agree that it sounds much better than the older computer voices (who sounded like a guy with a cold talking in a tin can).
I do, as a matter of fact, because I work there
The voice in Voice Xpress is indeed the typical monotone voice. But the latest and greatest voice synthesis technology is our RealSpeak. A demo can be found here. You can type in anything you want (up to 30 english words), and RealSpeak sends you a
Ok, I might sound stupid here, but...
"[the matrix] didn't have the kind of crypto-fascist subtext that one might expect with that kind of money. "
Does anyone know what he means by that?
Since the movie was produced by Warner Brothers, and they are part of MegaTimeAOLWarnerBigEvilCompany(tm), he would have expected it to look a lot more negative at 'evil hackers'. But contrary to what Gibson expected from such a big corporation, they actually produced a movie in which 'hackers' who fight the existing order are portrayed as positive, even as heroes.
Of course, that's my interpretation, Gibson might have meant something completely different.
But... on my "Axis & Allies" game board Norway was grey! THAT MAKES THAM NAZEES!!1!
So are France, and parts of Russia... Does that make them 'Nazees' too ? I'd suggest reading a history book...
Erm... How is he going to read your questions without using a computer ? Do you want to put him back in jail or something ;-)