Aside from the obvious fraudulent uses, this technology could also be put to good use in the customer support field. Particularly ISP support, where most of the calls are about changing email passwords, what happened to their favorite homepage, and what the dialup # was again. Extended issues will obviously need to be handled by a human, but the biggest part of making automated human-computer voice interaction work smoothly is fooling the human into believing that it is talking to another human.
For instance, if the voice recognition software messes up once in a while, it could easily ask the human to repeat themselves. If the human knew it were a computer, they would be instantly frustrated with the machine. However, people are more forgiving when dealing with other people, so they would repeat themselves more clearly when asked.
So all we need now is a good speech to text application that requires no voice training, and low level support can kiss their jobs goodbye.
If you think about it though, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Support is the biggest drain on any company's budget, and the removal of the low job would mean that there are more people available to fill the more complicated jobs.
> I watch barely any ads - but I usually have a good idea which channel I'm on. CartoonNetwork has some great network promoting ads.
THAT is why. Notice how Hemos still watches the ads on Cartoon network. Did you stop to wonder why he'll watch those ads, but not others? I've seen them before, and I'd gladly watch them again. All because they are actually entertaining. You forget that it's a commercial when you watch those ads, and that makes them much more effective.
The usual product pushing ads are boring. No one wants to waste their time watching 30 second informercials. "Jet dry will keep your dishwasher dishes clean and walk your dog too!" Bah! It's boring and has no entertaining value. I wouldn't voluntarily watch it either.
People with PVRs skip commercials for the same reason that most people don't watch Saturday afternoon infomercials. Because they are boring!
PVRs aren't going to go away anytime soon. Marketing drones are going to have to learn that the hard way. If they want our attention for 30 seconds at a time again, they're going to have to work for it by making commercials entertaining!
Is it just me, or does anyone else have vivid flashbacks of the Outbreak monkey every time you see the Ximian logo next to a headline containing "Mono"?
They are hardware manufacturers. They make money selling hardware. Not operating systems. You want Solaris 8? So download it. Sparc and Intel are distros are free. You want to run Solaris on a machine, and need a license? Here, fill out this web page and you'll be considered, 'in the green'.
if they don't make money on selling the OS, why would they care if people had the source code? The only thing that releasing the source code could do is allow people to fix bugs on their own, instead of waiting for the next release.
Someone mentioned above that the Intel compiler is selling for a couple hundred bucks per license. I've been in the development market for a few years now, and I've used Intel's "optimized" compiler a few times already. It has a few flaws right out of the box, being that it will only work on Windows systems. It can act as a plugin for MS Dev Studio (which I must admit is a pretty slick IDE), but the bottom line is that Intel is charging money for something that they should be trying to GIVE away. If they want a leg up on the market, they should be making it VERY easy for developers to use their compiler when they build their applications. The result would be a lot more stickers on product boxes labeled "Optimized for Intel CPUs", making the cpu decision much easier for newbies.
"Oh look, all of these games are optimized for Intel chips. They must be good!"
Better yet, if they want their cpus to get on top of the server market, they should be releasing the source code for their compiler as well. This would let the gcc crew use the optimizations in their compiler creating better/faster *nix software. (Unix being the server platform of choice for more large companies I've worked with than I can shake a stick at. I won't get into why, as that will probably start a small war.)
Bottom line, make the compiler free, and open the source, and Intel would definitely take off again.
Until that day, though, I will stick with AMD since they have better prices for equal performance.
Sure, pretty boots are nice and all, but I can't imagine what I'd do without my boot logs. It's kind of hard to catch those first few kernel messages as it is, and I'm usually rummaging through my log to see why the hell something is no longer working like it was on the last boot.
If I move into an apartment, the previous renter having watched an ungodly amount of pr0n, and the cable company forgets to flush their viewing habit records, am I going to get flooded with commercials for aphrodisiacs and french ticklers?
Seriously though. I used to work for a cable company not too long ago, and I don't see enough bandwidth available in those cables to send each user their own personalized 3 minute commercial break. Maybe reserve a few channels for demographic 'groups' but not individual users.
Every time I see a post about Napster's downfall, I always think the same thing. Cross freenet with gnutella, and suddenly the music sharing revolution is completely unstoppable, and untrackable.
Freenet's problem is that it isn't indexed. (At least it wasn't the last time I checked.) If you add a distributed search mechanism to freenet's distributed storage abilities, and put a nice browser together, we might actually have "the next big thing(tm)". Until then Freenet will still stay relatively smalltime, and Gnutella will still result in regular Joes getting sued for copyright infringement.
Anyways, that's enough tangent. Napster was doomed from the start. Now that they are going legit, they will have to turn a profit to stay afloat in the world. And since no one wants to download unknown music at 2k/sec when they can get it at over 100k/sec from mp3.com, Napster will be out of business within the year.
Bah. Maybe I'll go throw my $0.02 at the freenet project....
It was kind of funny how the reviewer's WPM dropped to less than half when using the half-sized keyboard.
Let's see, my half keyboard lets my type half as fast while allowing me to spend twice as much for it. That's a nice balance. Kind of like how only one of my two hands will cramp up twice as fast.
I feel kind of bad for the developer that is having his code used, but if this pulls through and he collects damages, then this will server as a warning flare to all corporations that are currently (or planning on) exploiting the open source community.
I'd like to see the actual figures he collects though if he wins. Generally, the idea is you sue for lost petential revenue. Well, open source software is generally given away for free these days, so the best I imagine the judge will make them do is release their source back the community. Which really won't hurt the company as visibly as paying royalties to the developer for the life cycle of the product.:)
okay....
And you expect to boot off of your encrypted/compressed drive how again?
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but you need to read the module files off the hard drive in order to load them and use them, but you need the modules loaded to read the drive... Kind of a chicken before the egg problem?
Lol. (Yea, I know. Boot partition is a standard FS the kernel and bootstrap prog can read and keep your FS module files on a non encrypted/compressed drive. But still, it's funny. I'm sure that more than a few newbies are going to forget about this little problem, move their module files to the encrypted drive, and then when they next reboot it won't work. *grin*)
Re:Linux advocacy: VR3 framework for the Desktop?
on
Agenda, Not Hidden
·
· Score: 5
I couldn't agree with you more.
The biggest problem with linux is not the lack of software, it's the complexity to operate it. Gramma isn't going to run linux because she doesn't even know what this "Windows" thing is. She just knows that if she pushes the button on the box, then in 2 minutes she can check her email and turn it back off.
Create a user friendly distro of Linux, and applications will follow. The key is to make enough apps to make managing the computer easy.
Microsoft has a huge lead of most opensource developers, and I don't mean manpower wise. I mean layout wise. Go download 5-10 open source applications and look at the interface. Try to learn them all to about 80% efficiency within an hour or two. Now if you were to go out and buy 5-10 name brand applications for Windows and try to learn then to equal efficiency, you'd find it much MUCH easier. Why? Because Microsoft, IBM, and all of the others employ people that do nothing but design user interfaces! They design it, and then have a group of users test it. They collect feedback, and then they try it again with a new group. After a few iterations, they have a really easy interface for their application. They've cut the learning curve in half. All because they put more effort into making it look pretty rather than making it do something.
Anyways, enough rambling. The point is, Linux is too complex for the average user. The average user wants to be able to put the disc in, and have the OS ask them if they want to run/install the application. It's sad, but that is exactly what Linux will have to do in order to go mainstream.
I've been advocating this for quite a while now.
X11 just isn't cutting it these days. Sure, it has it's advantages, but what Linux could really use it a complete makover as far as GUI environments is concerned.
Believe it or not, Windows really does have a pretty good window message protocol in place. And the GDI drawing routines really aren't all that slow.
The real goal would be to produce a replacement for X that allowed the use of drivers much like Windows does. This way the environment could be recompiled for any platform, and contributers would only need to install (or create) drivers for the specific hardware they have. (Kind of like how X has different X servers for each video chipset.) Of course, this replacement would have to support previous X applications by running an X server for applications to communicate with. However display and manipulation of these applications would be seemless with native applications. (They would share the same desktop space and could overlap, etc.)
I've been toying with the idea of starting up a project on sourceforge to facilitate the replacement desktop, but my extraordinarily long commute time eats up 90% of my day. So I have no time to work on it. Of course, this could all change, but who knows.
I was referring to Congresses ability to remove that whole DMCA idea. (Say what you will, but I'm still sticking to my original statement that it is too exploitable in it's current incarnation.)
As for the judges, I agree. The best we can do about them is not vote for them next time it comes around.
Ah yes...nothing like watching greed consume congress. Interesting how large companies can sway representatives to introduce a bill for damn near anything (currently legal or otherwise), yet the entire userbase of Napster couldn't get anything out of their reps other than "Sorry, Napster is facilitating illegal activity".
This same 'open design' policy is what brought x86 platforms into the mainstream. Everyone cloned it, and a wonderful pricewar of 'who can make the best the cheapest' made owning a computer very affordable. If this goes through, I won't be surprised to see these boxes replacing Nintendos and Playstations within 4-5 years, and box prices around $80 a piece within 8 years.
By the way, couldn't CDDB be considered a monopoloy. It's the only DB out there for music cd track/title retrieval. At least, until you put freedb into the picture.
Kind of like Microsoft and Linux. MS is a monopoly, until you put Linux in the picture.
So wouldn't CDDB be confinded to the same laws of using their monopoly to snuff the competition?
Sue everyone using Linux with WinE because it circumvents their technological measures to make Windows applications only run on the Windows line of OSes??
This is getting really lame. 2001 is turning out to be the sue-fest year. I'm already sick of it. DMCA needs to be destroyed as unconstitutional and redone by technologically inclined people.
Having lawyers make laws for technology use is like having my grandmother write her own operating system. Sure, with enough time and effort it will happen, but would it really be any good?
So essentially, If I go out and buy one of these and turn it on, I'm only going to be doing processing for all of the neighboring worlds, so I'll always want to leave it off so that I can get some work done.
So wouldn't all of my other selves in all of the other worlds also want to leave it off to get work done too?
I mean really, who in their right mind is going to actually RUN their quantum computer so that we can all glean information from it across dimension?
I've been introduced to this concept a while back. One of the other guys over here insisted that this method of programming was ideal and more efficient, and to prove it, he started following that idealism. Well, the rest of us just kind of looked at him funny and continued our usual practice of evaluating possibilities and writing modular code.
I've never seen a project that has 100% of EVERY feature written down and agreed upon before the first line of code is written. So, when the inevitable feature request comes along, the 'extreme programmer' spends the next week rewriting previous code to handle the new feature, while the rest of us just stick the button in there, add a function here and there, and reuse a lot of the functions we've already written, thus we finish it in a matter of hours rather than days.
In short, extreme programming is a nice idea, but unless you know EVERY aspect of the application before the first line of code is written, and don't intend on ever releasing a next version, it's a timewaster.
>And as soon as we get really good with the
>genetic engineering, I want my own half height
>clone to mow my lawn.
Wouldn't this also require a smaller lawn mower?
I can imagine it now, the half-height is pushing the mower up-hill, and then topples under the weight of the mower and is run over producing...really itty bitty copies of you...more or less...
So if you solve that problem with a smaller lawn-mower, then wouldn't it then take twice as long for you to mow your lawn? So basically, you'd just be wasting twice as much time as your already are, but since there are two of you, you'd be doing it twice as fast, so you're really not gaining anything by cloning. So let's just call the whole thing off and eat pizza.
>Five years from now, there will be about five
>companies providing high-speed internet access
>in the United States.
This is only referring to DSL. Cable modems are already standardized (DOCSIS though it's not employed in all markets yet) and they are unaffected by the Bell companies. The only thing that cable MSO's rely on is the use of telephone poles for signal distribution, and even then a lot of areas are moving toward buried lines to eliminate that need.
Slashdot Mirror
So will first posts to Banjo be modded down too?
hehe
Enter Sun Grid Engine
And yep, it's free!
Aside from the obvious fraudulent uses, this technology could also be put to good use in the customer support field. Particularly ISP support, where most of the calls are about changing email passwords, what happened to their favorite homepage, and what the dialup # was again. Extended issues will obviously need to be handled by a human, but the biggest part of making automated human-computer voice interaction work smoothly is fooling the human into believing that it is talking to another human.
For instance, if the voice recognition software messes up once in a while, it could easily ask the human to repeat themselves. If the human knew it were a computer, they would be instantly frustrated with the machine. However, people are more forgiving when dealing with other people, so they would repeat themselves more clearly when asked.
So all we need now is a good speech to text application that requires no voice training, and low level support can kiss their jobs goodbye.
If you think about it though, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Support is the biggest drain on any company's budget, and the removal of the low job would mean that there are more people available to fill the more complicated jobs.
> I watch barely any ads - but I usually have a good idea which channel I'm on. CartoonNetwork has some great network promoting ads.
THAT is why. Notice how Hemos still watches the ads on Cartoon network. Did you stop to wonder why he'll watch those ads, but not others? I've seen them before, and I'd gladly watch them again. All because they are actually entertaining. You forget that it's a commercial when you watch those ads, and that makes them much more effective.
The usual product pushing ads are boring. No one wants to waste their time watching 30 second informercials. "Jet dry will keep your dishwasher dishes clean and walk your dog too!" Bah! It's boring and has no entertaining value. I wouldn't voluntarily watch it either.
People with PVRs skip commercials for the same reason that most people don't watch Saturday afternoon infomercials. Because they are boring!
PVRs aren't going to go away anytime soon. Marketing drones are going to have to learn that the hard way. If they want our attention for 30 seconds at a time again, they're going to have to work for it by making commercials entertaining!
Is it just me, or does anyone else have vivid flashbacks of the Outbreak monkey every time you see the Ximian logo next to a headline containing "Mono"?
They are hardware manufacturers. They make money selling hardware. Not operating systems. You want Solaris 8? So download it. Sparc and Intel are distros are free. You want to run Solaris on a machine, and need a license? Here, fill out this web page and you'll be considered, 'in the green'.
if they don't make money on selling the OS, why would they care if people had the source code? The only thing that releasing the source code could do is allow people to fix bugs on their own, instead of waiting for the next release.
Someone mentioned above that the Intel compiler is selling for a couple hundred bucks per license. I've been in the development market for a few years now, and I've used Intel's "optimized" compiler a few times already. It has a few flaws right out of the box, being that it will only work on Windows systems. It can act as a plugin for MS Dev Studio (which I must admit is a pretty slick IDE), but the bottom line is that Intel is charging money for something that they should be trying to GIVE away. If they want a leg up on the market, they should be making it VERY easy for developers to use their compiler when they build their applications. The result would be a lot more stickers on product boxes labeled "Optimized for Intel CPUs", making the cpu decision much easier for newbies.
"Oh look, all of these games are optimized for Intel chips. They must be good!"
Better yet, if they want their cpus to get on top of the server market, they should be releasing the source code for their compiler as well. This would let the gcc crew use the optimizations in their compiler creating better/faster *nix software. (Unix being the server platform of choice for more large companies I've worked with than I can shake a stick at. I won't get into why, as that will probably start a small war.)
Bottom line, make the compiler free, and open the source, and Intel would definitely take off again.
Until that day, though, I will stick with AMD since they have better prices for equal performance.
Sure, pretty boots are nice and all, but I can't imagine what I'd do without my boot logs. It's kind of hard to catch those first few kernel messages as it is, and I'm usually rummaging through my log to see why the hell something is no longer working like it was on the last boot.
If I move into an apartment, the previous renter having watched an ungodly amount of pr0n, and the cable company forgets to flush their viewing habit records, am I going to get flooded with commercials for aphrodisiacs and french ticklers? Seriously though. I used to work for a cable company not too long ago, and I don't see enough bandwidth available in those cables to send each user their own personalized 3 minute commercial break. Maybe reserve a few channels for demographic 'groups' but not individual users.
Every time I see a post about Napster's downfall, I always think the same thing. Cross freenet with gnutella, and suddenly the music sharing revolution is completely unstoppable, and untrackable.
Freenet's problem is that it isn't indexed. (At least it wasn't the last time I checked.) If you add a distributed search mechanism to freenet's distributed storage abilities, and put a nice browser together, we might actually have "the next big thing(tm)". Until then Freenet will still stay relatively smalltime, and Gnutella will still result in regular Joes getting sued for copyright infringement.
Anyways, that's enough tangent. Napster was doomed from the start. Now that they are going legit, they will have to turn a profit to stay afloat in the world. And since no one wants to download unknown music at 2k/sec when they can get it at over 100k/sec from mp3.com, Napster will be out of business within the year.
Bah. Maybe I'll go throw my $0.02 at the freenet project....
It was kind of funny how the reviewer's WPM dropped to less than half when using the half-sized keyboard.
Let's see, my half keyboard lets my type half as fast while allowing me to spend twice as much for it. That's a nice balance. Kind of like how only one of my two hands will cramp up twice as fast.
I feel kind of bad for the developer that is having his code used, but if this pulls through and he collects damages, then this will server as a warning flare to all corporations that are currently (or planning on) exploiting the open source community.
:)
I'd like to see the actual figures he collects though if he wins. Generally, the idea is you sue for lost petential revenue. Well, open source software is generally given away for free these days, so the best I imagine the judge will make them do is release their source back the community. Which really won't hurt the company as visibly as paying royalties to the developer for the life cycle of the product.
okay....
And you expect to boot off of your encrypted/compressed drive how again?
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but you need to read the module files off the hard drive in order to load them and use them, but you need the modules loaded to read the drive... Kind of a chicken before the egg problem?
Lol. (Yea, I know. Boot partition is a standard FS the kernel and bootstrap prog can read and keep your FS module files on a non encrypted/compressed drive. But still, it's funny. I'm sure that more than a few newbies are going to forget about this little problem, move their module files to the encrypted drive, and then when they next reboot it won't work. *grin*)
I couldn't agree with you more.
The biggest problem with linux is not the lack of software, it's the complexity to operate it. Gramma isn't going to run linux because she doesn't even know what this "Windows" thing is. She just knows that if she pushes the button on the box, then in 2 minutes she can check her email and turn it back off.
Create a user friendly distro of Linux, and applications will follow. The key is to make enough apps to make managing the computer easy.
Microsoft has a huge lead of most opensource developers, and I don't mean manpower wise. I mean layout wise. Go download 5-10 open source applications and look at the interface. Try to learn them all to about 80% efficiency within an hour or two. Now if you were to go out and buy 5-10 name brand applications for Windows and try to learn then to equal efficiency, you'd find it much MUCH easier. Why? Because Microsoft, IBM, and all of the others employ people that do nothing but design user interfaces! They design it, and then have a group of users test it. They collect feedback, and then they try it again with a new group. After a few iterations, they have a really easy interface for their application. They've cut the learning curve in half. All because they put more effort into making it look pretty rather than making it do something.
Anyways, enough rambling. The point is, Linux is too complex for the average user. The average user wants to be able to put the disc in, and have the OS ask them if they want to run/install the application. It's sad, but that is exactly what Linux will have to do in order to go mainstream.
I've been advocating this for quite a while now.
X11 just isn't cutting it these days. Sure, it has it's advantages, but what Linux could really use it a complete makover as far as GUI environments is concerned.
Believe it or not, Windows really does have a pretty good window message protocol in place. And the GDI drawing routines really aren't all that slow.
The real goal would be to produce a replacement for X that allowed the use of drivers much like Windows does. This way the environment could be recompiled for any platform, and contributers would only need to install (or create) drivers for the specific hardware they have. (Kind of like how X has different X servers for each video chipset.) Of course, this replacement would have to support previous X applications by running an X server for applications to communicate with. However display and manipulation of these applications would be seemless with native applications. (They would share the same desktop space and could overlap, etc.)
I've been toying with the idea of starting up a project on sourceforge to facilitate the replacement desktop, but my extraordinarily long commute time eats up 90% of my day. So I have no time to work on it. Of course, this could all change, but who knows.
I'm open to comments on the whole idea.
I was referring to Congresses ability to remove that whole DMCA idea. (Say what you will, but I'm still sticking to my original statement that it is too exploitable in it's current incarnation.)
As for the judges, I agree. The best we can do about them is not vote for them next time it comes around.
Ah yes...nothing like watching greed consume congress. Interesting how large companies can sway representatives to introduce a bill for damn near anything (currently legal or otherwise), yet the entire userbase of Napster couldn't get anything out of their reps other than "Sorry, Napster is facilitating illegal activity".
Yeah yeah, -1 Overrated. I know, I know...
This same 'open design' policy is what brought x86 platforms into the mainstream. Everyone cloned it, and a wonderful pricewar of 'who can make the best the cheapest' made owning a computer very affordable. If this goes through, I won't be surprised to see these boxes replacing Nintendos and Playstations within 4-5 years, and box prices around $80 a piece within 8 years.
By the way, couldn't CDDB be considered a monopoloy. It's the only DB out there for music cd track/title retrieval. At least, until you put freedb into the picture.
Kind of like Microsoft and Linux. MS is a monopoly, until you put Linux in the picture.
So wouldn't CDDB be confinded to the same laws of using their monopoly to snuff the competition?
Sue everyone using Linux with WinE because it circumvents their technological measures to make Windows applications only run on the Windows line of OSes??
This is getting really lame. 2001 is turning out to be the sue-fest year. I'm already sick of it. DMCA needs to be destroyed as unconstitutional and redone by technologically inclined people.
Having lawyers make laws for technology use is like having my grandmother write her own operating system. Sure, with enough time and effort it will happen, but would it really be any good?
So essentially, If I go out and buy one of these and turn it on, I'm only going to be doing processing for all of the neighboring worlds, so I'll always want to leave it off so that I can get some work done.
So wouldn't all of my other selves in all of the other worlds also want to leave it off to get work done too?
I mean really, who in their right mind is going to actually RUN their quantum computer so that we can all glean information from it across dimension?
I've been introduced to this concept a while back. One of the other guys over here insisted that this method of programming was ideal and more efficient, and to prove it, he started following that idealism. Well, the rest of us just kind of looked at him funny and continued our usual practice of evaluating possibilities and writing modular code.
I've never seen a project that has 100% of EVERY feature written down and agreed upon before the first line of code is written. So, when the inevitable feature request comes along, the 'extreme programmer' spends the next week rewriting previous code to handle the new feature, while the rest of us just stick the button in there, add a function here and there, and reuse a lot of the functions we've already written, thus we finish it in a matter of hours rather than days.
In short, extreme programming is a nice idea, but unless you know EVERY aspect of the application before the first line of code is written, and don't intend on ever releasing a next version, it's a timewaster.
>And as soon as we get really good with the
>genetic engineering, I want my own half height
>clone to mow my lawn.
Wouldn't this also require a smaller lawn mower?
I can imagine it now, the half-height is pushing the mower up-hill, and then topples under the weight of the mower and is run over producing...really itty bitty copies of you...more or less...
So if you solve that problem with a smaller lawn-mower, then wouldn't it then take twice as long for you to mow your lawn? So basically, you'd just be wasting twice as much time as your already are, but since there are two of you, you'd be doing it twice as fast, so you're really not gaining anything by cloning. So let's just call the whole thing off and eat pizza.
Oh yea, that's great. Let's just promote that idea for the next Austin Powers flick.
*ring*
"Oh, just wait a tick, baby. I have a nellie on the tellie." To phone: "Oh realllly baby? SMASHING BABY YEAH!"
(Anyone else ever noticed the number of times he says 'baby' in a paragraph.)
>Five years from now, there will be about five
>companies providing high-speed internet access
>in the United States.
This is only referring to DSL. Cable modems are already standardized (DOCSIS though it's not employed in all markets yet) and they are unaffected by the Bell companies. The only thing that cable MSO's rely on is the use of telephone poles for signal distribution, and even then a lot of areas are moving toward buried lines to eliminate that need.