Yep, you're right. The voice is fine, it's the pronounciation and the complete lack of feeling that sux. I think what they need to do is get recordings of people reading a passage. Then make a speech synth that produces a similar sounding voice. Get it to read the same passage and then train it to produce identical output to the natural speaker. Repeat this with a few hundred passages and you'll capture a single person's reading style.
By we I assume you mean "the open source community" and the answer is "when you get off your ass and code it". If by "we" you mean the world at large then go and look at AT&T's Natural Voices project.
kick-ass laptop support is one of the stated goals of Ubuntu, so you can assume this will go away when the final release is done. As for a VPN client, yeah, ok, whatever, file a bug at bugzilla.ubuntu.org and in the description point at some existing stable free client that could be incorporated.
Ubuntu is a commercial distribution with 34+ full time engineers working on it. Every bug they fix they contribute back to Debian or the relevant project. There are a number of really good distributions out there that have forked Debian, but Ubuntu is one of the few who gives most of their changes back to the community. So I say it's a branch, not a fork.
More to the point, the X-Prize is about making space tourism profitable now. SpaceShipOne can be used to give thrill seekers a few minutes in space. That means they can make money from space tourism (assuming their costs are below the market "sweet point"). And I know this is scary to computer geeks, but soon there will be competition to provide these services. Competition drives down prices, in every industry except ours, and when the acceptable market price reaches the cost of launch it will no longer be profitable to do hops into space. The first company to develop an orbital plane will recapture the top end of the market. They'll do this because by the time the suborbital market bottoms out these companies will be swimming in cash and they'll either bomb or have to develop the next generation.
God, I explained that too, don't you read? Porn is about perversion and as long as their is sex involved there will always be a market for any kind of porn. Why? Because the depths of human perversion are unbounded. Let me give you an example. In many sex shops in germany (and many more on the internet) you can buy shit-in-a-can. Why would someone want this stuff? Because, believe it or not, a lot of gay men enjoy the smell of shit when they're having sex. It's disgusting, but it is true. Now when someone sat down and took that first dump in a can do you think he thought he was going to make profit? What do you think was going through his mind. Probably some stupid analogy like the one your just made: gee, lots of people are putting good smells in a can but no-one is putting bad smells in a can, there's probably a market for that. Everyone he mentioned this to said "don't be an idiot" or the appropriate german translation and he got on with his life, until one day he happened to be talking to one of his many gay friends who happened to mention this little fetish club they went to recently.... never underestimate the depths of human perversion.
I think I just answered that argument, any idiot can film porn - meaning there's already a flooded market of the stuff - but very few people can render it - meaning there's an empty market, and opportunity there.
If you believe watching porn is immoral because it makes you regard women as sex objects then clearly creating virtual models of women and creating virtual porn is even more likely to do so.
Your reference to uncanny valley combined with his "photoshoot gallery" totally suggests what this guy should be doing: making porn. Sure, it's cheaper to get a DV cam and some chicks who wanna make a few bucks together than it is to make a CGI short but uncanny valley suggests to us that the experience of watching porn vs the experience of watching rendered porn would be two very different things. Different reaction == different market, and as there's no-one in the business of making rendered porn (at least that I know of) that's a market that this guy could own. Of course, that assumes there someone out there who wants to watch rendered porn, but I think it's a given that the range of human perversen is infinite.
all these projects use Patch to merge files. Patch throws conflicts when it gets confused. BitKeeper has some proprietory merge algorithms (the infamous 3-way merge) so it gets conflicts less often.
I had a pollster call up the other day, but before they would take my many opinions they asked me my post code to confirm I was from the right area, I wasn't. Somehow I think they were doing a survey of how many people actually know what the name of their electorate is.
Isn't it the duty of every good citizen to try to influence how others vote? What are we supposed to do, lock ourselves in a political cage for 6 months before every election so as not to influence other voters? Cool, we can all go to the polls with no idea what the issues are we're voting for. Oh wait, I forgot, this is bipartisan politics, there are no issues.
The difference is that the BSA can claim that Microsoft has made a monetary loss from those few hundred illegal copies of Windows 2003 server. It would be pretty hard for the owner of the GPL work that you have unlawfully extended to claim they have made a monetary loss.
the forces at work are not really in balance. The current SCO vs IBM case is truly indicative of that.
As SCO is a two bit company consisting 100% of lawyers and IBM is a huge big business consisting of thousands of "creative people" it would appear that the balance is exactly the opposite of what you are trying to make it out to be.
That's because it is not possible. Even if you link your code to GPL code and distribute the result to a third party you cannot be forced to reveal your code. A court can rule that you are prohibited from distributing the combined work unless you reveal your code, but it cannot rule that you have to reveal your code to the people you have already distributed it to. You're the author, you hold all the rights over your code and no court can take that away from you.
You'd figure they could put some specific charges with dates and the precise content that wasn't available. I love the way the Slashdot summary says "read on to make your own decision" but the linked article doesn't actually contain any more detail than the summary.
The problem with XUL isn't with XUL:) it's with the javascript you need to interface with XUL. There's no documentation. You try to get stuff done and quickly discover that simple things that claim to work don't and if you're trying to do anything dynamic like change a style sheet at runtime there's no documented way to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, you're right. The voice is fine, it's the pronounciation and the complete lack of feeling that sux. I think what they need to do is get recordings of people reading a passage. Then make a speech synth that produces a similar sounding voice. Get it to read the same passage and then train it to produce identical output to the natural speaker. Repeat this with a few hundred passages and you'll capture a single person's reading style.
By we I assume you mean "the open source community" and the answer is "when you get off your ass and code it". If by "we" you mean the world at large then go and look at AT&T's Natural Voices project.
"Type foo"
"What?"
"There, foo"
"Oh yeah, ok"
"No, foo"
"Oh right"
"Oh for fuck sake.. FOO, the keyword is FOO"
"Oh sorry, was thinking about something else"
Pair programming is like watching a woman change channels. "You know what's on this channel, it's shit, keep going."
To translate Jeff's market speak: you get commercial support with Ubuntu.
kick-ass laptop support is one of the stated goals of Ubuntu, so you can assume this will go away when the final release is done. As for a VPN client, yeah, ok, whatever, file a bug at bugzilla.ubuntu.org and in the description point at some existing stable free client that could be incorporated.
Ubuntu is a commercial distribution with 34+ full time engineers working on it. Every bug they fix they contribute back to Debian or the relevant project. There are a number of really good distributions out there that have forked Debian, but Ubuntu is one of the few who gives most of their changes back to the community. So I say it's a branch, not a fork.
There's also stars stuck to the inside of the plane and they turn off the lights.
More to the point, the X-Prize is about making space tourism profitable now. SpaceShipOne can be used to give thrill seekers a few minutes in space. That means they can make money from space tourism (assuming their costs are below the market "sweet point"). And I know this is scary to computer geeks, but soon there will be competition to provide these services. Competition drives down prices, in every industry except ours, and when the acceptable market price reaches the cost of launch it will no longer be profitable to do hops into space. The first company to develop an orbital plane will recapture the top end of the market. They'll do this because by the time the suborbital market bottoms out these companies will be swimming in cash and they'll either bomb or have to develop the next generation.
God, I explained that too, don't you read? Porn is about perversion and as long as their is sex involved there will always be a market for any kind of porn. Why? Because the depths of human perversion are unbounded. Let me give you an example. In many sex shops in germany (and many more on the internet) you can buy shit-in-a-can. Why would someone want this stuff? Because, believe it or not, a lot of gay men enjoy the smell of shit when they're having sex. It's disgusting, but it is true. Now when someone sat down and took that first dump in a can do you think he thought he was going to make profit? What do you think was going through his mind. Probably some stupid analogy like the one your just made: gee, lots of people are putting good smells in a can but no-one is putting bad smells in a can, there's probably a market for that. Everyone he mentioned this to said "don't be an idiot" or the appropriate german translation and he got on with his life, until one day he happened to be talking to one of his many gay friends who happened to mention this little fetish club they went to recently.... never underestimate the depths of human perversion.
I think I just answered that argument, any idiot can film porn - meaning there's already a flooded market of the stuff - but very few people can render it - meaning there's an empty market, and opportunity there.
If you believe watching porn is immoral because it makes you regard women as sex objects then clearly creating virtual models of women and creating virtual porn is even more likely to do so.
Your reference to uncanny valley combined with his "photoshoot gallery" totally suggests what this guy should be doing: making porn. Sure, it's cheaper to get a DV cam and some chicks who wanna make a few bucks together than it is to make a CGI short but uncanny valley suggests to us that the experience of watching porn vs the experience of watching rendered porn would be two very different things. Different reaction == different market, and as there's no-one in the business of making rendered porn (at least that I know of) that's a market that this guy could own. Of course, that assumes there someone out there who wants to watch rendered porn, but I think it's a given that the range of human perversen is infinite.
all these projects use Patch to merge files. Patch throws conflicts when it gets confused. BitKeeper has some proprietory merge algorithms (the infamous 3-way merge) so it gets conflicts less often.
He jumped into Mike Moore's mosh pit!
I had a pollster call up the other day, but before they would take my many opinions they asked me my post code to confirm I was from the right area, I wasn't. Somehow I think they were doing a survey of how many people actually know what the name of their electorate is.
Isn't it the duty of every good citizen to try to influence how others vote? What are we supposed to do, lock ourselves in a political cage for 6 months before every election so as not to influence other voters? Cool, we can all go to the polls with no idea what the issues are we're voting for. Oh wait, I forgot, this is bipartisan politics, there are no issues.
Actually it's under 80.
It costs money to educate them.
The difference is that the BSA can claim that Microsoft has made a monetary loss from those few hundred illegal copies of Windows 2003 server. It would be pretty hard for the owner of the GPL work that you have unlawfully extended to claim they have made a monetary loss.
As SCO is a two bit company consisting 100% of lawyers and IBM is a huge big business consisting of thousands of "creative people" it would appear that the balance is exactly the opposite of what you are trying to make it out to be.
That's because it is not possible. Even if you link your code to GPL code and distribute the result to a third party you cannot be forced to reveal your code. A court can rule that you are prohibited from distributing the combined work unless you reveal your code, but it cannot rule that you have to reveal your code to the people you have already distributed it to. You're the author, you hold all the rights over your code and no court can take that away from you.
You'd figure they could put some specific charges with dates and the precise content that wasn't available. I love the way the Slashdot summary says "read on to make your own decision" but the linked article doesn't actually contain any more detail than the summary.
With gems like that, you should be posting to the wikipedia.
Actually it was more like the great BitKeeper/GNU Patch question, but hey.
The problem with XUL isn't with XUL :) it's with the javascript you need to interface with XUL. There's no documentation. You try to get stuff done and quickly discover that simple things that claim to work don't and if you're trying to do anything dynamic like change a style sheet at runtime there's no documented way to do it.