>> Then in a catastrophic event charges could fire seperating the plain into compartments which could be carried to earth safely. Each section could have air tight emergency doors which seals when the charges fire
The airlines won't even put locks on the cockpit doors to keep terrorists out, you think they'll spring for that?
>> Even if it is too hard a task for a computer to leap beyond dull drap monotone for straight text to speech, do you know of any attempts at emphasis tags?
Sure, it's used in video games all the time.. Stuff like the commentator chatter in the background of a recent sports title. It's evolved beyond just a bunch of voice samples strung together.
It's also in windows.. Clippy the paperclip, merlin the wizard, those guys are generated by the "Agent" activeX control. They use text to speech, and you can augment it with metatags to make the speech sound more natural.
But it takes too much massaging of the input. To format, say, this post so it could be 'spoken' in a more natural manner, would take longer than it took to write it.
To have a computer do everything automagically, that computer would have to have a good understanding of the english language, which is fairly complex and full of subtleties.
Then take the example of most asian languages, where the enunciation of a given word completely changes its meaning.
It's not just the phonetic sounds, but the multitude of various inflections and emphasis' that are lacking, and are pretty hard to reproduce, unless the TTS engine can interpret the meaning of the text.
Raising the voice at the end of a question may be easy enough. But how much? When? This is a question too, is it not?
A good orator would read a more 'exciting' passage more quickly, and with more enthusiasm, punctuating key verbs and nouns. How is software to know which passages are more exciting, and which arent?
It's not just a hard task for computers, but people too. Computers read aloud at about the same level as poor orator. Pho-net-i-call-y, in a dull drab monotone. Drop by the local high school, and listen to them reading shakespeare.
Reading aloud may be simple, reading it well and naturally is a skill.
Frankly, people with disabilities are a minority. And those without dont want to go to a restaurant full of jackasses talking to their PDAs (cell phones are bad enough).
There may exist a lucrative niche market for this sort of thing, but I don't see how anything short of lobbying the government to legislate this stuff into existence changing anything. After all, thats why mcdonalds has a wheelchair ramp.
>> I'm rendered speechless by the hubris of these scientists who think that somehow they have a right to own part of the very building blocks of life.
No, they want to own the rights to the methods they use to understand and manipulate those building blocks.
Noone is trying to patent the gene that gives someone blue eyes - but they are trying to patent the methods and devices they used to discover and manipulate that gene.
And frankly, a financial incentive that a patent provides is the only thing to drive the research at all. If you want to do it for free - go right ahead.
If she couldn't reproduce it, her paper sucked in the first place.
Milton, the blind bard, wrote Paradise Lost in his head, and dictated it to a scribe. Ellen can't remember some dumb-ass high school paper about Chinatown.
It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools for his work.
Her paper would have sucked if she wrote it on a Cray.
.. for calling the 'switch' ads typical corporate 'testimonials' from paid users?
>> Did Apple compensate you for the commercial at all?
I'm not actually sure how much I got paid because it was in installments, and the whole contract was dealt with by my parents, so I'm not actually sure. Oh, and I got an iPod. It's like the coolest thing ever. >>
I'm sure MSFT wouldn't have to look hard for 'testimonials' for a few bucks and a free xbox, either.
We've stopped growing exponentially, at least so far as computer science goes. It pretty much grows linearly now. CPUS's get faster, but not really more complex. Frankly the spiffy new P4 I just bought is the same technology as my Commodore 64 was, just lots faster.
There's much more to human intelligence than doing math really fast. Thats why this is a ton of horseshit.
The idea of a skynet-like being that becomes self-aware and destroys humanity is pure science fiction. Though, for these types, as the scientologists, technology has replaced 'god', and the 'Singularity' has replaced 'Judgement Day'.
Personally I find the idea of a catastrophic meteor strike, at its current odds of about a bajillion to one, to be much more likely.
Ah well, I always use it. It's part of slackware, which is all I ever needed to set up any servers.
It's pretty good. A little feature light and glitchy.
Like if you wrap text past the screen, it has a nasty habit of starting a newline, so you have to delete the newline, etc. Pain in the ass for long lines in config files.
From their own site Plasmon.co.uk, the optical media only lasts 35 years or so.
They really arent much better than DVD-R for long term storage, the benefit is fast random access, like a hard drive.
So they're decent for archival purpose, having last years catalog 'handy', etc, they're not well suited at all to disaster recovery.
Btw, they aren't 'made of glass' as you said in your parent post, it's like a hard drive platter 'encased' in glass. The heat will corrupt the magnetic media in the core even though the glass shell might survive.
If you want 'made of glass', talk to a pro production house about fabricating up some glass masters for you, if your pockets are deep enough.
>> A good alternitave is to put your backups in a safe in the back yard
Thats... OUTSIDE!
If/.'ers were willing to go outside, they might have heard of something called a safety deposit box, available at the local bank, which can be insured.
Nothing is 100% fail-safe, really. The nuclear explosion that wipes out your PC will probably wipe out your bank, the safe in the backyard.
Actually, with good PhthaloCyanine discs can last in the hundreds of years. Exposure to UV light of course weakens the reflective layer, as well as the plastic it's stuck in, but so long as you keep them in the case and stored somewhere safely, it's cheap, effective long time storage.
Microfilms will break down over time too, much by way of the same factors as a CD-R would, for much the same reasons.
Realistically, in 50 years, if you still needed the data, you'd be moving it onto some sort of super-cybernetic-solid-state-bio-petabyte-storage- device.
An optical disk lasting 1000 years is all fine and good, but if there's no drive that can read it, it'd just be an obscure relic sitting in a museum somewhere.
I've rewritten CD-RW with no degredation hundreds of times. Well, at least dozens. Not even the expensive ones, the moderately priced Digital Research branded ones at CompUSA.
I would use it to archive my projects at work and take home every night, and back in again the next morn, until the powers that be finally allowed me to setup a VPN for myself.
The key is to handle them extra gingerly.. Move them from the case to the drive quickly, and take extra caution not to get any shmutz or fingerprints on the back of them.
Oh, and burn slow. The longer the laser stays focused on a given point on the disc, the more clearly its going to 'burn' it. (Makes sense to me at least, though I'm sure some try-hard jackass will jump in with some idiotic chemistry lesson about why I'm wrong.)
All the same, while they make for good short-term or incremental backups, a one-time write on a *quality, branded* media is the best for archival.
So you'd rather eliminate your completely *voluntary* and *imaginary* "MS tax", in favor of the large manditory federal tax needed to set up a new beurocracy called the 'Department of Computer Formats', and have them audit each and every government PC for compliancy.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Then in a catastrophic event charges could fire seperating the plain into compartments which could be carried to earth safely. Each section could have air tight emergency doors which seals when the charges fire
The airlines won't even put locks on the cockpit doors to keep terrorists out, you think they'll spring for that?
You're lucky to get a bag of peanuts.
I'd rather it crashed and burst into flames. Do you know how nice meat smells broiling on a mesquite grill?
I'd assume they'd be SCSI cases, in which case, he should be able to get at least 16. SCSI stops being hyper-expensive in quantity.
>> Even if it is too hard a task for a computer to leap beyond dull drap monotone for straight text to speech, do you know of any attempts at emphasis tags?
Sure, it's used in video games all the time.. Stuff like the commentator chatter in the background of a recent sports title. It's evolved beyond just a bunch of voice samples strung together.
It's also in windows.. Clippy the paperclip, merlin the wizard, those guys are generated by the "Agent" activeX control. They use text to speech, and you can augment it with metatags to make the speech sound more natural.
But it takes too much massaging of the input. To format, say, this post so it could be 'spoken' in a more natural manner, would take longer than it took to write it.
To have a computer do everything automagically, that computer would have to have a good understanding of the english language, which is fairly complex and full of subtleties.
Then take the example of most asian languages, where the enunciation of a given word completely changes its meaning.
Notice a few posts down, someone posted the exact same thing I did, and got +Insightful. Yet I'm a troll because some AC 'sez so'.
The mods just do what they're told.
Meh. So be it.
It's not just the phonetic sounds, but the multitude of various inflections and emphasis' that are lacking, and are pretty hard to reproduce, unless the TTS engine can interpret the meaning of the text.
Raising the voice at the end of a question may be easy enough. But how much? When? This is a question too, is it not?
A good orator would read a more 'exciting' passage more quickly, and with more enthusiasm, punctuating key verbs and nouns. How is software to know which passages are more exciting, and which arent?
It's not just a hard task for computers, but people too.
Computers read aloud at about the same level as poor orator. Pho-net-i-call-y, in a dull drab monotone. Drop by the local high school, and listen to them reading shakespeare.
Reading aloud may be simple, reading it well and naturally is a skill.
Mod yourself down, spanky.
It's the truth.
If there was a market, it'd exist.
Frankly no market segment of significant worth wants or needs a PDA that they can talk to.
>> First off, buying a dictaphone ...
DICTAPHONE? DICTAPHONE?
re-vulcanize my tires, post-haste. And make sure this post is on the next auto-gyro to Prussia.
There's no market for it?
Frankly, people with disabilities are a minority. And those without dont want to go to a restaurant full of jackasses talking to their PDAs (cell phones are bad enough).
There may exist a lucrative niche market for this sort of thing, but I don't see how anything short of lobbying the government to legislate this stuff into existence changing anything. After all, thats why mcdonalds has a wheelchair ramp.
>> I'm rendered speechless by the hubris of these scientists who think that somehow they have a right to own part of the very building blocks of life.
No, they want to own the rights to the methods they use to understand and manipulate those building blocks.
Noone is trying to patent the gene that gives someone blue eyes - but they are trying to patent the methods and devices they used to discover and manipulate that gene.
And frankly, a financial incentive that a patent provides is the only thing to drive the research at all. If you want to do it for free - go right ahead.
It's just that easy to find Mac horror stories too.
A friend of mine who runs (or trys to) a web design business does most of his artsy-fartsy crap on his mac.
And it crashed. No hardware problem, just one day it stopped booting, and he lost everything that hadn't been burned to CD.
You can find 'horror stories' about any damn platform that exists, has existed, or will exist. Thats why this campaign is such a load of crap.
Bah, who cares.
If she couldn't reproduce it, her paper sucked in the first place.
Milton, the blind bard, wrote Paradise Lost in his head, and dictated it to a scribe. Ellen can't remember some dumb-ass high school paper about Chinatown.
It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools for his work.
Her paper would have sucked if she wrote it on a Cray.
.. for calling the 'switch' ads typical corporate 'testimonials' from paid users?
>>
Did Apple compensate you for the commercial at all?
I'm not actually sure how much I got paid because it was in installments, and the whole contract was dealt with by my parents, so I'm not actually sure. Oh, and I got an iPod. It's like the coolest thing ever.
>>
I'm sure MSFT wouldn't have to look hard for 'testimonials' for a few bucks and a free xbox, either.
inevitable? says who? you?
We've stopped growing exponentially, at least so far as computer science goes. It pretty much grows linearly now. CPUS's get faster, but not really more complex. Frankly the spiffy new P4 I just bought is the same technology as my Commodore 64 was, just lots faster.
There's much more to human intelligence than doing math really fast. Thats why this is a ton of horseshit.
The idea of a skynet-like being that becomes self-aware and destroys humanity is pure science fiction. Though, for these types, as the scientologists, technology has replaced 'god', and the 'Singularity' has replaced 'Judgement Day'.
Personally I find the idea of a catastrophic meteor strike, at its current odds of about a bajillion to one, to be much more likely.
I thought it was?
Ah well, I always use it. It's part of slackware, which is all I ever needed to set up any servers.
It's pretty good. A little feature light and glitchy.
Like if you wrap text past the screen, it has a nasty habit of starting a newline, so you have to delete the newline, etc. Pain in the ass for long lines in config files.
Damn, I can't believe this ancient thing still exists. And in development, no less.
Though, I still use pico to edit config files and the such, since its light, simple, and has just enough features to get stuff done.
But wow. A new version.
Whats the phrase I'm searching for?
Oh yeah.. "WHO GIVES A FLYING FUCK?!"
From their own site Plasmon.co.uk, the optical media only lasts 35 years or so.
They really arent much better than DVD-R for long term storage, the benefit is fast random access, like a hard drive.
So they're decent for archival purpose, having last years catalog 'handy', etc, they're not well suited at all to disaster recovery.
Btw, they aren't 'made of glass' as you said in your parent post, it's like a hard drive platter 'encased' in glass. The heat will corrupt the magnetic media in the core even though the glass shell might survive.
If you want 'made of glass', talk to a pro production house about fabricating up some glass masters for you, if your pockets are deep enough.
Because there's piece-of-mind with a physical backup.
What if the next great virus/worm/trojan wipes out not only your PC, but all of your remote sites. Perhaps even piggybacking on your rsync job.
It's not going to spread to last weeks tape sitting in a bank vault (or where have you).
Your solution doesn't cover the worst-case-scenario. The whole point is a catastrophe-proof backup system.
>> A good alternitave is to put your backups in a safe in the back yard
/.'ers were willing to go outside, they might have heard of something called a safety deposit box, available at the local bank, which can be insured.
Thats... OUTSIDE!
If
Nothing is 100% fail-safe, really. The nuclear explosion that wipes out your PC will probably wipe out your bank, the safe in the backyard.
Actually, with good PhthaloCyanine discs can last in the hundreds of years. Exposure to UV light of course weakens the reflective layer, as well as the plastic it's stuck in, but so long as you keep them in the case and stored somewhere safely, it's cheap, effective long time storage.
- device.
Microfilms will break down over time too, much by way of the same factors as a CD-R would, for much the same reasons.
Realistically, in 50 years, if you still needed the data, you'd be moving it onto some sort of super-cybernetic-solid-state-bio-petabyte-storage
An optical disk lasting 1000 years is all fine and good, but if there's no drive that can read it, it'd just be an obscure relic sitting in a museum somewhere.
>> I'm hypercritical and paranoid
.com winners as iDrive and the like for backups.
I wouldn't say so.
I've seen clients relying on such
When the bubble burst, so did their piece of mind.
I've rewritten CD-RW with no degredation hundreds of times. Well, at least dozens. Not even the expensive ones, the moderately priced Digital Research branded ones at CompUSA.
I would use it to archive my projects at work and take home every night, and back in again the next morn, until the powers that be finally allowed me to setup a VPN for myself.
The key is to handle them extra gingerly.. Move them from the case to the drive quickly, and take extra caution not to get any shmutz or fingerprints on the back of them.
Oh, and burn slow. The longer the laser stays focused on a given point on the disc, the more clearly its going to 'burn' it. (Makes sense to me at least, though I'm sure some try-hard jackass will jump in with some idiotic chemistry lesson about why I'm wrong.)
All the same, while they make for good short-term or incremental backups, a one-time write on a *quality, branded* media is the best for archival.
You, sir, are a dork.
If your house burns down, it will burn all night and into the next day.
And for what you spent on all those safes, you could easily rent an insured safety deposit box at your local bank.
Of course, you know, that means going outside.
So you'd rather eliminate your completely *voluntary* and *imaginary* "MS tax", in favor of the large manditory federal tax needed to set up a new beurocracy called the 'Department of Computer Formats', and have them audit each and every government PC for compliancy.
This would be a good thing, how?
>> Then Microsoft would have to choose either to implement it openly, or not fully support it.
And, of course, they'd sensibly choose the latter - and having 95% market share, the new format fades into obscurity.
I mean do these fleas seriously think the dog is going to take them where they want to go?
Sketching out a standard on paper and having some high-on-himself muckity-muck rubber stamp it is all fine and good.
In the real world, standard means "what most people use". And that's MS Office, like it or not.