if you go to http://www.in-q-tel.org/ you will find the VENTURE CAPITAL arm of the CIA, NSA, FBI and several other TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms) Every tech you mentioned in the article is ALREADY being funded and working in the commercial world.
This isn't wonderland anymore, this stuff is real and well funded.
Check out http://www.callminer.com/ or http://www.agentlogic.com/ if you dont believe me.
There are absolutely no hard facts in there. Please point us to ONE SINGLE virus, keylogger, adware, or any type of malware at all before making ridiculous claims like the old and completely bogus "it's just because of low market share". It's just not true. I haven't come across anything dodgy so far and I've _actively_ looked for it.
Dont believe this is happening.... check out the CIA (not the NSA's) investor called http://in-q-tel.org/. There are several companies on that list like http://www.callminer.com/that definately can do this and more to calls.
It is only a matter of time before Google realizes that the largest "untapped" database in the world is the spoken word. ergo: CallMiner, they create databases, normal sql databases, of every word in a call. Backed by investors, real customers, and oh yeah, another in-q-tel company.
I just cancelled my Sirius sub, and returned all of the equipment. I had the "radio" transmitter setup where I could put it in either vehicle. All in all, the signal was good, only would drop going under overpasses for a few seconds, or anytime anything blocked the line of sight. The reason I returned it is the sound quality and the setup. The sound quality was piss poor to be nice, there is no way it was CD Quality as mentioned earlier, in fact as a test I listened to a song on it, then put that same song in the CD player of the same radio and it sounded much much better.
The other issue for me was the basic setup. you have this cradle that holds the little controller, the cradle uses 88.1 - 88.9 in.2 increments to tune. If there happens to be radio on that channel, then you get static and have to change the station (and flicke a switch to a new position) on the cradle. I drove from south florida to DC and back over XMas and had to dick around with this switch about every 45-60 minutes. Also it is commercial free, but repeats ALOT. I listened to the comedy channel a bit, and within one day had heard several "bits" 2 or 3 times. The music seemed to not repeat in one day, but basically completely repeated the next.
Overall, a good experiment, but not a good experience.
Mining for data that might be related based on proximity, either temporal or locational, starts to get interesting when you are dealing with millions of interactions like in a call center on voice data (check out www.callminer.com) and suddenly you find out that when a customer says "hurricane" in an insurance call center, your agents are 5x more likely to hand them off to a supervisor, is real money saving information. This is what this technology is good for, and is being bought and used by a lot of companies hoping to find out that kind of information and save money by training those agents to handle those calls better.
Fast-Talk assumes you know the word you are looking for before you search, which is not super useful, except for google style searches, also it is extraordinarily slow (only searches about 10 hours of audio a second, think about how slow that is for say a year of NPR). Check out CallMiner for a much cooler use of speech to text technology. CallMiner uses trending to find trends in large volumes of calls. a real business use.
I worked for a company that evaluated the crusoe for use in their servers and had to take a pass. The reason it was so interesting is that to build very dense (i.e. small footprint, lots of power) servers, heat becomes the single largest issue. We were building servers that would service telephone company needs around speech recognition, so that you could pick up a phone and say what you wanted instead of dialing. Alas, we couldn't pick the crusoe because it didn't support SSE2, which is not required for speech recognition, but increases the speed of it soo much that you dont need nearly as much CPU horsepower. In the end we went with Intel PIII's because the CPU Mips to heat/power was the right balance.
The people of slash dot need to think beyond their desktop's sometimes and think about how a system will be used by users of servers, and not desktop's. I was really looking forward to the release of this chip, until they decided not to support the SSE2.
Oh well...
It is not enough to not know what I don't, but better to always to know what I do.
Slashdot Mirror
if you go to http://www.in-q-tel.org/ you will find the VENTURE CAPITAL arm of the CIA, NSA, FBI and several other TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms) Every tech you mentioned in the article is ALREADY being funded and working in the commercial world. This isn't wonderland anymore, this stuff is real and well funded. Check out http://www.callminer.com/ or http://www.agentlogic.com/ if you dont believe me.
First google Hit... http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/04/09/apple. trojan/
so apparently you aren't looking that hard... If it was written by people then there are bugs and exploitations are possible. Deal.
Dont believe this is happening.... check out the CIA (not the NSA's) investor called http://in-q-tel.org/. There are several companies on that list like http://www.callminer.com/that definately can do this and more to calls.
It is only a matter of time before Google realizes that the largest "untapped" database in the world is the spoken word. ergo: CallMiner, they create databases, normal sql databases, of every word in a call. Backed by investors, real customers, and oh yeah, another in-q-tel company.
I just cancelled my Sirius sub, and returned all of the equipment. I had the "radio" transmitter setup where I could put it in either vehicle. All in all, the signal was good, only would drop going under overpasses for a few seconds, or anytime anything blocked the line of sight. The reason I returned it is the sound quality and the setup. The sound quality was piss poor to be nice, there is no way it was CD Quality as mentioned earlier, in fact as a test I listened to a song on it, then put that same song in the CD player of the same radio and it sounded much much better. The other issue for me was the basic setup. you have this cradle that holds the little controller, the cradle uses 88.1 - 88.9 in .2 increments to tune. If there happens to be radio on that channel, then you get static and have to change the station (and flicke a switch to a new position) on the cradle. I drove from south florida to DC and back over XMas and had to dick around with this switch about every 45-60 minutes. Also it is commercial free, but repeats ALOT. I listened to the comedy channel a bit, and within one day had heard several "bits" 2 or 3 times. The music seemed to not repeat in one day, but basically completely repeated the next.
Overall, a good experiment, but not a good experience.
Mining for data that might be related based on proximity, either temporal or locational, starts to get interesting when you are dealing with millions of interactions like in a call center on voice data (check out www.callminer.com) and suddenly you find out that when a customer says "hurricane" in an insurance call center, your agents are 5x more likely to hand them off to a supervisor, is real money saving information. This is what this technology is good for, and is being bought and used by a lot of companies hoping to find out that kind of information and save money by training those agents to handle those calls better.
This is true, Except when your cost of customer acquisition is lower than the cost of customer retention then the idea is to get more new customers...
Fast-Talk assumes you know the word you are looking for before you search, which is not super useful, except for google style searches, also it is extraordinarily slow (only searches about 10 hours of audio a second, think about how slow that is for say a year of NPR). Check out CallMiner for a much cooler use of speech to text technology. CallMiner uses trending to find trends in large volumes of calls. a real business use.
I worked for a company that evaluated the crusoe for use in their servers and had to take a pass. The reason it was so interesting is that to build very dense (i.e. small footprint, lots of power) servers, heat becomes the single largest issue. We were building servers that would service telephone company needs around speech recognition, so that you could pick up a phone and say what you wanted instead of dialing. Alas, we couldn't pick the crusoe because it didn't support SSE2, which is not required for speech recognition, but increases the speed of it soo much that you dont need nearly as much CPU horsepower. In the end we went with Intel PIII's because the CPU Mips to heat/power was the right balance.
The people of slash dot need to think beyond their desktop's sometimes and think about how a system will be used by users of servers, and not desktop's. I was really looking forward to the release of this chip, until they decided not to support the SSE2.
Oh well...
It is not enough to not know what I don't, but better to always to know what I do.