What about a way to access and manage your phone from your computer without installing any additional software, since every computer already has a web browser?
"The work for the dole system has lots of potential to be misused."
I think anyone trying to misuse the system with coding labour would face the cruel reality of the quality of code developed half-heartedly.
It would seem very unlikely that a bunch of dole workers could build a large sufficiently functional system since they would have to communicate effectively, write code that others can understand and have a general picture of the project to be able to do really beneficial work.
Doing all this is something that really needs dedication to your work - unlike picking garbage on the side of the road. It is really hard to force dedication.
I personally think that, like a previous poster already wrote, OSS coding should be supported by the government as for example arts are supported. Here in Finland we pour heaps of money to all kinds of artists who have devoted their life to their art because it is seen beneficial to the society. I would really like to see similiar funding and prizes for succesful OSS coders - which we do have surprisingly many for such a small coutry: linux, ssh, irc, irssi and ion have to my knowledge originated from Finland and there are heaps of other not so well known projects like FLE3, Mimerdesk, Dicole, umix and all the projects i'm not familiar with. Also Perl has been maintained by a finn a couple of year back and many many translations and greatly helping hands on larger projects have come from Finland.
I think our coutry should aknowledge the good their citizens are doing globally which is also making our small country known around the world and support these people for their work. And I think every other country should do the same also.
"The support staff here (university) basically forbids people from administering their own systems, due to all the Windows viruses, spyware, etc."
The support staff here (at my university) basically lets people install any software they wish.
And I'm not saying they are doing a bad job. The Linux systems work like a charm and majority of our student (in the cs faculty) and staff use them as their primary OS even though a dual booting Windows is also provided. As an average user you really don't need to install anything since everything a normal user needs is already installed. They just have the option for us who like some exotic software (like an excellent experimental window manager called ion) to compile and install it for ourselves.
The latest treat is the Windows 2003 server login which you can open with some remote technology on one of your virtual desktops to use some of those legacy Windows administration apps or just see how your OpenOffice.org made presentations work in PowerPoint.
The machines very rarely have problems which are not hardware dependant and the basic login takes just as long as X and KDE take to start (when all of their data is usually fully cached in memory already) which is a snap compared to the Windows servers administered with Netware.
I would really want to see such a functional system built using Windows products too, but I doubt it would be an easy task.
And just to note: Even though almost all users use Linux the sizes of our Windows and Linux administration staff are equal.
In the Knoppix community there has been some effort to make Knoppix boot using WINGRUB initiated from the XP bootloader.
Inserting one line in your boot.ini can make the XP bootloader execute WINGRUB from your factory preinstalled NTFS partition and with WINGRUB you can load a Linux kernel and a miniroot package from the same NTFS partition.
So far this all works with a recent stock Knoppix (which I suppose Ubuntu live CD is also based on) and stock WINGRUB (grub4dos.sf.net) but the problem is that the stock miniroot does not feature the read-only NTFS-kernel module so you can not load Knoppix direcly from an.iso file residing on your NTFS partition.
Tested patches to miniroot DO exist for this to work and they are acquirable from knoppix.net forums, but they have not yet been added to the official Knoppix distribution.
It should be fairly easy to incorporate these changes to a custom live CD like the one of Ubuntu's and this would make it possible to offer a Windows installer which setups WINGRUB, Linux kernel and the modified miniroot, searches (or just asks) for the location of your downloaded Ubuntu Live CD and after that just lets the user choose to boot into a HD based Live CD residing on a.iso-file.
For some people who just want to test a live CD the burning process might be too much of a step to take. This approach would be a no-cost, no-partitioning, no-bootrecord-touching way for these people to hop into the wonderful world of Linux live CD's:)
I think this research does not seem very promising in the long run.
I think that applying only more computing power to audio recognition does not solve the underlying problem of the complexity of speech recognition.
For some people it is ofcourse a nice-to-have gizmo that they can command their cell phone with short sentences but this is really far from speech to text dictating and natural language interfaces.
I personally think that to achieve the "bigger goals" we need to concentrate more on context and sentence aware solutions. Speech recognition can at it's best be highly educated guessing of arbitrary human tone sequences - that's what we humans do too.
In these more desirable goals the audio analyzing which this project concentrates on is only a very small (although vital) subset of the process and thus optimizing it with hardware seems to me as fairly insignificant.
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What about a way to access and manage your phone from your computer without installing any additional software, since every computer already has a web browser?
"The work for the dole system has lots of potential to be misused."
I think anyone trying to misuse the system with coding labour would face the cruel reality of the quality of code developed half-heartedly.
It would seem very unlikely that a bunch of dole workers could build a large sufficiently functional system since they would have to communicate effectively, write code that others can understand and have a general picture of the project to be able to do really beneficial work.
Doing all this is something that really needs dedication to your work - unlike picking garbage on the side of the road. It is really hard to force dedication.
I personally think that, like a previous poster already wrote, OSS coding should be supported by the government as for example arts are supported. Here in Finland we pour heaps of money to all kinds of artists who have devoted their life to their art because it is seen beneficial to the society. I would really like to see similiar funding and prizes for succesful OSS coders - which we do have surprisingly many for such a small coutry: linux, ssh, irc, irssi and ion have to my knowledge originated from Finland and there are heaps of other not so well known projects like FLE3, Mimerdesk, Dicole, umix and all the projects i'm not familiar with. Also Perl has been maintained by a finn a couple of year back and many many translations and greatly helping hands on larger projects have come from Finland.
I think our coutry should aknowledge the good their citizens are doing globally which is also making our small country known around the world and support these people for their work. And I think every other country should do the same also.
"The support staff here (university) basically forbids people from administering their own systems, due to all the Windows viruses, spyware, etc."
The support staff here (at my university) basically lets people install any software they wish.
And I'm not saying they are doing a bad job. The Linux systems work like a charm and majority of our student (in the cs faculty) and staff use them as their primary OS even though a dual booting Windows is also provided. As an average user you really don't need to install anything since everything a normal user needs is already installed. They just have the option for us who like some exotic software (like an excellent experimental window manager called ion) to compile and install it for ourselves.
The latest treat is the Windows 2003 server login which you can open with some remote technology on one of your virtual desktops to use some of those legacy Windows administration apps or just see how your OpenOffice.org made presentations work in PowerPoint.
The machines very rarely have problems which are not hardware dependant and the basic login takes just as long as X and KDE take to start (when all of their data is usually fully cached in memory already) which is a snap compared to the Windows servers administered with Netware.
I would really want to see such a functional system built using Windows products too, but I doubt it would be an easy task.
And just to note: Even though almost all users use Linux the sizes of our Windows and Linux administration staff are equal.
In the Knoppix community there has been some effort to make Knoppix boot using WINGRUB initiated from the XP bootloader.
.iso file residing on your NTFS partition.
.iso-file.
:)
Inserting one line in your boot.ini can make the XP bootloader execute WINGRUB from your factory preinstalled NTFS partition and with WINGRUB you can load a Linux kernel and a miniroot package from the same NTFS partition.
So far this all works with a recent stock Knoppix (which I suppose Ubuntu live CD is also based on) and stock WINGRUB (grub4dos.sf.net) but the problem is that the stock miniroot does not feature the read-only NTFS-kernel module so you can not load Knoppix direcly from an
Tested patches to miniroot DO exist for this to work and they are acquirable from knoppix.net forums, but they have not yet been added to the official Knoppix distribution.
It should be fairly easy to incorporate these changes to a custom live CD like the one of Ubuntu's and this would make it possible to offer a Windows installer which setups WINGRUB, Linux kernel and the modified miniroot, searches (or just asks) for the location of your downloaded Ubuntu Live CD and after that just lets the user choose to boot into a HD based Live CD residing on a
For some people who just want to test a live CD the burning process might be too much of a step to take. This approach would be a no-cost, no-partitioning, no-bootrecord-touching way for these people to hop into the wonderful world of Linux live CD's
I think this research does not seem very promising in the long run.
I think that applying only more computing power to audio recognition does not solve the underlying problem of the complexity of speech recognition.
For some people it is ofcourse a nice-to-have gizmo that they can command their cell phone with short sentences but this is really far from speech to text dictating and natural language interfaces.
I personally think that to achieve the "bigger goals" we need to concentrate more on context and sentence aware solutions. Speech recognition can at it's best be highly educated guessing of arbitrary human tone sequences - that's what we humans do too.
In these more desirable goals the audio analyzing which this project concentrates on is only a very small (although vital) subset of the process and thus optimizing it with hardware seems to me as fairly insignificant.