We fought you off for as long as possible, but in the end we had to give in :) What decided it was that OSnews is not a mainstream source of news like Engadget or even sites where they actually employ people, we are not an entity like AOL that fails to grasp the reality of the web today and the issues surrounding the technology landscape. We have the technical background, and the community to boot to know that when we criticise others, we had better be doing the right thing ourselves. Get the feed here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-11-14
I'm an OS News regular. Your podcasts may be spectacular but I wouldn't know because I won't waste my time listening instead of reading. Reading is faster and enables skimming which you can't do with audio.
Ergo I don't get why anyone would prefer audio to text (except as an alternative) so popularity of podcasts is beyond my understanding.
do you know of any tool that can produce text from audio feed? .. I think it is asking a bit too much to ask for somebody to listen to audio and then manually typing all words in the audio and proof reading it later on.
Most podcasts are usually given with timelines and you can skip only to sections you are interest in and they usually come with a summary so its easy to know if the podcast will interest you or not.
Member since:2005-06-29
Then there's the browser back button, isn't there? 
.
Since I've studied conversation analysis in great detail at university (as in, in VERY great detail), I know what an absolute horror transcribing is. In case you're wondering what it's like, let me paint a picture for you.
You've found the girl or boy (or both, I'm Dutch) of your dreams. On your romantic getaway to Praha, you're strolling along the Vltava (the Moldau for the language-impaired), and you have it all planned out.
The ring is burning a hole in your pocket, and with the moon shining bright, stars dancing in the night's sky, your hand slightly shaking, you go down on one knee. You take the ring out, and you pop the question. Her eyes well up, and visibly trembling, she says yes.
*Just as you're about to get up, she gets hit by Britney Spears' tour bus, gets hurled to a lampost, and dies, her dead, shattered body curled around it. Right at that moment, your phone rings, you pick up, and it's the police telling you your entire family died in a horrible car crash in South Carolina - he tells you they had a slow, agonising death by petrol fire.*
Transcribing is experiencing that section between asterisks over and over and over and over and over and over, while a huge smelly Russian guy is prodding you in your left ear with an uncooked hotdog sausage every ten seconds.
But hey, feel free to provide a transcription. We'd totally appreciate it.
Member since:2008-07-15
Thom, I'd +10 that if I could. Having done transcription myself I agree with you how horrible it is. Well, actually, I don't think you painted a horrible enough picture, let me add:
*After the call about the fire, you are picked up by the local Mafia to whom you owe gambling debts. They take you somewhere dark and pull out a pair of pruning sheers, proceeding to cut something off for every grand you owe them. As it happens, you owe them $21,000...
There. Now the picture is horrible enough. 
Member since:2006-07-14
I've always had good luck with speech recognition, the problem for controlling a computer has always been speed of input.
Worst case scenario, I'll end up benchmarking open source speech recognition programs with charts with little indicators labelled "Bad", "Horrible", "Tax Fraud", "Felony", "Crime against Humanity (execution pending)","Deceased (executed during testing)", "Ashes scattered to prevent zombification".
Member since:2006-07-14
Member since:2005-07-06
Unless they script their podcasts, that would require a ridiculous amount of effort. Unless someone who works on the site is a professional stenographer, transcribing each podcast would probably take around 6-8 hours (for someone who can type 80-90 WPM).
What I like about the podcasts is that you can listen to them while doing something else, and still get the gist of what was discussed. It's kinda hard to read while you're washing dishes.
"Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz). Unlike last generation, you don't need to be some sort of Jedi to extract the PS4's potential here. The Xbox One and PS4 architectures are quite similar, Sony just has more hardware under the hood. Weâll have to wait and see how this hardware delta gets exposed in games over time, but the gap is definitely there. The funny thing about game consoles is that itâs usually the lowest common denominator that determines the bulk of the experience across all platforms. On the plus side, the Xbox One should enjoy better power/thermal characteristics compared to the PlayStation 4. Even compared to the Xbox 360 we should see improvement in many use cases thanks to modern power management techniques." AnandTech does its usual in-depth thing.
"The Verge has learned that HTC's Chief Product Officer, Kouji Kodera, left the company last week. Kodera was responsible for HTC's overall product strategy, which makes the departure especially notable on the heels of the global launch of the make-or-break One. It's not just Kodera. In the past three-odd months, HTC has lost a number of employees in rapid succession." I really hope HTC pulls it together.
"It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is a snapshot of Debian 'sid' at the time of the Debian 'wheezy' release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release." Important note: 75% of Debian packages are supported bu Debian GNU/Hurd. Impressive.
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Member since:
2009-10-12
In spirit of Audio for Everyone, would you pretty please provide plaintext as alternative format for me?
I'm an OS News regular. Your podcasts may be spectacular but I wouldn't know because I won't waste my time listening instead of reading. Reading is faster and enables skimming which you can't do with audio.
Ergo I don't get why anyone would prefer audio to text (except as an alternative) so popularity of podcasts is beyond my understanding.