Listen To Woz, And Perhaps Type Madly

Shawn King of The Mac Show Live talked a few days ago with Apple co-founder and knowledge-omnivore Steve (The Woz) Wozniak. Shawn graciously agreed to post the interview, formerly Quicktime only (downloadable or streaming), as an MP3 file -- so now most anyone can listen. This is an interview worth listening to: Woz talks about his lifelong motivations, his years with Apple (up to the present), OS X, the Newton, and what the future holds for him. He also talks about building TV jammers and the only prank he got caught for in high school, one which might not fly so well right now. (The interview starts about 55 minutes into the show, and lasts for nearly an hour.) What's this got to do with typing madly? Well, since Shawn's program is all-audio (no pictures, and only the barest explanitory text), it's a lot less useful to those on text-only or just-plain-slow links than it could be. Read on below for your chance to change that with just a few minutes of your time. Update: 10/20 20:43 GMT by T : Thanks to everyone who's volunteered to transcribe, and to the several alternates who are already in line! No need for more voluneers right now :)

Transcribing an hour of text takes a long time. But if you (yes, you!) are willing to transcribe a 3-minute (well. 3:15) chunk of this interview, I will spend my putative day off gluing chunks of interview together. Shoot me an email with "WozScript" in the subject if you'd like to participate, and I'll give the first volunteers (it shouldn't take that many) a randomly-drawn three-minute segment to type up, as well as more instructions on how to format it. No compensation except your name in lights, and the knowledge that lynx users everywhere appreciate your efforts. I'll update this story if and when the transcription is complete. (And if anyone can suggest a good Quicktime audio --> .ogg converter, Shawn and I would both appreciate it.)

Suggestions

A) Go from the mp3 to a high-quality ogg file. There are plenty of mp3-->ogg converters. And don't bitch about the quality, it's a freaking interview, notMozart.

B) On a related note, this would be a fascinating job for a text-to-speech editor. I say, slap the
entire interview through one, and then just edit. I'll bet it takes less than half the time.

Re:Suggestions

Use Qucktime Pro [apple.com], export to a .wav file, then encode the .wav as an ogg.
Or, if you're looking for an open source solution, try using Quicktime for XMMS [sourceforge.net] or other Quicktime players for Linux, redirecting the sound to a .wav file, and then encoding into Ogg.

This guy has vision

I've always been impressed with Steve Wozniak - ever since I was a kid. I remember reading his autobiography several years ago, and he was frighteningly accurate in predicting many of the trends that have since hit the PC industry.

I found it interesting that in this interview, he acknowledges that the industry has shifted to cheap, commodity hardware and that Apple continues to suffer from it - but he was absolutely correct in pointing out that blind brand loyalty by "artsy types" was keeping them in business. Though Steve's strengths are obviously technical in nature, he possesses an innate understanding of a lot of issues on the business side of things that helped to keep him ahead of the curve.

-CT

Re:This guy has vision

The guy never said that only artsy people buy macs. Nor did he say that that artsy people don't know about computers. You are putting words in his mouth. The truth is that Macintosh comptuers and their operating system are extremely pretty. The one thing that macs do better than every other computer is 2d graphics and audio/video editing. Those are the things that artsy beatnik type people do with their computers. They buy macs not because they are stupid but because they know that this computer excels at the applications they use the most.
And the fact of the matter is that the mac is only still alive because it is really good at 2d graphics and audio/video editing. If it wasn't, then it wouldn't be around.

Woz on Digital Village Radio

Woz was on Digital Village [digitalvillage.org] last week for the full hour. A good interview, especially his thoughts about M$.

Speech to text recognition

"Transcribing an hour of text takes a long time. But if you (yes, you!) are willing to transcribe a 3-minute (well. 3:15) chunk of this interview, I will spend my putative day off gluing chunks of interview together."

Which bring the question. What are the alternatives for a voice recognition application that sould take a sound sample and convert it to text? Sort of like OCR (Optical Character Recognition) softwares does with a scanned image?

Time index of interview

The interview with Woz starts at T = 55:27

How about algorithmic voice transcription?

I thought we were suppsed to be geeks? Come on guys. Transcribing an hour of audio into text should take one line to fire up a voice recognition code, and no more time than the wall time required to listen to the interview..

There's a huge group of people hear who would love to see a free variant of *NIX that can compete with windows for the desktop market. I think that before this happens you're going to need to sit down, spend some time in your local technical library researching voice, image, pattern recognition algorithms.. I'd love to be able to type:

voice2text -mp3 woz.mp3 woz_interview.text

and get a transcribed version of a speech, or lecture notes.. How about combining this with an answering machine app to record and transcribe messages then send those messages to the IMAP server or atleast place them in a searchable database for future reference..

This is way off-topic but it's something I started thinking about when rumors bagan floating around concerning Apple's iPhoto app.. I thought it would be pretty incredible if Apple could piece together an app to project photos onto an empirical basis set and then use the coefficients from that projection to sort images.. Think of it like a generalized face recognition routine only more useful..

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that gnome and kde are nice, but to take over the desktop market you we really need to crawl out of the box, and burn it to the ground!

Online voice transcription

Just 4 easy steps:

1) Pick up your phone and dial the voice transcription service (any number will do)

2) Give the transcription start command: "bin laden"

3) Play the sample to be transcribed

4) E-mail [e-mail] to receive your free transcript!

Woz is a true 'hacker' in every sense of the word

The fact that he was shafted by Jobs, and doesn't lead a multi-millionaire lifestyle is testament to this. He did it for the love.

He is almost the exact opposite of William Gates III. He is the Anti-Gates! :-)

Its good to see he's still around.

My e-mail to Timmothy:

Tmiothy,

OK, I'll tpye. ;-)

How long do I have, BTW?

TIA

Soko

File Sizes - Slashdot Poll

OK. So someone explain why the MP3 file is 20MB of audio only, where as the QuickTime is 17MB of audio AND video...

a) Quick Time quality sucks.
b) MP3 compression sucks.
c) Cowboy Neal sucks.

The Woz

I actually found some info on the Woz [eggforge.net] just the other day. I thought it was kinda cool, but the same thing he discusses on his website.

Eggplants! [eggforge.net]

As I Listen...

I can't help but wonder about the people in CBM and Atari - who probably did not have someone like Woz who was a sole engineer in the development of the first two Apple boxen.

I know that Nolan Bushnell [thetech.org] was a key player in Atari's early years, and that the Amiga and Atari ST were actually "swapped" between companies where execs "jumped ship" - but what about Commodore's early years?

I took a quick look for historical links, and came up pretty much empty-handed. Anyone have better resources?

Another Interview

can be found at The Guardian's Article [guardian.co.uk] that I got off Woz' site [woz.org].

Plenty of other references on Steve's site, as well...

On Listening

I'm listening to the interview right now, and I can assure you that much will be lost if you convert it to text. You can't hear Woz's tone, as he gets excited about some things, and his serious tone on others. Come on, listen to the man's words, this is a guy who is talking about his youth when he could barely stand to speak to people from sheer shyness, and now millions of people can listen to his voice all across the world through the personal computers that he popularized. It's worth hearing his voice.

That was fun :)

Thanks for the opportunity to transcribe, Tim! Here is to hoping no one finds any glaring problems with my section!!

The Question is...

If a hundred Slashdotters spend a thousand minutes typing out 20 million bytes worth of audio, will it be Shakespeare?

Or something like that...

-R

perhaps it would be more cost effective

if they offered a trade in program for those who are interested. I mean, not everyone is going to want a computer, but those who do can trade up their computer and Ford can give those unwanted computers to charity. That gives Ford a nice tax write off. Furthermore, you look good to everyone. I mean, you are give to charity, you are upgrading your workforce's computers, and you make a little money back in the form of tax savings. Seems a little smarter to me. I wish my employer at least made the effort that Ford did.

I Can't Believe I Found This...

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of the Apple Computer, worked for Atari in 1974 (phrasing corrected by me)

See for yourself in this article [scripophily.net]. (You'll have to search for "Steve" or something...) In the famous words of Johnny Carson: "I did not know that!" ;-p

Open-Source Alternative for good voice compression

I record weekly speeches to post on a website. The best format for recording speech I found was Windows Media format. However, due to my aversion to MS, I switched to RealAudio, which was still good, but not quite as good as WMA. I use RealAudio 16KB/s, which is perfect quality for my needs. Is there an open-source alternative that offers comparable voice compression?

I wonder...

what Woz thinks the "new thingy" by apple is going to be?

MP3 player (enuf of those) is one thought, but I personally think the kickin ass device would be a Portable DivX player...Imagine an iBook screen, with a (DPg3?), ffmpeg codec (divx.jamby.net for you X.1 users and get the "old player" divx.max.st to "doctor" the .avi).

DivX, maybe DVD, to go and music... Stripped down OS X...drool.

On a G4-400 DivX is *flawless* videowise.
Sound, depends on the datarate, it seems.

I liked when he called "Dr. Mac" an hourse' d'ourve..heh, cute...and Dr. Mac's comment about X.1 of "it's safe now. He recommend for 10.1 don't pay 129 bucks to beta test.

Moose.

ps. Does the lack of slash dot posts mean there is no enthusiams about these topics, or are all the LOTR /. fans camping out for tickets?

pps. See my rant in the LOTR topic if you feel the need to mod ppl down for joking around.
Get a grip/clue/BJ/sense of humor, something...if you can't appreciate my sense of humor...dammit, that is *your* problem.

Did I hear "Woz" correctly?

In the interview he was asked about os X.

The response was he was "burned" pretty badly by the pre X.1, but Mail, utilities and such (with mention to Office for X, too) everything in X.1 "seemed 'good enough'".

Correct me if I am wrong, please, but is that not a statement normally associated with Microsoft's applications? Even in the Microsoft, Linux, Unix and Mac camp's I've heard this so much it stood out as if shouted from a rooftop.

Tell me honestly; Is that comment a compliment or a slap in the face?
I'm still mulling it over.

Anyone have a non-Fraunhofer conversion?

Anyone have a non-Fraunhofer conversion? The one they have out there is not working very well.

But where is the text?

I scoured all the comments, and if the link to the transcribed text is there, I missed it.

Re:Need more Mice Buttons

*sigh*

Are these comments trolls? Or are people just uninformed?

The answer is: whenever you plug in the multibutton mouse of your choice.

I'm using a cordless optical Logitech mouse that doesn't even "support" Mac in OS X 10.1, and the scroller scrolls and the second button brings up contextual menus.

--MMN

Re:Need more Mice Buttons

If you don't like the Apple optical mouse, you can sell it for $40 on eBay, which is more than you paid for it with your system.

When you cross platforms, you realize that there are a lot of inherant assumptions in each platform. If you use your right mouse button all day long, it's hard to imagine a system where it's not needed. The Mac has a pervasive, context-sensitive, "infinitely-deep" menu bar (you can't overshoot it since it's at the edge of the display). It's easy to slam your cursor up there and hit any particular menu in no time at all. If the menu bar were smaller, and sitting between a row of buttons and a window title bar, then there would be more utility in context menus. It's just a different approach. Windows users go "right-click / New Folder" and Mac users go "File > New Folder". The Mac user will be faster, I guarantee it, if they have used a Mac for more than a week. And if you want to work the Windows way, that is available too. Plug the same USB mouse from your Windows machine into a Mac and it works just fine, with scroller and multiple buttons and context menus.

I love the Apple mouse I got with my PowerMac G4, and I just bought an identical mouse for $59 to use with my PowerBook G4. They are great mouses. Good to the hands, easy to use, easy to travel with because there are no pieces to fall off (the only moving part is an internal hinge).

> especially with high prices that Apple is
> already charging them

Check out today's Mac prices ... they are not high. You just have to realize that Apple doesn't have any low-end machines. They all have 802.11 antennaes and slots (the high-end PowerBook has the $99 card included, too), they all have FireWire, they all have Mac OS X (equivalent to Windows XP Pro, not Home), they all have iMovie and iTunes software (best-of-breed software, not LE stuff), they all have TV out (except the PowerMac), they all have the best-quality displays. They all have Software Update, which is system software that checks once a day/week/user's-choice with Apple and updates everything that came with the box automatically, just asking the user for permission and an administrative password, including drivers, security updates, bundled apps. There are 10 other features like that, too, like CD/DVD burning in the Finder (4.5GB to a $6 DVD-R in 20 minutes in the background), or DiskCopy, which images any kind of disc to a file you can mount as if it were still a disk, so you can take game CD's with you on the road as a 300MB compressed file on your monster hard disk ($99 for a Windows software that does this). When you are looking to get all that stuff included and have a complete system that can do a lot of things out of the box, you will pay less in the end and do more with a Mac. If you are looking for a bare-bones system to run Linux, then yes, Macs look expensive. Saying that "Macs are expensive", though ... it doesn't take into account "value" as opposed to just "sticker price".

That's why Apple is opening stores where all the display products are plugged-in, working, even with third-party software installed and ready to use, so you can try it out before buying ... they want people to come in and see what you get for your money, to see that the PowerPC chips are very high performance, even though they are small, low-power, and low-clock-speed. It's a pleasure to buy and work with their stuff.

Re:Need more Mice Buttons

interstingly.. though off toppic.. OS X nativly supports 3 button scroll wheel mice.

mmm... contextual menus..

Re:Lynx users everywhere...

And deaf users should get with the program and install a new pair of ears, right?

Text is good because nearly everyone can use it one way or another.

Re:Good Idea, But...

Jeez, you'd think I would have taken the time to read the damn post...

Never mind...

-- Shamus

Re:Good Idea, But...

RTFA:

Shoot me an email with "WozScript" in the subject if you'd like to participate, and I'll give the first volunteers (it shouldn't take that many) a randomly-drawn three-minute segment to type up, as well as more instructions on how to format it.

Re:Steve Wozniak's Starting Capital

who, in turn, owe a debt to a quirky academic out east for the invention of the "mouse".

The mouse and hypertext was invented by the Englebart team at SRI in Menlo Park, CA (on Ravenswood near a really good bar, coffee shop and book store).

The original 1968 presentation which includes the world's introduction to hypertext and windowing is available on video at: http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html [stanford.edu]. So, it might be safe to say Xerox owes their GUI to someone SRI who owes Turing who owes Grunt for discovering fire.