Audio Download: Linux Kernel to be on Radio

cyber_rigger writes: "The Linux Kernel is to have a (spoken) reading on Radio Free Linux and some other regular radio station throughout the world. http://radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux/ I guess this makes Linux offically 'free as in speech.' 'The Linux kernel contains 4,141,432 lines of code. Reading the entire kernel will take an estimated 14253.43 hours, or 593.89 days. Free Radio Linux begins transmission on February 3, 2002, the fourth anniversary of the term "Open Source."'" If only the mysterious numbers stations would open their source as well.

Minimalist Art.

[minus23]

Personally I think this is great. In a minimalist sort of way I really dig these sorts of things. I dig monitors in my room that show the airplanes in the skies. ... I dig 4 measure beat clips playing on a speaker in the corner in the bathroom really softly. ... I dig old laptops playing Sim City (black and white) with the time slowed down to real-time... or on normal and let people check on the village when they come over and visit. I could see myself setting up a little speaker somewhere just to play back the linux kernal. I am actually excited. :)

Not that good

[komet]

I listened in for a bit and it was very confusing. The punctuation marks especially have very confusing names and not enough pause between them. =( came out as: equals..... signpar-en-the-sis ... very confusing. And why "traditional hyphen"?

It also mispronounced "Linus Torvalds". How hard would it have been to sample Linus' name properly?

Of course, these are all things that can be improved as time goes on and I do hope they will actually do so.

Re:magic numbers + the synth sux

[abdulwahid]

I was disappointed by the bad speech encoding. I had expected in 2002 you'd actually be able to synthesize a voice that sounds close to human or at least be understandable. The old amiga 500 had a utility that was much more understandable than this is.

I don't know about the Amiga but I had an old TI99-4A that had a speech synthesis module. It was quite good at reading most words but had a built in list of words it could read. You could get it to read other words but it meant that you had to express the word in a special way so that the module could pronounce it properly. That really defeats the point of text to speech.

I think text to speech has come on a long way since those days but it seems like slow progress which is due to the complexity of the subject. There is a good open source text to speech engine called Festival [ed.ac.uk]. You can test it with your own text here [festvox.org]

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Why not Gutenberg?

[heyetv]

Why the linux kernel???

Why not start reading from the Project Gutenberg [promo.net] files instead, something that would support 'open' and 'free' concepts, but at the same time be useful and improving...

Re:what kernel ?

[Bios_Hakr]

I haven't tuned in as of yet (just woke up at work and cannot find the power supply for my speakers), but it seems to me that they would be reading the algorithym, not the code.

Reading the code symbol for symbol would seem to me to be slightly, well, geeky. But not in that good way.

On a side note, has anyone thought about calling Guiness ( the records guys, not the beer guys) for a note in The Book? This has to be the longest online reading ever.

On second thought, call the beer guys too. It might be harder to understand, but it would be a hellava lot more fun. And I can always get the written transcripts later:)