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The Courts

How the Inventors of Dragon Speech Recognition Technology Lost Everything 606

Posted by samzenpus from the all-the-eggs-in-one-basket dept.
First time accepted submitter cjsm writes "James and Janet Baker were the inventors of Dragon Systems' speech recognition software, and after years of work, they created a multimillion dollar company. At the height of the tech boom, with investment offers rolling in, they turned to Goldman Sachs for financial advice. For a five million dollar fee, Goldman hooked them up with Lernout & Hauspie, the Belgium speech recognition company. After consultations with Goldman Sachs, the Bakers traded their company for $580 million in Lernout & Hauspie stock. But it turned out Lernout & Hauspie was involved in cooking their books and went bankrupt. Dragon was sold in a bankruptcy auction to Scansoft, and the Bakers lost everything. Goldman and Sachs itself had decided against investing in Lernout & Hauspie two years previous to this because they were lying about their Asian sales. The Bakers are suing for one billion dollars."

Comment Good luck with that (Score 1) 323

by g051051 (#40654745) Attached to: EA Outs <em>Battlefield 4</em>, Plans To Charge $70 For New Games

I've never paid more that $30 for a game, normally won't buy a new game for more thatn $20, and usually wait for sales or other discounts. I've got the money, but I find games rarely deliver the entertainment value for the cost. I've never purchased a game at the current $60 price point, so I'd expect more gamers to start passing on the triple-A releases, or DLC driven games.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft gives Linux "Big Boobs".

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For all those living under the false impression that large software companies "do software development properly, including code reviews", I submit exhibit "A". It appears that Microsoft's HyperV currently uses the guest ID "0xB16B00B5" for Linux, which may prove a little difficult to change if it has been baked into their management stack for Asure.

Comment Like this (Score 1) 2

by g051051 (#40387643) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How to introduce someone to Star Trek?

TOS: City on the Edge of Forever, Trouble With Tribbles
TNG: Measure of a Man, Parallels, any Q episode after the first one.
VOY: Can't recall the name, but the one where a race finds a backup copy of the Doctor and activates it, and he discovers that the race thought Voyager was a warship filled with psychopathic war criminals.
DS9, ENT: just say no.

Comment Why is this treated as a story? (Score 1, Insightful) 415

by g051051 (#40245661) Attached to: Microsoft Ignores Usability With All-Caps Menu in Visual Studio

As much as I loathe Microsoft and everything they do, it’s silly to post this as a news story. Who’s Mike James, a.k.a. “mikejuk”? What’s this other than his opinion? Does he have any design and usability chops to speak of, so we can treat this as anything other than trolling? I’m willing to believe that they actually conducted real usability studies and decided to try this because it worked better. Even the Ribbon, which I personally hate, was a hit with most users.

Is it generally considered appropriate for authors to submit their own “stories” to Slashdot?
Music

Submission + - "Open Source Bach" project completed; score and recording now online (opengoldbergvariations.org) 1

Submitted by
rDouglass
rDouglass writes: "MuseScore, the open source music notation editor, and pianist Kimiko Ishizaka have released a new recording and digital edition of Bach's Goldberg Variations. The works are released under the Creative Commons Zero license to promote the broadest possible free use of the works. The score underwent two rounds of public peer review, drawing on processes normally applied to open source software. Furthermore, the demands of Bach's notational style drove significant advancements in the MuseScore open source project. The recording was made on a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial piano in the Teldex Studio of Berlin. Anne-Marie Sylvestre, a Canadian record producer, was inspired by the project and volunteered her time to edit and produce the recording. The project was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign that was featured on Slashdot in March 2011."
Chrome

Submission + - Hackers Uses Six Separate Bugs to Break Chrome's Security Model (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Browsers are a really nice target for attackers of all stripes and skill levels. But, unless you're a savant or have just landed here from the future, you may want to take a pass on going after Google Chrome, judging by the insane level of effort and skill that an anonymous security researcher had to deploy in order to compromise Chrome during the company's Pwnium contest in March.

The researcher who received one of two $60,000 rewards handed out by Google for full sandbox escapes and compromises of Chrome during the contest used the alias Pinkie Pie. At the time that his accomplishment was announced during the CanSecWest conference in March, Google officials did not specify exactly how the researcher had been able to break Chrome's many layers of security, but just said that he had used multiple bugs to do it.

Now, Google security researchers have revealed the method and techniques that Pinkie Pie used, and if anything, the whole story is even more impressive than observers had thought at the time of the contest. Pinkie Pie used a total of six vulnerabilities in various components of Chrome, chaining them together in a long sequence that eventually enabled him to break out of the Chrome sandbox and completely compromise the browser.

Submission + - Tex Murphy - Project Fedora (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Kick starter continues to bring back well loved old game franchises the newest asking for a kick is Tex Murphy.

“Project Fedora” will continue the amazing adventures of Tex Murphy, the down-on-his-luck P.I. in post-apocalyptic San Francisco. This long-awaited game will be the sixth in the adventure series, which includes the award-winning games Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive and Overseer.

With some excellent reward tiers and a fast delivery date could this be another Kick starter success?
Games

Submission + - Battle Chess Kickstarter: Bringin' the Queen back (playerattack.com)

Submitted by dotarray
dotarray writes: Battle Chess. Even the name evokes a certain imagery, a certain feel, full of knights and bishops and pawns beating the living daylights out of each other. And if you played the original 1988 smash hit game for PC, you'll also have the mental image of two queens engaging in a slap-fight, mid-board.
If you didn't play the original game, you may be about to receive a second chance, with Subdued Software announcing plans to bring the game back — and how else, but via Kickstarter.
Media

Submission + - Geeknet Mulls Sales of Slashdot and SourceForge (thenextweb.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Geeknet this morning announced that its board of directors has started evaluating “strategic alternatives” for its online media businesses, which include popular ‘news for nerds’ site Slashdot, open-source software community site SourceForge and Freecode, an online index of Linux, Unix and cross-platform software.
Google

Submission + - Oracle v Google: verdict reached (groklaw.net)

Submitted by
walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: "Google won everything but the one issue that the judge has to decide anyway, the API SSO issue. The jury found, as they had been instructed to assume for the purposes of deliberation, that APIs can be copyrighted, the structure, sequence and arrangement of APIs, but that is by no means established. The same question, in a b) section, asked if fair use excused any infringement if found, and the jury couldn't resolve that issue. But the judge has to decide whether or not that is true, that APIs can be protected by copyright. That comes later this month. Meanwhile, Oracle prevailed only on 9 lines of code that Google admitted prior to trial to have included by mistake and then removed from current Android. Oracle's own expert, the judge pointed out in court, valued those 9 lines of code at zero. This is 9 lines out of millions. So that means, if we are looking at damages, that so far Oracle has won nothing. There is no liability. You can't have infringement without considering fair use, Google asserts, and there will be briefing on that. Somebody has to decide that fair use issue. And then the judge has to decide about the API copyrightability issue. If he rules that APIs can't be copyrighted, as the EU Court of Justice just ruled, then fair use is moot. And Oracle takes nothing at all from the copyright phase of this litigation, and this was heralded far and wide by Oracle people as the big ticket item, if you recall."

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