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Getting engineers to innovate->

Submitted by lottameez
lottameez writes "Here's an interesting blog post for any engineer who feels underpaid (like there's any that don't feel that way). A University of Maryland professor suggests that many companies say they want to innovate, yet they pay the engineers "less than just about everyone else in the company". Dr. Jacob says:

I think the right answer is the following: if you want innovation, overpay your engineers. Give them a stable environment, the right tools, and plenty of cash ... and innovation will most assuredly come. Xerox PARC comes to mind, one of the last times anybody tried that recipe."
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Programming

Are C and C++ Losing Ground? 961

Posted by Soulskill
from the lots-of-ground-to-lose dept.
Pickens writes "Dr. Dobbs has an interesting interview with Paul Jansen, the managing director of TIOBE Software, about the Programming Community Index, which measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence. Since the TIOBE index has been published now for more than 6 years, it gives an interesting picture about trends in the usage of programming languages. Jansen says not much has affected the top ten programming languages in the last five years, with only Python entering the top 10 (replacing COBOL), but C and C++ are definitely losing ground. 'Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion,' says Jansen. 'The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.'"
Security

Eight Security Vulnerabilities You May Have Missed->

Submitted by
talkinsecurity
talkinsecurity writes "You hear about the big worms and viruses, but there are lots of less-publicized threats that may actually be more dangerous in the long run. Here's a look at eight of them, with some discussion of how they work and what can be done about them. http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=126 560&WT.svl=news1_1"
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The Internet

Social networking - what's it all about then?

Submitted by Atari Yo
Atari Yo writes "It's rather late in the day but silicon.com has written a social networking cheat sheet, in an attempt to get to grips with the many-headed hydra.

From the article:
"A slightly less high-tech example of mobile social networking, but one that's not hamstrung by expensive hardware restrictions, is Twitter: a site that enables users to publish SMS messages detailing their current status to the web and to mobiles of whoever has signed up to hear about it. It surely can't be long before 'twittering' enters the lexicon as a word meaning 'random, trivial text-based utterings'.""
Hardware Hacking

How to spy on monitors through walls

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Using radio to eavesdrop on CRTs has been around since the 80s, but Cambridge University researchers have shown laptops and flat-panel displays are vulnerable too. Using basic radio equipment and an FPGA board totalling less than $2,000 you it was possible to read text from a laptop three offices away. This is certainly cool, but is this a security issue we should worry about?"
Software

What's the best Speech Recognition today?

Submitted by StonyCreekBare
StonyCreekBare writes "A client wants to build a kiosk system intended to interact with the user entirely via speech. Speech Recognition is absolutely key to the success of the project, so an excellent speech recognition engine is absolutely key to success.

Key requirements are Speaker Independence, and a large vocabulary, with a great deal of flexibility for recognizing arbitrary speech. The system needs to interact with arbitrary speakers on a walk-up basis.

I have built a reasonable "Proof-of-concept" prototype using an L&H / Windows based system. I was quite pleased with the overall performance of the system, and believe an optimized system could do even better. My goal is not so much to improve the recognition performance (although there is room for improvement), as to improve the system reliability and to have more control at the system level.

There seems to be two candidates to supply the system. Microsoft and Nuance.

The Microsoft Speech SDK has the unfortunate circumstance of being innately wedded to Windows, and all the other viable systems (such as L&H, and Viavoice) seem to have been acquired by Nuance. Microsoft's system seems to require a lot of training to perform well, which is unacceptable. At least the L&H system is truly speaker independent. I would greatly prefer to use a Linux or BSD solution, if viable, so that requires a *nix compatible solution.

I have seen some other systems, mostly proprietary systems for telephony applications. e.g. Sprint, to name one. I hear about other systems such as Sphinx from Carnegie Mellon, and a system from Phillips, both of which I do not know much about and do not know anyone actually using.

What are Slashdot users experiences with the various systems available? Have I overlooked any good candidates? What is the "bleeding edge" in reliable speech recognition? Am I going to be forced to use Windows?

-Stony"

It is very difficult to prophesy, especially when it pertains to the future.