Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Submission + - How the inventors of Dragon speech recogniton technology lost everything. (nytimes.com) 5

cjsm writes: James and Janet Baker were the inventors of Dragon Systems speech recogintion 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 billions dollars.

Submission + - Thomas Drake innocent of all ten original charges (npr.org) 2

decora writes: "NPR, and dozens of other media sources, are reporting that NSA IT Whistleblower Thomas Andrews Drake is innocent of all 10 original charges against him; including the 5 Espionage Act charges for 'retention' of 'national defense information'. Drake stared down the government to the last minute, rejecting deal after deal, because he "refused to plea bargain with the truth". The judge had even recently ruled that there was no evidence that Drake passed classified information to a reporter. In the end, he has agreed that he committed a misdemeanor: "unauthorized access to a computer". It is unknown what this means for the other non-spy Espionage cases that Obama's DOJ currently has pending (Kim, Sterling, Manning), or the Grand Jury that is currently meeting to discuss Espionage Act charges related to Wikileaks. "

Comment Just get along with everyone. (Score 1) 842

Make sure you socialise across any groups that are in your workforce. Do not hid this fact from fractions that dont get along, both sides will still respect you so long as you do not gosip about them.

Never be caught agreeing to or patcipating in gosip, just a quit 'uhur'. Plausible deniability works wonders, espicaly across the above mentioned fractions. Baicly listen to, but keep your mouth shut. This bonds you to the speeker of said gosip in your favor.

Where ever posible share in socal activeis with coworkers, even if its just lunch. *Do* talk to other staff mebers about your life and thier own.

However at the end of the day, you will not get along with everyone, dont push your self on that one person who for what ever reason dosn't like you, they will either come around or not. You can not make them like you. But by behaving and acting at lest nice, you can earn a usable amount of respect.

In one job I worked 3 years next to a staff member who if they where on fire, I would of run to the nerest gas station and goten more fule for. This lady left on her fianly day not knowing that I hated her guts, and infact after she left and still visited it took over 9 months for me to let it slip that I hated her guts.

That was a minor mistake, and thankfully didnt come back to haunt me.

Comment Re:Not necessarily fake (Score 1) 511

Yellow is the closest to luma, and most data encoded into most video or images encode the luma most heavily, red and blue are shown in reduced resolution because chroma is less significant than luma. Most one-chip cameras also have two green color cells with a single blue and red color cell because green is closest of the three to encoding luma information. I can see future chips using yellow, red, green and blue to provide better information to the encoder.

Comment Re:cloud != "VM frontend" or "Hardware Abstraction (Score 1) 66

You keep saying it's not hardware abstraction, and then go on to say how cloud computing abstracts the hardware. Whatever, dude; you clearly get a kick out of lecturing people and talking down to them - I'm glad I don't actually have to work with you in real life.

Btw, are you talking about ScyId? I would get some amusement out of you consistently misspelling what you're name dropping, but it's also possible I just don't know what I'm looking for :)

Comment Re:Thanks (Score 1) 213

As a Oracle customer that runs Linux I can say that cost savings plays a lot into it given that I have a named user license for 10g allowing me to run many servers in a RAC providing real up-time. Because I don't have to pay for licenses on every server I get the benefit of high availability without the usual costs and for a relatively small business that means a lot! I can state that Oracle runs just as well on Windows as it does on Linux as I run both for mitigation purposes and because it's convenient to have a single log shipping server for both Oracle and SQL Server which I'm required to run for our general ledger application which accounting purchased without consulting me.

Slashdot Top Deals

Friction is a drag.

Working...