michaela - Slashdot User

Comment: Like they should worry (Score 1) 539

by michaela on Wednesday February 25, 2009 @06:56PM (#26989213) Attached to: Authors Guild President Wants To End Royalty-Free TTS On Kindle

The Author's Guild should just give it a rest.

Having just received my Kindle 2 and trying the TTS in it, nobody is seriously going to use TTS on the thing. Think robot voice with no cadence or inflection. I've worked phone menu trees with more personality.

+ - Project Blackbox the World domination tour.

Submitted by

D10MR

on Saturday March 03, 2007 @11:36AM

D10MR writes "It looks like Sun's Project Blackbox is alive and well and on tour across the US. I was able to get a guided tour of the container. Sun's rolling it around the country on the back of a flatbed trailer equiped with generator and chiller unit. There's only 2 1/2 racks worth of real running Sun gear in it, but it's pretty cool to see/hear/feel this thing running while it's riding piggyback on an we've-got-ourselves-a-convoy-18-wheeler, good-buddy. (Scary visions of Burt, Dom, Sally). They even stuck a couple of blade chassis and storage arrays in it.

Ok, so they had the usual marketing and sales droids, but they also had one of their project architects on hand to honestly answer real questions, everything from how do you move the container around, to how the Sunspots work...very cool. It looks like Sun eats their own sausage by using their hardware(sunspots) to realtime monitor their hardware(shake, vibration, temperature and gps position) Lots of stainless steel in the thing, too.

NOTE: If you take the tour, you get a neat Project Blackbox long-sleeve shirt molded into the shape of the truck/container OR you can get a toy trailer/container matching the tour unit. It was pretty cool and totally worth the time to listen and walk through the container. ciao — D10"

Total Lunar Eclipse This Weekend 133

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday March 03, 2007 @11:04AM
from the umbra-and-penumbra dept.

SeaDour writes "This Saturday night, March 3rd, a total lunar eclipse will be visible from nearly all inhabited parts of the world. A great shadow will stretch across the surface of the moon, eventually casting it in an eerie red glow as sunlight filters through our atmosphere onto the lunar surface. Viewers in Europe and Africa will have the best vantage point, able to watch the entire eclipse in action, while observers in most of the western hemisphere can see it eclipsed as it rises just after sunset."

Windows Vista Keygen a Hoax 154

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday March 03, 2007 @10:14AM
from the too-good-to-be-true dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The author of the Windows Vista keygen that was reported yesterday has admitted that the program does not actually work. Here is the initial announcement of the original release of the keygen, and here is the followup post in which the same author acknowledges that the program is fake. Apparently, the keygen program does legitimately attack Windows Vista keys via brute force, but the chances of success are too low for this to be a practical method. Quote from the author: 'Everyone who said they got a key is probably lying or mistaken!'"