bookmark_borderDon’t get (too) close, you could get hurt

How to start this entry?

Yeah, it seems I have rejection issues. I seem to not be able to handle rejection. But it seem I also crave closeness; the moment someone is nice to me, I assume that they are nice because they intend to be close. I believe they want to fully understand the actual me.

No, they don’t. They are just (superfluously) nice, that’s all.

Continue reading “Don’t get (too) close, you could get hurt”

bookmark_borderThe M-AILABS Speech Dataset

The following is the text that accompanied the M-AILABS Speech DataSet:


The M-AILABS Speech Dataset is the first large dataset that we are providing free-of-charge, freely usable as training data for speech recognition and speech synthesis.

Most of the data is based on LibriVox and Project Gutenberg. The training data consist of nearly thousand hours of audio and the text-files in prepared format.

A transcription is provided for each clip. Clips vary in length from 1 to 20 seconds and have a total length of approximately shown in the list (and in the respective info.txt-files) below.

Continue reading “The M-AILABS Speech Dataset”

bookmark_borderHas Apple Lost its Mojo?

Wow, what a disappointing presentation: Apple’s Media Event on Sept 10th was the biggest disappointment I had with regards to Apple.

I don’t mean to say that I expect Apple to innovate ahead of everybody else every year and introduce ground-breaking technologies year after year. That was not what I was expecting.

What disappointed me were two items:

Continue reading “Has Apple Lost its Mojo?”

bookmark_borderEnd of the Operating System License as a Business Model?

Today, I was reading an article about the history of Unix. When I came across this paragraph, I had an intense instinctive and natural reaction:

Sun was already a success (with imitators!) when, in 1983, the U.S. Department of Justice won its second antitrust case against AT&T and broke up the Bell System. This relieved AT&T from the 1958 consent decree that had prevented them from turning Unix into a product. AT&T promptly rushed to commercialize Unix System V—a move that nearly killed Unix.

My reaction was: “Whoa! How can they think anyone would want want to pay for an operating system (OS)?

Continue reading “End of the Operating System License as a Business Model?”