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Have you checked out grip? It's a Gtk-based frontend for cdparanoia and lame (some other rippers / encoders supported, too) and it is absolutely awesome. Automatic CDDB-query (even gives you the option to submit a successful cddb-lookup to freecddb, if it didn't have it), support for multiprocessor systems, you name it. http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~oliphant/grip/

Actually, the Altair had audio built-in.
(Scroll down a bit)

Here's how I did it:

1. Grab a copy of the FreeType font server here (for linux/x86 w/glibc2), h ere (for solaris/SPARC) or here (patch to XFree sources -- not for the faint of heart).
2. Put the xfsft executable somewhere in your $PATH.
3. Get a directory full of TT fonts. I have a directory on my Linux partition full of symlinks to /dosc/windows/fonts/*.ttf, for example. /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/tt is not a bad place.
4. Run the ttinst script in that directory; this will create a fonts.scale file.
5. ln -s fonts.scale fonts.dir
6. echo "catalogue=/usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/tt" > /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/tt/xfsft.conf
7. Add the following to your .xinitrc:

   xfsft -port 7100 -config /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/tt/xfsft.conf
   sleep 1 # Give xfsft a chance to start up
   xset +fp tcp/127.0.0.1:7100
   xset fp rehash
   

Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty

If you want to eliminate the "jaggies", and be able to get your hands on a LARGE selection of fonts, a great idea is to get TTFonts going.
X (along with the Gimp) will handle TrueType fonts if you have a font server installed. RH6.0 has the TTF capability compiled into X already,
but I don't know offhand of any other distros including it currently. A free font server out there that I know works under rh5.1-5.3,
as well as other distros, is xfsft. The road to making this work was rather long and somewhat torturous (for me), so poking
around for other references on the net might help. Anyway here's the link to xfsft

Any questions just email me, i'd be glad to help:
eckhareg@clarkson.edu

-EE

Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre had a group several years ago working on this problem using big iron hardware - they have now downsized their software from MPP's to workstations and PC's, and it's being flogged by a commercial company called Quadstone Last time I saw a demo of Paramics (c. 1996) it was doing the whole of central and suburban Edinburgh (inside the A720) in close to realtime on a then state of the art SGI workstation, and they had just put in modelling for different nationalities' driver tempraments.

I know the display postscript extensions to X failed to catch on because of being Adobe ip, but surely it could be run under whatever arrangement ghostscript is run?

This link has a bit of info on why dps is needed.

-- Reverend Vryl

The basic idea was that the pages are indexed locally at the server, and indexed data are gatherad and can be queried at "brokers".

You seem remarkably bitter about the whole affair. There is some genuinely useful and interesting research coming out of Edinburgh (and out of AI departments elsewhere). AI projects can have real-world applications which affect 'grown-up' subjects such as computer science (see the work done in Edinburgh on programs such as CYNTHIA, for example).

How much do you actually know about the machine humour research, by the way? Have you read the relevant theses (info available at this page)? FWIW, 99% of the jokes the research was based on were crap, too. :)

As for your claim that "Artificial intelligence lacks a proper definition", I am slightly confused by this. There are any number of good definitions of Artificial Intelligence. They may not all agree on the exact boundaries of the discipline, but nor do definitions of many accepted fields. A definition of AI as taught at Edinburgh can be found here. Minsky provides an often-quoted definition which takes a more practical approach: "the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men". Any good AI text book (and many bad ones) spend a chapter or so looking at definitions of the field.

For what it's worth, if every field 'without foundation' were ignored, the grown-up subjects of which you are so proud wouldn't exist. What's wrong with working in a young field? That's where all the discoveries are still waiting to be made...

I feel as qualified to comment as you, given that I went through the best respected MSc course involving AI in Europe (actually there are many other courses, particularly at the undergraduate level that cover AI). Evidently I got more out of my time at the department than you did.

You seem remarkably bitter about the whole affair. There is some genuinely useful and interesting research coming out of Edinburgh (and out of AI departments elsewhere). AI projects can have real-world applications which affect 'grown-up' subjects such as computer science (see the work done in Edinburgh on programs such as CYNTHIA, for example).

How much do you actually know about the machine humour research, by the way? Have you read the relevant theses (info available at this page)? FWIW, 99% of the jokes the research was based on were crap, too. :)

As for your claim that "Artificial intelligence lacks a proper definition", I am slightly confused by this. There are any number of good definitions of Artificial Intelligence. They may not all agree on the exact boundaries of the discipline, but nor do definitions of many accepted fields. A definition of AI as taught at Edinburgh can be found here. Minsky provides an often-quoted definition which takes a more practical approach: "the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men". Any good AI text book (and many bad ones) spend a chapter or so looking at definitions of the field.

For what it's worth, if every field 'without foundation' were ignored, the grown-up subjects of which you are so proud wouldn't exist. What's wrong with working in a young field? That's where all the discoveries are still waiting to be made...

I feel as qualified to comment as you, given that I went through the best respected MSc course involving AI in Europe (actually there are many other courses, particularly at the undergraduate level that cover AI). Evidently I got more out of my time at the department than you did.

I used to agree with the guy who wrote the article. I didn't really see the point of MP3s. I downloaded a few songs off the net (some legit, some not) and generally ended up deleting them.

Then I realized that on a 10 gig drive (which is pretty affordable these days) I could store over *200* albums. That blew me away! Then I realized that I could burn the whole lot onto a DVD. That *really* blew me away. Imagine taking your entire music collection over to a friends house in a single jewel case.

Now I'm an MP3 convert. I've written software to allow me to convert my CD collection into MP3 format ( Grip, a ripping/encoding tool and DigitalDJ, an SQL-based playback tool). I'm in heaven! I've got 64 albums online at work so far (taking up about 3300 megs of space).

--

I used to agree with the guy who wrote the article. I didn't really see the point of MP3s. I downloaded a few songs off the net (some legit, some not) and generally ended up deleting them.

Then I realized that on a 10 gig drive (which is pretty affordable these days) I could store over *200* albums. That blew me away! Then I realized that I could burn the whole lot onto a DVD. That *really* blew me away. Imagine taking your entire music collection over to a friends house in a single jewel case.

Now I'm an MP3 convert. I've written software to allow me to convert my CD collection into MP3 format ( Grip, a ripping/encoding tool and DigitalDJ, an SQL-based playback tool). I'm in heaven! I've got 64 albums online at work so far (taking up about 3300 megs of space).

--

--

Hell, if you'r going to go to PC104, might as well go wearable. Little box strapped to you, with an optional lcd panel, a twiddler input device, festival speech synthesis, and a ricochet wireless modem. Just imagine, walking down the street, "You have one new message from ...". Or hearing all of the /. news while walking around town. Now thats the life

emacspeak is rather well-regarded (and particularly handy for people that already use the One True Editor...). It's more targeted towards people that can't see, although I'm sure it would be useful for people that can't speak as well. There's another stand-alone project, festival, if you don't dig that M-x stuff (what, you don't have pedals on your terminal?).

It works well under Linux. It works best (obviously) with faster processors, but a Pentium 90 or higher should be sufficient for most uses.

A simple shell or perl script could be devised to speak sentences as they were typed.

Doc Technical

I am impressed with Festival. RedHat RPMs and Debian packages are available.

It comes with several British voice. Several American, a Mexican Spanish and a German voice are available from Oregon Graduate Institue.

Call me a nerd but I like to hear the original voices quotes my favorite lines from Monty Python.

-tim

You might want to start with the comp.speech FAQ:

http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/comp.speech/

In particular, take a look at:

http://www.speech.cs.cm u.edu/comp.speech/Section5/Q5.5.html


Two speech synthesis programs I have played with are:

rsynth: ftp://svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk/ pub/comp.speech/synthesis/

Festival: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/f estival.html

The one thing I CAN'T do is ROLL IT UP, but I suppose that might be too much to ask of a technology that is basically trying to imitate print.

If we really want to create a new paradigm, how about talking books? What I really mean is highly intelligible text-to-speech. No need to conform to the flat page, and it would be eyes-free. That's what I'd spend my commute time with - listening to a carefully-selected subset of the news: "all /.", or "all Kosovo", etc.

Re: text-to-speech systems, Festival is getting good, but I still found it required too much concentration to listen to for a long time. Someday, though...

While I'm all for a new format, development seems to have stalled. Meanwhile, the best thing to do is support the free CDDB servers. If a new format comes along, the free CDDB data can be transferred over.

As an application author, I declined to sign Escient's license agreement. My cd-player apps ( Grip and GCD) now come configured to use freecddb.org for lookup/submission. Does anybody know if there are any other free CDDB servers?

I believe Xilinx has pretty much wrapped up development on the XC6200's... A pity as it was a nice architecture to play with. You can still get XC6200 boards from Virtual Computer Corp. There are even linux tools and drivers for working with VCC style 6200 boards (check it out here).