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Mandriva Appeals to Users for Bookend Audio Bits
Mandriva announced it is holding a contest for the best startup and logoff music for Mandriva 2007. The winner gets to have their sound as part of the new release. Technical lead Romain D'Alverny told Newsforge some of the philosophy behind the contest.
please move along...;)
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
C:\WINDOWS\Sounds\Startup.wav
http://stoploudness.org/
That said, I'm interested to see what they come up with.
(end of post)
... I just want to know if they're going to finally fix the cutting off of the shutdown sound. As either Gnome or KDE exits, it seems no effort was made to be sure the sound had finished playing before turning off the sound service. Somehow that was never an issue in Knoppix, which always managed to finish that longish "Initiating shutdown sequence" clip during KDE shutdown.
Such a minor thing, but so noticeable.
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
FTFA:
"There will be no cash or any other kind of prize for the winners, except for a hearty thanks from Mandriva..."
Why not at least offer a lifetime Gold club membership for the winner and a Tee shirt or something for the runners up. A "hearty thanks", for someone's creative work, even if it is only a couple of 5 second clips, seems almost insulting.
They sound like my first attempts at making sound with my Commodore 64 when I was 8.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Father Jack style!
Login: Arse! Drink! Girls! Feck!
Shutdown: Feck off!
My vote would be for excerpts from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_Overdriv e :)
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now if I could only get my damn sound card to work in linux.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
At LEAST 1k Euros worth... http://corp.mandriva.com/webteam/soundsubmit/rules /
Prize
The winner may choose one of the following two prizes:
A life membership of the Mandriva Club, Silver level;
A copy of Mandriva Linux PowerPack+ 2007, a GlobeTrotter 2.0, and an Archos Pocket Media Assistant PMA400.
The latest Slashdot meme.
I'm with you there. I don't know why a computer needs a shut-down sound; it always struck me as a stupid Windows thing, something they tossed in there to amuse people while they were watching the "Windows is shutting down" screen.
When I tell my computer to shut down, the only thing I want to hear is the fans going quiet, and I want to hear that as quickly as possible.
I'm a little more open to the idea of startup sound effects, but only if they serve some sort of purpose. The Mac always gave its startup chime as part of its self-test routine, as a confirmation that the hardware was good. So if you got the chime and then the system refused to boot, you knew it was a software issue and not hardware. Even if your video card was bad or blown, or you didn't have a monitor plugged in. (Which is incidentally handy if you're ever buying a used system at a trade show or something.) There are some HP workstations which will even play a diagnostic tone on startup if they've gone bad, which you can play into a telephone to a tech support rep, and they will decode to tell you what's FUBARed.
I might even be convinced that playing a sound once the OS's GUI is started and it's ready for user input is useful, since it's a good way to tell the user "okay, I'm here, ready to go!", but this necessitates making sure that playing the sound is the ABSOLUTE LAST thing that happens in the startup sequence. If that's the purpose of the sound, I don't want to walk over to the computer upon hearing it, and still have it churning away on some part of the boot sequence, or loading the GUI.
I think the Mandriva people, as well as anyone else involved in designing an OS, should sit down and think about what purpose exactly these sounds serve, and make sure they're doing their jobs, before they invest a lot of time -- either their own or somebody else's -- in making it pretty. If they're serving a legitimate function, by all means then make them pretty and polished. But I'd rather lose the excess noise if they're not functional.
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