This isn't nanotech. While it may be a nifty advance in materials technology, it's still produced "in the large" by relatively conventional methods. Calling this sort of thing nanotechnology is like calling someone a computer scientist because they know how to send e-mail, or perhaps calling an abacus a "high speed digital computer".
Yes, it is technology, and yes, it involves very small things, but the technology isn't at the nanoscale, even if in some sense the product is.
A claim is moot if you could make a plausible case for either side. I think the term you are looking for is "irrelevant."
Other than that, I agree with all you said.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. AFAIK, the confusion about moot started from the practice of holding "moot courts" where sudents would act out historical cases of interest (w. students as judge, concerned parties, etc.) to hone their skills. What made the cases interesting was that they were moot; but since the mock-retrials didn't matter, people started mistaking the meaning.
Here's a trick I've seen in the real world that gets the results you want in short order:
Tell them teamwork is required (this cuts communication down right off the bat).
Implement some form of zero-sum grading; e.g., you are going to award N points for each problem / assignment, distributed among the correct solvers as you see fit. Make sure they understand the system.
If you suspect cheating, give half the points to the cheater (the one who you think copied, not the source) and divide the reduced remander among the rest of the students.
Act like you don't notice when the cheaters fail to show up for the next few classes, or limp, etc.
It works best if their livelyhood is on the line, but the effect should be sufficent even with grades.
The problem with blocking calls from strange numbers is that the times you really need the call to get through are often also the times you are calling from a strange number (e.g. a kind stranger's cell phone, since yours is somewhere under the rubble).
Not only that, but they use "nanotechnology" in the buzzword-sense:
The research team...is focusing on applying ST's expertise in nanotechnology to the development of new solar cell technologies that will eventually be able to...
...which sets off my bogon detectors, in the same way that calling a glass windows "semiconductors" (because they contains silicon) would. Just because it's small doesn't mean it's nanotechnology.
The size of a MAJOR METROPOLIS? Good grief, unless they paint it moon-rock color, we'd see it. It's not like the moon has an atmosphere or anything to obscure things - it's not at all like looking at Earth from the moon.
Uh, unless you live at the top of a really tall mountain there is just as much air between you and the surface of the moon as there would be between someone standing on the surface of the moon and you. In fact, it's the same air.
As for "moon rock colour" we really only detect the brightness of the moon, not the colour.
...imagine if MS went away tomorrow, where would you be?
I'd be in more trouble if the sun suddenly exploded tomorrow, which is about as likely.
Wow. I hope your job doesn't depend on your ability to judge odds. Major US corporations go away on a regular basis (at least one a decade); their life expectancy is well under 10^2 years. G class stars explode--almost never. But even if we charitably count all failure modes as "explosions" they still last on the order of 10^10 years, a ratio of a hundred million to one.
Thus, you are saying that a 1% chance is "about as likely" as 1 chance in 100,000,000, which is...well, wrong.
I expect all the top SCO execs to leave for one reason or another before the lawsuit reaches the courtroom and fall-guys hired to take their places.
Scott (you know who you are):
Elsewhere, you have posted that your job at SCO didn't really involve you in the unix IP scandal (my words, not yours). You might consider the possibility that there is a note taped to you back that says "fall guy #3" or something of the sort; you might be "concerned" even if you aren't presently "involved."
You may of course be right that SCO is a great place and they just brought you guys in out of love & kindness.
the RIAA has only had 838 takers for their file swapping amnesty offer
I'd like to see the break down by name though. For instance, it would be interesting to see what percentage of them were named "D. McBride", "G. W. Bush", "B. Gates", "A. Coward", etc.
If the reality is as the letter says it is -- and I'm not in California so I haven't cared enough to look -- then it seems to me that MS's concerns are completely reasonable.
This is "informative"? In what sense?
The letter from MS is BS; as others here have noted, it mostly objects to procedural aspects of the claims process (e.g. digital signatures), mostly on hypocritical grounds (think MS's click-though EULA's) and throws in a few "think of the children!" sops (e.g., stating that even if the digitally signed claims were excepted, the real consequence would be that the schools wouldn't get to purchace MS products at 150% of retail with the unclaimed funds).
Even if you credit these objections, it would only be fraudulent if the Lindows people (after failing to get the settlement funds) tried to charge the people who had used the site.
There's nothing wrong with me (for example) offering to pay out lottery winners or cash checks, etc. and then just burning the check or ticket. As long as Lindows.com acctually accepts the filling out of their form in leu of payment, there's no fraud involved.
Proportion that speak some form of technical english: ~1/10
Proportion of those who speak computer english: ~1/10
Proportion of those who program: ~1/10
Proportion of those who could write a device driver: ~1/10
Proportion of those who actual do write device drivers: ~1/10
Proportion of those who are doing so for *nix: ~1/3
Proportion of those who are doing so for FreeBSD: ~1/10
Proportion of those who use mkdev: ~1/2
So even assuming 5% of them read/. to keep up an library changes, less than one person will care. Presumably, that was the poster.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. So what, you may ask, am I doing here? Easy. Some people are croud followers, and rush to the scene of a big fire or train wreck (or, if none are handy, a mall).
The Big Evil companies also do things like...help underwrite the cost of touring
Ha! Touring is one of the few things a band can do to make money (for themselves, not their lable) these days, and several of the Big Name / Big Evil companies have been trying to cut into that revenue stream as well, effectively charging bands to tour.
Thanks! My son (almost 2yrs old) was very impressed; he kept saying "Water!" and pressing play. I was (of course) wishing I had the knobs to play with (I was imagining a larger value for f1, and your comment about cubic noise at the bottom of the page makes me think I may have muffed the "pop" term,...). I suspect sound programming like this is a lot like graphics programming: do all the math you want up front, but at some point you have to use your eyes (or ears) to find where you goofed.
Maybe we should all start to think about jumping ship?
Why don't you run what you like and I'll run what I like and the other people can run what they like. That will give us a lot more time to concentrate on important things like calling each other up & asking "so, what are you going to wear to the party?"
Remember bang paths!? I have flip'n nightmares about them to this very day--or rather, the ten-plus years of dealing with every possible way of interpreting RFC-822 (IIRC) et al, when trying to route mail from a fido-net homed Bouroughs (SP?), with one weird character set to uucp'd boxes that spoke petscii (SP?) or some such and mysterious 300 baud black holes that wanted baudot. There was a sign on the wall that said "the wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose from" until someone ripped it into tiny little bits and scattered it festively down the hall.
But, for all of that, I don't think my boxes routed a more than a single bit of spam that whole time. Back then, people seldom used e-mail to talk about penis size or herbal suplements, and when they did it wasn't with strangers.
*laugh* That's great! Now I know how I'm going to waste my weekend. I'm not all that interested in sounds per se (I just got going in response to the orginal question) but I've got a weakness for oddball languages. I followed the link and by the time I got to:
...familiar analog modeling opcodes such as adsr, lfo, vco, and even a moogvcf...
I was hooked. I have no idea what those "familiar opcodes" do, but I expect to by Monday.
If replication is so easy, why hasn't a replicator been built at the macro scale?
This is one of the key questions. So far as I can tell the key problem is that, unless you specify your feed-stock / parts-supply you haven't really defined the problem.
For example, it would be relatively easy to build a replicator to function in an envirionment that consisted of a 50/50 mixture of tested-snap-together-replicator-tops and tested-snap-together-replicator-bottoms (batteries included). But there's no point to doing this. (A fact which hasn't stopped people from doing it.)
On the other extreme, so far as we know it would be impossible to build a replicator that used nothing but vacuum for parts.
So what makes a useful feed stock? Modular parts that are 1) well standardized, 2) easy to manipulate, 3) hard to damage, 4) cheaply and readily availible to the replicator, to start with. Further, at least some of the parts need to be able to able to store and convert energy, and some of them need to be able to store and process information. All of the replicators we know of build themselves from parts that meet these criteria, which occur naturally in their environment. (For example: fax-humour-pages replicate by using paper, ink, people, and fax machines--all of which are more or less standardized, easy to manipulate, hard to damage (from the perspective of a fax-joke), and cheaply & readily available. I'll leave it up to you to decide where the energy and information processing comes from.)
But the "why hasn't a replicator been built at the macro scale" question is really asking "why hasn't a replicator that uses primative raw materials been built at the macro scale" and the answer is that primative raw materials at the macro scale don't meet the critera for good feed stock. Atoms do (which is why we should expect nanotechnology), provided that the replicator is small enough that atoms are easy for it to manipulate.
Thus we should not expect to see any macro scale replicators using primative parts, and we don't. Ellephants, for example, rely of feed-stock produced by other organisms. Note that they are not even big replicators; they are big vehicles built by (and serving the interests of) nano-scale replicators.
Thanks for pointing this out.
Suprisingly (to me at least), it turns out that
it depends on the instrument. For piano, you are correct; for bells (which were the source of my "IIRC" memory) it is as I'd recalled. My brain is telling me there is a good reason for this, something involving resonance modes and harmony, and offering to explain it to me in exchange for coffee...
Re. your sig:
"We GAVE peace a chance. Boycott the ANTI-war machine."
Like heck we did. We claimed that the UN inspectors weren't finding weapons of mass destruction that we knew for a fact to exist, and basically short-circuted the lawful process for resolving these sorts of problems, including implying (and sometimes outright stating) that everyone else was lying, incompetent, or both.
Now that it turns out that we (or I should say, the Bush administration) was lying and/or incompetent, we go hat in hand asking the world to help pay to clean up the mess. The majority of the hijackers were Saudi Arabian; North Korea has nuclear weapons and may have delivery systems that could reach the western US. And instead of dealing with the real issues we are bogged down in a land war in asia, facing a $87,000,000,000.00 bill to rebuild a country that was never a credible threat. What sort of American wouldn't be against that sort of lunacy?
I am an American, and a republican, and I'm mad as all-get-out about what Bush has done. In the long run he may well turn out to have done more damage to our country than any president in recent history, and more damage to our party than any president (including Nixon).
-- MarkusQ
Re:Much less than half joking...
on
Free Sound Samples?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I had no idea there was actually a formula you could use to generate a 'waterfall'... wow.
Well, if you think about it, the waterfall you see in a game is generated by a formula (or, if you rather, by a whole nested series of formulas)...so why shouldn't the one you hear be created the same way?
any other fun ones?
I suspect that there are a whole bunch of easy sirens, whoops, and machine/robot sounds. After a point (and maybe right from the start) the thing to do is try all sorts of combinations and find sounds you like. That's what physical folly artists do, making use of what they have. We (programmers) just have a different starting kit.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. As for other specific ideas, I suspect sin(t*t/f1)*(1+sin(t*t/f2)) would be a good starting point for a "damn it Spock, you're going to blow up your tricorder again!" sound.
Re:Much less than half joking...
on
Free Sound Samples?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Sounds like you could start a webpage on this!
*Laugh* In all my free time...
On a side note is there a good free (as in beer, and preferably as in freedom) sound editor out there for Windows that could let me do this?
I don't know...as the old saying goes "I don't do windows."
But more to the point, what you'd really want for doing this is a programming language. You could generate the values with a simple loop and then either pump them out to the speakers (/dev/something under *nix, not sure under mswin*), which would give you instant gratification, or write them to a file & play them back (which would be easier).
-- MarkusQ
P.S. It wouldn't have to be a WAV file, that's just the first hit I got from google.
Much less than half joking...
on
Free Sound Samples?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
(Responding to myself)
In case you need some ideas to get you started:
Simple musical notes -- m(f) = sin(t/f) where f is the frequency. IIRC, 440hz = A natural below middle C, and you multiply by 2^(1/12) for every half-note higher.
More realistic notes -- M(f) = (m(f) + c1*m(f*3/2) + c2*m(f*4/3) + c3*m(f*4/2)... )*k1/(k1+t*k2), where the c's provide harmonics and the k's give a fade out.
I'm sure a little googling will give even better formulas...
White noise -- w = random
Equipment -- w*c1*sin(t/f1) + w*c2*sin(t/f2)..., where the c's & f's are used to modulate the white noise (because machines typically cycle)
Rain -- w*w*w
A waterfall -- c1*w + c2*w*w + c3*w*sin(t/f1+k*rand)..., where you have 1) a steady roar, 2) some random splashes, 3) random, quasi-periodic fluctuation in flow, etc.
Heck,this could be more fun than writing the game!
Why not generate them? A sound, after all, is just an amplitude as a function of time. True, you won't get much that sounds like complex real-life objects (say, a cat or a corporate executive) but you should be able to come up with things that sound like simple natural (e.g. a waterfall) or artificial (e.g. a door bell) objects without too much difficulty. More importantly, you should also be able to come up with a wide range of weird, other-worldly sounds that might be useful.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. As an added bonus, you may be able to come up with sound families that give you a wide range of effects with almost no storage required.
Slashdot Mirror
Nano-tech saves the day again!
This isn't nanotech. While it may be a nifty advance in materials technology, it's still produced "in the large" by relatively conventional methods. Calling this sort of thing nanotechnology is like calling someone a computer scientist because they know how to send e-mail, or perhaps calling an abacus a "high speed digital computer".
Yes, it is technology, and yes, it involves very small things, but the technology isn't at the nanoscale, even if in some sense the product is.
-- MarkusQ
making SCO's claims legally moot
A claim is moot if you could make a plausible case for either side. I think the term you are looking for is "irrelevant."
Other than that, I agree with all you said.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. AFAIK, the confusion about moot started from the practice of holding "moot courts" where sudents would act out historical cases of interest (w. students as judge, concerned parties, etc.) to hone their skills. What made the cases interesting was that they were moot; but since the mock-retrials didn't matter, people started mistaking the meaning.
Here's a trick I've seen in the real world that gets the results you want in short order:
- Tell them teamwork is required (this cuts communication down right off the bat).
- Implement some form of zero-sum grading; e.g., you are going to award N points for each problem / assignment, distributed among the correct solvers as you see fit. Make sure they understand the system.
- If you suspect cheating, give half the points to the cheater (the one who you think copied, not the source) and divide the reduced remander among the rest of the students.
- Act like you don't notice when the cheaters fail to show up for the next few classes, or limp, etc.
It works best if their livelyhood is on the line, but the effect should be sufficent even with grades.-- MarkusQ
The problem with blocking calls from strange numbers is that the times you really need the call to get through are often also the times you are calling from a strange number (e.g. a kind stranger's cell phone, since yours is somewhere under the rubble).
-- MarkusQ
Not only that, but they use "nanotechnology" in the buzzword-sense:
-- MarkusQ
The size of a MAJOR METROPOLIS? Good grief, unless they paint it moon-rock color, we'd see it. It's not like the moon has an atmosphere or anything to obscure things - it's not at all like looking at Earth from the moon.
Uh, unless you live at the top of a really tall mountain there is just as much air between you and the surface of the moon as there would be between someone standing on the surface of the moon and you. In fact, it's the same air.
As for "moon rock colour" we really only detect the brightness of the moon, not the colour.
-- MarkusQ
I'd be in more trouble if the sun suddenly exploded tomorrow, which is about as likely.
Wow. I hope your job doesn't depend on your ability to judge odds. Major US corporations go away on a regular basis (at least one a decade); their life expectancy is well under 10^2 years. G class stars explode--almost never. But even if we charitably count all failure modes as "explosions" they still last on the order of 10^10 years, a ratio of a hundred million to one.
Thus, you are saying that a 1% chance is "about as likely" as 1 chance in 100,000,000, which is...well, wrong.
-- MarkusQ
VC - you need to find a Venture Capitalist
Nooooooo!!!!!
A pact with the devil is a better long-term plan than bringing on venture capitalists.
-- MarkusQ
I expect all the top SCO execs to leave for one reason or another before the lawsuit reaches the courtroom and fall-guys hired to take their places.
Scott (you know who you are):
Elsewhere, you have posted that your job at SCO didn't really involve you in the unix IP scandal (my words, not yours). You might consider the possibility that there is a note taped to you back that says "fall guy #3" or something of the sort; you might be "concerned" even if you aren't presently "involved."
You may of course be right that SCO is a great place and they just brought you guys in out of love & kindness.
But I still don't buy it.
-- MarkusQ
the RIAA has only had 838 takers for their file swapping amnesty offer
I'd like to see the break down by name though. For instance, it would be interesting to see what percentage of them were named "D. McBride", "G. W. Bush", "B. Gates", "A. Coward", etc.
-- MarkusQ
I think that one in a thousand is actually a pretty high rate.
Yes, but what they got was less than one percent of that.
In the metric system at least, 1% of "pretty high" is roughly equal to "quite low".
-- MarkusQ
If the reality is as the letter says it is -- and I'm not in California so I haven't cared enough to look -- then it seems to me that MS's concerns are completely reasonable.
This is "informative"? In what sense?
The letter from MS is BS; as others here have noted, it mostly objects to procedural aspects of the claims process (e.g. digital signatures), mostly on hypocritical grounds (think MS's click-though EULA's) and throws in a few "think of the children!" sops (e.g., stating that even if the digitally signed claims were excepted, the real consequence would be that the schools wouldn't get to purchace MS products at 150% of retail with the unclaimed funds).
Even if you credit these objections, it would only be fraudulent if the Lindows people (after failing to get the settlement funds) tried to charge the people who had used the site. There's nothing wrong with me (for example) offering to pay out lottery winners or cash checks, etc. and then just burning the check or ticket. As long as Lindows.com acctually accepts the filling out of their form in leu of payment, there's no fraud involved.
-- MarkusQ
- World population: ~10^9
- Proportion that speak english: ~1/10
- Proportion that speak some form of technical english: ~1/10
- Proportion of those who speak computer english: ~1/10
- Proportion of those who program: ~1/10
- Proportion of those who could write a device driver: ~1/10
- Proportion of those who actual do write device drivers: ~1/10
- Proportion of those who are doing so for *nix: ~1/3
- Proportion of those who are doing so for FreeBSD: ~1/10
- Proportion of those who use mkdev: ~1/2
So even assuming 5% of them read-- MarkusQ
P.S. So what, you may ask, am I doing here? Easy. Some people are croud followers, and rush to the scene of a big fire or train wreck (or, if none are handy, a mall).
I'm not like that.
The Big Evil companies also do things like...help underwrite the cost of touring
Ha! Touring is one of the few things a band can do to make money (for themselves, not their lable) these days, and several of the Big Name / Big Evil companies have been trying to cut into that revenue stream as well, effectively charging bands to tour.
-- MarkusQ
Thanks! My son (almost 2yrs old) was very impressed; he kept saying "Water!" and pressing play. I was (of course) wishing I had the knobs to play with (I was imagining a larger value for f1, and your comment about cubic noise at the bottom of the page makes me think I may have muffed the "pop" term,...). I suspect sound programming like this is a lot like graphics programming: do all the math you want up front, but at some point you have to use your eyes (or ears) to find where you goofed.
Thanks again for posting it.
-- MarkusQ
Maybe we should all start to think about jumping ship?
Why don't you run what you like and I'll run what I like and the other people can run what they like. That will give us a lot more time to concentrate on important things like calling each other up & asking "so, what are you going to wear to the party?"
-- MarkusQ
Remember bang paths!? I have flip'n nightmares about them to this very day--or rather, the ten-plus years of dealing with every possible way of interpreting RFC-822 (IIRC) et al, when trying to route mail from a fido-net homed Bouroughs (SP?), with one weird character set to uucp'd boxes that spoke petscii (SP?) or some such and mysterious 300 baud black holes that wanted baudot. There was a sign on the wall that said "the wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose from" until someone ripped it into tiny little bits and scattered it festively down the hall.
But, for all of that, I don't think my boxes routed a more than a single bit of spam that whole time. Back then, people seldom used e-mail to talk about penis size or herbal suplements, and when they did it wasn't with strangers.
-- MarkusQ
*laugh* That's great! Now I know how I'm going to waste my weekend. I'm not all that interested in sounds per se (I just got going in response to the orginal question) but I've got a weakness for oddball languages. I followed the link and by the time I got to: I was hooked. I have no idea what those "familiar opcodes" do, but I expect to by Monday.
Thanks!
-- MarkusQ
If replication is so easy, why hasn't a replicator been built at the macro scale?
This is one of the key questions. So far as I can tell the key problem is that, unless you specify your feed-stock / parts-supply you haven't really defined the problem.
For example, it would be relatively easy to build a replicator to function in an envirionment that consisted of a 50/50 mixture of tested-snap-together-replicator-tops and tested-snap-together-replicator-bottoms (batteries included). But there's no point to doing this. (A fact which hasn't stopped people from doing it.)
On the other extreme, so far as we know it would be impossible to build a replicator that used nothing but vacuum for parts.
So what makes a useful feed stock? Modular parts that are 1) well standardized, 2) easy to manipulate, 3) hard to damage, 4) cheaply and readily availible to the replicator, to start with. Further, at least some of the parts need to be able to able to store and convert energy, and some of them need to be able to store and process information. All of the replicators we know of build themselves from parts that meet these criteria, which occur naturally in their environment. (For example: fax-humour-pages replicate by using paper, ink, people, and fax machines--all of which are more or less standardized, easy to manipulate, hard to damage (from the perspective of a fax-joke), and cheaply & readily available. I'll leave it up to you to decide where the energy and information processing comes from.)
But the "why hasn't a replicator been built at the macro scale" question is really asking "why hasn't a replicator that uses primative raw materials been built at the macro scale" and the answer is that primative raw materials at the macro scale don't meet the critera for good feed stock. Atoms do (which is why we should expect nanotechnology), provided that the replicator is small enough that atoms are easy for it to manipulate.
Thus we should not expect to see any macro scale replicators using primative parts, and we don't. Ellephants, for example, rely of feed-stock produced by other organisms. Note that they are not even big replicators; they are big vehicles built by (and serving the interests of) nano-scale replicators.
-- MarkusQ
Thanks for pointing this out. Suprisingly (to me at least), it turns out that it depends on the instrument. For piano, you are correct; for bells (which were the source of my "IIRC" memory) it is as I'd recalled. My brain is telling me there is a good reason for this, something involving resonance modes and harmony, and offering to explain it to me in exchange for coffee...
-- MarkusQ
Re. your sig: "We GAVE peace a chance. Boycott the ANTI-war machine."
Like heck we did. We claimed that the UN inspectors weren't finding weapons of mass destruction that we knew for a fact to exist, and basically short-circuted the lawful process for resolving these sorts of problems, including implying (and sometimes outright stating) that everyone else was lying, incompetent, or both.
Now that it turns out that we (or I should say, the Bush administration) was lying and/or incompetent, we go hat in hand asking the world to help pay to clean up the mess. The majority of the hijackers were Saudi Arabian; North Korea has nuclear weapons and may have delivery systems that could reach the western US. And instead of dealing with the real issues we are bogged down in a land war in asia, facing a $87,000,000,000.00 bill to rebuild a country that was never a credible threat. What sort of American wouldn't be against that sort of lunacy?
I am an American, and a republican, and I'm mad as all-get-out about what Bush has done. In the long run he may well turn out to have done more damage to our country than any president in recent history, and more damage to our party than any president (including Nixon).
-- MarkusQ
I had no idea there was actually a formula you could use to generate a 'waterfall'
Well, if you think about it, the waterfall you see in a game is generated by a formula (or, if you rather, by a whole nested series of formulas)...so why shouldn't the one you hear be created the same way?
any other fun ones?
I suspect that there are a whole bunch of easy sirens, whoops, and machine/robot sounds. After a point (and maybe right from the start) the thing to do is try all sorts of combinations and find sounds you like. That's what physical folly artists do, making use of what they have. We (programmers) just have a different starting kit.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. As for other specific ideas, I suspect sin(t*t/f1)*(1+sin(t*t/f2)) would be a good starting point for a "damn it Spock, you're going to blow up your tricorder again!" sound.
Sounds like you could start a webpage on this!
*Laugh* In all my free time...
On a side note is there a good free (as in beer, and preferably as in freedom) sound editor out there for Windows that could let me do this?
I don't know...as the old saying goes "I don't do windows."
But more to the point, what you'd really want for doing this is a programming language. You could generate the values with a simple loop and then either pump them out to the speakers (/dev/something under *nix, not sure under mswin*), which would give you instant gratification, or write them to a file & play them back (which would be easier).
-- MarkusQ
P.S. It wouldn't have to be a WAV file, that's just the first hit I got from google.
(Responding to myself)
In case you need some ideas to get you started:
- Simple musical notes -- m(f) = sin(t/f) where f is the frequency. IIRC, 440hz = A natural below middle C, and you multiply by 2^(1/12) for every half-note higher.
- More realistic notes -- M(f) = (m(f) + c1*m(f*3/2) + c2*m(f*4/3) + c3*m(f*4/2)
... )*k1/(k1+t*k2), where the c's provide harmonics and the k's give a fade out.
- I'm sure a little googling will give even better formulas...
- White noise -- w = random
- Equipment -- w*c1*sin(t/f1) + w*c2*sin(t/f2)
..., where the c's & f's are used to modulate the white noise (because machines typically cycle)
- Rain -- w*w*w
- A waterfall -- c1*w + c2*w*w + c3*w*sin(t/f1+k*rand)
..., where you have 1) a steady roar, 2) some random splashes, 3) random, quasi-periodic fluctuation in flow, etc.
Heck,this could be more fun than writing the game!-- MarkusQ
Why not generate them? A sound, after all, is just an amplitude as a function of time. True, you won't get much that sounds like complex real-life objects (say, a cat or a corporate executive) but you should be able to come up with things that sound like simple natural (e.g. a waterfall) or artificial (e.g. a door bell) objects without too much difficulty. More importantly, you should also be able to come up with a wide range of weird, other-worldly sounds that might be useful.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. As an added bonus, you may be able to come up with sound families that give you a wide range of effects with almost no storage required.