Eww, you're using the default voices. What you want to do is install the OGI RES LPC pack, the OGI Lexicon, the tll voice, and write a bit of scheme to get the thing configured. For instance, if you want it to just say whever you give it on the command line of a script: echo "(voice_tll_diphone) (Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'freebsd16audio)(SayText \"$*\")" | festival --pipe
Obviously using whatever sound system you have. By default it will try to use NAS if it is installed on your system, but I've never managed to make that work.
If you can stand the default voice, it is quite a bit easier to install. I'm pretty sure there's a way to get it to do some TTS on a file with those parameters as well, but I havn't pored over the documentation enough to find it yet.
I think part of the reason is that everybody knew it was rendered. When you're looking for a particular pattern you can spot things much more easily. I think Square should have announced that they were making a regular movie and see how long it took the general public (not just the graphics weenies) to catch on to the fact that the people were rendered as well. The general public is accustomed to seeing CG special effects these days, but the having the people be rendered would have been quite a shock.
As for the lighting, I took one of the publicity shots from the movie when it was first announced and showed it to several people. Only my graphics weenie friend actually caught on that it was CG, and the only because they took a shortcut with the hair that he spotted.
It reminds me of an old demo I saw back at sGI. A camera is looking out at the desert, it then pans to the right a bit and you see a guy standing behind sandbags with a shotgun pointed at a flying saucer. Everybody goes: ok, the flying saucer is obviously rendered, it just doesn't look quite right for some reason. Then you show them the next film, which is the same scene, but when it pans over, not only is the flying saucer gone, but so are the sandbags. Nobody had even suspected the sandbags were CG.
I just finished the first two Honor Harrington ebooks from the Baen Free Library on my Palm VIIx. I find it to be very pleasant on the eyes, not so pleasant on the thumb (although that is a design defect of the VII series: a very stiff up/down rocker). The text flows very naturally and the whole package is smaller than a regular book. The only limitation is that you don't get the occasional graphics in there, but for most books that's not really a problem.
I've actually started to prefer reading books on the PDA. The text seems to flow better, the printing is never spotty, and it never uses a lousy font. Additionally, the palm has a backlight and Weasel reader is a fine piece of software. The only thing that might be cooler (although my Palm couldn't do this, but the Zarius might) is to hook up a good speech synthesis unit and have your ebook read to you while you drive or whatnot like some sort of computerized book on tape.
The only problem with Festival is that it practically requires a PhD to get it up and running correctly, and the documentation is aimed at the speech synthesis development community, not the end users. The only reason I got mine working was the FreeBSD ports system an running across a reasonably small demo script I could hack to get what I wanted.
IIRC, it wasn't standard, but you could get Macintalk for OS 6. OS7 shipped with it standard. The default voice is the same one Koko the Gorilla and Stephen Hawking use. IIRC the entire module was 100k in size and left ample CPU time for other projects (like animating Moose lips) on a 16Mhz 68020.
It looks like a sound business plan to me. Create a market, then exploit it. Don't worry about the Oversight committees, those can be taken care of with a little pressure from the top and a quick nip off the old budget.
My ISP has only two classes of service. A "standard" service, and a "business" service which costs 4x as much and provides exactly the same bitrates (although it doesn't prohibit VPNs). No DSL around here since I'm one of the majority of Americans who live too far from their CO to get DSL.
Yeah, and where's everyone's favorite password for those enviroments where people write down any password they need and paste it to the window: ask me.
It does get some people who never think of putting a space in their password, and it makes it harder to use as a parameter to a command which is an additional bonus. More people should use a password like *? '"`|& just to discourage that behavior.
Did you read the part where they were planning to play ads whenever you have it paused? That's typical network thinking at its best. I also like the part where they downplayed the "it won't actually work." This sounds like the Networks promising us the moon, and actually delivering nothing but vapor yet again. I especially love the comparisions to TiVo, a device you can buy today that works wonderfully and has more features (from the consumer's perspective) than they are willing to allow in their own machine.
My cable company (Comcast) already has something kind of like this. They have what was being touted as a Tivo-killer: video on demand. Basically, they store the content on their end and your digital cable box acts kind of like a Tivo with pause, ff, and rewind from a list of shows.
As with most things however, the devil was in the details.
It turns out the cable companies are still stuck in their old monopoly mentality where they see how lousy they can make a service for the customers before they'll buy it, rather than trying to provide services your customers would actually like. It's actually a new form of pay per view, where you must buy each show (for a fairly substantal fee) you want to watch, and they have only a very limited selection of shows to choose from. The shows rotate each month or two and usually consist of the same stuff that's on pay per view.
In the end, this service just turns out to be Pay Per View 2.0, which is not what the customers were clamoring for. As for me, I dropped digital cable ages ago (none of the channels I watch were available in digital, and Tivo has a far better guide) and never went back. Sometimes I check to see if the channels I watch (like Comedy Central, Sci-Fi, USA, or other little known networks) move over to digital, but they never do. I would probably switch if they did, simply because the cable company was never able to figure out why the signal they provide is so weak (about 10 dB weak from the drop) and we get a fair bit of leakage from the broadcast stations on some channels.
I love my Tivo though. It's exactly what I've wanted for a long time now. That's why I didn't mind plopping down the $500 for the unit+service. It's totally worth it.
On the other hand, how many people would have downloaded the pirate version (or even *gasp* the demo) found that it was good and actually bought it? It's impossible to speculate on the affect piracy would have on the sales because nobody ever takes reliable numbers.
Besides, don't most PS2 games get cut down to CD size when they're pirated?
$30/month for something that uploads no faster than a 33.6 modem? Your service is a rip off, I'm going to go with one of your competitors, unless you mange to get a monopoly in the area through crafty legislation or something.
You are going to flood the return channel with ACKs and have lousy downstream bandwidth anyway. It's the same situation with the 1.5M/128K Cablemodems these days.
I hope the users of your service never feel a need for any one of the many bidirectional uses of the network. I pity the guy who works with large data files for say some open source project and blows past his upload cap halfway through the month. Yes there are completely legitimate uses for large datafiles, despite what you might think. In fact there are lots of them, and they're growing by the day.
This is the common though I see on Slashdot and elsewhere. The only "valid" use for a broadband connection is downloading web pages and perhaps using FTP sometimes if you're l33t. No user should ever need to actually originate some data, and those that do are just slowing down my porn downloads dammit. It's sort of similar to the idea that everybody should just be a consumer, you shouldn't produce anythinig outside of the framework of a large corporation, since that's communism. It's crazy, but some people honesly think like that.
I think bandwidth should be free to allow people to innovate and not restrict them when they finally do come up with a good idea. Granted many people will abuse such privleges just like people abuse civil liberties, but that doesn't make them a bad idea. We don't need to impose martial law on our networks because you don't want to let other people use more bandwidth than you, even if it feels like you're being ripped off. Do you honestly think the DSL and Cablemodem providers would lower their price if everyone stopped using so much bandwidth?
I hate rebooting. It means I have to stop all of the background processes on my machine (including time limited things like news downloads) just to play a game. Plus I have to maintain an OS I barely ever use (It's not like you can just connect an unpatched Windows box to the net, and I usually want to play games online).
I've found that if a game requires rebooting, I'm much less likely to play it because I have to deal with Windows again. That's why I still love my old Loki games.
I could never stand those tile interfaces. The little 16x16 or even 8x8 tiles were always too small for me. It was much easier to visually discern a D rather than a blob of green and red pixels. Plus you can play the ASCII version in a PuTTY window over SSH.:)
The parent was talking about not being able to buy a CD of a local band that played in a bar because they didn't have any, which then brought on the $3/per cd cost I was replying too. Nobody pressing 5000 CDs is going to "make it" in that sense anyway. For that you need a big rip off recording contract.
20 minutes to burn a CD is way too long these days, especially if you're burning from image. It's not unrealistic to expect a decent burner to finish in 5 minutes anymore. What's more, burners are _cheap_, you can have several of them working in parallel, which would cut down on the hours needed to burn the CDs considerably.
$3 per CD? That's highway robbery. You can burn CDrs for $.10 each plus maybe $.25 for the cases, and 5000 of them would only take a few weeks at most for someone with a few CDr drives and nothing better to do (your average broke band member). Label art would be tough, but we're talking about tiny indy acts here, not big commercial acts. With time and materials you'd probably get each CD for about $1, which is a considerable savings for broke band members.
Their position is weak because there are so many bands out there that want to be signed. I have a feeling that any band that tries to negotiate a better contract is just kicked to the curb and the next band is signed instead. It doesn't really matter to the record company who they sign, as long as they look good in a tight shirt on a billboard and don't play any music that might be banned in any of Clear Channel's areas.
There are of course some obscure bands signed now and then if they're willing to accept a contract bad enough (because it's the Record company that's taking the risk you see). I suspect that even those hundreds of records the company "loses money" on are actually profitable (or at least break even) with their fancy accounting practices, but why bother signing a bunch of good sounding bands (and taking up valuble shelf space), when you can sign a few good looking bands and mass market the heck out of them for a few years, which makes megabucks (although less than it used to) for a lot less effort?
Bluetooth has a special mode for devices like Cell phones (it was developed by Cell phone companies after all) that allow you to create a dumb device that bypasses the regular Bluetooth stack and works more or less like a dumb packet radio. It's designed for voice traffic (it has no error correction for instance), but it does have low latency and guarenteed bandwidth. It could be modified for this pretty easily.
People who follow that advice to the letter end up with very standards compliant pages that look like crap to the 99% of people who just use the default browser on the default settings. Stylesheets should fix the problem for people who buy new machines (and get the automatic browser upgrade), but the other method had wider availability.
I don't know. Sometimes I think some people are afraid that if a book contains refrences to anything that might offend anyone, then it won't be considered a classic and they shouldn't bother reading it.
Or it's a puritanical fear that someone somewhere might get a thrill out of reading that section. That seems to be one of the underlying thought processes behind selecting school reading assignments at least.
Personally, I'm glad that most narrow minded people don't read. It's great to be able to read about the stuff they can't show on TV or on the Radio and have people praise you for it. Little Jonny is watching Smut! Bad! Little Jonny is reading some book. Good! Doesn't really matter what the book is, most of the people who want to censor stuff don't read anyway. Of course there are always some people who will hear about a book from their friends, and then we get book burnings, but those are fortunately still poorly organized and haphazard.
Most Sci-Fi/fantasy authors especially fall victim to the DOM[1] syndrome fairly early in life. I've always thought it was a reaction to their material, which is often highly scientific and abstract. They want to put something in there to make the story more human and more enjoyable for people can't read 400 page novels on abstract constructions.
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It would have the same effect if you covered your blimp in highly flammable paint.
Eww, you're using the default voices. What you want to do is install the OGI RES LPC pack, the OGI Lexicon, the tll voice, and write a bit of scheme to get the thing configured. For instance, if you want it to just say whever you give it on the command line of a script:
echo "(voice_tll_diphone) (Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'freebsd16audio)(SayText \"$*\")" | festival --pipe
Obviously using whatever sound system you have. By default it will try to use NAS if it is installed on your system, but I've never managed to make that work.
If you can stand the default voice, it is quite a bit easier to install. I'm pretty sure there's a way to get it to do some TTS on a file with those parameters as well, but I havn't pored over the documentation enough to find it yet.
I think part of the reason is that everybody knew it was rendered. When you're looking for a particular pattern you can spot things much more easily. I think Square should have announced that they were making a regular movie and see how long it took the general public (not just the graphics weenies) to catch on to the fact that the people were rendered as well. The general public is accustomed to seeing CG special effects these days, but the having the people be rendered would have been quite a shock.
As for the lighting, I took one of the publicity shots from the movie when it was first announced and showed it to several people. Only my graphics weenie friend actually caught on that it was CG, and the only because they took a shortcut with the hair that he spotted.
It reminds me of an old demo I saw back at sGI. A camera is looking out at the desert, it then pans to the right a bit and you see a guy standing behind sandbags with a shotgun pointed at a flying saucer. Everybody goes: ok, the flying saucer is obviously rendered, it just doesn't look quite right for some reason. Then you show them the next film, which is the same scene, but when it pans over, not only is the flying saucer gone, but so are the sandbags. Nobody had even suspected the sandbags were CG.
I just finished the first two Honor Harrington ebooks from the Baen Free Library on my Palm VIIx. I find it to be very pleasant on the eyes, not so pleasant on the thumb (although that is a design defect of the VII series: a very stiff up/down rocker). The text flows very naturally and the whole package is smaller than a regular book. The only limitation is that you don't get the occasional graphics in there, but for most books that's not really a problem.
I've actually started to prefer reading books on the PDA. The text seems to flow better, the printing is never spotty, and it never uses a lousy font. Additionally, the palm has a backlight and Weasel reader is a fine piece of software. The only thing that might be cooler (although my Palm couldn't do this, but the Zarius might) is to hook up a good speech synthesis unit and have your ebook read to you while you drive or whatnot like some sort of computerized book on tape.
The only problem with Festival is that it practically requires a PhD to get it up and running correctly, and the documentation is aimed at the speech synthesis development community, not the end users. The only reason I got mine working was the FreeBSD ports system an running across a reasonably small demo script I could hack to get what I wanted.
IIRC, it wasn't standard, but you could get Macintalk for OS 6. OS7 shipped with it standard. The default voice is the same one Koko the Gorilla and Stephen Hawking use. IIRC the entire module was 100k in size and left ample CPU time for other projects (like animating Moose lips) on a 16Mhz 68020.
To be fair, that 100 - 200 billion (probably more) is not his money. On the other hand, companies that Still have top administration officials on their payroll are getting sweet contracts in Iraq directly related to the war effort.
It looks like a sound business plan to me. Create a market, then exploit it. Don't worry about the Oversight committees, those can be taken care of with a little pressure from the top and a quick nip off the old budget.
Wow, good troll. FOr a second I thought people still believed that.
My ISP has only two classes of service. A "standard" service, and a "business" service which costs 4x as much and provides exactly the same bitrates (although it doesn't prohibit VPNs). No DSL around here since I'm one of the majority of Americans who live too far from their CO to get DSL.
Yeah, and where's everyone's favorite password for those enviroments where people write down any password they need and paste it to the window: ask me.
It does get some people who never think of putting a space in their password, and it makes it harder to use as a parameter to a command which is an additional bonus. More people should use a password like *? '"`|& just to discourage that behavior.
Did you read the part where they were planning to play ads whenever you have it paused? That's typical network thinking at its best. I also like the part where they downplayed the "it won't actually work." This sounds like the Networks promising us the moon, and actually delivering nothing but vapor yet again. I especially love the comparisions to TiVo, a device you can buy today that works wonderfully and has more features (from the consumer's perspective) than they are willing to allow in their own machine.
My cable company (Comcast) already has something kind of like this. They have what was being touted as a Tivo-killer: video on demand. Basically, they store the content on their end and your digital cable box acts kind of like a Tivo with pause, ff, and rewind from a list of shows.
As with most things however, the devil was in the details.
It turns out the cable companies are still stuck in their old monopoly mentality where they see how lousy they can make a service for the customers before they'll buy it, rather than trying to provide services your customers would actually like. It's actually a new form of pay per view, where you must buy each show (for a fairly substantal fee) you want to watch, and they have only a very limited selection of shows to choose from. The shows rotate each month or two and usually consist of the same stuff that's on pay per view.
In the end, this service just turns out to be Pay Per View 2.0, which is not what the customers were clamoring for. As for me, I dropped digital cable ages ago (none of the channels I watch were available in digital, and Tivo has a far better guide) and never went back. Sometimes I check to see if the channels I watch (like Comedy Central, Sci-Fi, USA, or other little known networks) move over to digital, but they never do. I would probably switch if they did, simply because the cable company was never able to figure out why the signal they provide is so weak (about 10 dB weak from the drop) and we get a fair bit of leakage from the broadcast stations on some channels.
I love my Tivo though. It's exactly what I've wanted for a long time now. That's why I didn't mind plopping down the $500 for the unit+service. It's totally worth it.
On the other hand, how many people would have downloaded the pirate version (or even *gasp* the demo) found that it was good and actually bought it? It's impossible to speculate on the affect piracy would have on the sales because nobody ever takes reliable numbers.
Besides, don't most PS2 games get cut down to CD size when they're pirated?
$30/month for something that uploads no faster than a 33.6 modem? Your service is a rip off, I'm going to go with one of your competitors, unless you mange to get a monopoly in the area through crafty legislation or something.
You are going to flood the return channel with ACKs and have lousy downstream bandwidth anyway. It's the same situation with the 1.5M/128K Cablemodems these days.
I hope the users of your service never feel a need for any one of the many bidirectional uses of the network. I pity the guy who works with large data files for say some open source project and blows past his upload cap halfway through the month. Yes there are completely legitimate uses for large datafiles, despite what you might think. In fact there are lots of them, and they're growing by the day.
This is the common though I see on Slashdot and elsewhere. The only "valid" use for a broadband connection is downloading web pages and perhaps using FTP sometimes if you're l33t. No user should ever need to actually originate some data, and those that do are just slowing down my porn downloads dammit. It's sort of similar to the idea that everybody should just be a consumer, you shouldn't produce anythinig outside of the framework of a large corporation, since that's communism. It's crazy, but some people honesly think like that.
I think bandwidth should be free to allow people to innovate and not restrict them when they finally do come up with a good idea. Granted many people will abuse such privleges just like people abuse civil liberties, but that doesn't make them a bad idea. We don't need to impose martial law on our networks because you don't want to let other people use more bandwidth than you, even if it feels like you're being ripped off. Do you honestly think the DSL and Cablemodem providers would lower their price if everyone stopped using so much bandwidth?
I hate rebooting. It means I have to stop all of the background processes on my machine (including time limited things like news downloads) just to play a game. Plus I have to maintain an OS I barely ever use (It's not like you can just connect an unpatched Windows box to the net, and I usually want to play games online).
I've found that if a game requires rebooting, I'm much less likely to play it because I have to deal with Windows again. That's why I still love my old Loki games.
I could never stand those tile interfaces. The little 16x16 or even 8x8 tiles were always too small for me. It was much easier to visually discern a D rather than a blob of green and red pixels. Plus you can play the ASCII version in a PuTTY window over SSH. :)
welcome to the 21st century. I would like to introduce you to plexiglass.
The parent was talking about not being able to buy a CD of a local band that played in a bar because they didn't have any, which then brought on the $3/per cd cost I was replying too. Nobody pressing 5000 CDs is going to "make it" in that sense anyway. For that you need a big rip off recording contract.
20 minutes to burn a CD is way too long these days, especially if you're burning from image. It's not unrealistic to expect a decent burner to finish in 5 minutes anymore. What's more, burners are _cheap_, you can have several of them working in parallel, which would cut down on the hours needed to burn the CDs considerably.
- Take classes, although he can't afford those official classes and the local community college doesn't offer anything like this
- Buy a book at the local bookstore for full price ($$$).
- Buy the book online at a nice (20%) discount ($$)
Johnny has just bettered himself[1] and saved a bit of money in the process. Isn't that what the internet is all about?If someone is poor because they are fiscally irresponsable, do you think the Internet is going to leave them worse off than they were before?
[1] Technically he isn't a better person until he actually sits down and learns the skills, but that is beside the point.
$3 per CD? That's highway robbery. You can burn CDrs for $.10 each plus maybe $.25 for the cases, and 5000 of them would only take a few weeks at most for someone with a few CDr drives and nothing better to do (your average broke band member). Label art would be tough, but we're talking about tiny indy acts here, not big commercial acts. With time and materials you'd probably get each CD for about $1, which is a considerable savings for broke band members.
Their position is weak because there are so many bands out there that want to be signed. I have a feeling that any band that tries to negotiate a better contract is just kicked to the curb and the next band is signed instead. It doesn't really matter to the record company who they sign, as long as they look good in a tight shirt on a billboard and don't play any music that might be banned in any of Clear Channel's areas.
There are of course some obscure bands signed now and then if they're willing to accept a contract bad enough (because it's the Record company that's taking the risk you see). I suspect that even those hundreds of records the company "loses money" on are actually profitable (or at least break even) with their fancy accounting practices, but why bother signing a bunch of good sounding bands (and taking up valuble shelf space), when you can sign a few good looking bands and mass market the heck out of them for a few years, which makes megabucks (although less than it used to) for a lot less effort?
Bluetooth has a special mode for devices like Cell phones (it was developed by Cell phone companies after all) that allow you to create a dumb device that bypasses the regular Bluetooth stack and works more or less like a dumb packet radio. It's designed for voice traffic (it has no error correction for instance), but it does have low latency and guarenteed bandwidth. It could be modified for this pretty easily.
People who follow that advice to the letter end up with very standards compliant pages that look like crap to the 99% of people who just use the default browser on the default settings. Stylesheets should fix the problem for people who buy new machines (and get the automatic browser upgrade), but the other method had wider availability.
My parents are more close minded, techno-fobic, and politically unactive than I am. By some measures (their peers) they are more "decent" than I am.
I don't know. Sometimes I think some people are afraid that if a book contains refrences to anything that might offend anyone, then it won't be considered a classic and they shouldn't bother reading it.
Or it's a puritanical fear that someone somewhere might get a thrill out of reading that section. That seems to be one of the underlying thought processes behind selecting school reading assignments at least.
Personally, I'm glad that most narrow minded people don't read. It's great to be able to read about the stuff they can't show on TV or on the Radio and have people praise you for it. Little Jonny is watching Smut! Bad! Little Jonny is reading some book. Good! Doesn't really matter what the book is, most of the people who want to censor stuff don't read anyway. Of course there are always some people who will hear about a book from their friends, and then we get book burnings, but those are fortunately still poorly organized and haphazard.
Most Sci-Fi/fantasy authors especially fall victim to the DOM[1] syndrome fairly early in life. I've always thought it was a reaction to their material, which is often highly scientific and abstract. They want to put something in there to make the story more human and more enjoyable for people can't read 400 page novels on abstract constructions.
[1] Dirty Old Man