🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <39340@apple.Apple.COM> mjohnson@Apple.COM (Mark B. Johnson) 
writes:
> It is important for Apple, for developers, and most of all the users that
> we provide a SOLUTION to the problem, not just another problem.  
Unfortunately,
> that solution takes a little longer than we would all like.

Maybe, if Apple are serious about this.  I remain skeptical.  I am not 
flaming you, Mark (note my first disclaimer), but Macintalk has been in 
limbo for half a decade.  During that time about half a dozen third 
parties have done speech hacks.  Apple could have acquired any of them and 
had something functional by now.  I infer from their not doing so either 
apathy or a forked-tongue approach to Macintalk support.  I hope I am 
wrong.

Perhaps the perception among those who control is that Macintalk is a fun 
hack for silly talking meese with little serious possibility, another 
version of the "we don't need no steenkin' user interface" mentality.  
However, there are people in the world who do not see very well.  
Macintalk, along with the ability to make just about any application use 
large fonts, is a great boon to these people.  Apple have been nearly 
unique among computer manufacturers in their awareness of the existence of 
disabled people.  Look at Easy Access.  The people who actually need 
something like Easy Access are only a tiny minority, and such things are 
usually overlooked by marketing-driven companies in their perpetual 
navel-gazing.  How much revenue does Easy Access generate?  Very little by 
itself.  How much revenue does the attitude that people with special needs 
are worth considering generate?  One hell of a lot, I would guess.  Apple 
have done well on this point.  On the other hand, perhaps Easy Access, 
too, may prove to be nothing more than a relic from the old days when 
Apple's corporate posterior had not achieved diamond hardness.

Trying to integrate a speech synthesizer with the already massively hacked 
Sound Manager is the wrong approach, especially as it increases the amount 
of time to do the job.  Get the Sound Manager working properly, but in the 
meantime provide a routine that takes some phonemes and parameters and a 
sampling rate and returns a handle to a sound sample.  I have always been 
able to play sound samples on the Mac, the amount of memory to hold a 
single sentence is not going to be a problem to allocate, and my fingers 
are hardly going to be worn to nubbins from the need to type in one extra 
toolbox call.  That way, even if Apple release Comprehensive Sound Manager 
Controller Package Version 37 that requires an array of 256 interconnected 
DSP chips numerically to simulate the electronics in an NE-555 timer, the 
damn thing will still work.  Besides, I can *filter* a sample.

The other thing is that I am sure that there are hundreds of people with 
the ability to disassemble Macintalk and produce something useful, and I 
bet a few of them would do it for free or shareware, but I doubt anybody 
is going to do it in light of images of phalanxes of grim Apple lawyers 
armed with Uzi's.  Macintalk is free, completely unsupported, and 
guaranteed to break within a year.  So release it into the public domain.  
That won't happen, of course--it will probably be kept as a trade secret 
until the collapse of the universe, and even then the lawyers will probably
be working overtime to figure out how to keep control over it in the next
one.

Pardon the cynicism, but I needed the therapy.  Again, I am not flaming 
those in Apple who voluntarily contribute to the world by being on this 
newsgroup.  Contributions like that and like Macintalk made Apple great.  
Quite the opposite, I criticize the mindset that judges those kinds of 
contributions to be without value.  I hope my fear that said mindset is 
swarming over Apple in a giant mindless protoplasmic mass turns out to be 
dead wrong.

Eric Pepke                                    INTERNET: pepke@gw.scri.fsu.edu
Supercomputer Computations Research Institute MFENET:   pepke@fsu
Florida State University                      SPAN:     scri::pepke
Tallahassee, FL 32306-4052                    BITNET:   pepke@fsu

Disclaimer: My employers seldom even LISTEN to my opinions.
Meta-disclaimer: Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.