info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (10/15/84)
From: Christopher A Kent <cak@Purdue.ARPA> Maybe I'm being dense. I macput smoothtalker.rsrc and smoothpics.rsrc to my Mac, and can't get anything to happen other than bomb with ID 26. I've broken the finder in the process... but certainly no speech. Help? chris ----------
info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (10/15/84)
From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler) Oh yeah, I should have noted that the smoothpics.rsrc file has to be called just SmoothPics on the Mac disk. Dan.
info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (10/17/84)
From: Christopher A Kent <cak@Purdue.ARPA> Thanks to all who pointed out my problem -- I had forgotten to do TYPE L 8 in FTP. After I got the files this way, things worked much better. I did still run into troubles with macput'ing smoothtalker.rsrc; the transfer consistently broke at about 23% of the way through. I finally used tohex to convert the file, macput it, and fromhexed it. Then it worked fine. Well, after I put the standard finder on the disk. Smoothtalker and the altered finder don't get along for some reason. Is the file *just* an ad? Or is the usable code hidden in there somewhere, too? chris ----------
info-mac@uw-beaver.UUCP (10/19/84)
From: Farber <farber@udel-ee.ARPA> The price of Smoothtalker is $149. Relase is 23 Oct. A "license" fee for the components is $500 plus royalties. I have asked them what royalties mean in a University?
info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (12/04/84)
From: wasser_1%viking.DEC@decwrl.ARPA (John A. Wasser)
Beware of Smooth-Talking Software Vendors!
or
The First Byte may not be the last!
I purchased a copy of SmoothTalker (by First Byte) recently
(at least I thought that was what I paid for... see below) and
would like to warn people what they are getting into. I made
the purchase based on the SmoothTalker Demo Disk that I saw
and heard at a computer store. What I got is not what I
expected from the demo (or from previous experience purchasing
software).
When you open the box (after having paid your $150) you find
out that they didn't include the Female voice (mentioned in
the demo) on the disk. You have to send for the free backup
disk (the built-in manual says $15 backup disk) to get the
Female voice.
When you start SmoothTalker you are assaulted with six screens
worth of legalese in the form of a "License and Use Agreement".
The full text of the agreement is too long to post (Please send
mail if you want a copy) but here are some of the more odious
points in it:
1) What you purchased is a SINGLE-USER, SINGLE-CPU,
NON-TRANSFERRABLE license.
2) First Byte (the publisher of SmoothTalker) owns the
software and any copies you make AND ANY SOFTWARE
DEVELOPED USING THEIR SOFTWARE. You cannot make
copies without PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION.
3) The program is sold "AS IS" and can be as full of
bugs as they like. They only thing that they
Warranty in any way is the disk on which the
software is shipped.
4) If you sue them, you can only recover the purchase price.
If they sue you, they get legal fees and more.
It gets worse! The only way to use SmoothTalker (currently) is
to have it speak a text file. You cannot currently call
SmoothTalker (V1.0 as shipped) from ANY programming language.
(Remember that if you do, the program legally becomes theirs and
you can't use it on any other Macintosh.) The program works
fairly well on plain English text... except for the falling
inflection that falls at a constant rate (falls more on long
sentences than short sentences) and makes it sound like the
speaker.. is... running.... d o w n. The text file can be
phonetic but cannot (it seems) be mixed English and phonetic.
There is no way to have a text file converted to phonemes, and
English text is read in chunks of about 3 to 6 lines with
long pauses in between.
One bright spot: I have it on good authority that if the master
disk (which is copy-protected, by the way, with bad sectors) is
write-protected (uncover the hole), you can accept the license
agreement without changing the disk. This way you can check out
the software without loosing your chance to return it to the
dealer for a refund (which is what I intend to do).
"Let the buyer BEWARE... but let him also be INFORMED!"
John A. Wasser
New England Computer Society
SIGMac Founder
Work address:
ARPAnet: WASSER%VIKING.DEC@decwrl.ARPA
Usenet: {allegra,Shasta,decvax}!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-viking!wasser
USPS: Digital Equipment Corp.
Mail stop: LJO2/E4
30 Porter Rd
Littleton, MA 01460info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (12/05/84)
From: Joseph I. Pallas <PALLAS@SU-SCORE.ARPA> After reading the description of the "Agreement" offered by First Byte for Smoothtalker(tm), I have some advice: DON'T TAKE THIS KIND OF BULLSH*T FROM ANYONE! Don't give your support to software pirates, for that's exactly what these people are. They take your money and don't even promise you something in return, let alone deliver it. Be sure to let them know exactly why you refuse to deal with them, too. If enough people stop taking this kind of crud, perhaps the message will get through. (An aside: is it any wonder that so many otherwise ethical people are willing to violate agreements like this one? It's pretty easy to rationalize along the lines of "They've promised me absolutely nothing, so why should I be hesitant to share that nothing with others?") I know that this is not the place to discuss legal matters, but I'd like to raise a legal point in addition to my ethical one. I must say that I am not a lawyer and have no training in the law. I have read in more than one place, however, about the implied warrant of merchantability (or some such legalistic phrase) which essentially says that no agreement you sign protects the seller if the product is completely unusable, or not what he says it is. I suspect this is related to your protection against fraud. Hence, if the product was represented to you as having a female voice, or being callable from other programs (the version you were buying), I believe they would have no protection against your suit. I have serious doubts about whether some of those other points would hold up, as well--especially the one about their owning software you develop. I'd love to see them produce something in court that proves you accepted their license. joe -------
info-mac@uw-beaver (12/07/84)
From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler) Sorry to hear SmoothTalker turned out so bad. Good news though: when Larry Tesler visited Harvard a few weeks ago he showed us a speech synthesizer that Apple will be giving away soon. It sounded better than the SmoothTalker demo, and we were actually able to type in text to it and (in real time) hear it spoken to us. It was really very impressive and it will be distributed free as drivers (one for text to phoneme, one for phoneme to speech) and will come with one of the future software supplements. We've also heard that each part of this product will be about 8k, or 1/3 the size of the corresponding parts of SmoothTalker. Larry also showed us a Clascal program that implements a generic Macintosh application. It does once and for all much of the work that anyone who writes a Mac application normally spends many hours doing by hand (such as alligning scroll bars in windows and setting up event loops). He showed two examples of how you can, with only a little changing and adding class of definitions and code, tailor it to your particular needs. It looked very nice and I can't wait to convert one of my C programs to Clascal to see how good it really is. We also saw an early version of Macintosh Logo. It of course has turtle graphics but because it is so fast they use a bunny rather than a turtle.