perry@atux01.UUCP (P. Kivolowitz) (01/09/86)
To the people putting spoken bells and the like into their terminal emulators (and putting terminal emulators into their shells!): At the root of the matter, it is *neat* to have a spoken bell in your terminal program. But...to have just one word spoken, the narrator and (depending on how you go about things) the translator devices need to loaded into memory (and of course) resident on disk. Yeah the amiga can amazing things, but for predestrian work-horse applications like terminal emulators you should always be aware of the cost versus benifit of a particular feature. In the case of the spoken bell, DisplayBeep is already in ROM (you know what I mean). Ask your self the question: Is saying Beep! worth the five or ten kbytes of overhead (in addition to possibly inter- fering with other programs doing sound at the same time). To sum up: yeah it's a neat idea but does it belong in a product? Perry S. Kivolowitz "I regret that I have but one Amiga to vie for!" ------------------------------------------------------------ JAUG MEETING JANUARY 24th - Hall 114 , Hill Ctr , Rutgers New Brunswick. 7:30 p.m. Featured: Activision.
bruceb@amiga.UUCP (Bruce Barrett) (01/09/86)
In article <139@atux01.UUCP> perry@atux01.UUCP (P. Kivolowitz) writes: >To the people putting spoken bells and the like into their >terminal emulators... ... lots of good points... (and this is not a flame) >Ask your self the question: Is saying Beep! worth the five >or ten kbytes of overhead (in addition to possibly inter- >fering with other programs doing sound at the same time). (Lucky me! I have a Sun AND an Amiga on my desk so I can check these figures in "real time".) The V1.1 Translator (probably not needed for spoken bells) is 10.5k (10592bytes) long. The Narrator is 23k (23280bytes) long. (These are disk sizes, not RAM, but should be close enough for this discussion.) So we aren't even talking about 5-10k but more like 23-30k! Let's see 80x25=2k so if you allowed some form of backward scrolling this would cost you 10 full pages of history. The other "expense" is loading it from disk in the first place, this takes time too. >To sum up: yeah it's a neat idea but does it belong in a >product? Maybe, maybe not. I vote that if it goes in that: 1. there is some option to disable it 2. might as well make what it says an option. 3. if speech is being used by some other task you do not hold up the terminal emulator by waiting to say something. --Bruce Barrett