Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu!bob From: bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: NeXT sound Message-ID: <26198@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 31 Oct 88 22:37:18 GMT References: Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer & Information Science Lines: 48 In article cb29+@andrew.cmu.edu (Chad Kavanaugh Bisk) writes: >2) There is only one speaker provided in the NeXT system so playback >at the machine can only be in mono... Note that the sound demos heard >at the announcement ceremonies and elsewhere were piped through the >stereo RCA jacks into external speakers, not through the internal >NeXT speaker. When a student walks up to the system, she first inserts her floptical disc into the drive on her system, then logs in. While (briefly) awaiting the window system's initialization from her dot-files, she dons the lapel mike and shifts her headphone plug from the WalkPerson in her bookbag to the jack on her workstation. While she misses the Talking Heads, at least she's wired into the rest of the world. >...When hooked up to a fast network via NFS, any NeXT machine capable >of voice mail (i.e. having a microphone or an operator headset) will >also be capable of real live 2-way packet-switched voice >conversations. This would require writing some software and would >load down the net, but the advantage of real time communication in a >networked environment is incredible. I can imagine some cooperative talkd(8)s that can adaptively negotiate, between all the machines on a network, the audio sampling frequency in use by each of them. Residents of a more heavily loaded subnet would experience somewhat degraded sound quality as all the talkd(8)s agree to conserve net bandwidth. Network router hop counts would also be a factor. She mouses over and picks the telephone icon off-hook, to place a call to her instructor. Drat, she gets his answering machine - it seems he's off to a conference somewhere, and will check in occasionally from the NeXTs in the show hall. Now, rather than demonstrating the bug in her project interactively, she'll have top drop some animated voice-mail in his box. It seems rather archaic to have to work with him in this sort of non-interactive, batchy sort of way, but it will have to do for now. I wonder what high-latency long-haul networks would do to a conversation's legibility? When I'm tty-talk(1)ing with someone across several IMPs, it gets bursty for both of us. What is the aural analog of packet burstiness? I've experienced long-distance telephony which was apparently passing through a sattelite, and the delays confused all the normal social cues for "Who's talking now?", "Who's waiting for an answer?", and "Did I interrupt?" quite noticably. -=- Zippy sez, --Bob Everybody is going somewhere!! It's probably a garage sale or a disaster Movie!!