Re: AFT -- Almost free text.

[Luke Davis <ldavis@shellworld.net>]

Building converters is easy.  Geting the format specs is not.


On Fri, 11 Jan 2002, Martin G. McCormick wrote:

> 	I will weigh in a bit on this topic.  Everybody else
> around me primarily uses Microsoft Windows and related products.
> This whole campus of roughly twenty-thousand students and another
> three-thousand give or take a few hundred staff members uses and
> sometimes barely uses Windows and products that run on Windows.
> We have a few Mac users and those of us who are FreeBSD and Linux
> users, but I feel great if I can just hand somebody a file and
> say, "Here.  This is what you needed."
>
> 	Information is what this game is all about and my hope is
> that Linux will make it easier for computer users who are blind
> to function along side everyone else.
>
> 	I send and receive ASCII files all the time and people
> use them, but just as we would rather get sound files we can
> play and text files we can read without doubling the cost of our
> work stations or going to a lot of various other forms of hassle,
> the general user community wants stuff they can use without a lot
> of trouble.
>
> 	Utilities that convert one format in to another should be
> our stock and trade since smart employers and instructors will
> not get nearly as hung up about whether or not we can do this or
> that job if we can simply make our system work with the existing
> infrastructure.
>
> 	I am not ranting at anybody or saying that anybody is
> wrong, only that I like it if I can take something I am
> comfortable using, feed it in to a filter or format converter and
> come out with some gibberish in standard output or sent to some
> file that the other guy is happy with.
>
> 	I don't know how many care, but this happens all the time
> when you make an international telephone call.
>
> 	The digital ISDN lines in Europe and many other countries
> use something called A-law encoding for audio.  It is a
> piece-wise handling of the logarithmic values which
> represent sound levels.
>
> 	In North America, our ISDN lines have a piece-wise
> logarithmic function which is slightly different.  It is called
> MU-Law encoding.  Audio encoded with one scheme sounds positively
> terrible if received on a telephone built for the other system so
> there are digital converters that substitute MU-Law for A-Law
> encoding as the audio flies back and forth across the pond.
>
> 	I believe that our /dev/audio device is set up to receive
> MU-Law signals, here, and you can set your /dev/audio in Europe
> for A-Law, but I may be dead wrong.  My point is that it is a
> neighborly thing to do if you can communicate with the rest of
> the world in a manner that works for all.
>
> 	We Linux users probably have more flexibility built in to
> the operating system than non-UNIX users so building converters
> should be a lot less painful for us.
>
> 	I am sorry if this sounds like a rant, but it is a
> positive rant if such a thing exists.
>
> Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK
> OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Network Operations Group
>
>
>
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