Delicious LiveJournal Links for 1-6-2010

[andrewducker]

• A Chess program in 1K
  Actually, in 672 bytes.
  (tags: programming history software games zx81 assembly chess)
• The Gentle Seduction - a short story
  The Singularity, as experienced by a non-geek.
  (tags: fiction scifi science singularity transhumanism nanotechnology)
• Stunning pictures of the world's newest tallest building's opening ceremony
  (tags: photography pretty architecture)
• Kodak wireless picture frames are trivially easy to read over the internet and update. For anyone. Oh dear.
  (tags: EpicFail technology kodak)
• The Things - a short story telling the story of The Thing from its point of view.
  (tags: sf short_story writing)
• Heroes is a hit as the most pirated TV show that is
  It (and Dexter) have more people pirating it than watching it live...
  (tags: tv piracy copyright)
• What's up with the Beep driver in Windows 7?
  (tags: windows audio history computers hardware)
• Obama makes first trans-gendered appointment
  (tags: transgender usa politics)

Comments

Re: Beep()

[andrewducker]

"The ADA? What on earth could the ADA have to do with a PC making a beep? Well it turns out that at some point in the intervening 25 years, the Win32 Beep() was used for assistive technologies – in particular the sounds made when you enable the assistive technologies like StickyKeys were generated using the Beep() API. There are about 6 different assistive technology (AT) sounds built into windows, their implementation is plumbed fairly deep inside the win32k.sys driver.

But why does that matter? Well it turns out that many enterprises (both governments and corporations) have requirements that prevent them from purchasing equipment that lacks accessible technologies and that meant that you couldn’t sell computers that didn’t have beep hardware to those enterprises."

So what he's saying is that the assistive technologies needed sound to go with them - and that the standard method of them doing so was to call "Beep" as you could be assured that all PCs would produce a beeping sound when this happened.

Re: Beep()

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

That's exactly how I read it. Except that that's crazy. The obvious thing to do would have been to change Beep() so that it uses proper sound hardware if it's available, and fall back to the timer sound generator if no proper hardware is available.

What I'm basically saying is this: Beep() is an API. It should be abstract. There is no requirement that it be implemented in any particular way, only that it work.

So for the last 20 years, hardware manufacturers have been manufacturing PCs with something that looks like an 8254 in them, just to make a beeping sound when a Windows program calls Beep(), when it would have been far simpler to change the software implementation of Beep() to use the *real* sound system.

What I am basically saying is this: that is crazy. ;)

Re: Beep()

[andrewducker]

Not just when Windows calls Beep - also for POST.

And nobody ever got around to changing Beep, because it wasn't high priority.

I'm not sure when we transitioned to every motherboard having a sound card built in. 5 years ago? 10?