Re: [linux-audio-dev] EVO status...was: (open-source like hardware)

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Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] EVO status...was: (open-source like hardware)
From: Richard A. Smith (rsmith_AT_bitworks.com)
Date: Tue Jan 15 2002 - 22:59:59 EET


On Tue, 15 Jan 2002 13:54:40 -0500, Paul Davis wrote:

>>Well being one of those people I guess I should speak up and debunk
>>the nasty rumor that I have "vanished off the face of the earth"
>>before it spreads. I'm just happen to be in lurker mode now.
>
>sorry for seeding misinformation.
>

No worries. I can see where you would get the idea though. From an
onlookers viewpoint the project does seem to have vanished.

>>I have also been in contacted by Nemesis and they have indicated that
>>if I were to do anything that infringes on thier patent(s) they
>>_WILL_ litigate. My initial inquiries with a patent attorney
>>indicates that a typical patent fight runs about a Million dollars.
>>A little more than I can afford currently.
>
>i wonder what's going on with steinberg. halion clearly uses the same
>technology; i seem to recall a story on harmony central about a
>lawsuit, or maybe it was in sound on sound. not sure though.
>

Hmm.. Dunno. I have to look into this some more. Maybe they are
paying a royality?

>this is definitely a problem. let me make two suggestions.
>
> 1) i will try to arrange a time to talk to fairly good
> friend of mine who is a patent attorney, and see if i can
> flush out the options a little more.

Excellent. Thanks for your help.

> 2) i can see no reason not to write EVO so that it doesn't
> explicitly do anything like the patent's claim. this can
> be done very easily by the most obvious (yet inapplicable
> prior art): use the kernel's own disk caching.

That would be good. However, Benno lives in Italy where he in
unencumbered by US software patent balony. And its his intentions to
write his sampler code in such a way as to provide the best
performance regardless of US patents. Which IMHO is probally the
best policy for him. (At least unless Italy decides to honor software
patents) I imagine that leaving the stream buffer management to the
OS involve a lot of code rework from his base. I haven't dug into
his code too deep so I don't really know. Maybe it won't. In either
case it will involve duplicate effort.
 

> WRT the proto GUI Work....

>the problem with demos like this is that represent only a tiny
>fraction of the real work, and once the working version is
>operational, many changes typically become necessary from testing.
>writing complex GUIs like this is a huge amount of work, and
>prototyping screen transitions is a tiny part of that in my experience.
>

Amen brother. Your preaching to the choir here. I do GUI stuff at
the day job and I know exactly what you mean. But, I'm a coder and
not a UI designer. Having someone else design the UI and present to
me how they want it to work is so much better than a nebulus idea of
what they want. Mike B. has lots of experience with lots of
different packages and what seemed to me to be some really good ideas
on a UI.

If you tell me straight up I want this screen to to this, with these
options, I can consume raw materials, (pizza & caffiene) crunch away,
and kick out code which does just that. Ask me to design you a UI
and things get messy.

I'm good at code. I suck at dreaming up UIs. Having a clear target
"template" even if it is just pictures, is a large first step at not
creating a monster.

So far Python is awesome. It's such a wondful thing to not have to
deal with memory mangement issues. And the built in list/tupil data
types are really a time saver. I'm still pretty green on python code
but I think once I got going I could really start rocking. (Assuming
I actually carve out the time to work on it)

>>I would like to code up a proto of the interface though. I was
>>planning on trying to do it with python and something like wxPython.
>>Mostly because Python is my new favorite language and I need a good
>>graphics project to work on.
>
>any chance you'd consider using pyGTK and python?

Sure. Although I'm partial to the cross-platform ability of Tkinter
and wxWindows. As proficency in those frameworks would help me a lot
with my day job which involves code running on both MS and linux.
Tkinter has served me well so far but I really don't like the look of
the non-native widget set with Tkinter.

Do you have a specific reason for wanting pyGTK over wxWindows?
  

--
Richard A. Smith                         Bitworks, Inc.               
rsmith_AT_bitworks.com               501.846.5777 x204                        
Sr. Design Engineer        http://www.bitworks.com   


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