Text To Speech Goes In As A Tech Preview For Qt 5.8

[hansg]

And on an Amiga, if you yanked a removable media while an IO operation was underway it would pop up a notice politely demanding that you re-insert it so that it could finish the operation. How many of you have corrupted USB media devices (probably unknowingly due to an intermittent failure) on Linux systems?

True. Although in all fairness, it had two: there was "please insert volume xxx in any drive", but in case a write was absolutely necessary to avoid corrupting a disk, there was also "You ***MUST*** insert volume xxx in drive df0:!".

Corruption could still happen, of course, but the disk validator would just clean that up. Usually ;-)

Damn, I still miss assigns, ARexx, screens, sane file requesters (not the native ones), and so many other things... Sure, computers have come a long way, and I certainly enjoy the comforts of a modern OS, but a hell of a lot has been lost as well.

[AllLinux]

And on an Amiga, if you yanked a removable media while an IO operation was underway it would pop up a notice politely demanding that you re-insert it so that it could finish the operation. How many of you have corrupted USB media devices (probably unknowingly due to an intermittent failure) on Linux systems?

Will the Linux Kernel, or any desktop environment on Linux, perform reliable IO to a removable media? Nope. Is it important? Apparently not. Heck, we're only just starting to get somewhat reliable Audio on our desktops lol.

That was not guaranteed to recover from you pulling the plug on a half written sector. Same goes for any removable media, on any modern system.
If the OS was busy updating an important block and you eject the media, your device is messed up.
The only way to safely eject, is to ask the OS if it is done

[linuxgeex]

"Unix was written from the ground up to be stable" - We touted this for decades as a fundamental reason why Linux was better than GoldenArchesOS and LoseDoze, but what I am talking about here is a fundamental regression of stability from where we were in the 1980's with personal computers.

That was not guaranteed to recover from you pulling the plug on a half written sector. Same goes for any removable media, on any modern system.
If the OS was busy updating an important block and you eject the media, your device is messed up.
The only way to safely eject, is to ask the OS if it is done

And that's fine and dandy to expect in an Enterprise environment. But consumer electronics get wobbly wobbly connectors over time, media sockets such as for TF can get bumped, there's such a thing as mobile devices which have this little thing called vibration, etc etc. The operating system developers shouldn't be standing on their laurels saying "We have done The Right Thing (TM). Any use which doesn't suit our software is wrong." Because they have designed a storage layer which is like making a 100-storey skyscraper balanced by a matchstick in a forest full of woodpeckers, filesystem corruption is rampant in removable media, and not because __nothing__ can be done about it.

Thanks for playing.

[linuxgeex]

Did you know that most desktop environments have that little eject button ? It's here so that when you unplug your stick you will be sure that your data are where they should be. If you just yank stick don't be suprised.
Doesn't matter which OS you are using, though windows seems to mount USB sticks with synchronous write, progress bar on linux is quite useless.

And how was that relevant to what I said? - "How many of you have corrupted USB media devices (probably unknowingly due to an intermittent failure)"

I didn't say you SHOULD yank your media. Did you know that most users have seen those little eject buttons? Did you know that sometimes they forgot them, or tripped over their USB cord? Or the cord was slightly loose and a tiny nudge caused an intermittent contact that reset the interface and the OS never said a damn thing about it? Or the media took a nudge in its socket and again had intermittent contact? Did you know that with media auto-mounting, you can have corruption even though you've never made any effort to mount or write to the media? Did you know that interrupting mounting can corrupt a poorly designed filesystem? Did you know that most media devices have poorly designed filesystems on them?

Did you know that myself and several others probably found your response super thoughtful and helpful, in a special way, reserved for special people, in a special classroom?

[linuxgeex]

It's an abstraction layer, and the article clearly states that. It doesn't have its own speech quality. (And it's Qt, not QT.)

Exactly, and that's the kind of thing that should be mentioned when we have an article about a major FOSS project "Adding text to speech"

"Qt Speech is new to Qt 5.8 as their initial text-to-speech implementation with abstractions for different platform back-ends. So far this module is quite basic and the API appears to be very easy to interact with for Qt application developers.

The article states that Qt has an initial TTS implementation, with abstractions for different platform back-ends. So is that a new TTS implementation? No. It's initial support for 3rd party TTS.

[Zoll]

I was actually researching TTS solutions for my cross-platform KDE application and found it cumbersome to implement different solution for each platform, so this should be handy once it is stable. It is the exact same problem that was resolved by Qt Positioning module with different backends/plugins on different OSes.