Many motherboards have a chip for a back-up BIOS. I wish we could write some code for speech that we could force to reside there, thus giving up our back-up BIOS, but allowing us to have some speech output, maybe to the PC speaker, or piped through a port. Glenn ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gregory Nowak" <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Thursday, October 12, 2006 2:15 AM Subject: Re: ancient speech synthesizers -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thu, Oct 12, 2006 at 07:21:04PM +1300, Marcel Oats wrote: > The other think we could > think about, are why companies such as Asus have not made a piece of > windows > software that is able to read the bios parameter block on their > boards, and allow the user to change them, in a nice accessible > interface. Why limit it to Asus, why not ask the same thing of all companies producing motherboards and bios code? Actually, I think that if AMI and Award were to include it in the base bios, the mb companies probably wouldn't pull it out. \as for the why, I'm willing to bet that it's because they don't care, because they think the RND would be too expensive, and probably because these companies think the market for something like this is too small. Granted, something like this wouldn't probably cost too much to develop. While we're discussing things to think about, if such a utility were developed, it would be nice to find it on the CD that comes with the mb, instead of having to pay for yet another program, because you have a disability, and most other people don't. Oh one more thing, let's not limit it to windows, arguably, I think such a utility would be easier to program as a gnu/linux text-based application, though since I haven't done hardware driver programming under gnu/linux, I could be wrong in my estimate of the difficulty level. Greg - -- web site: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org gpg public key: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org/pubkey.asc skype: gregn1 (authorization required, add me to your contacts list first) - -- Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager at EU.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFFLeuP7s9z/XlyUyARAjVAAKCASW/PEucGdZpscORSn3OW9mTMiQCgtvJs IUjw10Vyr+pgVaPUAbQculk= =hfcK -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup at braille.uwo.ca http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
