Why Leopard's "Alex" sounds so good

[Sidnicious]

So I installed Leopard, let Time Machine and Spotlight sit overnight, and woke up to 0 bytes of free space.

My bad. I should've checked my space beforehand. So I fire up WhatSize and start looking around the system for stuff to delete or offload to my external. I find this, and just have to laugh a bit. Alex is larger than most Linux install disks:

$ du -hd 1 /System/Library/Speech/Voices/ | sort -r
702M	/System/Library/Speech/Voices/
669M	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Alex.SpeechVoice
1.6M	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Victoria.SpeechVoice
1.6M	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Bruce.SpeechVoice
1.5M	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Agnes.SpeechVoice
 52K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Hysterical.SpeechVoice
 48K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Bells.SpeechVoice
 32K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Deranged.SpeechVoice
 28M	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Vicki.SpeechVoice
 24K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Organ.SpeechVoice
 24K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Cellos.SpeechVoice
 20K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Bubbles.SpeechVoice
 20K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Boing.SpeechVoice
 20K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Bahh.SpeechVoice
 20K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Albert.SpeechVoice
 12K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Zarvox.SpeechVoice
 12K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Whisper.SpeechVoice
 12K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Trinoids.SpeechVoice
 12K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Ralph.SpeechVoice
 12K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Princess.SpeechVoice
 12K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Kathy.SpeechVoice
 12K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Junior.SpeechVoice
 12K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//GoodNews.SpeechVoice
 12K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//Fred.SpeechVoice
 12K	/System/Library/Speech/Voices//BadNews.SpeechVoice

 

[Mal]

LOL, the difference between Fred at 12k and Alex at 669MB is quite amusing.

jW

 

[stoid]

This is valuable information for institutions and individuals that have absolutely no need for text-to-speech on the machines, and need to trim the Mac OS X install as much as possible.