Protecting Windows

Bart Silverstrim bsilver at chrononomicon.com
Thu Feb 9 07:05:18 PST 2006


On Feb 8, 2006, at 11:02 PM, Brian Astill wrote:

> Greetings, all.
> Can anyone help with this issue?
>
> Person with deteriorating vision has discovered Dragon
> Naturally Speaking which not only allows the construction of text
> from speech but can also speak from received text.  ie letter writing
> and email conversing etc become possible for the visually impaired.
>
> All of which is wonderful except - you guessed it - the %$$#@*&
> program runs on Windows 2000/XP only.  Why would anyone in their
> right mind NOT port a program as sensible as this to a SECURE OS?

Not being a wise-ass here, but...
1) discourage saying your passwords out loud?
2) Unix is traditionally a server operating system, not targeted to end 
users, so applications like Dragon Naturally Speaking isn't top 
priority?
3) Most applications in Linux/FBSD are created to "scratch an itch"; 
the reason people now face usability problems is because most apps are 
written by and for people who are technically minded and/or 
programmers.  I would guess that there aren't too many visually 
impaired programmers active in the field, or that the current crop of 
speech translators have trouble with translating programming language 
to text.
4) You can't port a program you don't have the source to.  Dragon 
sounds proprietary, and the algorithms they use for transforming sound 
to text are probably considered proprietary.  To make a "clone" would 
mean working from scratch.  We're lucky sound OUTPUT is getting to a 
level where it almost works among applications without a ton of 
fiddling...let alone getting input translated properly to text.

Those are just my ideas of why someone in their right mind wouldn't 
bother with the port off the top of my head.  If the visually impaired 
are a minority and there aren't many programmers in that minority, it 
may take a long time to scratch that itch unless you are willing to 
offer some kind of open-source bounty and pay for said program to be 
developed.  Windows programs are more often than not proprietary and 
profit driven as an incentive to get a product like Dragon to market.  
Linux/FBSD is driven by whims and itches of programmers and techies...



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