sudo and uac both contain a 'u'; coincidence?

May 1, 2007 under sudo, UAC, Vista, Windows

This is a pretty bold statement from Microsoft’s Peter Watson. He claims that other operating system developers should learn from Vista‘s UAC component and provide something similar. Hasn’t UNIX had the su command (and later sudo) for a long while? Hell, even Mac OS X and Linux distros like Ubuntu wrapped it in a nice GUI a few years/releases ago. Microsoft not only showed up late to this party, it brought an ugly date.

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coding the painful way for all to hear

February 22, 2007 under Programming, speech recognition, Vista, VoiceCode

Last summer, I posted about a cool open-source project from the National Research Council of Canada, known as Voice Code, that allows developers to code by talking. From the demos that I’ve watched, VoiceCode performs very well, and shows promise. However, Windows Vista includes speech recognition functionality, and doesn’t appear to be on par with VoiceCode in terms of recognition accuracy, as evidenced by this poor soul who attempted to create a simple Perl script with his voice.

It took that guy over ten minutes to “write” simple Perl code to read the contents of a file and print them to standard output! Now I know that it’s not completely fair to compare VoiceCode (aimed at software development tasks) to Vista’s speech recognition capabilities (aimed at general computer use and word processing and the like). But that script was not an example of advanced programming techniques and methodologies – there were no classes, functions, ADT definitions or elaborate syntax.

I guess sometimes, you don’t get what you pay for.

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vista blahs

January 30, 2007 under Vista, Windows

Windows Vista was released at midnight today. Woohoo?Microsoft Windows Vista logo

I played with Vista while it was in beta. I liked it and thought that Microsoft added a few nifty things. However, I was bummed that WinFS was dropped from the feature list. A few other planned features were canned as well so that Vista would ship on time. This didn’t bother me all that much. But within the past couple of days, a few facts give me cause for concern:

For my home computers, I think I’m done with Windows. I’ve given this some thought and I think I can do it with little transition pain. Now I won’t be replacing my PC hardware with Macs anytime soon, since I don’t have that kind of money…not yet, anyway. 😉 I think Ubuntu is well on its way to becoming the primary operating system on my home computers. I already use it in a virtual machine, so I’m comfortable with it. Compared to other Linux distros that I’ve used in the past, it’s by far the most usable. There really isn’t anything that I’d be missing.

Web Browser
I’ve been using Firefox on Windows for 3+ years and I’d continue to do so on Ubuntu.

Email
A dedicated email client is not something that I need since I use Gmail, which is browser-based.

Instant Messaging
Like Firefox, I’ve already been using the browser-based Meebo. And there is a Linux version of Skype.

Fun dynamic scripting languages
Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl are all available to Linux.

Word processor and spreadsheet
I mostly use Google Docs and Spreadsheets now, but OpenOffice does have a Linux version too.

Media and iPod sync-ing
Rhythmbox will do the trick.

For work and skill development, I’ll still need Visual Studio, SQL Server and IIS. That can be taken care of by creating a Windows virtual machine in VMWare Server.

Games would be the only drawback to going all-Linux all of the time. Mind you, I don’t play as many games as I used to. So if I ever start jonesin’ for some gaming, I could always create a small Windows XP partition and dual-boot. I think I’d rather have a Wii anyway.

As soon as a get a home storage solution, I think that’s when I’ll switch. I really can’t find any compelling reasons to keep running Windows.

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comments: 6 »