Linux alternative

users
#1

Hi Jack,

You’re most welcome.

I think many Windows users are married to old verbiage they heard
years ago (some unfounded) about how you’ll need to learn to code or
have to learn language like the old DOS to make Linux work and so
propelled by fear they remain with Windows.

I’m looking forward to all the good work and advancement Eric (on this
list) makes with his foray into voice recognition but can you or Gary
on this list or others recommend any Linux-based voice recognition?

Nuance has dragged their heels in so many ways including developing
voice recognition for more than one voice at a time so I don’t feel
like I can count on them to offer a Linux-based version by 2020 when
MS is supposed to end W7 support.

Thanks for disabusing readers of their “Linux-fear” in your article
and for your and others voice recognition recommendations.

Charles.

#2

I started with computers when punch-cards were still common and computers smaller than a refrigerator was not.

I wished I still remembered all the programming skills I have back then [but that ended with the strokes]. Users are pampered with a GUI and other "modern" items on their really small sized systems, compared to what I started working with. You try writing a general ledger accounting system from scratch in COBOL and then tell me that people do not have it so easy now. Well, at least if you do not have to do the GUI programming from scratch instead of using templates, or needing to do AI work withing a game environment. But the basic business stuff was much harder to produce back then when colored printing, or even graphical printing, from a low to middle environment business computer was not available at all. I was programming computers for over a decade before I ever saw a colored printer, let alone afford one.

#3

My son is a technical illiterate and one time, when I had got tired of
rescuing his scsrewed-up (often virus-infected) Windows box, I gave him
Ubuntu. He only uses his computer to surf to his webmail and to
facebook. Nonetheless, he came to me after a week and asked me to
re-install Windows as he 'didn't understand how to use linux'. So now I
have an iso of his disk which I reinstall as necessary. There's never
anything on the actual disk other than the operating system.

James

#4

Tim,

agree with you there- Cobol was considered e great modern productivity improvement. I started in assembly. Getting a system running by inserting the bootstrapper papertape on the first punched holes, ste the start address through phisical switches and press the start butten. Only after the bootstrapper was loaded the rest of the program could be loaded....

We came a long way since then, but I agree that all the new stuff around now is depriving young people from basic understanding that a computer doesn't know anything, and is not capable of doing anything by itself.

Rob.

#5

On my first computer, I had to use the front toggle several bytes into
memory, before there was anything to run. I also worked on some Data
General Nova computers which had the boot loader option. I also worked
on a PDP-8i, where I had to toggle in the "RIM loader" before it could boot.

#6

No matter how far computers have come, they still cannot count higher than one.
Blessings, Joe