The dawning of the Windows era

Recently the RSI stress in my right hand is becoming too much to bear. I needed to find a way to reduce the stress on my hands so I went to pick up Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The idea is, for me to use voice recognition to do regular English writing, such as e-mails, blogs, and other non-coding writing.

Since trading NaturallySpeaking is a Windows only product, and the open source speech recognition tools are not nearly mature enough, this is meant that I've had to officially convert one of my machines to Windows. I think Dragon NaturallySpeaking can be made to work in wine, but when it comes to something as serious as my health I'd rather just bite the bullet, and exchange OS preference for physical comfort.

I purchased a Compaq Mini 10 inch laptop, with Windows XP installed, so that I can take it into a quiet room in order to dictate. The first thing I did with the laptop is remove all the preinstalled software that came with the laptop, and installed from source alternatives like Firefox, OpenOffice, VideoLAN, and ClamAV.

So far using Dragon NaturallySpeaking has been as smooth as silk, the error rate is extremely low, and if there is a mistake it's usually because I slurred my speech. In fact this whole blog entry has been dictated through Dragon NaturallySpeaking; in far less time and far more comfort than had I had to type it out. The only adaptation being having to think about what you say before you speak it,and make sure you enunciate clearly. it also includes a startlingly large dictionary with plenty of technical terms included such as Windows, Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice; all dictated directly without need for correction.

If there is one drawback, it's that writing become so easy, there is a tendency to carry on far too long. :)

Here's hoping someday open source speech dictation becomes as good as this.

Glenn Beck's "Common Sense" in all it's glory

Since amazon removed this scathing criticism of the book, I'll repost it for posterity. It'd be a shame to let something this good go to waste.

647 of 678 people found the following review helpful: Don't Buy this Book - It's a Sham, August 10, 2009 By M. Mazenko

Well, I just finished Glenn Beck's "Common Sense," which, according to Beck, was "Inspired by Thomas Paine." Beck has clearly never truly read Thomas Paine and knows very little about him, his history, or his beliefs. For many readers, pages one to seven seem to make a lot of sense. There are some general and specific criticisms about government spending and corruption in Congress I agree with. Who wouldn't? But Beck's attempt to connect his neo-conservative positions with Founding Father Thomas Paine is shockingly ignorant of both Paine and American history.

Beck uses this book - and Paine's name - to criticize "Progressivism," blaming it for much of what ails the country. Sadly, this is a complete distortion of Paine's legacy. While the extent of most Americans' knowledge of Paine is "he wrote Common Sense, I teach his work in class every year. I use "The Crisis" and selections from "The Rights of Man" and "Age of Reason." If you want to understand Paine and his vision for America, you should read them. Beck doesn't understand Paine, but he does want to use the credibility of "The Founding Fathers" to promote an anti-government message.

Far from opposing "progressivism," Thomas Paine is one of the original "Progressives," though at the time he was called a radical for his liberal views. He is commonly associated with the origins of American liberalism. "Common Sense" was one small piece of his work - it was a pamphlet simply designed to encourage revolution against Britain. Paine later clearly outlined his vision of what he thought American government should look like. This is where Beck falls off the apple cart.

Beck uses this book to openly criticize progressive taxation, public education, social security, and "the progressive agenda." But readers should know something - Thomas Paine was one of the earliest advocates of progressive taxation, even drawing up tables and rates.

He was also the first proponent of the estate tax. And in Agrarian Justice he proposed a democratic ideal to combat poverty and income inequality by taxing the wealthy to give jobs and "grants" to young people. He also proposed using this system to provide government-sponsored pensions for the elderly. Historians cite Paine's Agrarian Justice as the earliest call for a national old-age pension - ie. Social Security. He wanted to tax the rich and give money to the poor.

He joined Thomas Jefferson in strongly advocating universal tax-supported public education, believing it was necessary to promote an educated electorate and was a necessary way to combat poverty. Paine also sought a federally guaranteed minimum wage, and long before Woodrow Wilson, Paine urged the establishment of, and US participation in, global organizations to help solve international problems and avoid wars.

Yet, this is all lost on Glenn Beck.

Beck criticizes Progressives for leading the United States away from its original purpose. He even goes as far as chastising Teddy Roosevelt. That's pretty bold for a guy whose only contribution to the United States has been as an entertainer. Has Glenn Beck completely forgotten "The Gilded Age"? While Beck, for whatever reason, is disturbed by progressive ideals, he fails to concede the un-democratic conditions that led to the desire of Americans for the rise of progressive reforms.

In fact, if you look at American history from 1776 to 1900 and from 1900 to present, you will see that Beck is right in that progressives shaped America into the country that it is. It's one with a thriving middle class, reasonably safe food and water, no child labor, forty hour workweeks, etc. If Beck wants to dismiss Progressives and return to life under President McKinley or Harding with robber barons running the economy and the atrocious work conditions chronicled by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, he's crazy. Beck has never known what it would be like to live in an America not guided by the leadership of progressives. Instead, he lives comfortably in a nation defined by liberal and progressive policies, and then audaciously challenges the very notion of the peaceful prosperity they provide.

Beck ironically praises "our political leaders" that could inspire us to "defeat Nazism and fascism," and then goes on to criticize that leader - FDR - as helping destroy the country. Beck doesn't even concede that the United States would never have been able to wage WWII or build the Atomic Bomb or put a man on the moon or wage and win the Cold War if it weren't for the large-scale ability of the federal government to raise revenue, mainly through progressive taxation. He reviews the original foundation of the United States government in the Articles of Confederation, acknowledging that it failed because it was too weak, and then heaps his praise on the Constitution. However, he doesn't concede that the significant difference in power given to the federal government in the Constitution was the power to levy taxes. Even conservative Edmund Burke knew that "the revenue of the state is the state." Thus, weak revenue gathering equals weak government. And a weak federal government would never have been able to respond to two World Wars, the Cold War, and two Iraq wars.

Beck goes on to criticize Hillary Clinton and the public education system for "suggesting the community has a vested interest in what each child is taught." Who doesn't believe that? He offers no alternative proposals for how education should be carried out. Though I hardly believe he is proposing the end of public education. That would be so un-Jeffersonian, another Founding Father.

On page 99, Beck shifts from a scathing criticism of public education to promote God and religion in public life. This is completely disingenuous in a book "inspired by Thomas Paine." Paine was a deist who vigorously opposed Christianity or any organized religion. He often called himself an atheist. Paine was very anti-Christianity. He vehemently opposed the government supporting religion in any way. In fact, in his later life, he was practically exiled from the country because of his criticism of religion in America.

A few other criticisms:

On page 61, Beck paraphrases Barry Goldwater's quote, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have," and doesn't even give the original mind credit.

On page 17, Beck paraphrases the well-known "You can't save the poor by destroying the rich" quote from Reverend William J. H. Boetcke and again doesn't give credit. Historians and English teachers call this plagiarism.

Finally, Beck writes a mere 111 pages, and then re-prints all of Paine's "Common Sense" which is in the public domain - and he charges $12.00 for the book. What a sham. I'm glad I checked it out of the library, but I hate that my library spent taxpayer funds on it. They should have waited until it was in the bargain bin for $.99

That's why Beck is disingenuous. He is a hack, and while I occasionally enjoyed some of his earlier work - I've read all three of his books - I am sadly disappointed in this mis-use of one of America's Founding Fathers. Beck says Americans do not know their history, but he is one of them, and with this book he is counting on their ignorance. Ultimately, he is

From what I know of American history, Thomas Paine would have been appalled by Beck associating their two ideologies, and he would have bitch-slapped Beck. And Beck would have deserved it.

Moblin 2.0 Beta Impressions

• Boot is insanely quick. BIOS appears to take longer to come up.
• Alpha software, not Beta. Crashes a lot. Functionality doesn't consistently work.
• Reworked UI hints at amazing amount of promise. So many interesting new possibilities. So many of which are yet unrealized.
• Pop-up activity menu: central means of task management. Saves a lot of screen real estate compared to windows/GNOME task bars. Can pop up unexpectedly when interacting with menus of your individual tasks. Not a lot of room for growth.
  
• MyZone: aggregates what you've been doing with the netbook recently. Kind of like a local facebook feed page. Privacy concerns: don't surf porn unless you want a thumbnail of the site in question on the first page you see after boot.

• Status: sets your presence info on IM and any web services. Interesting, but is this really a top-level task?

• People: add IM accounts and display their presence status. Can't IM directly from this screen. Doesn't feel finished design-wise.

• Internet: shows thumbnails of recently visited websites, and allows searching for or directly opening new sites. Nice and simple UI for the built-in WebKit-based browser.

• Media: searches and plays local video, sound, and image files. Nice and simple UI for known libraries, but missing features for importing new media or complex library management. No MP3 or other "non-free" codecs (see previous bog).

• Pasteboard: a simple copy-n-paste UI? I think it's a shame that no previous OS had a clipboard management UI, but at this point we really need this as a top-level task? If it was integrated with pastebin.com however, it might be a different story.

• Applications: simple application finder. Non-Moblin apps, like Firefox and Terminal; and GNOME settings here. I changed my CAPS LOCK to a Ctrl key. :)

• Zones: Moblin concept for window management. Seems like each application gets it's own virtual desktop. Interesting idea given such limited screen real estate, but the execution doesn't feel very comfortable.

• Applets: one for screen/power, sound, and wireless. Wireless applet doesn't show signal strength.
• Calender: Seems to be local, underpowered thingy. It's 2009 FFS, if you can't integrate with a web-based calender, don't bother! Very very unimpressed, as calender is integrated with MyZone, which could have made it a very smart feature.

• Web Services: only integrates with twitter and last.fm, and as I don't use those, hard to say what this does. No Facebook integration is very disappointing.

• Web browser: flash built in. Simple and fast. UI similar to Safari. Opening links in tabs doesn't seem to work yet, and entering URLs manually works spottily, making it basically unusable for serious work. Did this blog in it, so it's just a matter of time before bugs are cleaned out.

• Media player: as expected clutter UI really shines here. Lots of thumbnails and animated progressions. Lacks complex importing such as from digital camera.

• Email: appeared to understand my gmail account well enough to set up IMAP for it, but wasn't actually able to show me any of my emails.
  

Conclusions

• This is Alpha software. Lots of basic functionality is missing or spotty. Lots of foundational work yet needed. UI specifically needs much testing, as the technology under the surface is mostly proven.
• Clearly shows the results of such an ambitious effort to redesign and rewrite so much of the basic desktop software stack. I just hope the team has the balls to continue forward, and not let it die because of the tough road it has chosen, because there is *so* much potential to do something truly new and make a substatial improvement over what is available today.
  
• As a *netbook* OS, one hopes for much better integration with existing web APIs. Specifically neither Google nor Facebook have any integration what so ever. Specifically I'd like to have the calendar and email applications handle web calendars and email as the primary use case.