Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, sindi keesan wrote:

> I was not using Windows for anything else.  What do other people still
> need it for that linux cannot do?

Machine translation (Systran). There are languageA<->languageB
dictionaries for Linux, but no machine translators that can provide a
semblance of translation for discursive speech. WINE so far has not worked
with Systran. I'm not speaking of BL here, so pardon the digression. But
to speak of BL, one could use Altavista's/Babelfish's web translation
portal: but it seems to use java or something so the place where you enter
text won't display. Then, there's the problem of entering foreign
characters. Other occasions when I need to resort to Windows: my
university also has a printing system with which you can send print jobs
from any machine on the campus network (including from your personal
computer in your campus apt.) to central printers. The software it uses is
called Pharos, and it requires Windows. And not just *any* Windows. It has
to be Win2K or better (it's hard to believe that educational institutions
allow themselves to become marketing arms for M$ like this. And this
printing system is not the only place where this problem crops up: in
order to use the campus-wide wireless network, you must have Win2K or
better as well. A friend who was still using WinME got a wireless card and
tried to connect and was unable because he was using an "outdated"
version). Pharos uses ActiveX. I also would really like to have the option
of using speech-to-text software (like Dragon Naturally Speaking) since I
need to write long papers at times and typing can create a bottle-neck.
Ironically, IBM produced a very capable speech recognition package for
Linux. But they stopped development and no longer make it available for
download. Bootleg copies can still be gotten. So, if I want to have this
speech-to-text software and remain within legal/ethical boundaries, I
would have to use Windows. I wish this weren't the case. But for some
fields, like higher level studies in the humanities, Linux just doesn't
provide everything needed. Sad but true.

James