Dragon NaturallySpeaking is voice-recognition software that’s cutting-edge. It is not yet another speech-to-text application; it is high-performing as it exploits the entire power of a modern Pentium 3 (better or equivalents) machine and it involves a training phase where an individual’s voice is learned.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is now available for the Palm Tungsten. The recorded data will be synchronised with the desktop and then interpreted automatically. This makes a vision come true — the vision of composing E-mail by talking to a PDA. See the Web site for details.

Cited by: PalmAddict

here came a time when I stopped shutting down machines, let alone restarting them. The waiting is unnecessary and re-opening of programs is avoidable. Today’s computer architecture is sophisticated enough to deprive monitors from power and stop the rotation of hard-drives after a specified time-out. What’s more, modern programming languages, standards and fast-growing operating systems make memory leaks rare, while in fact, perhaps needless to mention, memory becomes cheaper.

My personal experience has shown that Windows XP is stable, but it slows down considerably after hours of work. Similarly, the Registry gets bloated after months of regular use. Linux (and branches like Mac OS X) suffers from none of these issues. I typically reboot after 50-100 hours of persistent work. Windows CE suffers from similar problems and needs to be reset quite often (provided it has not already crashed). My Palm gets reboot every 3 weeks or so.

The bottom line: if you tolerate system crashes or reboot too often, consider alternative platforms.

Fun stuff with transparent screens has recently hit the Web. Go view the full gallery.

This beats the hell out of the previous item, which briefly mentioned transparency in KDE.

Linux Desktop

Slashdot have spotted a demonstration of Luminocity [sic.] — an experimental OpenGL-intensive window manager for GNOME. For the hi-tech savvy, the site includes stunning videos of Luminocity in action.

An illustration of transparency in KDE

Sneak Peek at Microsoft’s Longhorn

For the curious, there are recent Longhorn screenshots at Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows.

A few hours ago I was listening to BBC Radio 1. I heard a conversation which made me smile:

Radio Host: “Here is the tie-breaker question: In the year 2000, how many people lived in Miami? Not the whole of Florida, just Miami.”
Caller: “Ummm… 42 million?”.
Radio Host: “Well, according to you, Miami is just a little smaller than England”.

A funny support enquiry from Samsung Electronics:

Caller: “Can you give me the telephone number for Jack?”
Operator: “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand who you are talking about”.
Caller: “On page 1, section 5, of the user guide it clearly states that I need to unplug the fax machine from the AC wall socket and telephone Jack before cleaning. Now, can you give me the number for Jack?”
Operator: “I think you mean the telephone point on the wall”.

Apple developed a mechanism which enables alignment of windows with respect to the ground. This is done simply by rotation of the windows based on sensor data. The idea was recently taken a step forward so that it allows interaction with programs and games, simply by movement of the (PowerBook) laptop.

Playing games by shifting CoG