I will follow up the other two mentions of the Peace Corps or similar outfits with a plug for the Geek Corps.
I haven't done it yet, but I am interested in doing it sometime perhaps a few years from now. The stipend is minimal, but you will get to see a part of the world you normally wouldn't.
It will give you an appreciation for the opportunities you have here in this country. You will have a much better perspective on the world and it will make you a better person for it. You will suddenly stop caring so much about having the latest video game system and start volunteering your time and donating to charities. The words "digital divide" take on a whole new meaning...
The RULE Project provides a simple installer using Bash scripts. It is highly modifiable. It uses very little RAM, which allows it to fulfill its primary purpose, that being to enable the most recent Red Hat Linux distributions to be installed on low-end hardware. They call their lean 'n' mean installer Slinky.
It is currently under active development and probably could still use some usability improvements, but it is a fully-functional installer with minimal overhead.
I did a summer research project implementing this kind of a system using a neural network. The professor with whom I worked had patents on the system he had developed with one of his Masters students back in 1990/91. They are published. But, of course, the patent is for the *implementation* of the idea, not the idea itself. The idea has, as many have thankfully testified, been around since keyboards.
My work was to improve the results using a different neural network. I later used this work as the basis for my thesis. I didn't quite achieve the results I was hoping for, but my test samples were small. I am also published.
My research was purely academic. I distributed the source code to my implementation. I used an open-source implementation of an ART2 neural network. So, my entire project can be picked up where I left off and continued.
Your affinity for patents is rather silly at this stage of the game and you probably wasted a lot of money on those patents. Your implementation sounds rather simplistic, as well. In my extensive literature survey, statistical methods *always* lagged neural networks in their results. If you want to see my literature survey, it is in the IJCIA:
(I know, you would have to pay. Use this info to find it at a library.)
Oh yeah, I also implemented it in Java for my senior project and got lousy results because you can't get millisecond timing accuracy from that technology. The other implementation is in Tcl/Tk.
Finally, to address all the brilliant observations like "what if you hurt your hand?" or "what about logging/network attacks?". Yes, obviously this has limited application. In fact, my senior project combined this approach with Java iButtons. And yes, there will always have to be a backup authentication method, with a human involved, OR this is stealth authentication, allowing any typing style to get through, but triggering a warning if it doesn't match.
Replacement installers that put the latest Red Hat distributions on older systems (~Pentium w/ 32MB RAM). It installs light-weight X-Server, called TinyX (formerly kdrive) and desktop.
See their software database for some applications with low resource requirements.
I did a presentation on IBM's ViaVoice software for a Linux event a couple of years ago. I'm not sure what the current availability is of this offering, but at the time it was rather good.
IIRC, the training was very short, but it would require help from a sighted person (reading text and adjusting microphone sensitivity). It's all Java and it runs on Linux. If he just wants to enter text, it's okay. It comes with its own editor that can do simple markup and save to RTF format. It required a fairly beefy computer for the times (I think 256MB of RAM and a 500MHz processor) but that type of hardware is more affordable now. I remember it being smart enough to use context in its recognition (e.g. "the nose knows").
PS: I was struck by one of the earlier comments that stated that your friend should learn to touch-type. I'd be suprised if your friend doesn't already know how to touch type. It would seem to be the more efficient and accurate way of communicating with a computer. Forget mice... I hate mice! I myself use the keyboard whenever I can and I'm sighted. However, if you were using your hands to *read* and you wanted to dictate while scanning some braille, the need for voice recognition becomes manifest.
I can absolutely understand the urge to archive documents in a simple, open, searchable format. I can also understand wanting to preserve basic formatting. But there's no need to stick entirely to plain old ASCII. Yes, you'll be able to read it on any system for the conceivable future, but you're missing out on a lot of benefit which can be gained from adding a small amount of complexity.
RTF is what I'd recommend. It's an open format, like PDF. Word supports RTF very well and other posters have mentioned automated, third-party apps which can convert all of your Word files into RTFs. Have you ever opened an RTF document in 'vi' or (god forbid) Notepad? It's all there in plain ASCII text. It's just yet another mark-up convention (HTML might do just as well).
My only reservation about going all RTF is that it may actually retain *too much* detail (such as embedded images and fancy fonts). Now, if you aren't opposed to that, then RTF is definitely for you. But, if you really just want plain old ASCII, I'd recommend listening to the other posters who mentioned using both ASCII text and PDF/PostScript or using a multi-step conversion process such as Word to HTML to ASCII text (although I've found Word's HTML export to be lacking).
Unique Systems, Inc. has a product called ThinSoft Accounting. It's a native UNIX/Linux modular accounting package written in Informix-4GL. According to their website, "ThinSoft is now free and in the process of being converted to OpenSource. It will be the first Enterprise Accounting System in the world that is OpenSource."
It currently relies on some commercial products, but that fact that the accounting package itself will be Open Source is a big thing.
The people at USI will customize the product for you. You will wind up spending less than half what you'd spend buying a comparable commercial solution, though.
To address your primary concern, ThinSoft has a long history and is extremely stable and reliable.
Slashdot Mirror
That would depend on the relative sizes of the cat and the toast. If you had a very small cat and a very large piece of toast... :-)
I haven't done it yet, but I am interested in doing it sometime perhaps a few years from now. The stipend is minimal, but you will get to see a part of the world you normally wouldn't.
It will give you an appreciation for the opportunities you have here in this country. You will have a much better perspective on the world and it will make you a better person for it. You will suddenly stop caring so much about having the latest video game system and start volunteering your time and donating to charities. The words "digital divide" take on a whole new meaning...
The RULE Project provides a simple installer using Bash scripts. It is highly modifiable. It uses very little RAM, which allows it to fulfill its primary purpose, that being to enable the most recent Red Hat Linux distributions to be installed on low-end hardware. They call their lean 'n' mean installer Slinky. It is currently under active development and probably could still use some usability improvements, but it is a fully-functional installer with minimal overhead.
I did a summer research project implementing this kind of a system using a neural network. The professor with whom I worked had patents on the system he had developed with one of his Masters students back in 1990/91. They are published. But, of course, the patent is for the *implementation* of the idea, not the idea itself. The idea has, as many have thankfully testified, been around since keyboards.
8 02 00052X.html
My work was to improve the results using a different neural network. I later used this work as the basis for my thesis. I didn't quite achieve the results I was hoping for, but my test samples were small. I am also published.
My research was purely academic. I distributed the source code to my implementation. I used an open-source implementation of an ART2 neural network. So, my entire project can be picked up where I left off and continued.
Your affinity for patents is rather silly at this stage of the game and you probably wasted a lot of money on those patents. Your implementation sounds rather simplistic, as well. In my extensive literature survey, statistical methods *always* lagged neural networks in their results. If you want to see my literature survey, it is in the IJCIA:
http://www.worldscinet.com/157/02/0202/S1469026
(I know, you would have to pay. Use this info to find it at a library.)
Oh yeah, I also implemented it in Java for my senior project and got lousy results because you can't get millisecond timing accuracy from that technology. The other implementation is in Tcl/Tk.
Finally, to address all the brilliant observations like "what if you hurt your hand?" or "what about logging/network attacks?". Yes, obviously this has limited application. In fact, my senior project combined this approach with Java iButtons. And yes, there will always have to be a backup authentication method, with a human involved, OR this is stealth authentication, allowing any typing style to get through, but triggering a warning if it doesn't match.
Jason
Replacement installers that put the latest Red Hat distributions on older systems (~Pentium w/ 32MB RAM). It installs light-weight X-Server, called TinyX (formerly kdrive) and desktop.
See their software database for some applications with low resource requirements.
I did a presentation on IBM's ViaVoice software for a Linux event a couple of years ago. I'm not sure what the current availability is of this offering, but at the time it was rather good.
IIRC, the training was very short, but it would require help from a sighted person (reading text and adjusting microphone sensitivity). It's all Java and it runs on Linux. If he just wants to enter text, it's okay. It comes with its own editor that can do simple markup and save to RTF format. It required a fairly beefy computer for the times (I think 256MB of RAM and a 500MHz processor) but that type of hardware is more affordable now. I remember it being smart enough to use context in its recognition (e.g. "the nose knows").
PS: I was struck by one of the earlier comments that stated that your friend should learn to touch-type. I'd be suprised if your friend doesn't already know how to touch type. It would seem to be the more efficient and accurate way of communicating with a computer. Forget mice... I hate mice! I myself use the keyboard whenever I can and I'm sighted. However, if you were using your hands to *read* and you wanted to dictate while scanning some braille, the need for voice recognition becomes manifest.
I can absolutely understand the urge to archive documents in a simple, open, searchable format. I can also understand wanting to preserve basic formatting. But there's no need to stick entirely to plain old ASCII. Yes, you'll be able to read it on any system for the conceivable future, but you're missing out on a lot of benefit which can be gained from adding a small amount of complexity.
RTF is what I'd recommend. It's an open format, like PDF. Word supports RTF very well and other posters have mentioned automated, third-party apps which can convert all of your Word files into RTFs. Have you ever opened an RTF document in 'vi' or (god forbid) Notepad? It's all there in plain ASCII text. It's just yet another mark-up convention (HTML might do just as well).
My only reservation about going all RTF is that it may actually retain *too much* detail (such as embedded images and fancy fonts). Now, if you aren't opposed to that, then RTF is definitely for you. But, if you really just want plain old ASCII, I'd recommend listening to the other posters who mentioned using both ASCII text and PDF/PostScript or using a multi-step conversion process such as Word to HTML to ASCII text (although I've found Word's HTML export to be lacking).
Good luck!
Jason
Unique Systems, Inc. has a product called ThinSoft Accounting. It's a native UNIX/Linux modular accounting package written in Informix-4GL. According to their website, "ThinSoft is now free and in the process of being converted to OpenSource. It will be the first Enterprise Accounting System in the world that is OpenSource."
It currently relies on some commercial products, but that fact that the accounting package itself will be Open Source is a big thing.
The people at USI will customize the product for you. You will wind up spending less than half what you'd spend buying a comparable commercial solution, though.
To address your primary concern, ThinSoft has a long history and is extremely stable and reliable.