How to uninstall Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10.1

I’ve been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking for a number of years, and just last week got my hands on the latest incarnation, Version 11.

I decided to uninstall version 10.1 and start afresh, retraining the voice recognition learning engine to make allowance for a different headset and to take advantage of any new features.

But when I tried to uninstall version 1.1 it kept asking for an installation disk “1” that I knew didn’t exist anywhere on the planet, with the inevitable result:



Nothing that I tried, including a bit of fiddling with the Windows registry, enabled the product to be uninstalled.

So I did a little web searching, and on Nuance’s support site came across the answer, see How to completely uninstall Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10

Just in case that page disappears from the Nuance web site at some stage, I used the second method successfully, which is as follows:

Uninstall with the Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 "Remover Tool"
If uninstalling Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 from "Add or Remove Programs" and from the Product DVD fails, use the Remover Tool to completely uninstall Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10:
Note: Using the option below will not deactivate Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 or allow an additional installation to be activated.

1. Click Here to download the Remover Tool.
2. Save the "Dragon10.1Remover.exe" file to the Windows Desktop.
3. Back up any user profiles (if any exist).
4. Double click on the "Dragon10.1Remover.exe" file.
5. Follow the on-screen instructions.

Notes:

• The user must be logged into the machine with administrator rights before running this utility.
• When selecting a different location to re-install Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 after using the Remover Tool to uninstall it, the installation path reverts to the location of the original installation. To uninstall Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 and re-install to another install path, we recommend using the uninstall feature in "Add or Remove Programs".

And that’s all there was to it, thank goodness! I subsequently was able to install NaturallySpeaking Version 11 without any further problems.

Technorati Tags: Dragon NaturallySpeaking,Nuance Communications Inc,Version 10,Version 11,Installation,Uninstallation,Problem

Is it POSSible (or PROSSible) that the great FOSS debate is missing an important point?

David M. Williams (one of my fellow writers at iTWire) has just posted an opinion piece that got my grey matter going, see Free software isn't freeware: why Linux and FOSS have a higher standard

You’ll find some interesting, on the whole supportive, comments to David’s article here.

I thought that thee was an additional aspect of open source missing from his arguments, and missing also from just about every other thing I’ve read on the FOSS topic, including those by the arch-advocate Richard Stallman, so I added these comments on iTWire

You haven't quite covered all the bases regarding "free" and "gratis" and "non-gratis" and "open source" in my opinion.

Let's have a pseudo-hypothetical example. Apart from other gratis apps that I generously offer, suppose I have a non-gratis product "Fantastic App" -- gotta make a living somehow, so why not charge for at least one of my apps?

I've slaved away developing over many months, and keep coming out with minor enhancements (let's call these "releases') and less frequently major enhancements (let's call these "versions"). If you are willing to agree with the license and usage terms for FantasticApp and pay a license fee for any given version of it, then I let you have it together with all the source code to use however you like throughout your organization. All bug fixes and minor releases incur no extra fee, but there's an upgrade fee if you choose to upgrade to a newer major version.

Since you have all the source then surely FantasticApp is "open source" is it not? If I get run over by the proverbial Bourke Street bus (you probably don't know that we had double-decker buses in Bourke Street, Melbourne, some decades ago), there's no issue since you have all of the code.

But it's proprietary because the license states that you cannot share it with anybody outside your organization. Nobody forced you to purchase the license in the first place. You were free to try to get the same or a similar app elsewhere, presumably agreeing to license my app because it was the only one of its sort or the other were in some way unsuitable for your needs.

I would intend to demand payment from and/or sue any organization that obtained the source for FantasticApp without paying the appropriate license fee, or released to other organizations who hadn't paid up.

So this is a piece of non-gratis "proprietary open source software" (or "POSS") is it not? Or maybe it would be more accurately labeled "proprietary restricted open source software" (or "PROSS"). What's wrong with all that? Surely we aren't expected to develop apps like FantasticApp for no financial return if we want to make a living from them from at least some of our efforts, that seems absurd to me.

Richard Stallman, eat your heart out over this one!

And what are your opinions on my POSS/PROSS concept?

Technorati Tags: Software,Freeware,Open Source,FOSS,POSS,PROSS,Proprietary

An error was encountered while opening a window!

I've written previously about pathetically inane error messages that lurk in dark corners of otherwise good software, waiting to spring out at you when you least desire them.

Today's beauty is one that lives in the current latest release 7.0.2 of the IBM Lotus Notes client (imminently to be replaced by the brand new Notes 8 client based on the IBM Expeditor/Eclipse architecture).





This is all that you're told. No more, no less!

So, there was an error, was there? And one that was encountered while opening a window, was it? What a masterpiece of exposition! What design committee thought up that one?

If you get yourself into this predicament, you'll find that this artfully vague message will be regurgitated every time that you try to relaunch the Notes Client following the crashed session.

As it turns out, the solution is quite simple: open the Task Manager and cancel the ntaskldr.exe Notes task.

Would it not be easy to modify this error message to suggest such a remedy? No, no, of course not: let's leave it there to bamboozle even more users!

MESSAGE FOR ALL SOFTWARE DESIGNERS & DEVELOPERS:
Why not eliminate the stupidities in your old code, and not just plow ahead creating new code?

UPDATE:
There's more info about this situation in IBM support Technote 1224056 which states this "was addressed in Notes/Domino 6.5.6. It is reported as no longer occurring in the Notes/Domino 7 and 8 releases." ... I'm not too sure about that! Time will tell, eh?