{"id":866,"date":"2004-03-19T08:29:31","date_gmt":"2004-03-19T12:29:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=866"},"modified":"2004-03-19T08:29:31","modified_gmt":"2004-03-19T12:29:31","slug":"dear-abbyy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=866","title":{"rendered":"Dear Abbyy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Software inefficiency can always outpace Moore’s Law.<\/span> — Jaron Lanier, quoted in Scott Rosenberg’s column today.<\/a> This is one reason why I don’t tend to buy software, and,when I do buy it, it never runs faster than the thing it replaces. I really, seriously, have never had a program that looks up names and addresses as fast and fusslessly as a DOS TSR<\/span> I used back in 1990, when collating the Best of the Independent<\/em> book on a Compaq laptop with a gigantic 20 MB hard disk.<\/p>\n\n

But the OCR <\/span>program I use occasionally, TextBridge Pro 98 (the fruit of an ancient blag when writing for the Mail<\/em>) has been getting slower and crankier with every improvement on the computer that runs it. So yesterday I tried a Russian program, Abbyy Finereader<\/a>. Given the choice I would always buy a Russian program over an American one, because it’s more likely to have been written to run well than to sell well. I didn’t really want it to do anything more than output its results to the clipboard, something Textbridge refuses to do. Finereader will do that; but it also recognises at about three times the speed and twice the accuracy. So I’ll buy it.<\/p>\n\n

I wonder if more software could be sold if it did the old job quicker, better, and with less fuss, rather than thinking up new jobs. I don’t suppose, though, that there’ll ever be a large enough sample of such programs to test the theory.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Software inefficiency can always outpace Moore’s Law. — Jaron Lanier, quoted in Scott Rosenberg’s column today. This is one reason why I don’t tend to buy software, and,when I do buy it, it never runs faster than the thing it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}