I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave

I was looking around at screen reader products to get a feel for what they are like.

Image mocking the Dolphin Software site I made the mistake of downloading Hal™ from Dolphin Software (the lady holding glasses is such a generic stock image I recognized it without my contacts in. The blue link on top of the blue dolphin is nice.)

Did I learn nothing from 2001? The name should have warned me off, but I waded right into the artificial stupidity.

First off, the Hal™ software has a 30 minute demo period. Not 30 days, 30 minutes. Apparently this is about the same as JAWS, the leader in the field.

So I tried to change the settings and the best I could get is 1024x768 with 16 bit colors. I shrugged, uninstalled all three packages the HAL demo install, and rebooted.

The 16 bit setting was still the best I could get! You understand I've been doing 32 bit for a month now (with 64 Meg card my brother, a bleeding-edge gamer, no longer found adequate.)

For those of you wondering what bits are, I have a custom background with lots of swirling Jovian clouds. 16 bit color makes it look grainy and nasty. 24 or 32 bit means nice and smooth full color mode.

Every time I tried to use any 32 bit mode, it snaps back to 640x480, at 256 colors no less. Unbelievable! Finally, I re-installed my video drivers and that solved the problem.

Talk about anti-social software! There is an expression among hikers and cavers: Leave it as you found it. This is what an uninstall must do.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Saturday, December 21, 2002 (Link)

Comments

Posted by Chad Lundgren Monday, December 23, 2002 at 05:52 PM

Lucky folks may have got to see a reference to something called "Ham" software in an early version of this posting.

Ah, the joys of over-zealous spell check!

Posted by lundgren Monday, December 23, 2002 at 11:18 PM

I thought that was pretty funny till I saw the price of this product,just sad. While reading a book about crappy software development I found a saying that sumed it all up. Went something like this. If McDonalds was like todays software development companies 1 out of 5 Hambergers would have salmonella, and we would all go back for more.

ps (and OT)
Im sure most people that use dictionary.com as a spell checker when they type beutifull in the search were trying to spell
"bad block" "bad blood" "batfowl" "beatable" before beautiful! :/
I certainly was ;P
pps I still like dictionary.com.