Father Xmas

/facepalm

Every tab in Chrome is sandboxed in it's own process. This way if one tab dies/locks up/goes on walkabout, it doesn't affect your other tabs unlike Firefox or IE. You can simply close the non-responding tab and everything is great. The downside is if you open a lot of tabs, you will end up using a lot of memory. See Tom's Hardware's semi-frequent performance comparisons of browsers to see what I'm talking about.

Yea, I got it once when I tried to play my SF Brute. As others have said, a simple logout/login fixed it.

I found classic Star Trek picture of her as well as her other cosplay pictures from last few SDCCs. Not that it was hard, someone else already did the heavy lifting.

But the OP's post specifically says it's merely a thread to collect info on drop rates. That's it.

If you aren't happy about the drop rate that's not a bug. However if the drop rate has suddenly shifted downwards in a patch after the new DA came out on live, changes from Beta doesn't count, then you could say it was a bug.

It's a slow Friday night.

Well google Google Glasses and watch the video. It's their first pass on AR. I'm sure Microsoft will soon follow with their own take on it.

If they aren't true then they aren't facts. And they didn't attack it, they stated their first hand experience with it or reiterating that fact it's the most negatively talked about Microsoft OS in the tech press since Vista. It looks nifty. So does the BMW radio and navigation system until you find out that changing radio stations is a 4 step process that takes your eyes off the road to do so. But it's nifty.

I've been using it since 1998, back when I had a Pentium 3 and 256MB of memory was a lot.

It's great for general dictation, lousy for desktop/app control unless it's being used with certain Microsoft apps that I don't use. It also requires training for individual users. And training isn't just the initial reading of a known example of text, correcting when it chooses the wrong word soon after it happens is a must to tune the model, which does break up the free flow of speech. Technical jargon is a problem as well as acronyms, well remembering that I have to say "spell I B M" every time I want to reference IBM. Even the current version is maybe 99.5% accurate which sounds great until you say 1 in every 200 words is wrong.

It's a phone, no real useable keyboard. Even in landscape mode the keyboard isn't all that friendly with someone with "fat fingers". As for Siri's other functionality, it's a crutch for those people who don't know how to do use features like the calendar but it's not like they made the standard way more difficult to use.

Note that Apple didn't include Siri on the new iPad, which has slightly faster hardware than the iPhone 4s but it can display a much larger keyboard for the fat fingered among us. It's voice input capability seems reasonably good for the 10 seconds I tried it in a noisy Best Buy but that function isn't universal across apps.

I don't text. I don't IM. I don't Twitter. If you have something important to tell me, call me. It's a phone. That's it's purpose. If you think it'll be inconvenient for me to take a phone call, like while I'm at work, than wait until lunchtime or after normal work hours. SMS is quite possibly the single most distracting piece of technology in the last 50 years. But lets not swerve this thread off onto yet another tangent.

Actually, my somewhat common first name (well common when I was born) violates the "i before e" rule. It annoys me when I see it misspelled because of slavish devotion to rules that aren't 100% correct. Exceptions are the bane for computer programmers.

It's because of this voice input to text will never be perfect, especially for a language like English which, as someone once put it, "... follows other languages into dark alleys, beats them up for their words and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." They may be able to push out the 9s a bit as computing power continues to accelerate but it'll never be 100% accurate.

Tell me about it. I use read back software so I can audibly proof my drafts in the office because I've found that if I'm typing versus dictating, I can leave out fragments of sentences that I wouldn't catch if I simply read it back to myself (I would end up unconsciously add back the parts of the sentence I left out).

My favorite class senior year in college was computer speech and image recognition. I think I still have the book in my closet. But back then, mid 80s, it required at least a minicomputer class machine to crunch the data and then with specialized front end audio hardware to massage the audio stream. I do keep tabs on what's current but there really hasn't been many revolutionary breakthroughs, its mainly just cheaper, more powerful hardware allowing it to become more mainstream.

Believe it or not, that was my yearbook quote in high school. Always liked the first law but everyone remembers the third and almost nobody remembers the second.

"The Warrior's bland acronym, MMI, obscures the true horror of this monstrosity. Its inventors promise a new era of genius, but meanwhile unscrupulous power brokers use its forcible installation to violate the sanctity of unwilling human minds. They are creating their own private army of demons."

All kidding aside, it's still very rudimentary. Like voice recognition, cheaper more powerful computer hardware makes it more available. And if you ever read any of the reviews of the Epoc Headset, most were not all that impressed at least with it as a gaming device. Cyberbrains ala Ghost in the Shell is still far away into the future.

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As interesting as this may be, it has nothing to do with this thread. You took this off the rails because of a passing comment that the tablet oriented UI of Windows 8 isn't right for a PC. And I'm someone who believes that 90% of home users could get by with just a tablet level device, and maybe a wireless keyboard if you are going to be writing a term paper or the next great novel.

There are people here that have been doing this since probably before you were born and we know what's coming next because it's been tried and failed before. This Christmas HP will release a whole series of All-in-one touch screen PCs running Windows 8, people will by them and within two weeks there will be a class action suit from a group whose are getting painful arm cramps using the new touch oriented features on their PCs.

Which goes back to my TV/Movie point, while Minority Report looks good waving your hands at a virtual screen in front of you, it's tiresome, it would have been more practical to have a touch table top.

Today's voice command systems work with a simple set of command/response interactions. Siri and the various car oriented voice interfaces are an example of this. But it still relies on the user to adapt to the syntax of the interface and not the other way around, just as Palm made handwriting input work by training the user to write in a certain way than develop a clever way to read everyone's handwriting, ala Newton.

Maybe. The manga/anime series Full Metal Alchemist approaches alchemy as a science even though the truth is stranger.

However a programmer may be able to break the fundamentals of magic down to the point where it could be compiled.