i suspect you had a large number of US-based calls. nuance is an american company and their algorithm is highly tuned to the accents found there.

from my own unscientific experiements, the success rate is 0% over about 100 phrases. some got close but most were so wildly off i was wondering how the hell is could even get there. some with potentially damaging consequences (calling international numbers, former bosses, and other business acquaintances) with no way to cancel. it's also extremely inconsistent, even when spelling the same names a few times. keep in mind this is with a limited vocabulary (ie, contacts names). on free text it's even worse

has any non-us speaker actually used a nuance product (or any other voice recognition engine)?

none of them deal with even the slightest accent. hell they can't even get me the proper number when asking for a a contact on my phone, nuance can't even understand when i say "call" and often try to do a search on some garbled text

how they ever expect to be trusted for critical financial stuff is beyond me

OP's point is that instead of paying 5$ for 6 channels, of which you only watch 2, you'll be paying 4$ for each of the two channels you actually want. (hint: total 8$)

"And the answer here is that women generally make much better managers than men"

that's another stereotype that's patently false
i've had plenty of more than useless female manager
i've also had really bad men manager
most studies never account for actual skill level when they compare the two, or they have an agenda to propel.

of course a good "female" manager is going to be better than a bad "male" one. this has nothing to do with gender and all to do with skill, experience and individual traits

i wish all the best to robyn here though i've never heard of her. the only question that matter is "is she qualified for the job?" and the summary seem to imply that yes, she is

except it doesn't run fine. it's completly buggy and shouldn't ever have been released to the public

there already IS an unnofficial port, im running a beta of it right now and it's miles ahead of what samsung is providing.
no random crash, or reboot, the status bar doesn't get stuck on top and i can actually answer every calls i receive (unlike the samsung rom which would make the touchscreen totally unresponsive about 25% of the time). to top it off, my battery lasts around 2-3 days instead of the 18 hours i was getting

i don't know about gnutls's maturity,

but polarssl does not seem to support renegotiation, that to me indicates it's a pretty bad choice for a vpn which you expect to be up 100% of the time and pass significant traffic. looks like the dutchies just wanted SOMETHING they had made locally in an approved software, security be damned!

they dont get the credit. they get the bitching.

java's garbage collector is horrible, probably the worst of all VM. that's exactly why you always hear about it
but it's the old "bad publicity is good publicity" trick, because we always hear about java's garbage everyone assume they're the only language to have one and they want garbage collection (who wouldn't? no one likes trash piling up on their front door!)

it's not legal to do that over a certain (ridiculously low) amount of taxes due. check out provisional accounts

and i did, cancelled my service last year.

it's not cheaper, but it's certainly better in other ways

this is actually an improvement over their current practices.

they've been billing based on usage for years now, but they charge 8$/GB instead of 1.12$.

unless the article meant Gb, in which case it's meaningless and just validates their current business model

pidgin is nice, but it has one of the worst notification system around. either it's focus-stealing or not notifying you at all of new messages

add my vote for ubiquiti gear. it's seriously great, their official firmware is linux based, and they even give instructions to install thirdparty fw (hell, the routerstation only as a thirdparty firmware)

newegg won't even let me purchase from them, their paypal settings are fucked and they won't do anything about it

i have half of a mind to think it's on purpose just so they can get get credit card numbers to run scams on, and this latest snafu doesn't help me think otherwise