Nicole060

I think the case could be made for either C or Scheme because they are both quite small languages compared to most of the pl that are in common use. I've seen people start with something like C++ and they spend more time playing language lawyers than learn about algorithms and data structure.

All the things you said are true but remember, not all doctors are up to date with research and even if you can find a lot of false information on the internet, you're more likely to also find the truth than you are with an outdated physician.

The general practitioner that has followed me since I was born whenever I was ill or hurt is someone who has nearly stopped reading anything about medicine since he finished his study and got his job. On his own admission he doesn't even use computers much and doesn't read the research you can find on places like pubmed. He's nearing retirement and I'm going to change my physician (in France you have to declare one to prevent people from hopping to one place from the other whenever they're ill and "paranoid" and save costs to our health care) once I get done with the paperwork, since I am very lazy when it comes to anything that has to do with paperwork. Btw I know all this about him because he's rather talkative and love to waste time once he's done with the check up. One thing that enforced my laziness in looking for another one is the fact that it can be good to have a physician who knows all your health history from the start, even if he's somewhat incompetent.

When you end up with that kind of "doctor" the internet doesn't look so bad.

Adding android to their p&s cameras is not what I expected from them. Nikon has a huge problem to tackle and adding android to their p&s is not the solution.

While Nikon makes great DSLR (but not necessarily better than the competition), their point and shoot cameras aren't any good. Not when compared to the Canon S95 in the cheap segment. Or the Fuji X10 in the expensive segment. Nikon can't even get the mirror-less interchangeable lens system right : what were they thinking with the Nikon 1 ? the sensor is way too small, much smaller than the already small sensors of the Four Third system from Olympus/Panasonic and the size of the sensor is one of the most important thing to consider when it comes to image quality. Canon obviously knows better than Nikon and their entry to that market will feature an APS-C sensor.

Whatever it is that Nikon does, they do not understand photography anymore, apart from the few who work in their DSLR division.

Unfortunately for you, you haven't proven anything about MSG being the root of any disease whatsoever, as both links only proves what it can do to someone who already has some kind of disease (fibromyalgia in this case). This is not so different from the harmful effect of gluten to someone who has coeliac, or sugar to a diabetic, but no sane person is going to demonize gluten or sugar just because a very small subset of the population are harmed by those substances. Or milk. Or peanuts.

Almost any type of food source could be thought of as harmful based on your own criteria. I can find the kind of study you link to for so many things that you'd develop a fear of eating itself.

The truth remains : there is no STRONG correlation between MSG and the kind of horrors the demonization campaign stirred up by conspiracy theorists pretends it to do to the human body. You type "monosodium glutamate" in google and one of the links on the FIRST page is a link to rense.com, a website maintained by 9/11 deniers and UFO believers, and it's for a good reason if that link is on the first page, because talk about MSG is most popular amongst that group of people.

Anything that is not "natural" (for some highly subjective value of) is prone to be hated and part of a fear mongering campaign from the type of people that are obsessed with fear, fear of technology, of progress, of science, of politics [...]

"We know things like MSG and artificial red food dies cause ADD in a large percentage of the population, though in North America we still allow it in our food - whereas in much of Europe such things are ban."

First, MSG has not been banned in Europe, and you can buy this food additive and use it for your own home cooking, I should know because I sometimes use it instead of salt. Second, you'll have a hard time finding an actual study proving the harmful effect of MSG, and links to websites with no credibility like rense.com doesn't count. It's not a coincidence that most links point to stuff like that on the first page of google when you search for MSG and they are popular among conspiracy nuts/fear mongers.

If you listen to the conspiracy theorists, MSG causes diabetes, alzheimer, autism, heavy migraine/headaches, parkinson, seizures, addiction to MSG itself.. stop propagating the bull*.

Which is why I type random data I wouldn't remember and don't write that stuff down either whenever I'm asked to provide an answer to a "security question". They're the worst idea someone could think of to implement a security scheme. I am appalled at the fact that most (all ??) of the big names on the internet use them. Even google who should know BETTER what with all the first class software engineer they have.

It has been way more than a month since Windows Phone 7 has been released and it's still an unknown as far as its app ecosystem is concerned. Who knows what will happen to this W8 tablet, because WP7 which has the same interface, Metro, hasn't been a great success.

Free in France is now selling a monthly subscription you can quit anytime (no contract, no subvention for the phone, just like the typical prepaid stuff) that gives you both unlimited voice calls and unlimited data and sms for only 20 euros. 16 euros instead of 20 if you're also subscribed to their ISP.

And for those who don't really have a need for cell phones beyond the basics, they have an offer at 2 euros a month for 1 hour of voice time and 60 SMS. Even better, it's free as in beer (0 euros) if you have chosen Free as your ISP. http://www.free.fr/adsl/index.html

You'd really have to be bad at math to chose an expensive contract nowadays over paying in full for your own phone and getting that kind of plan.

I think wt is much better suited than a rails clone for the few kind of webapps you'd write in C++. http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt/

You can think of using it as a multiplatform GUI for a native app, that runs locally but uses the web browser instead of something like Qt or WxWidgets. Or you can use it for a webapp that pegs the CPU more than a database.

There's also a port to the JVM and ruby bindings.

For someone like me, who doesn't actually consume (and don't pirate) much of the content covered by those laws and taxes, I kinda feel wronged every time I buy a DVDR, a usb hard drive or key and so on. I use those to backup my own data (documents, photographs in raw+jpg, system backups..) and I feel sick to see even a cent of my money going to some random French singer I couldn't be bothered to care about. What little music I actually listen to (it's not a primary hobby for me) isn't even French. None of the money from the tax is ever going to the artists I do listen to from time to time.

Why should we subsidize a dying business anyway. Is this business that important to our daily lives ? I don't think so. Did they whine the same when modern technology destroyed other business practices or destroyed obsolete jobs, replaced by machines ? The music industry (the main whiner here) has existed for what, a century at most ? Let's just say it was a short-lived way to make a profit. People centuries ago didn't buy CDs or Vynils to listen to in their home. Is that business so essential to the world that we have to impose a tax on every citizen to sustain its existence ?

I'm not a pirate. I don't defend piracy. I just don't care for the music industry. It can completely disappear for all I care. There still will be music to listen to, just maybe not the drivel they're producing en masse.

Mountain Lion uses like 300mb more on my Macbook Air (probably some of the new stuff running in the background like Notifications) but I don't feel the difference in performance. It's not much slower or heavier than SL during real world usage. It does on the other hand feel better than Lion (I really had regrets when I first switched to Lion, particularly before the bug fixes). But I don't think Lion's problems had anything to do with ram management. Some of the animations just felt particularly sluggish, even if the computer had lots of ram free, and lots of other little things like that.

By not switching to lion and waiting for ML you dodged a bullet.

And here I hoped that since the last time I tried that it would finally work.. many months have passed since the last time I gave Linux a go on this desktop. The fact that you're saying that you're still having this problem now is not making me feel any happier.

... if in the next 6 months the situation doesn't get any better I feel I am going to physically destroy the GPU with a hammer, send the pic to AMD and buy a nvidia before the need for a hardware upgrade even shows up. The fact that it has drivers problems even under windows doesn't help making AMD's case.

"Windows fans" is a bit strong of a word for many. Does the fact that one needs windows to run some of the software they like makes them a "windows fan" ? I used the three major desktop OSes on a regular basis. My laptop is a MBA running OS X, since that's what works best for me in a mobile computer. My desktop used to have a dual boot of linux for my main, daily computing needs, and Windows for games. I had to stop using linux since I switched to an ATI card that couldn't even tolerably work with Gnome 3.

Free software proponents tend to be less level headed on the issue. I think there aren't a lot of true "windows fans", but on the other hand, there are a lot of "linux fans" who live for the politics of free software. Lots of people use both proprietary and free software. I do. We are the ones who don't care for your politics. Unlike lots of hardcore linux proponents who are actively hostile to closed source software. On purely technical terms, I like linux better than windows because of its ecosystem (terminal software, scripting, unix philosophy) but certainly not because I'm enamored with the politics of the FSF. OTOH I use windows not because I love it, but because I need it. That's being practical.

People who put other groups into boxes, like "anti linux" "Windows fans" aren't practical, they're turning software into a religion. You're even speaking of a "revolution".. for god's sake.

And that's probably why we're not going to get a retina macbook air anytime soon. I don't think a GPU that is fast enough to give a good experience on retina-level resolutions could be put in a MBA without severe consequences related to heat.

It doesn't look significant because the game is old and runs already pretty fast on modern hardware. If it was more gpu intensive game, a 20% difference could make a difference between a tolerably fluid framerate and a jerky framerate.

Yeah even when your run windows AMD's still not worth the pain. OpenGL games like Rage are bugged on release for AMD owners and the catalyst drivers often introduce terrible bugs. I don't upgrade my drivers unless I the older ones have a known bug with a newer game. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsD3y3vnsM8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pSHOJKcFU8 (the youtube comment is wrong, it didn't happen only with skyrim, I had the antialiasing bug with lots of games after I upgraded to that version of the catalyst at the time) This is what happens (and happened to me) when you trust AMD with their drivers. That one of their mid or high end card can work like shit with one of the best sellers on the PC platform says it all about how much AMD cares for their customers : they're giving us the finger.

How could AMD stay in business with such subpar products is beyond me. I know they'll never regain my trust. That's just not possible. Too many problems on too many platforms.

I know nvidia's support is not perfect. But frankly which is better, something that's not perfect but achieving "good enough" support, or something like ATi that has so many bugs you couldn't even use Gnome 3, a desktop environment ? http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAyN... http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=99

I couldn't run any game under wine either without crashing, even older games that usually run ok like Baldur's Gate 2. The open source driver are much more stable but on the other hand they are MUCH slower. Like, turning a good, midrange card like the Radeon 5770, into what low end crap would do in Windows. But you're better off with that mid range or a high end card since a low end card is not going to be usable at all for anything that makes use of the GPU, with the open source drivers running even free games like Xonotic on a low end card is plain crazy.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r...

On a game like Warsow, the difference between the open source driver and the catalyst can be as high as 34 fps vs 374 fps (34 fps is not enough for a fluid gaming experience, you need at least 50 to 60. Gaming is not like the 24 fps of motion pictures with each frame blurred giving the illusion of movement even with a low framerate since each frame rendered in a 3d game are sharp as hell.) on a high end card, and 17 fps vs 45 fps on a low end card, which means that the game is not playable at all on the open source driver, while it's tolerable on the catalyst.

AMD's stuff is not worth the pain. Don't buy AMD unless you have a masochist streak. I wish I had known before I built my desktop, I was being influenced by all the free software maniacs who were praising AMD to heaven because of their policy on giving out the GPU specs. Free software be damned, I will take nvidia's closed source driver over shit that is not working the next time. My previous GPU was a Nvidia Geforce 7600 GT and it worked like a clock.

AMD (ATI) GPU drivers are the worst when it comes to OpenGL. id software is one of the few big companies that makes OpenGL games and they always run much slower on ATI cards (Doom 3 during the first few years of its release) or run with nearly game breaking glitches (Rage, textures that pop up 3 seconds too late on the screen)

John Carmack was seriously angry about ATI's drivers when the game "Rage" was released. http://kotaku.com/5847761/why-was-the-pc-launch-of-rage-such...

"The driver issues at launch have been a real cluster !@#$, [...] When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn't work. The fact that the working driver has incompatibilities with other titles doesn't help either. Issues with older / lower end /exotic setups are to be expected on a PC release, but we were not happy with the experience on what should be prime platforms."

I unfortunately made the mistake to buy an AMD 5770 when I assembled my last desktop computer. This hateful GPU. If you even care one bit about either OpenGL or Linux, you are *ed with AMD. The open source drivers for linux are too slow for anything that matters and the closed source drivers made by ATi are too buggy to be used at all, they couldn't even run Gnome 3 without so many glitches, for so many months without improvements to the drivers, that I felt true despair.

You want OpenGL or/and Linux, and you need performance ? Get a Nvidia. There's nothing but Nvidia that works well with either. If you don't need performance, then simply get something that has an integrated intel chip.

I will never, ever think about buying anything from AMD again. Pure garbage. Their newer CPU line, the Bulldozer, is also garbage that runs slower than the older generation on many tasks.

Using an outdated OS that is not supported anymore isn't good security, but in theory there shouldn't be much danger as long as you follow some basic restrictions :

1/ Put the computer behind a NAT router with no open ports/outside access 2/ Use a browser that hasn't dropped your platform (just because the OS isn't supported anymore doesn't mean you can't find at least one browser that's up to date with continuous security updates. There are still people porting Firefox to PPC macs, an initiative called "TenFourFox". You can also try Camino or iCab, two alternative browsers that have kept PPC compatibility) 3/ Don't open an email attachment unless it has been scanned through an antivirus

Point 1 and 3 are something I do even on a patched computer anyway. Your desktop shouldn't be directly exposed to the internet.

I've never ran an outdated OS myself but I would feel confident in using one as long as I respect those principles. The one thing I wouldn't be confident in doing, though, would be running an outdated browser or an outdated mail client. Security updates for anything that is in direct contact with the internet is a top priority and using an abandoned mail client like sparrow that doesn't guarantee security updates is a terrible, terrible idea.