I work for a Fortune 500 company which is a microsft gold partner, but they made us sign some crap agreement that all MSDN resources are to be used at work on their equipment only, so at home I learn and tinker with mostly non-microsoft technology which is not and never will be accepted for use by my employers (their loss). Their reasoning mystified me until we learnt that it was just a policy created by the IT management to make their job easier, so quite unrelated to the company-wide misunderstanding and total under-utilization of their developer resources.

Of course, I will need to be extra creative and put something out there to show potential new employers that I know some of this technology, if I decide to get a job using it in a non-MS environment, as I have not been using it in the workplace, but it still gives pleasure to learn and investigate alternative tech.

Well one aspect to consider is, keeping a bunch of staff tied into using some proprietary internally developed tools could also be isolating those staff from gaining any experience with current tools out there in the market and in use by many/most future employers. I am stuck in a situation like this myself, where any chance to get a new job will rely on me learning new development tools in my own time on my home PC, then trying to convince somebody that this is the same as workplace experience with the tools.

Out of consideration of your staff and their career development, they should be able to at least keep up with knowledge and preferably hands on experience of real world tools. Of course, some employers don't give a toss about such things.

Do you have Steam auto starting at powerup, and do you know how many games are attempting to synchronise their cloud backup data at startup?
My router has fits and sometimes reboots after powering up my win7 PC. Trying to eliminate what could be flooding it, and so far Steam appears to be the only likely candidate.

Well I seem to remember repeated faults with mismatched .Net library dependencies and somehow ending up with a CCC installation that would not load up its user interface and could not be fixed by uninstall/re-install and wasted many days of effort. But I guess you are right, it takes a special kind of developer to make such a poor hash-up of a user interface.

I often wondered if his intent was as intensive as his purpose.

Yeah I feel the same way about their driver support, couldn't trust them with too much of my limited gaming hardware budget.
Also, would it be really really difficult for them to hire some decent programmers and produce a new version of Catalyst control center that doesn't have to run on .Net?
Whatever happened to C++ and fast reliable software?

I recall an "alternative" medicine article I read recently (but didn't take too seriously) which insisted that raising the body's overall pH level above a certain point would pretty much give protection against cancer. This would seem to agree, if the acid excreted by these bacteria is the link, as suggested.
Hopefully these avenues are being investigated.

yeah but VLC for android is not yet ready for market. the audio is never in sync with the video. practically any other android video player is better than VLC.

Can you still do that? Last time I installed twonky those options seemed to have disappeared. Or were they moved from the free version to the paid app only?