(1) What specifically is bullshit? That your taste buds become desensitized when consuming a liter of high-sugar soda every day for years? That carrots are sweet? That you don't taste the (comparably low) sugar in a carrot after consuming lots of high-sugar drinks?

(2) Could you name some of these myriad fruits? I know that dried fruits are typically high in sugar (though also eaten in much smaller quantities), but that's about it. A quick search doesn't turn up a single fruit that I'd find in a typical grocery store outside of the few dried varieties that can even match the 26g of sugar per 8oz serving of Dr. Pepper (and I'm being generous in calling a serving 8oz instead of a 12oz can), let alone surpass it.

A couple years ago I decided to give up refined sugar in general for a few months, particularly soda (like any good dev, I consumed more than my share of the stuff). After 3 months without, I drank a Dr. Pepper (my favorite) and it was disgusting. Tasted like a mouthful of sugar. Amazing how much you become desensitized to sugar, and the same holds for salt.

The real surprise was one day when I discovered that carrots are actually sweet. They just don't seem that way when you consume a metric ton of refined sugar every week. That really made me start wondering just how badly my perception of foods had been corrupted over the years.

Two less-common changes that make a noticeable difference are using software to change the spin profile of the CPU fan and boost the standby time for the drives so they spin down faster when unused. Once I had done all the usual tricks (silent rear case fan, PSU that is rated as being a quiet model, etc), I still saw a noticeable difference by tweaking those settings.

Never realized how much I hate whirring fans until I had a setup that allowed me to not hear them.

C2D processors are definitely still viable. My main development machine until earlier this year was an E8400 with an SSD for several years. I only mothballed it because I decided to combine my dev and gaming PCs into one, so the better specs from the gaming PC became my daily driver.

Mobo: ASRock B85M Pro4
CPU: Core i3-4150
RAM: 16GB DDR3
Video Card: Geforce 750 Ti
PSU: Corsair CX430
Drives: Samsung 840 Evo (250GB) and Samsung 850 Evo (250GB)
Case: Some cheap case
OS: Windows 7

The best part of this is that after tweaking the fan controls and drive standby settings, the machine runs almost silent. You can just barely pick up a hum when sitting at the desk, more than a couple feet away you can't hear anything.

Not sure how I feel about running Windows 7 as my main OS after 15 years as a Linux guy, but it has been acceptable so far.

If you're that paranoid, run separate instances. One that you use online for purchases and downloads only, then copy the Steamapps subfolder for your game over to your offline-gaming instance. No achievements, no gameplay tracking, etc. An inconvenience, sure, but a fairly minor one.

I do this to keeps games sync'ed between my gaming PC and my laptop for traveling, but IIRC there's nothing that'll prevent you from having two copies of Steam installed on one PC.

Love their keyboards. My only complaint is the white color gets discolored pretty quickly with heavy use. I really prefer black keyboards for this reason.

Agreed on the Apple keyboards. I use the wired one with the numpad both at home and at work (to much ribbing from my coworkers given my dislike of Apple products in general) and love it. I've tried a few different mechanicals and they've never lived up to the hype.

Not always. My alarm clock doesn't. The time displays in my kitchen don't. The clock in my car doesn't. Even some software doesn't. Ever used an in-house corporate scheduling app that has some piece of shit homebrew datetime library and doesn't properly account for DST when sending out meeting invites? I have, it causes problems. I've seen mail servers block all logins because the local clock didn't adjust for DST and the one-hour difference in times is triggering clock skew errors for everyone.

Hell, my android phone sometimes can't figure out what time zone I'm in. Multiple times, I've been sitting here in Florida, nowhere even remotely close to the next zone, and watched my phone repeatedly switch back and forth between Eastern and Central.

in a perfect world, technology would just figure it out. But it doesn't, not reliably enough that we can completely ignore the change.

Obligatory BOFH reference:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

7. When diagnosing any computer output by reading an endless stream of slowly scrolling text, hackers never need to reference a line that has already gone off the screen.

I thought that was more of the whole "all teen and tween asian girls are alt" trope.

The larger the frontal surface area of the vessel, the harder it is to control. Wave motion and tidal forces become more pronounced as the vessel gets wider, making it harder to hold position.

This "barge" isn't a standard cargo hauler, though. You can see a photo of it at the link below. It was definitely custom-built for this purpose.
http://www.spacex.com/sites/sp...

Sure they do. AMD has had hybrid graphics for years, and both Catalyst and the open-source driver have had support for quite some time. I've used laptops that had AMD's hybrid setup and it was far simpler to set up.

It is possible that Optimus has improved a bit in the past year. A large part of my woes stemmed from my particular card being relatively new and hence requiring a bunch of bleeding edge packages for support, and trying to get bleeding edge stuff to play nicely together is often painful.

I'm sticking with AMD for my Linux boxes for the time being, and NVidia for my gaming PC. I've had more troubles with AMD in Windows than in Linux the past few years.