Daddy, I want a MacBook Pro!!

24 Feb

Macbook pro logo I must be masochistic, there can’t be any other explanation: every now and then, I go to apple.com to see the new MacBook Pro webpage. I’m kind of attracted by it, just like a gambler is attracted by a poker table. I know I shouldn’t but I can’t help it.Over the last years, I’ve become a Windows user. It wasn’t always like this, I swear. I used to be a Mac user before. For almost 8 years. Life was good, and I was happy. I then took some classes in Computational Linguistics at the University of Geneva. PowerMac 7200 We were asked to develop basic syntactic parsers by playing with compilers and different programming languages (LISP, Modula-2, Oberon, Prolog, …). Since most of the development tools were available for free only for Windows, there was no choice left for me but to adopt this OS. So I left my little PowerMac 7200 with a 90Mhz CPU (!!).And here I am, using XP, reinstalling every now and then and hoping to win the lottery (in fact, I should start to play lottery before even thinking of winning one day…) so I can buy me the new MacBook of my dreams…But before making this idea concrete, I just wanted to know how nice the new MacBook was. Would anyone be nice enough and tell me how it is to own such a wonderful toy?

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Alex around the world » Blog Archive » Word of the Week: Computational Linguistics - March 2, 2006
[...] Remember my last post about me dreaming about the new MacBook Pro? It contained a word (in fact 2) that may seem a bit strange to some readers. I thought it could be a good idea to describe it in more details, specially since Wikipedia has a quite complete entry for this concept: Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and logical modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics. Computational linguists were formerly usually computer scientists who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Recent research has shown that language is much more complex than previously thought, so computational linguistics work teams are now sometimes interdisciplinary, including linguists (specifically trained in linguistics). Computational linguistics draws upon the involvement of linguists, computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychologists and logicians, amongst others. [...]