I've seen a surprising number of women that see gaming as a "boys thing". That is slowly changing with age, but it is still more prevalent than with men. When I was a kid, only nerd played video games or PnP games. Real boys splayed sports. That has changed now, and it is perfectly acceptable for all boys to play games, and most people are even coming around on male adults gaming. With girls/women, there is still a more prevalent view of it not being "normal" to be in to gaming.

Funny thing is, it'll come form women who do play games. They play something like Angry Birds or Farmville or the like. Despite being a video game, they don't see it the same as playing on a AAA video game on an Xbox or the like. It is different in their mind, probably because they have a hangup about gaming being an ok activity for a woman.

The good news is that it has been changing, and is continuing to change. I think before long it will be to the point where video games are just something most people play. Different people will have different interests in types of games, but it won't be a "kid thing" or a "boy thing" or a "geek thing" it'll just be an activity that is ok for anyone to partake in, much like TV is now.

It is amazing, given they are a big enterprise, but they really don't get what enterprises need, and just don't care. They want enterprises to use their iToys but don't want to spend any time on it. They just want to treat them like consumer devices and what you to spend your money and fuck off. It is really annoying.

They aren't much better to their people internally, either. Last time the campus Apple engineer came by, several years ago (our college doesn't use many Macs) it was shortly after Apple had suddenly discontinued their Xserve like. I asked him what they were going to do for their own web hosting, since they'd been using those. He said "I don't know, they didn't warn us about this or give us any guidance. We'll probably go back to using IBM systems like before."

The sad thing is Mac fanboys decide they want to use them for enterprise work, even though they are manifestly unsuited to it.

I mean I can understand feeling violated about having sexual pictures of you shared with the world. Many people are very private and shy in their sexuality. That's fine, nothing wrong with that.

However that rather runs counter to having a very sultry picture on the cover of a popular magazine with international distribution. You can't really claim that you feel violated by people looking at sexy pictured of you if you then choose to distribute the same voluntarily.

Pro audio software all has analogue like meters, but they are all digital of course being computer software. You can adjust how they respond, tell them how to integrate the data they get, how fast to respond, etc. So you can tailor the output to what is most useful.

Also as a converse back in the day some high end analogue audio meters were made to try and quantize data. They'd be designed to segment the display to 1dB increments around the clipping/saturation point so that the engineer could make more useful adjustments (anything under 1dB difference is hard to impossible to hear). Not truly digital, but the same idea.

Because I haven't seen a hardware release where Windows drivers didn't ship with the product. I see a reasonable bit of hardware too, what with doing IT support for a living.

There's nothing wrong with an analogue like display, either a needle (like a speedometer) or a bar drawn on a monitor or the like. However the display itself is probably not analogue these days. The monitor is an LCD and while the pixels are small, they do quantize. The needle is analogue, but it is probably driven by a PWM controlled motor and takes digital inputs. It is a sensible way of doing thing, it makes for more precise meters, more error free transmission, and the ability to display the same data with different kinds of outputs. They are continuous displays, not truly analogue.

If you insist on trying to use all truly analogue gauges that makes you a luddite. You have this view that somehow they are superior for whatever reason. That's just not the case. It is like the people who try to argue records are better because they are analogue and that is what sound is. No, turns out when you do a good job digitizing you get a better reconstruction later.

So use a continuous display if you want, but stop bitching that it needs to be analogue. Makes you look silly.

Uplay is stupid, particularly since they make you ahve Steam anyhow, but it uses no appreciable resources. Mere seconds of CPU time per hour of operation. Poor performance on their games is because of poor optimization in the engine, not Uplay.

Also for all that, their games still do look better on the PC. Of course they damn well ought to when you are throwing an order of magnitude more power at it.

You wanna limit bittorrent on your network? You go right ahead. You do ti in whatever way pleases you and works well. You want to limit bittorrent on MY network? Fuck you. If I wanna run a network where I let BT leeches go nuts, that's my prerogative, and you are welcome to go away if you don't like it.

The funny thing is, like most sociopath types, he is being just as selfish and greedy as those he dislikes. He is mad because he wants to get to use free bandwidth belonging to others, and he's not getting to use as much as he wants due to other people. So he feels entitled to push them off so he can have more.

That is the only purpose here. This isn't for your own network, I don't have a problem with BT leeches on it. Why? Because I choose who gets on it.

Just saying if consoles aren't powerful enough to make you happy, well there are these new fangled PC things with a shit ton of CPU, RAM, and other goodies and gamers like me who spend way too much money on them to play games. Of course if you keep taking the attitude that we are all pirates, releasing shitty ports and so on don't be surprised if we aren't so interested in your products

http://www.escapistmagazine.co....

Noise is not arbitrary, you can objectively measure the sound level keyboards create. Now if you work alone, then sure, get what you like. However when you work with others you need to be considerate of them. Likewise there are noise critical environments where objective standards of silence need to be maintained.

Key activation force is also not this subjective matter. This is something that research has gone in to and low activation force is important to minimizing RSI. Ergonomics aren't something to just scoff at. Perhaps you are lucky and you have a body built such that you never have issues. However perhaps you aren't as lucky as you think and later in life you will have problems if you don't have a good ergonomic work setup. Thus it is a much better idea to work ergonomically and avoid problems.

There are modern mechanical keyswitches with much less for required, and less noise. Matias makes some really amazing ones.

Seriously. The best keyboard ever made? Not hardly. I can think of three massive issues:

1) Key activation force. You have to push quite hard to activate those key switches. That is unergonomic and contributes to developing RSI in many individuals. A good keyboard should have a light key activation.

2) Keyboard shape. The straight keyboard is not a good shape. Our hands don't naturally sit straight, neither should our keyboards. Again, this is an ergonomic issue, being your wrists like that can lead to RSI. A good ergonomic keyboard can be adjusted to match the position of the user.

3) The noise. Those springs are loud. Makes it very annoying to use in an office environment, and unsuitable for quite environments like a studio. A good keyboard has dampened keys that don't make noise.

Well, turns out you can get good keyboards like that. Matias, Kinesis, Maltron, all make really good keyboards. They solve the problems that the Model M, and others, have.

Even if you don't believe you'll ever suffer from RSI (and that's a bet I wouldn't make) you will probably find your typing speed increased by lighter keyswitches.

This Model M worship needs to stop. It is old technology, we have better tech and a better understanding of how to make good human interfaces devices these days.

Though some people seem to think racism is something white people do to other people, there are racists in all races and India is no exception. Lots of Indians are racial and cultural supremacists. They believe that Indians, and particularly their kind of Indian (there are many different ethnicity and linguistic groups in India) are the best/smartest/most capable people in the world and everyone else is inferior.

Friend of mine had an interesting situation with that. He's a consultant and he was consulting for another consulting company. This place is owned by an Indian guy, and largely staffed by Indian programmers. The owner was disinterested in bringing him on full time, and would routinely assign one of the Indian employees to help him. This despite the fact that it was evident my friend was quite a bit better at DB programming and routinely had to get called in to bail out other projects. The owner just had this view that as a non-Indian (my friend is 50/50 white and pacific islander) my friend just couldn't be as good at programming.

He finally came to the conclusion that my friend was by far the best programmer he had, despite his race and nationality, and tried to hire him, but at that point it was far too late and my friend will only work for them on a contract basis.

Valve is extremely lazy, and Steam has allowed that. They have by far the majority of digital PC game sales, and most PC sales are digital these days. So they make tons of money doing very little work. This has allowed them to do what they really like doing: Faffing about with random projects, not worrying about any kind of deliverables.

Unfortunately, lacking any real competition, Steam has no reason to really get better. The only store I would say is actually better than Steam is GOG, but they have the problem of not using DRM, which means many publishers won't release on them.

Steam isn't likely to get much better unless it has to. If some other company makes a good games store, as in one that actually hosts and deals with distribution, not just one that sells Steam keys (as many do) and it starts to eat in to Steam's market, then maybe Valve will give a shit, get a bigger dev team, hire some CS people, etc. However until then, they'll continue to just mess around.

They aren't beholden to investors, they make so much money (like $40 million PER EMPLOYEE per year) they don't have to adhere to any kind of schedule, and they are the one and only place many will go to buy games. As such, they can have it be a big shitfest and it doesn't really matter.

Personally, I go out of my way to buy any game I can on GOG, rather than Steam, if said game is available on GOG. They actually curate their store, make sure minimum quality standards are met, make sure old titles run, and don't put out unfinished games (aka Early Access). However, there's a lot I can't get there, and I'm one of the few people who do. Most gamers have this "Steam is the only place to buy, Gabe is god, all hail Valve," attitude.

Just because one group of people knows about something, doesn't mean another group can't discover it as well. It would be much like if aliens visited Earth. They could discover Earth, and humanity. Doesn't matter we were already here, it is still a discovery to them.