Honestly I'm kicking myself for not having written everything up before going public. The vast majority of people who saw the original post will not see the technical details. :/

It's a fair criticism. I wanted to make the desks lower but I also wanted the monitors to sit higher when folded up, and the desks were getting stupidly deep, so I had to compromise. In practice, though, people aren't typing at these desks, they're gaming, which in my experience (as someone with some RSI problems) is not as sensitive to desk height.

All coming in future blog posts. Subscribe or follow me on G+. :)

Yes but the base bandwidth used by games is actually quite small. Let's say (overestimate) that you have 10 input events per second that need to be broadcast. That's going to take maybe 100 bytes, tops. All the other players are receiving events from 10 people, so 1k each. Times 10 players. 10k per second. My bandwidth is 400x that.

Of course, that's not actually how most client-server games work. Rather, they send you updates just about the objects you can see. Which probably takes significantly more bandwidth than just broadcasting keypresses, but not 400x more bandwidth.

We've had times when all 12 of us joined a public TF2 server, and it worked out just fine.

50ms latency is within the range that games can hide using client-side prediction, though I think my connection usually gets better pings than that.

>> Playing games with your friends all in the same room: fun
>
> What about having a girlfriend instead?

What about having a girlfriend who is also a gamer and plays games with you and your friends? :D

It turns out plain old gigabit ethernet is enough bandwidth for all disk I/O for 12 machines. True, they aren't super-fast to load, but no one has ever complained about them being slow either. Go figure.

Hi Slashdot! I updated my Blogger/G+ profile to link back to my Slashdot ID, so you can see this is actually me.

I'm a little disappointed that the submitter linked the Gizmag article instead of the original blog post -- I think a lot of Slashdotters would have found that more interesting, for some of the technical details. Although, even that post is pretty light on details. I'm working on writing a more in-depth description of how I manage the machines. In short: Hooray for PXE boot, iSCSI, and LVM snapshots.

You'd also be interested to know that I ran several successful LAN parties with all the gaming machines running Ubuntu Linux and WINE. I'd estimate 70% of games worked well (although often not perfect) with this configuration. Sadly, I have recently given in and installed Windows, though the server machine obviously still runs Linux.

Here are some pictures of the server room, which Slashdot inexplicably won't let me link as HTML: http://goo.gl/BgFpT

Here is the back-story behind how I ended up with this house.

As I said, I'll be writing some more blog posts soon with full gory technical details. I'll try submitting them as a new story when they're ready, but you can also subscribe to the blog or follow me on G+ if you're interested.

If you look at the pictures in the article, there's a girl sitting in the very front of the first one. I guess I should have had her face the camera while I took the picture to make it a little more obvious... :P

Well, it was expensive, but not very much more expensive than any other house. The cost of the computers was small compared to the cost of the house.

Here's the back story, if you're interested.

I really wish the Slashdot submitter had linked directly to the original blog post rather than the Gizmag article. It goes into a bit more detail on the configuration of the systems, which I think would interest Slashdotters in particular. (Though I still need to write a longer blog post about this.)

All the system netboot off the same disk image. Or rather, LVM snapshots of that image. Each machine gets its own snapshot, so guests can modify it to their heart's content. At the end of the night, I just delete the snapshot and make a new one. When I need to update the machines, I boot one machine against the master image and update that, then remake all the snapshots.

So, it doesn't matter what the guests do to the machines, because they aren't modifying the master image.

Everyone brings this up and I don't quite understand. Who cares where the server is located? We all have internet connections, don't we? What matters is where the players are located.

We've actually played quite a bit of Starcraft 2 in this house despite the supposed lack of LAN support.

Hi. This is my house.

> 1) People are facing a wall, not each other.

People are facing their computers when playing, and then they can turn around to chat when done. Having everyone at a table would actually make them more separated. And anyway, the whole point is that having fold-out stations in the wall means they don't take space when not in use.

> 2) There's no table central to all players, where pizza resides.

Didn't you just say that the computer table should be central? :P There's actually space right behind that line of chairs for a table if that's what we wanted, and in the other room you could put a table in the middle of the room. In practice we just put the pizza on the dining table (in the background there) and that works fine.

> 3) A single-line of players means players on the ends have trouble communicating verbally.

In practice everyone's voice carries fine across the room.

> 4) There's uneven lighting across the gaming spots, and it looks like more lighting behind the players than in front of them

I think the lighting in the house is fantastic. There is never a need to turn on artificial lights during the day.

True, bright lights are not ideal for LAN parties, and at just the right time of day there may be some glare on one or two monitors, but it's brief, and once the sun goes down it's a non-issue.

Remember that I live in this house even when there aren't LAN parties. :)

> 5) Those chairs are not comfortable enough.

Actually, I'm very happy with the chairs. They are padded and quite comfortable. And, most importantly, they stack, so I can store them out-of-the way between parties.

Also, the United Arab Emirates is a single, relatively small country, located to the east of Saudi Arabia. You seem to be thinking of it as a group of countries; it's not. Maybe you were thinking of the Arab League? But yeah, Iran is not Arab.

Will they just track every packet you send over the net and sell that data?

Why would you expect Google to sell the data? Can you cite any examples of Google selling user data? What do you think would happen to Google's image if they actually did sell user data?

Who do you think is more likely to sell data on your browsing habits: Google, or your current ISP? Your current ISP could trivially be tracking every host you visit, and everything you do on non-HTTPS sites. That's probably a lot more information than Google has ever had. Do you trust that your current ISP is not misusing that information? What would happen to their image if they were discovered to be selling user data? Do the ISP duopolists even have images to uphold?

Just trying to put things in perspective.