Chess! You can play a casual 5-minute blitz game, or delve deep into theory for years, or anything in between. With the Internet chess has exploded. On the chess.com server I play on, you'll find 15,000 people or more available for a game at a given time.

I'd love to see the age breakdown for Slashdot. I'm 34. Definitely older than the mean age of the reddit crowd. But not quite as old as some.

The new design has a slightly less attractive font, flatter, maybe a little more whitespace, slightly larger social media sharing icons. I don't get the freak out. I've been using Slashdot since 1998 (see my fancy 4-digit user id) and have seen it go through a few redesigns since then. This is nothing new. It's just Slashdot catching up to the rest of the web for what's fashionable (flat design is in right now).

Calm down, everyone.

Oh god. The software apologist. Pretty sure it *was* designed to do what he's doing, since it doesn't prevent him from doing so. If it were against spec, he'd get a warning "you just opened tab 100, are you sure?" Let's make better software instead of lecturing people on how they're "doing it wrong".

It's a shame the developer > QA mentality persists. I've been doing QA for some time and love it. Things I like about it:

* Well-compensated (I make 86K + great benefits like matching 401k/etc.)
* At every place I've worked, QA works fewer hours than dev -- not sure if this is due to personality or the natures of the work or what, but I like it
* Some of us actually *enjoy* testing. Weird, huh? It's a different mode of thinking than dev. Devs imagine how things will work, QA imagines how things *won't* work and systematically finds way to expose flaws. Believe it or not, it's FUN to find failures.
* There's plenty of opportunity for programming. QA is far different from what it used to be. There aren't giant labs of manual testers as much. I and most of my colleagues lean on automation quite a lot, and in day-to-day work look much like developers (spending most of our time in IDEs, CI servers, etc.)


But, hey, the lack of competition is nice. During my last job hunt earlier this year, I pretty much had to turn off my phone and sift through everyone vying for my attention.

Citation needed. There's no requirement. In fact, most fonts have most of Unicode missing. It'd be insane to try to cover the entirety of Unicode with each new font released. The most complete font I've found is Arial Unicode MS, but even that has vast swaths of Unicode missing.

I think it's neat that there are so many obscure and interesting uses of Unicode. If you don't agree, well, just don't use it?

I've never been to one. They look like pure marketing to me. Local users groups on the other hand are fantastic! I've gone to groups in Portland revolving around Python programming and Selenium web automation and met lots of awesome people who are my peers in the industry. Great way to find out about jobs.

My state shows a 98.7% chance* of voting Obama, and I don't like Obama**, so I took the opportunity to vote 3rd party for the first time in my life.

* http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

** Failed to close Guantanamo, increased raids on MJ dispensaries, watered-down healthcare act... he makes Clinton look liberal!

Look, I'm about as technologically inclined as it gets. I'm posting this from my current generation Android, I work in software, I read tech blogs daily. But I also hike and do Zen meditation and zone out at my desk at work. It's not an either / or proposition. You can have both.

I'm on my second Saitek keyboard. I would still be on the first one, but I spilled soda on it. They're great -- rubber base for minimal slippage; LED lights for night time gaming if you wish; solid key response, not mushy; slim and very few bullshit media buttons. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823175012

All modern desktops are more or less equivalent. What matters more is software compatibility (can I run app Y and game X on my OS?), hardware compatibility, and support/user experience (bring your Mac into the Apple Store and get a replacement the same day). Even if you made the Holy Grail of desktop UI/UX perfection, no one would care, because your Linux OS won't run Call of Duty 5 (or whatever they're up to now) and doesn't have an associated store in the mall.

The best organizations use a blend of methods; they don't fall into the trap of forcing everyone to work the exact same way at all times.

I'm left-handed and of course have always bought ambidextrous / neutral mice. What puzzles me is why anyone would *want* to use a mouse that was permanently shaped for one hand. I mean, I switch off my mouse hand sometimes when I start to feel tendinitis (such as after a marathon gaming session on the weekend). I can't imagine using the same mouse hand *always*.

You can't rest on your laurels and think you can keep making the same profits you used to in the "beige box" era of PCs. The only PC maker I can think of that's actually interesting is the one I bought my last system from: iBUYPOWER. But they're specialized, making gaming systems for a specific type of user.

Secret Santa this year. But the thought of donating to Wikipedia never entered my mind, despite that I use it daily. Why? Because I've never seen the deletionism issue seriously addressed by the organization. I have a fundamental disagreement with how the site is run.

As well, I don't believe Wikipedia is all that unique. While it may have been (one of?) the first wiki encyclopedia, and obviously now it has a huge amount of content, there's nothing inherent in Wikipedia that couldn't be recreated if necessary. I don't think the Internet would implode if Wikipedia vanished tomorrow. Would I be inconvenienced? Yes. Would it take years to build a new Wikipedia? Yes. But it's not so vital to the Internet. Whereas if Google had never existed, I think the Internet would be far different.

20 hours!? So why didn't you charge them? Sounds like they have good reason to ignore the costs if they get free help.

Just like a user won't start backing up files until they feel the pain of file loss...