I watch a lot of spedrunners and the occasional eSports event on twitch/hitbox. I watched a friend try out youtube's streaming today, because he was excited about it. It seemed competent but not really a serious threat to twitch, at least for now.

First, the pros:

- They appear to offer lower quality re-encodes to all streams, whereas Twitch only provides them for partners and streams with a lot of viewers (because re-encodes cost them CPU). This is a nice perk for people who would like to stream at a high resolution/bitrate, but still allow users with bad internet / mobile users to watch them.
- Support for higher bitrates (above 3500kbps)
- Youtube has built-in "DVR" functionality, where you can pause and rewind the video at any time during a stream, and then catch back up to "live" when you choose. This is actually a very cool feature that is not offered by Twitch, Hitbox, etc.

And now, the cons:
- The interface is bare bones. There's no way to pop out the stream video or the chat. The streamer "profile" page is AWFUL. There's no indicator on the main youtube site that someone you're following is currently livestreaming--you have to go specifically to the gaming subdomain and then pop out the right-side panel.
- The chat interface doesn't support commands or even emotes (/me). It has no timestamps. It has no user list to see who is watching (no way to know if the person you're chatting with has suddenly left)

It remains to be seen whether ContentID (or similar) will become a serious problem with youtube's streaming service. It also remains to be seen if they'll follow in twitch's footsteps and implement those silly graphical chat emotes--they're a big part of the twitch culture, and are obviously rather popular, though I for one would be glad to see them go.

I know the summary said "best one", but screw you.

Primary desktop (work, games, screwing around on /.):
Core i5-4670
ASRock Z87 Pro3
GeForce GTX 660
16GB G.Skill DDR3-1600 RAM
2TB Hitachi spinning disk
256GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD
A pair of 24" Dell U2412M 1920x1200 monitors

HTPC (watching movies, occasional couch gaming):
AMD Phenom II 965
ASUS M4A87TD/USB3
GeForce GTX 560
16GB G.Skill DDR3-1600 RAM
2TB Western Digital spinning disk
Pioneer DVD-RW optical drive
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250
50" Samsung DLP 1080i TV

Work Laptop (Excel, general computing while travelling):
15" Retina MacBook Pro (2012)
Core i7
8GB RAM
GeForce GT 650M
500GB SSD

Account bans are not going to be as effective as you claim in a free-to-play game.

It may help somewhat, but the trolls can trivially create a new account or 10 whenever they feel like being an asshole. And they'd get away with it, because they've already had their fun by the time Riot/etc. review the complaint and ban their worthless account.

Somehow they state that people spend 5 times more on insurance than it costs to deal with the problem... Why should I belive the numbers weren't manipulated (upwards, obviously)?

First, phone insurance is kind of a scam. Second, I'd wager that most people buying said insurance are far more concerned about dropping their phone and breaking/losing it than they are about theft--and no numbers are provided for those costs.

If you are retired, why not take the chance on $20 vs a sure $5 you don't need?

But TFA says exactly the opposite occurred--"older adults tended to prefer to lock in guaranteed earnings over gambling on a bigger win".

The noteworthy part of the study is not simply that the elderly made less money, but that their decisions were inconsistent and irrational.

As a matter of fact, there's still an active community that plays multiplayer Master of Orion 2 games over the Internet (via dosbox). Anyone interested, check out #moo2 on QuakeNet IRC.

I use screen protectors on any device with a stylus. Gorilla glass is good enough for everything else (including my phone).

With the exception of Angry Birds (great for killing time on public transport) what smart phone games have original ideas

Angry Birds isn't even original. It's pretty much just a colorful reskin of flash games like Castle Clout and Crush the Castle, which predate it by a year or so.

It's only in cleartext during installation, and only while the password field has focus. This is hardly something to get up in arms about, unless you regularly re-install your OS in front of a crowd.

I have to second this. I had been looking to upgrade an aging 1600x1200 LCD for a while, but the only affordable monitors I could find were 1080p and I really couldn't justify an "upgrade" that actually lost me vertical resolution.

I finally picked up a U2412M last year, and have been extremely pleased with it. Thinking about grabbing another to replace the mediocre Hitachi serving as my 2nd display.

At least here, they're going after someone who was systematically and deliberately distributing copyrighted content, rather than just some poor kid running bittorrent.

Of all the things to complain about. The necessary tools are readily available for purchase.

How about the Nintendo DS? Speaking from personal experience here--I've written (or ported) several DS homebrew projects.

Sure, there's plenty of emulators, and ports of popular (and less popular) classic games. And the obligatory linux port, not that it's useful for much besides bash and ssh.

But there's plenty of original games too. There's also ebook readers, music and movie players, utilities to backup retail game saves, drawing/coloring apps*, music creation tools, and more.

* One of these, Colors!, later became a rather successful commercial title for the 3DS.

I had the same reaction to Unity as most people... at first. When I first upgraded to 11.04, I found Unity annoying to use, even on my touchscreen laptop.

However, they've been steadily improving it, and to be perfectly honest I rather like Unity as of 12.04. The Dash is slick, the HUD is a great new feature, and I've always been a fan of the more minimalist window managers anyway. My only significant complaint is that I refuse to give up sloppy mouse focus, which renders the global menubar completely useless (so I reverted to the old menubars).