What grinds my gears

The then-United States Senator Ted Stevens, in a speech made in 2006 criticizing an amendment to a bill on internet neutrality, made the analogy that the internet "is a series of tubes" (that can be clogged when too much data is sent.) Of course I'm 100% pro net neutrality, and I fervently oppose any laws, in any country, that would undermine it. However, that analogy got a ton of ridicule and mockery, and I really can't understand why. It might not be the most technical analogy in existence, but I don't see what's wrong with it. Internet transmissions have an upper limit to how much data they can transmit. It's called bandwidth. And the data being transmitted is, in fact, on some cases being compared to the flow of a liquid. Heck, there's a reason why it's called "video streaming ", for instance. The analogy might not be flawless, but it isn't all that far off either. If you try to put too much stuff to go through a series of t...

For some reason the term "capitalism" has a really negative connotation in our modern world (although this actually goes way back, several decades in fact, maybe even a century). Not very surprisingly especially the modern regressive leftist social justice ideology hates and opposes capitalism with a passion, and would want to tear it completely down (and replace it with, usually, communism, or some other kind of Marxist system.) The very word "capitalism" immediately gives people the mental image of fat corporate magnates in old-fashioned suits smoking a cigar (bonus points for an old-fashioned monocle), running huge megacorporations that exploit poor third-world countries, exploit consumers, tear forests down and pollute like there is no tomorrow. The thing is, what people, especially the social justice warriors, oppose is not capitalism, but corporatism. Uncontrolled capitalism can lead to corporatism, but they are in no way synonymous. Capitalism is define...

Mr. Johnathan McIntosh. You are currently making a video series about "masculinity in media". Let me just cut to the chase: I would argue that you are the least qualified man on this planet to talk about masculinity. I would even go so far as to say that at least 90% of women on this planet are more qualified to talk about masculinity than you are. You see, in order to talk about masculinity, you have to understand it. I know that the term emasculation is quite over-used, and even misused, but in this particular situation that word applies perfectly to you, Mr. McIntosh. And that pretty much excludes you from being a qualified person to talk about masculinity. It would be like a person who has never drunk any alcohol talking about the experience of being an alcoholic. It would be like a marriage counselor who has never even dated, much less been married. Or, perhaps closer to your ideology, it would be like someone who has never been raped talking about being the victi...

VR adoption among Steam users has crashed to a halt . "The number of new HTC Vive owners on Steam grew only 0.3 percent in July and was flat in August, according to a survey (via Reddit) of customers that use Valve’s distribution network. The Oculus Rift headset from the Facebook subsidiary saw similar stagnation of 0.3 percent in July and 0.1 percent in August. At this point, only 0.18 percent of Steam users own the Vive and only 0.10 percent own the Rift." So after the early adopters, who have too much money to spend, rushed to buy the headsets, how many other people are now buying them? Next to none. And how many people are surprised by this development? Not me, at least. When you price your toy at almost 1000€ (which is what the HTC Vive costs here), plus when you have really hefty hardware requirements, often requiring expensive upgrades (sometimes even requiring the purchase of an entirely new PC), what do you expect? I think it's safe to say that HTC, Val...

Sometimes a company, or service, becomes so immensely popular, that it effectively kills or at the very least overshadows all competition, even without the company having to do anything in particular in order to achieve that situation. In other words, that company or service becomes a de facto monopoly in that particular market. Valve's Steam service is the quintessential example of this. There's nothing stopping other companies from creating their own content distribution / online shop of video games for the PC, and some have tried. However, the fact remains that Steam holds effectively a total monopoly status in this field. If you want easy access to an enormously wide range of video games, often for very cheap, completely legally, Steam is pretty much your only choice. (Other similar services by other companies do exist, but they tend to be significantly narrower in their range of games, and are significantly smaller in terms of their customer base.) I have never heard ...

I wrote previously a post about how crappy most of the current VR games available at Steam look like . And no, I didn't deliberately pick&choose the worst examples I could find. I took directly the top rated VR games on Steam, without any kind of bias. When I comment about this online, many people jump to the defense, stating that VR is so resource-heavy that you just can't expect even a VR-capable PC to render modern games at the required resolution and refresh rate. After all, it has to render the view of the game twice, 90 times per second minimum. That's like almost triple compared to your regular games, right? Well, no. For some reason these people seem to think that the game needs to render the game at full resolution twice (thus requiring twice the rendering speed), and at a significantly increased framerate at that (compared to the standard 60 fps.) In actuality the resolution for each eye is 1080x1200 pixels. That sounds like a rather high resolution, but i...