Tiby

Kings Quest .. Heard there will be a pre-sequel soon. Gives me shivers just thinking about it.

There were violent games in the past (Doom, Quake, Duke, Blood .. to name a few), some with foul language everywhere but I didn't hear any violent attitude from them. Truth is the age we started playing them (at release date) was much higher than today and this probably is the main problem here. Kids are more influenced from what they see and the level of shitty designed games nowadays with no real story behind just stuff like: run from the ghost or he will get you or shoot everyone in sight because you get power-ups do have an impact on their attitude. Heard so many cases of The Slender man group or Call of Duty "militia" that is not even funny.

Well mostly because of past experience. When you buy an Apple product you expect quality (no matter what model you choose). You can't apply the same rules for PC's unless you know exactly what you are searching for (and let's be honest there's a difference between consumers and prosumers). If everbody would spend the same amount of money on choosing a good pc than just buying a Mac, the debate will end here, but truth is they aren't. I've heard so many things like: "Why should I pay 50 bucks more for this laptop when this one is cheaper and has the same specs?". Better cooling design, better materials, less crap software installed is something not everbody takes for granted. And then of course there are businesses. You really don't expect a manager to show up at a conference with a shinny Asus ROG laptop regardless the price or some other brand that by the looks of it doesn't screem "I can afford 2000 bucks on this so let;s do business".. These days it's getting better, however there really are few options out there that do stand out. At the end of the day is what you prefer as well. If you can't stand OSX or Apple design choices (myself included, and I do have a mac Mini running as a test server nicely), then it's pretty obvious that it won;t be on your choice list and that is ok.

Windows 10 is fine for the most part. However the Metro apps are still pretty unusable. How did they get by QA its beyond my understanding.

You can buy expensive pair of headphones all you want but if your sound quality is poor, you will not feel they make any difference, aside from knowing how much you paid for them). And yes, the cost of premium hifi deadphones can go quite high up (like these for instance, and that's only for the headset itself )

You can always use the available RAM as a RAM drive, but honestly if you're not into running virtual machines on your system or several deployment services, you will not need 16 GB of RAM. 8 GB will do fine.

4 GB is enough for OSX and maybee Photoshop but not for multiple tabs on Chrome. Many users actually hate Chrome with a passion on OSX because well of poor optimisation. OSX is designed with 2 GB of RAM in mind (even new MacBook Air are selling now with 4 GB of RAM) and the other applications that run on it as well. Sure they may not run as fast as on Linux or Windows counterpart but they run well enough for most mac users. I've recently upgraded a Mac Mini (from 2010) with 4 GB of RAM and an SSD and it's mostly like new. Don't use it as much as my desktop but it's a nice little testing machine.

Windows 10 was very stable on most of the devices I've installed it on (and does come with most welcomed features). Sure there were some updates that failed to install (the first rollup actually) and the store apps is in the same "mess" as it was with windows 8, but it's more usable from first day than either 7 or 8 were. There is no rush to upgrade to it and keeping it off until next spring will probably be a better ideea. I'm pretty sure we won't see DirectX 12 exclusives or any world changing app that makes extensive use of Windows 10 features until then (which isn't good business for Microsoft but it takes time for people to adapt to newer stuff once they are in the open).

Using full potential of your pc hardware should be a priority to every developer. Things like locking fps, running the app only on one core or even restricting the memory allocation to just 2 gb in 32 bit standard. What happens today is well lack of interest from game development houses in what a pc is. As long as consoles sell better and even tablets that will be their business priority. You know someone is doing things wrong when a small company with limited budget can release something way better than what a dedicated coorporation gives you at launch date.

Hyper-V, VMWare, Citrix.. Depends on what you want from them. VirtualBox is still a solid contender, especially now when v5 was released.

Only know about the Cardas (but they do cost half the price you will be paying for the headset) or these ones.

Maybee when they will launch phones / tablets with Android on it, but don't get your hopes too high on general availability. It all sums up to "if you buy my hardware or not".

Motherboard manufacturers don't make the soundchip. It's mostly Realtek with slight optimisations done depending on the manufacturer. Just check on realtek website the specs for the chip that comes with your motherboard. The values you should search are the DAC Sample rate or ADC sample rate. Nowadays the quality of these chips has grown exponentially, the higher end ones being able to drive flagship headphones like the HD 800's or Grado's with no problem. However when you have 2000 bucks for a headphone you don't actually settle for the integrated sound chip. They may output un-balanced sound (because usually most higher end integrated audio chips come customized with gaming in mind) therefore you will need to power them from an AMP/DAC that does not distort the sound.

You don't need to go that high (i.e 200 bucks) just for a pair of cans. With your current equipment I bet you won't notice that much of a difference anyway. It's not only buying expensive headphones that will make the music sound great. I would settle now for a pair of HyperX Cloud II. You can get them for around 100 bucks and come with almost everything you need. It will be a huge step up than what you have right now.

Why would they? Each Mac I know of suffers from thermal throttling. If they can't manage a decent cooling on Intel CPU's (because hey staying quieter is much more fun than being hotter) imagine what will happen if they started using AMD CPU's. Apple just takes "the best" components from vendors based on what makes them .. well Apple. The only reason they're in bed with AMD GPUs now is that most editing software uses OpenCL almost exclusively. As for cooling, well let's be honest there is no such thing as small form factor design and decent cooling solution at the same time.