Druegan

Actually, a good portion of the way websites are terrible today is exactly the same way they were terrible in the past... "Design" is an art.. and like any other art, there are people who do it well, and people who do it horribly. It doesn't matter what kind of design you're talking about. But there are certain patterns and tendencies that can be identified. Trends, that sort.. The first is that the "people who do it horribly" will pretty much *always* outnumber the "people who do it well" by at least a few orders of magnitude. Now, when the 'net was more or less "new".. when "web design" as a discipline was still coming into being.. There was really a ton of experimentation, and not much "knowing what was good and what wasn't". It was much more a time of "What can we actually make this new medium do", rather than "How should we do this to make it work well." There were some hits, and yes, a lot of misses. However, as "Trends" go, in the internet of today.. A lot of what we seem to have is major websites being designed by people who don't really have any grounding in the *principles* of design. The methodology of crafting a good, functional, elegant product. They're marketing people, not designers. They're interested in "eye catching", not usability. They care about the metrics a person would use for determining the success of say, a tv commercial... not the metrics one would use for determining the success of a communication tool. A lot of this is due to new tools lowering the bar for participation. Lowering it so far that yes, any idiot can build a website these days. So much so that many companies, large and small, don't actually hire people who have the skills needed to do the job well, and instead just assume "Well, my kid has a website, how hard can it be? Just have Joe from Marketing do it.". And Joe from Marketing has ZERO experience in how to make a website work like a website... so he makes it look like a billboard, or a powerpoint presentation, or a tv commercial. And grabs every plug in piece of crap to add needless flash and scrape marketing data possible, and creates an abomination. Now, in the old days, when things were new.. You could kinda forgive some of the abominations. Because there wasn't 3 decades worth of feedback from users on the stuff that generally *always* annoys them. Today, on the other hand, well... that sorta thing is widely available.. and should be really obvious anyway, as we all use the internet.. for most everything. The decisions are being made by people who don't understand the medium, or people who just don't *care*, and the result is that we're seeing an explosion of crap. Facebook is absolutely terrible, yes. Not surprising, because it's a terrible company that has forgotten its "First Four Words" principle that it so highly touts, and in 99% of cases, does the exact *opposite* of it's founding statement. Because it no longer cares about producing a product that its user base wants, but rather has shifted towards depending on its user inertia to milk those users for every cent it can squeeze out of them. Much like many other "major" websites as well, really.

Anything for sorting out motherboards by feature set? Like number of various connectors/headers/etc?

I'm in the pre-pre-planning stages for a new build sometime in the spring.. it's been about 5 years since my last one.. so I'm playing a bit of "learning curve catch-up" on the hardware on the market.. I've built quite a few systems over the years, so I'm comfortable under the hood with the expensive legos.. but what I'm having a bit of an issue with is finding websites that are actually comprehensive in terms of features, comparisons, and relevant data for the parts I'm considering. I've used PCpartpicker before, tried sorting around and looking for things on like Amazon and Newegg.. but it seems like there's always something that's either missing, or has no data on, or just is otherwise lacking in terms of figuring out all the particulars of different products. A lot of times, even getting clear information about some things from the manufacturer isn't particularly easy.. Anybody have any good, if maybe lesser known, sources or tools for helping me get back into the swing of the current hardware choices without having to spend a thousand hours digging through dozens of website per component?

Greets, peeps. Fairly new to the forum. Lurked a bit, figured I'd say Hi. Fairly old nerd. Minor neckbeard status. Been a subscriber to LTT on youtube for a little bit, like some of Linus's builds and guides and stuff. He's made me realize I need to learn a lot more. Soo.. figured I'd come here to start in on it.

Ok.. I gotta start with "I'm old" as a disclaimer. I remember the internet before AOL opened for business. I still mourn "Eternal September".. That said, "modern" web design has gone totally to crap, even for a fair number of "major" or "successful" websites. And frankly, I blame the social and economic parasitism that is "Marketing" for most of it. (Although yes, I am very biased there too.) I hate websites that look like an overblown television commercial. Or some Yuppie Jackoff's PowerPoint presentation. I hate ridiculous amounts of dynamic content. I absolutely *despise* any form of pop-up, for any reason.. web designers should have gotten that garbage out of their system in the 90's, from the utter trainwreck that ensued when people first started figuring out how it was done.. Autoplay video is just as annoying today as embedded website music was ages ago. What I want in a website is just clean, efficient communication. Because that's what the internet is.. it's a communication medium. I go visit a website, any website, because I want either information, or a product, and the more garbage you make me go through to get to that information or product, the greater your chances of me spouting a lot of profanity and going somewhere else. I don't buy products or services based off of marketing wankery, because it basically exists to misrepresent something inherently substandard as something actually *good*. The Internet used to be a cool place. You could just chill, talk to people, and learn things. Like, have intelligent conversations in a public access unmoderated chat.. Mindblowing in the 'net of today. Now, you need a veritable arsenal of advertising blockers and script blockers just to get anything done. Websites have 2, maybe 3 scripts related to the actual content on them, and another 30 that are just wasting my bandwidth and cpu cycles to try to turn me into a product to sell to parasites who are going to waste more of my resources trying to shove garbage I have no interest in down my throat.. It's all gone to hell, man, it's all gone to hell... *traumatized pleading*

Heh.. My first "I guess you could call it a computer" system was a Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 model 1.. Specs.. um.. it had a Zilog Z80 processor running at 1.77 MHZ, 4k of ram, and data storage was on a separate cassette tape.. yeah.. like audio cassettes.. if anyone remembers those.. The first thing I'd call a "system" by today's standards was an IBM PC, sporting an 8088 processor cracking out a whopping 4.77mhz, 256kb of ram, a Color Graphics Adapter "vid card", and dual 5.25" floppy drives.. Bought it second hand from a friend of the family who had used it at Caterpillar Inc and was getting a new one provided by the company...

Hello all. I've got a bit of a question I've been trying to figure out for years now, figured this might be a decent place to find someone who has an answer. I'm not a hardcore gamer, but I do play a fair bit, and I watch a lot of gaming content on various online platforms like Youtube and Twitch.. On many occasions, over the years, I've seen games with crazy graphical or scaling options possible, or otherwise high demand setups, that bring even the most powerful gaming rigs practically to their knees. I've also seen games that aren't quite so hardcore just.. start to really chug and perform poorly on what one would think should be more than sufficiently powerful hardware for the task.. Now, I'm kinda an old guy.. I remember back in the days before digital distribution when it was actually important for companies to make sure the game worked before it was shipped.. because there wasn't really an option to "patch".. so you had a lot of QA work and testing before a launch... but.. I've always wondered.. "What kind of systems do the makers of these games use to create and test them?" From a lot of what I've heard, honestly, the specs of the hardware used by even AAA devs are often kinda rubbish.. Like, the systems they actually build the game on could never actually run what they create on a "max bling" kind of setting.. I'm not sure that is correct, but... it's what I've heard. So.. if I take a game that isn't really meant to be brutally demanding on a system.. like say, Minecraft. Nobody's gonna argue that it's a Crysis 3.. But I've seen "far better than average" hardware chug out and players running around in an unloaded section of the world just because it can't keep up... So I have to wonder "man, what kind of systems must these guys be running to make sure their game actually works, or do they even particularly care about that anymore?" Can anyone shed some light?