Part of the reason english was easy to learn for your slovenian friend, is that after your first foreign language, learning a second one is easy - especially if you learn your first foreign language at a young age. It wires your brain to be able to pick up new languages, and that's difficult for you to do the older you get. What gets a lot of people with english isn't the spelling or the pronunciation. It's all the freaking idioms and slang we use.
In japanese, however, with the written form - they have a symbolic alphabet to fall back on when reading.
They also have marker syllables, which dictate if something is a verb, noun, or adjective. Example: most adjectives end in i, and most others end in na. Verbs can have a variety of suffixes, depending on tense, level of formality, etc. The subject of a sentence is typically followed by wo or ni or wa.
In Japanese, if you ignore the kanji (semi-symbolic alphabet) and focus on the kana (the two different phonetic alphabets - katakana and hiragana), each word is spelled exactly how it sounds. Each letter is a consonant-vowel pairing, except for n. example: ka, sa, shi, tsu, ko, za, etc. There are five vowels, and eight full groups of consonants (with modifiers for some: example, sa can become za with a modifier "accent", and others are not full groups, such as wa & wo, ya & yu & yo, n). Every vowel a is pronounced the same, and every vowel i is pronounced the same, and so on and so forth.
If you can read and write hiragana, you can spell any word that you come across - at least, phonetically. English has so many pronunciation and spelling rules, that it quickly becomes one of the most difficult language to become fluent in, in terms of reading and writing (the most difficult, arguably, are the languages which have symbolic alphabets, such as chinese and japanese - where not only do you have to learn how to pronounce each word, you must memorize a symbol to go along with it. Granted, a lot of symbols are compound symbols, and Japanese even has compound kanji, where two kanji put together have a completely different pronunciation than the same two kanji representing seperate concepts).
Anyway, once fluent, English is one of the easiest languages to read, due to distinct word-shapes caused by the rising tails and falling tails of letters. If we changed how to spell things, it would quickly become difficult to read - and it would take centuries to change. The English language has changed significantly over the years, compared to something like mandarin, but not as significantly as such a reform would call for.
One of the issues with switching to a completely phonetic language, is while the number of hominyms would stay the same, the number of hominyms with the same spelling would dramatically increase. That would make context even more important in reading, and probably increase the time it takes someone to read an average sentence.
Some second-language english learners would have an easier time with it - people who learn to speak and understand it before learning to write it would have a much easier time becoming fluently literate. Those who are learning both at the same time, however, probably would have a much more difficult time and would become confused quickly.
Well, only 4 or 5 of the games you mentioned even had a good story. KOTOR's writing was just terrible, as was its voice acting. Compared to even something like Kings Quest VII (The Princeless Bride), everything about it was pretty mediocre... and the gameplay was pretty boring. Oblivion had a pretty neat story, but that wasn't the point of the game so much as it being a sandbox (plus, because it was developed by a huge name in the CRPG genre, it didn't take much to sell it to publishers I'm sure). I haven't played DeusEx, so I can't really comment on it.
And Planescape, Baldurs Gate, Fallout, Deus Ex and System Shock (and 2) were all released in the Golden Age of CRPGs - which came a few years after the golden age of adventure games.
Try to sell something like Planescape or Fallout to a publisher nowadays and you'll get laughed out of the office. Just look at how screwed the Fallout franchise has been lately. Maybe Bethesda will do something interesting with it - but they bought those rights what, 2 years ago now?
IANAL.
This sounds like a law made to prevent OTHER people from recording your home.
However, it certainly does seem to be able to be construed to mean that you yourself cannot record your home.
HOWEVER, the law ALSO defines a private place as one where "a person may reasonably expect to be safe from unauthorized surveillance."
Since when should a police officer reasonably expect to be safe from recording, if he's on your front porch? That's a public area. If this were taken to trial and the man found guilty, this could have terrrrible rammifications. It means that home-video evidence of crimes could be dismissed from evidence because they were gained illegally (example: woman has hidden video recording, husband starts beating her; woman calls 911, man breaks into her house and doesn't notice the phone off the hook as he beats her unconscious; parents set up nannycam and find their nanny shaking their child to death. In all of these cases, the video / audio recordings could be thrown out of court if this law were twisted to mean what these police officers want it to mean)
IANAL.
That's what a grand jury is for.
You arrest someone, you can hold them for a certain ammount of time (24 hours I do believe), before you must submit the case to a grand jury. At the grand jury, the state attorney must prove that he has enough evidence to go to trial. The grand jury issues an indictment. Only after an indictment is issued can the trial go before a judge and jury of peers, with the defendant represented by defense counsel (a defendant does not have defense counsel at a grand jury, because the sole purpose of a grand jury is to make sure the prosecuter has enough evidence to go to trial with - to make sure he's not going to trial on his word alone).
They're not being coerced to abandon religion.
Everyone, no matter their religious affiliation, is a member of the Church of Finland upon birth.
So all these people who are resigning? They're resigning either because they didn't have a religious affiliation to begin with, or because they don't like to be taxed just because they were born and the government decided to automatically make them members of their church.
RTFA.
It's more than just exp loss that makes those games unattractive. FFXI? The endless camping of mobs, the endless group-finding expeditions, the horrible inflation and gil-selling market.
Now, if you did away with xp and used a skill-based system (like UO) with permanent death and a fast advancement curve, you would end up with a neat little bell curve of character potential, with most people being average (rather than most people being uber). Powerful characters would be famous, and people would look up to them.
If a game isn't mostly gear based (try and tell me that being a caster in EQ, FFXI, or WoW is not gear based and I will laugh in your face), losing gear is an inconvenience but not a frustration factor. Dying in FFXI - probably due to a poorly synchronized group - was absolutely frustrating. Partially because it took hours to even get a twentieth of your level even at low levels, and partially because one death would set you back four or five hours on the neverending treadmill.
One way to make it 'hurt' more if you lost your equipment when equipment isn't necessarily the end-all be-all of your character, is to make tons of really unique looking weapons. You just lost a sword with JUST the look you were looking for.. as opposed to you lost the sword with the +6 to damage that you'd been camping a boss mob for weeks to get... the first one hurts more, while the second one just frustrates the hell out of you. Because the first one is an emotional investment, while the second one is an investment to maybe get to the point in the game where it starts being fun again.
I was about 10 when I first started playing Ultima Underworld. I'd never played anything like it - I'd played Heretic before, but that's more action than immersion.
I eventually got so creeped out by how immersive it was, that I had to stop playing. I'd be scared to go around corners, because what if there was a headless there? The game was mindblowing for its time. I went back to it probably a year after playing, and watching my family (older sister, mother) play through the game. It still ranks as one of my favorite PC RPGs (up there with Fallout and Baldur's Gate - but for entirely different reasons).
Gain without potential for loss makes gain worthless. The adrenaline pumped when you're in a situation to lose your 'stuff' is more potent than the scant ammount pumped when you're in a situation where you have to run back to your body, losing maybe 10 minutes of playtime.
Of course, this wouldn't be feasible in current MMOs where your equipment makes up a majority of your combat prowress.
And in other games, where you lose experience instead of equipment.. well, that's just plain discouraging. It has to be random, and not in a dice-rolling sense: -if- you die in the wilderness, and -if- someone comes upon your corpse and takes a few things, and -if- you have a method of tracking that person down.. that's when it becomes feasible.
"- Sex has invaded every part of life. (i.e. "Those two guys sure are good friends, I wonder if they're gay? That old guy is being nice to those kids, I wonder if he's a child molester?") The only protection is to never be close to anyone."
This is partially, I think, a reaction to close-mindedness in terms of sex. Our government has attempted at every turn to shield us from sex, while extreme violence is blatant in mass media. This creates a culture of fear around sex, when it's not something to be afraid of at all. And because of that culture of fear, people focus on the terrible aspects of it - sex crime - or the percieved notion that they will be come less empowered if gay/lesbian couples are allowed civil unions.
American culture isn't plastic because it's "losing family values," it's plastic because of rampant consumerism, stagnant education, and blame-tossing. When "what did britney spears do last weekend" becomes more important than self-advancement, whether in terms of edification or education, you know something is wrong. But the main question is, what is the root cause of this lack of drive? And what can we as a society do to fix it - not what can we as a society get our government to do to fix it?
Spend more time with our kids. Get them interested in education. Expose them to culture other than sesame street - take them to kids museums, and when they're old enough, take them to classical music concerts. Instill a notion of self-worth and personal enrichment in them at a young age, and they won't grow up to be glassy eyed corporate whores. Maybe.
Or maybe the cycle of cultural degredation is too strong to break - maybe this is why so many people are looking at other cultures for new ideas, whether in foreign films or obscure religions.
Multiplayer Battletech was a freaking awesome concept.
There were territories you had to defend or conquor in matched battletech mech matches.
A few things that would have made it cooler: -earning cash through wins and holding territories in order to customize the weapons / armor loadout of your mechs -micropayments for this cash to subsidize the game and the servers (a la Bang! Howdy, or Gunbound) -better graphics, more varied maps. Unfortunately, it looked fairly pre-mechwarrior4. The user interface for the lobbies was damn nice, though. -people in leadership positions being able to set waypoints, like you can in single player mechwarrior games -people in higher leadership positions being able to set daily goals, etc....The game was a freaking blast when it was in beta, but it wasn't at a point where I would pay money for it. Unfortunately, this is true of every EA game I've ever played.
Get it straight about the cell. It's really fucking fast at doing CERTAIN THINGS - like parallel computing, SIMD computing, and other such stuff. Media encoding/decoding? you bet it's fast. But try to do some stuff that you can't put in a pipeline and forget about, and you'll see it quickly degenerate.
It isn't even a full power pc - and the power pc chip only serves to control the SPEs. It's been said to be even more difficult to program for than the PS2. The PS2 had huge potential in clustered computing - but the math libraries just were not up to snuff on the processor they used... and it's looking to be more of the same, if not worse, with the PS3.
Theoretically it's damn fast.
In practice, it's just iterative, and PROBABLY (speculating) about as good as a core duo.
(note that sony origionally thought they were going to be able to use the cell for graphics too - but they realized that wouldn't work very well, and went to nvidia for help).
Most commercially available flash memory has a limitation of about 1 million rewrites. A better solution to this, rather than putting the flash memory in the hard drive:
Put a flash card, removable and upgradable similar to how RAM is on a laptop, and mount it as your Suspend To Disk partition. Except, well, that doesn't work well on windows, I don't think... Then again, I've never used Windows on a laptop.
Something else that would benefit from Flash rather than hard drive, is virtual memory.... reduce seek time, allow read from flash at the same time as read from hard drive, etc. Would significantly improve the performance of virtual memory.
Simutronics has also been running subscription based MUDs since 1991 - and profitably. They've used the profits from Dragonrealms and Gemstone to fund and develop Hero's Journey.
"Actually thinking about it, I think your radar signature would be bigger with this apparatus than with a standard chute."
Except it's carbon fiber, and made to deflect radar as opposed to show up on it.
You know. Hence the 'stealth' bit.
"Usually when I start hitting backspace when I notice a mistake, I've already typed four or five more letters - those letters need to be backspaced through and retyped."
Or, do the smart thing and use the left arrow key, backspace, and then end. Left arrow key and end should be fairly close to your right pinky, anyway.
"Where's all the programmable shortcut keys? Macros? Zoom wheels? Volume+media keys? How about tilt? These are the nice little keyboard advances we've made, there's no need to take a step backward."
Programmable shortcut keys suck. They're annoying, especially if you accidently hit them. I pry off my windows key for just that reason.
Zoom wheels and extra buttons for navigating the screen can be found on a decent mouse.
The Das Keyboard (and II, apparently) are built for one thing: typing. And they do it extremely well.
Like most keyboards, it has two feet that you can flip up to adjust how it's tilted.
Sound when typing is a matter of preference. I prefer mechanical switches to quiet ones, because it gives me more than simple tactile feedback as to whether the key has been pressed or not.
Quiet keyboards also tend to give much less tactile feedback. Less tactile feedback, at least for me, leads to slower and more innacurate typing - due to my mind being less sure of my actions from lack of feedback.
And it's one of the most comfortable keyboards I've ever typed on.
The different weights on the keys has reduces the strain on my hands, and I can now type for longer periods of time.
The lack of notation on the keyboard was disconcerting at first, but once I got used to it, has made me a better touch typist.
Since I received the keyboard, my typing has gone from ~80wpm up to around 95wpm. I can't imagine what I could do if I bit the bullet and switched to dvorak, a pleasantly easy thing to do on this keyboard seeing as there are no labels.
I love the old IBM clicky key feel, great tactile feedback. I have had no downsides to this keyboard, and no inconsistances; my cat even spilt a glass of water on it, and after a few days of drying it works perfectly. That was four months ago.
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My old apartment complex would not accept cash for rent. It required a money order or check.
Cause they were too cheap to invest in a safe, I guess.
Part of the reason english was easy to learn for your slovenian friend, is that after your first foreign language, learning a second one is easy - especially if you learn your first foreign language at a young age. It wires your brain to be able to pick up new languages, and that's difficult for you to do the older you get. What gets a lot of people with english isn't the spelling or the pronunciation. It's all the freaking idioms and slang we use.
In japanese, however, with the written form - they have a symbolic alphabet to fall back on when reading.
They also have marker syllables, which dictate if something is a verb, noun, or adjective. Example: most adjectives end in i, and most others end in na. Verbs can have a variety of suffixes, depending on tense, level of formality, etc. The subject of a sentence is typically followed by wo or ni or wa.
English has none of these contextual helpers.
In Japanese, if you ignore the kanji (semi-symbolic alphabet) and focus on the kana (the two different phonetic alphabets - katakana and hiragana), each word is spelled exactly how it sounds. Each letter is a consonant-vowel pairing, except for n. example: ka, sa, shi, tsu, ko, za, etc. There are five vowels, and eight full groups of consonants (with modifiers for some: example, sa can become za with a modifier "accent", and others are not full groups, such as wa & wo, ya & yu & yo, n). Every vowel a is pronounced the same, and every vowel i is pronounced the same, and so on and so forth. If you can read and write hiragana, you can spell any word that you come across - at least, phonetically. English has so many pronunciation and spelling rules, that it quickly becomes one of the most difficult language to become fluent in, in terms of reading and writing (the most difficult, arguably, are the languages which have symbolic alphabets, such as chinese and japanese - where not only do you have to learn how to pronounce each word, you must memorize a symbol to go along with it. Granted, a lot of symbols are compound symbols, and Japanese even has compound kanji, where two kanji put together have a completely different pronunciation than the same two kanji representing seperate concepts). Anyway, once fluent, English is one of the easiest languages to read, due to distinct word-shapes caused by the rising tails and falling tails of letters. If we changed how to spell things, it would quickly become difficult to read - and it would take centuries to change. The English language has changed significantly over the years, compared to something like mandarin, but not as significantly as such a reform would call for. One of the issues with switching to a completely phonetic language, is while the number of hominyms would stay the same, the number of hominyms with the same spelling would dramatically increase. That would make context even more important in reading, and probably increase the time it takes someone to read an average sentence. Some second-language english learners would have an easier time with it - people who learn to speak and understand it before learning to write it would have a much easier time becoming fluently literate. Those who are learning both at the same time, however, probably would have a much more difficult time and would become confused quickly.
Well, only 4 or 5 of the games you mentioned even had a good story. KOTOR's writing was just terrible, as was its voice acting. Compared to even something like Kings Quest VII (The Princeless Bride), everything about it was pretty mediocre... and the gameplay was pretty boring. Oblivion had a pretty neat story, but that wasn't the point of the game so much as it being a sandbox (plus, because it was developed by a huge name in the CRPG genre, it didn't take much to sell it to publishers I'm sure). I haven't played DeusEx, so I can't really comment on it.
And Planescape, Baldurs Gate, Fallout, Deus Ex and System Shock (and 2) were all released in the Golden Age of CRPGs - which came a few years after the golden age of adventure games.
Try to sell something like Planescape or Fallout to a publisher nowadays and you'll get laughed out of the office. Just look at how screwed the Fallout franchise has been lately. Maybe Bethesda will do something interesting with it - but they bought those rights what, 2 years ago now?
3DRealms still makes games?
id and Epic make games that aren't just advertisements for their newest licensable engine?
Not to mention a gullible grand jury.
IANAL. This sounds like a law made to prevent OTHER people from recording your home. However, it certainly does seem to be able to be construed to mean that you yourself cannot record your home. HOWEVER, the law ALSO defines a private place as one where "a person may reasonably expect to be safe from unauthorized surveillance." Since when should a police officer reasonably expect to be safe from recording, if he's on your front porch? That's a public area. If this were taken to trial and the man found guilty, this could have terrrrible rammifications. It means that home-video evidence of crimes could be dismissed from evidence because they were gained illegally (example: woman has hidden video recording, husband starts beating her; woman calls 911, man breaks into her house and doesn't notice the phone off the hook as he beats her unconscious; parents set up nannycam and find their nanny shaking their child to death. In all of these cases, the video / audio recordings could be thrown out of court if this law were twisted to mean what these police officers want it to mean)
IANAL. That's what a grand jury is for. You arrest someone, you can hold them for a certain ammount of time (24 hours I do believe), before you must submit the case to a grand jury. At the grand jury, the state attorney must prove that he has enough evidence to go to trial. The grand jury issues an indictment. Only after an indictment is issued can the trial go before a judge and jury of peers, with the defendant represented by defense counsel (a defendant does not have defense counsel at a grand jury, because the sole purpose of a grand jury is to make sure the prosecuter has enough evidence to go to trial with - to make sure he's not going to trial on his word alone).
They're not being coerced to abandon religion. Everyone, no matter their religious affiliation, is a member of the Church of Finland upon birth. So all these people who are resigning? They're resigning either because they didn't have a religious affiliation to begin with, or because they don't like to be taxed just because they were born and the government decided to automatically make them members of their church. RTFA.
It's more than just exp loss that makes those games unattractive. FFXI? The endless camping of mobs, the endless group-finding expeditions, the horrible inflation and gil-selling market.
Now, if you did away with xp and used a skill-based system (like UO) with permanent death and a fast advancement curve, you would end up with a neat little bell curve of character potential, with most people being average (rather than most people being uber). Powerful characters would be famous, and people would look up to them.
If a game isn't mostly gear based (try and tell me that being a caster in EQ, FFXI, or WoW is not gear based and I will laugh in your face), losing gear is an inconvenience but not a frustration factor. Dying in FFXI - probably due to a poorly synchronized group - was absolutely frustrating. Partially because it took hours to even get a twentieth of your level even at low levels, and partially because one death would set you back four or five hours on the neverending treadmill.
One way to make it 'hurt' more if you lost your equipment when equipment isn't necessarily the end-all be-all of your character, is to make tons of really unique looking weapons. You just lost a sword with JUST the look you were looking for.. as opposed to you lost the sword with the +6 to damage that you'd been camping a boss mob for weeks to get... the first one hurts more, while the second one just frustrates the hell out of you. Because the first one is an emotional investment, while the second one is an investment to maybe get to the point in the game where it starts being fun again.
Completely agree with you!
I was about 10 when I first started playing Ultima Underworld. I'd never played anything like it - I'd played Heretic before, but that's more action than immersion.
I eventually got so creeped out by how immersive it was, that I had to stop playing. I'd be scared to go around corners, because what if there was a headless there? The game was mindblowing for its time. I went back to it probably a year after playing, and watching my family (older sister, mother) play through the game. It still ranks as one of my favorite PC RPGs (up there with Fallout and Baldur's Gate - but for entirely different reasons).
such as MMOs.
Gain without potential for loss makes gain worthless. The adrenaline pumped when you're in a situation to lose your 'stuff' is more potent than the scant ammount pumped when you're in a situation where you have to run back to your body, losing maybe 10 minutes of playtime.
Of course, this wouldn't be feasible in current MMOs where your equipment makes up a majority of your combat prowress.
And in other games, where you lose experience instead of equipment.. well, that's just plain discouraging. It has to be random, and not in a dice-rolling sense: -if- you die in the wilderness, and -if- someone comes upon your corpse and takes a few things, and -if- you have a method of tracking that person down.. that's when it becomes feasible.
"- Sex has invaded every part of life. (i.e. "Those two guys sure are good friends, I wonder if they're gay? That old guy is being nice to those kids, I wonder if he's a child molester?") The only protection is to never be close to anyone." This is partially, I think, a reaction to close-mindedness in terms of sex. Our government has attempted at every turn to shield us from sex, while extreme violence is blatant in mass media. This creates a culture of fear around sex, when it's not something to be afraid of at all. And because of that culture of fear, people focus on the terrible aspects of it - sex crime - or the percieved notion that they will be come less empowered if gay/lesbian couples are allowed civil unions. American culture isn't plastic because it's "losing family values," it's plastic because of rampant consumerism, stagnant education, and blame-tossing. When "what did britney spears do last weekend" becomes more important than self-advancement, whether in terms of edification or education, you know something is wrong. But the main question is, what is the root cause of this lack of drive? And what can we as a society do to fix it - not what can we as a society get our government to do to fix it? Spend more time with our kids. Get them interested in education. Expose them to culture other than sesame street - take them to kids museums, and when they're old enough, take them to classical music concerts. Instill a notion of self-worth and personal enrichment in them at a young age, and they won't grow up to be glassy eyed corporate whores. Maybe. Or maybe the cycle of cultural degredation is too strong to break - maybe this is why so many people are looking at other cultures for new ideas, whether in foreign films or obscure religions.
However, if the interest charged on student loans went to education instead of defense R&D, we might have more money for schools.
Also, while literacy rate is high, the rate of people who graduate high school and cannot locate europe or australia on a map is staggering.
And that's "literate," not "able to read things beyond the tabloids and actually enrich their lives through it"
Multiplayer Battletech was a freaking awesome concept.
...The game was a freaking blast when it was in beta, but it wasn't at a point where I would pay money for it. Unfortunately, this is true of every EA game I've ever played.
There were territories you had to defend or conquor in matched battletech mech matches.
A few things that would have made it cooler:
-earning cash through wins and holding territories in order to customize the weapons / armor loadout of your mechs
-micropayments for this cash to subsidize the game and the servers (a la Bang! Howdy, or Gunbound)
-better graphics, more varied maps. Unfortunately, it looked fairly pre-mechwarrior4. The user interface for the lobbies was damn nice, though.
-people in leadership positions being able to set waypoints, like you can in single player mechwarrior games
-people in higher leadership positions being able to set daily goals, etc.
Get it straight about the cell. It's really fucking fast at doing CERTAIN THINGS - like parallel computing, SIMD computing, and other such stuff. Media encoding/decoding? you bet it's fast. But try to do some stuff that you can't put in a pipeline and forget about, and you'll see it quickly degenerate.
... and it's looking to be more of the same, if not worse, with the PS3.
It isn't even a full power pc - and the power pc chip only serves to control the SPEs. It's been said to be even more difficult to program for than the PS2. The PS2 had huge potential in clustered computing - but the math libraries just were not up to snuff on the processor they used
Theoretically it's damn fast.
In practice, it's just iterative, and PROBABLY (speculating) about as good as a core duo.
(note that sony origionally thought they were going to be able to use the cell for graphics too - but they realized that wouldn't work very well, and went to nvidia for help).
Most commercially available flash memory has a limitation of about 1 million rewrites. A better solution to this, rather than putting the flash memory in the hard drive: Put a flash card, removable and upgradable similar to how RAM is on a laptop, and mount it as your Suspend To Disk partition. Except, well, that doesn't work well on windows, I don't think... Then again, I've never used Windows on a laptop. Something else that would benefit from Flash rather than hard drive, is virtual memory.... reduce seek time, allow read from flash at the same time as read from hard drive, etc. Would significantly improve the performance of virtual memory.
Simutronics has also been running subscription based MUDs since 1991 - and profitably. They've used the profits from Dragonrealms and Gemstone to fund and develop Hero's Journey.
"Actually thinking about it, I think your radar signature would be bigger with this apparatus than with a standard chute." Except it's carbon fiber, and made to deflect radar as opposed to show up on it. You know. Hence the 'stealth' bit.
"Usually when I start hitting backspace when I notice a mistake, I've already typed four or five more letters - those letters need to be backspaced through and retyped." Or, do the smart thing and use the left arrow key, backspace, and then end. Left arrow key and end should be fairly close to your right pinky, anyway.
"Where's all the programmable shortcut keys? Macros? Zoom wheels? Volume+media keys? How about tilt? These are the nice little keyboard advances we've made, there's no need to take a step backward." Programmable shortcut keys suck. They're annoying, especially if you accidently hit them. I pry off my windows key for just that reason. Zoom wheels and extra buttons for navigating the screen can be found on a decent mouse. The Das Keyboard (and II, apparently) are built for one thing: typing. And they do it extremely well. Like most keyboards, it has two feet that you can flip up to adjust how it's tilted.
Keyboards with a large enter key usually half the size of the backspace key and stick it to the left of the backspace key. I cannot stand this layout.
Sound when typing is a matter of preference. I prefer mechanical switches to quiet ones, because it gives me more than simple tactile feedback as to whether the key has been pressed or not. Quiet keyboards also tend to give much less tactile feedback. Less tactile feedback, at least for me, leads to slower and more innacurate typing - due to my mind being less sure of my actions from lack of feedback.
And it's one of the most comfortable keyboards I've ever typed on.
The different weights on the keys has reduces the strain on my hands, and I can now type for longer periods of time.
The lack of notation on the keyboard was disconcerting at first, but once I got used to it, has made me a better touch typist.
Since I received the keyboard, my typing has gone from ~80wpm up to around 95wpm. I can't imagine what I could do if I bit the bullet and switched to dvorak, a pleasantly easy thing to do on this keyboard seeing as there are no labels.
I love the old IBM clicky key feel, great tactile feedback. I have had no downsides to this keyboard, and no inconsistances; my cat even spilt a glass of water on it, and after a few days of drying it works perfectly. That was four months ago.