Just bought a Noppoo choc mini. Loving it so far.

I'm using the cherry reds; they're generally thought of as the go to 'gaming' switches. You can sort of hover over the actuation point. I've really got better at league since owning this board... Much faster.

>>21675
And it has browns if you want.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B007OK938Y/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_2?pf_rd_p=479289247&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B007OJA4Y2&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_r=00A9N358T6ZGE9CW7XKV

>>21675
>I've really got better at league since owning this board
Come off it.

I've got a CM Strom Trigger which, if you can deal with a gimmicky backlighting options (who in their right mind wants the backlighting to pulse?), is pretty decent with a nicely solid base. The only quibble I had with it is the placement of the macro keys since I align my left hand by letting my little finger feel for the left most keys which the macro keys hampered before I got used to it. I've got the brown version, so that's definitely available.

>>21677

The keys have a much lighter actuation force; my speed has increased greatly with combos. Really, it does help a lot.

Ducky Zero

>>21676
£80 for a keyboard? Christ.

I'm confused, if these are mechanical keyboards then what's a non-mechanical keyboard?

>>21681
My limited knowledge of the subject would tell me is that common keyboards have rubber nibs under the keys.

sage for likely being completely and utterly wrong

>>21681
>>21682

You're not far off. Mechanical keyboards have mechanical switches under each key. Depending on the type of switch it gives the key a different feel. These range from tactile, extremely heavy and clicky (a bump under the finger when the key has been registered; such as the buckling springs in the IBM Model M) to light linear without a click (no bump under the finger and very easy to press; such as the Cherry MX Reds).

Your bog-standard keyboards have a small rubber dome under each key which collapses when you apply enough force, completing a circuit on a plastic sheet with conductive tracks.

It's arguable that a mechanical feels much better to type on than a rubber done, and I'd be inclined to agree. The keyboards are also often of higher quality, and testament to that is the still-common IBM Model Ms -- some of which are 30 years old now and still working like new. I have a Dell AT102W from 1996 which is still working. I'd also recommend an AT102W if you want to try a mechanical keyboard as you can often pick them up for less than a tenner in unsuspecting computer shops or on eBay.

I have a Razer Blackwidow. It's not the best out there, I'm sure, but build quality is actually solid, and the little extra functions like volume control, disabling of system keys, and dedicated macro keys (which I bind to mouse sensitivity adjustments) make it worth a look. Though thinking about it, they have Blue MX so maybe that rules it out for you.

>>21684
I'm surprised anyone would put Blues in a gaming keyboard. The clicky bit tends to make things like a double-tap awkward.

>>21681
This is a good guide.

http://www.overclock.net/t/491752/mechanical-keyboard-guide

>>21685

They seem to work pretty well for me, that clicky bit is what I prefer. It doesn't feel particularly difficult to double tap, far better than my dome keyboards anyway.

Interestingly, it seems on their newer models, Razer are using their own switches. I wonder what they're like. http://www.razerzone.com/gb-en/razer-mechanical-switches

>>21687
From what I can see on that site, they are slightly heavier reds.

I have a bottom end Microsoft keyboard and mouse set I got for £20 years ago. They both work absolutely fine for gaming and general typing. I've tried high end mechanical keyboards and I honestly don't feel any significant difference. The whole keyboard industry bemuses me. I guess this must be how people feel when I'm amazed they can't see any difference between SD and HD.

Sage for dumb unsolicited opinions.

>>21689
I agree with you for the most part but disagree about the comparison to SD vs HD. I think that is very noticeable on a reasonable sized screen to anyone who doesn't have a serious visual problem. However paying £50+ for something that might make you fractionally better at merking people in some online twatfare seems like the biggest waste of money imagineable. I'll point out that at this point I'm almost completely disillusioned with online gaming, and I'm not nearly convinced that such a keyboard would significantly improve a single-player gaming experience in nearly the same way as spending that money on a better CPU/GPU or whatever.

>>21690

>might make you fractionally better at merking people in some online twatfare


It's not a waste of money if that's what you intend to get out of it, is it?

Ignoring online games, my words typed per minute has gone up by at least 10 since owning a mech board. The reason being instead of "bottoming out" on key presses (pushing the keys until it hits the bottom), you can sort of glide over the keys with a light touch and have them actuate. I need to type a lot for my job so in the long run £50+ quid on this has been an excellent investment.

They are also generally of much better build quality than their rubber dome counterparts and can last a very, very long time. To top it off, they have that old school clacking noise, and feel like sex to type on. There's something incredibly satisfying about it.

People who use a computer a lot are well justified in spending a bit of cash on good quality peripherals in the same way someone who writes a lot may not want to use a biro constantly.

>>21690
My girlfriend, parents and quite a number of friends have better eyesight than me (before I had contacts my glass were thick enough to plausibly be bulletproof) and can't understand how it's better. I wish I didn't notice things like that. I can't imagine how much money I'd save.

A mechanical keyboard has a working lifespan of decades, so the amortised cost for even the most expensive model is a couple of quid a year. Compare that to a graphics card or CPU that might be completely obsolete in three years time.

In the software industry, investment in equipment one of the benchmarks of whether an employer really understands how to manage developers. Good firms pretty much write a blank cheque for computer equipment, on the basis that even very small gains in productivity are excellent value compared to the fully-loaded cost of an employee.

Some really shit firms begrudge the cost of even a second monitor for a developer, even though the research suggests that software developers are about 10% more productive with a second screen. Even for a junior developer on £30k (so at least £45k fully loaded), spending £400 on a decent second monitor nets you £4,500 worth of extra output per year. Getting a few extra WPM of typing speed or shaving a few seconds off compile times yields a massive return-on-investment.

There's an old adage that you should buy the best mattress and the best shoes you can afford, because if you're not in one then you're in the other. I think that for many of us, computer equipment is just as important.

Aside from all of that, just look at what some people spend on golf clubs or fishing tackle. There's nothing wrong with using your disposable income to indulge in your hobbies.

>>21693
Do you seriously think that the kind of computers people will be using in many decades time will be connectable to current day keyboards? Not to mention the rise in touchscreen and voice-controlled computers even today. Most of your post I agree with but I think you are significantly overestimating the functional lifespan of the top end keyboards due to constraints other than when it fails.

If you buy a mechanical keyboard for gaming or performance gains alone then you're probably going to be disappointed. I prefer to think of them like some people think of cigars. Sure you can smoke marlboro cigs and get cancer and a nicotine rush. You can also indulge in a fine cigar because it just feels better to smoke. Higher quality leaf has gone into the production and so it's a smoother taste. Or why people drink 1947 vintage wine or buy £300 bottles of whiskey -- because it feels nicer to drink it.

It just feels nicer to type on a (good) mechanical, and that's the primary reason people use them.

>>21693
>a junior developer on £30k
Maybe in a company with far too much money to burn, perhaps. Outside the smoke, £15-20k is more realistic, and even then an extra £2k a year worth of output still seems optimistic.

I could certainly do with a second screen, but first my employer would have to provide a development environment that would support it - we're using virtual desktops bound to a single window so couldn't use the second monitor productively if we wanted to. Needless to say, I won't be retiring there.

>>21696

Move to the US where they blow $70k on every fresh faced graduate with some idea how to turn a computer on.

>>21697
Given that America is full of greedy companies that would happily pay their staff nothing if they could get away with it, I'm assuming that there's some reason for the disparity you're not taking account of there. I'm told that their market is even more flooded with useless types than ours is.

Apparently, if you really want to make big bucks, the thing to do is see if you can work remotely for an Australian company. Australian salary but without Australian prices - up until this year the AUD was significantly overvalue, as a result of which that salary would have converted to sterling very favourably.

>>21698

The US is where most of the worlds main tech companies are. There is a huge demand for programmers which is why they get paid silly money over there.

>>21699
All of which begs the question of how easily one could do the trick above for an American company - receiving an American salary while on UK-compliant conditions. I know of someone who managed to do this, but he was head-hunted by name.

>>21694

People still use Model M keyboards today, and they're older than I am. I'm almost completely sure there'll be some sort of USB adapter available even in thirty years. Unless we've moved completely to entirely non haptic input methods, like mind waves or summat.

>>21699
FWIW, the shortage of programmers in the US is largely a myth. Counter-intuitively, their visa restrictions actually depress wages.

>>21694

Text is text. The QWERTY keyboard dates to the 1870s but remains a standard today. A majority of skilled software developers still work primarily in derivatives of vi and emacs, editors that date to the mid-1970s and are still in active development. As >>21701 says, plenty of people are still using 1980s-vintage Model Ms today, with the aid of a PS/2 to USB adapter. USB is likely to have a very long lifespan indeed, due to the huge array of USB peripherals in use and the excellent forwards-compatibility of the specification.

We've been talking about the end of keyboard input for as long as I've been alive, but very little has changed. It would take a remarkable device indeed to allow me to input a string like "<([A-Z][A-Z0-9]*)\b[^>]*>(.*?)</\1>" more efficiently than with a keyboard; I type strings like that all day, as do most software developers, accountants, scientists etc. All manner of input devices have been invented for gaming, but none have surpassed the keyboard and mouse.

>>21702

There's a huge shortage of good developers and hardly anyone knows how to hire them. It's very easy to get a PHP/.NET drone who can cobble together half-working code, but very difficult indeed to get a bona-fide hacker. The worst developers have drastically negative productivity and the best are 20x or 30x more productive than the average. Lacking the ability to actually tell the difference, most American firms have resorted to paying over-inflated wages to ROCKSTAR NINJAS and hoping for the best. Some developers end up badly overpaid, others are ludicrously underpaid. I know guys on £40k who do work worth millions of pounds a year, they just lack the social and business skills to extract the value from their technical ability.

The bay area has such high living costs that the valley firms have to offer bonkers wages, and crazy valuations have flooded the industry with money. That drags up wages nationally, as firms outside of SV try and compete. Nobody wants to pay below the odds and hire the dregs. The Google and Facebook IPOs kickstarted a second bubble, I think it's just a question of whether this one pops or merely deflates.

>>21703
This. While we are seeing higher and higher market share for mobile devices, one of the most popular accessories for tablets is a keyboard. Indeed, when IT issue iPads at work, the standard loadout includes a keyboard. They're simply much easier to handle than typing on the tablet surface.

><([A-Z][A-Z0-9]*)\b[^>]*>(.*?)</\1>
http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454

>>21704
Again, that's mostly a myth. Average salaries for developers in the US have fallen in real terms in recent years (that is to say, they have not kept pace with inflation). Even in the crazy world of the Valley, money is tight - many startups simply don't have the cash to pay high salaries, even though by their nature tech startups demand the most from their developers.

The other thing that's frequently overstated is the difficulty finding "good" programmers. The problem certainly isn't that there aren't enough of them, particularly with all the layoffs over the last 5 years. There are two things that lead to this perception. One is that employers' expectations are frequently too high - they end up looking for what's known in the business as "purple squirrels". The other is that the dregs just keep on sloshing around because nobody will hire them - if you get 200 CVs and 95% of them are obviously useless, then the chances are these are the same 95% you saw last time you hired, and the same 95% your mate in another company saw when they were hiring.

Just whapped out my old (somewhat broken) AT102W. I'll be buying a WASD with MX Clears when I get paid so I just throught I'd give it one last week of use. The Enter "key" is broken -- I have a few spare ALPS switches but I can't seem to get the switch out of the board and even the I'm missing an enter key as the once that came with it broke off.

It needs a good clean but my keycap puller broke along with the enter key. Not like it matters as soon a shiny new one will be replacing it and my shitty old microsoft rubber dome. The fucking noise this sing makes is glorious.

http://vocaroo.com/i/s0pUK2rMxvib

>>22848
s/sing/thing

The thumbnail is upside down but the big picture is the right way up... odd.

>>22848

If that keyboard could talk it would be begging you to call dignitas.

>>22849
EXIF magic turns it the right way up.

>>22851
I still use a PS/2 keyboard, my year old motherboard has a slot for it.
Though I doubt my next motherboard will have a PS/2 slot on it.

>>22855
You can get active PS/2 to USB adapters.

Put the Dell out of its misery and replaced it with this.

If nothing else I hope we never see the end of PS/2 because it gives a splash of colour to the connectors.

>>22848
The Dell has been mostly resurrected with a bit of solder and a couple more donor keys. The space bar isn't very well stabilised, though.

Not that it matters; I got this bad boy a couple of weeks ago and I couldn't be happier.