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Some of the stuff that Log­itech has been putting out re­cent­ly is cer­ti­fi­ably gim­micky. For ex­am­ple, the *wire­less* track­ball mice ([Cord­less Track­man Op­ti­cal][cto]) that Log­itech makes. The whole point of a track­ball is that it *stays put* on your desk: on­ly the ball moves! Why, then, is it made wire­less? Wire­less mice are cool be­cause the cord doesn’t get in the way when it moves along with the mouse, but the track­ball base doesn’t move! Log­itech’s site even calls the wire­less fea­ture “con­ve­nient” - I per­son­al­ly don’t think that need­ing to change bat­ter­ies for a fea­ture that the de­vice doesn’t re­quire is con­ve­nient.

[cto]: http://www.log­itech.com/in­dex.cfm/mice_point­ers/track­balls/de­vices/189&cl=us,en

One more seem­ing­ly-use­less Log­itech fea­ture: the G15 key­board’s LCD. Gamers that would buy the G15 key­board - most like­ly MMO play­ers and, to a lesser ex­tent, FPS play­ers. The G15’s most out­stand­ing fea­ture is its pletho­ra of assignable macro keys, which makes it won­der­ful for, say, WoW. Why, though, would you look down from the game on your mon­i­tor to check some dim­ly-lit stats on your key­board LCD? Seems point­less to me.

Don’t get me wrong: Log­itech is a won­der­ful pe­riph­er­al com­pa­ny. They make what I con­sid­er to be the world’s best gen­er­al-pur­pose mice (Dell’s ba­sic USB mouse in­clud­ed with their desk­tops, my per­son­al fa­vorite, was[^1] made by Log­itech). They make rel­a­tive­ly good, us­able key­boards, some­times with a touch of my pre­ferred min­i­mal­is­tic style (Di­Novo Edge). And, de­spite ar­gu­ments be­tween Log­itech, Raz­er, and now Mi­crosoft users about which gam­ing mouse is the *best*, there’s no doubt that Log­itech’s, espe­cial­ly the G5, are among the top gam­ing mice avail­able. It’s just that no­body re­al­ly wants to spend ex­tra money buy­ing fea­tures that are com­plete­ly un­nec­es­sary.

[^1]: I’m not en­tire­ly sure that it is any­more; I don’t have this in­for­ma­tion.

My cur­rent ques­tion is this: why are there few (if any!) ca­su­al/par­ty mul­ti­play­er games for the PC? I’ve been look­ing around for games that might ap­peal to more than just me and my hard­core gam­ing friends, in a (per­haps vain) at­tempt to cre­ate so­cial gath­er­ings through video games/LAN par­ties. Be­cause ev­ery­one here at school has a com­put­er, and net­work­ing is al­ready very-well tak­en care of, it’s def­i­nite­ly very plau­si­ble. The on­ly things miss­ing now are the games.
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I have been hav­ing, to put it light­ly, some prob­lems with VMware server and an Ubun­tu guest. My guess as to why is this: VMware server is, in my eyes, built for pro­duc­tion-level server vir­tu­al­iza­tion. It’s not re­al­ly built for on-the-side home server vir­tu­al­iza­tion, like the kind that I’m do­ing, and on fair­ly desk­top-ori­ent­ed hard­ware to boot. Ba­si­cal­ly, my Ubun­tu in­stall often has trou­ble with disk ac­cess, and some­times net­work ac­cess as well. (I’m run­ning a Vis­ta Home Premi­um host with an Ubun­tu Server 8.04 guest.)
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