Nuke

i bought me a hot air rework station of of ebay for $54. can now non-destructively remove dram chips from their simms in 4 seconds! pleased i am.

put things in perspective i owned an early x52 (the one with major deadzone wear issues), and an x36. i probibly got less than 2 years out of each of them. my ch stuff has already outperformed it and shows no signs of slowing down. the joystick market is somewhat ridiculous nowadays. very few people are buying them, and only a few games even support them anymore. they few companies left that manufacture them are ether extremely hard core (ch and thrstmaster) or are trying really hard to be (saitek, logitech). its not like in the 90s when everyone and their mother was making joysticks and almost all games supported them, and every self respecting gamer owned one. as a result prices are much higher than they should be.

too late, already rich. sorry if universe implodes

it was about as i expected.

i would go back in time to '98 and buy google stock.

it will be on at 10:30am ish. why you brittish time? william hartnell didnt need no screwdriver

oems, lol. ive been building my own since '99. costs less, and you get a solid machine that you can repair when it breaks down.

i sometimes wonder if on a relativistic (not ftl) ship going in the neibothood of 99.999999 the speed of light if it would be like walking uphil to walk towards the front of the ship (assuming said ship had a mans of gravity, like a centrifuge) because of the mass inherited from trying to go faster.

joystick under $75. lol. i have ch fighterstick and pro throttle (retail $125 each!), and pro pedals (retail about $100). thing is i bought them about 5 years ago and they still work great. wont get that kind of life out of anything saitek. or anything under $75. also made in usa.

for lan i think we just use an arbitrary point in space (ive heard first point in ares too, which i guess is a particular star) to mark where the zero point is, and measure the angle from that.

i actually have some of those features programmed into my ch controllers. i have 9 different modes. all with different deadzone and sensitivity settings. for planes you want linear control and no deadzones, for rcs thrusters you want a deadzone and a slow ramp in. the result is a profile so complex i just use the keyboard most of the time.

thing that keeps me from using mechjeb all the time: it cant fly half my ships without destroying them.

mechwarrior 2 is actually an epic success story. not only can i run the glide version through a 3rd party patch, i can do it with my modern joystick, and my trackir through ppjoy+tir2joy. its quite amazing.

i didnt know this was a thing that could be done with a mod. frankly this is something squad should have done a long time ago. anyway with reference to normal maps, is there a way to use dxt5_nm. this essentially puts the red channel into dxt5 alpha. this makes the channels interpolate independently (color data interpolates together), and also gives you a bit more depth on one channel. there is also a newer format (3dc/bc5) that is essentially a two channel format (they are similar to the way dxt5's alpha works) which could give even higher normal map quality for the same cost. there is also a one channel version that could give us better greyscale quality for things like emmission maps. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Dc

dosbox has really solved issues with old dos games for me. most of them run. the biggest problem is with games build on directx versions prior to 8. they just dont like modern windows. which is sad because a lot of early opengl games (and even a few that use glide through a wrapper) work perfectly fine. any operating system works fine when properly configured. be it windows, linux, osx, dos, whatever. when you buy from an oem thats what you get (at least until you start uninstalling all the demo ware they put on there and accidentally break something, i hate oems). if you get crashes, something is wrong. in my experience reinstalling everything is a fix all assuming you know how (i was a system builder back in the pentium 4 era and this is how we did support).

i didnt exactly go in expecting shakespere.

ive seen a few gamers in their 30s who have massive games collections that they cant run. which i think is about the only case you need an older os. i have a few games that wont work on anything but windows 98. some will work in xp and some grudgingly work in win7. i can slap together a nostalgia rig if im desperate for some old games. but im not going to drag everything else through the mud for that kind of capability. vm if you can, dual boot if neccisary, but dont slow your 64 bit hardware down (it's not just ram, its all the architecture improvements which end up not getting used) by running a 32 bit os.

as a movie i thought it was pretty good. but it was so full of obvious technical mistakes and annoyances. every time they tried to explain any of the technology i had to facepalm. analog tech! why? analog systems are so dead that its hard to find people who know how to build them. unlike digital systems which everyone and their mother seems to know and understand. but you keep on watching and at the end of the movie you didnt feel ripped off. one big pet peeve of mine with movies, is how grossly they underestimate the effectiveness of modern weapon systems. after seeing what a simple full metal jacket rifle round can do to meat, that big M61A2 vulcan 20mm gatling gun (firing 110 rounds a second!) should have ripped a massive wound in the side of that kaiju. especially if equipped with du rounds. depleted uranium is really good for projectiles because its liquid state is so small to be no-existant, it essentially goes from solid to vapor instantly on impact, resulting in a devastating explosive effect. why just planes, why not artillery, 105mm howitzer. such a large beast would be hard to miss, even from several miles out. lets just face it meat is easy to mutilate with weapons of war.

idk, i dont think ive dated one sane girl yet, some of them were pretty hot. they all seemed to have severe emotional psychological problems, which they all had to take meds for. im sure sane ones exist, though i have the feeling they aint no fun. i guess thats about as much i can say on such a g rated forum, its kinda like that motorhead song damage case. wait, i thought this was a hack physics thread.

win7 x64 is the best thing since win xp. when i used xp i used the professional x64 version, i haven't used a 32 bit os (on a 64-bit cpu) for ~8 years. i always find it discouraging when people keep beating that dead 32-bit horse.

we need bigger magnets. and more power!

on the contrary i think we should move the art of war into space, and make the earth a no fire zone.

when it comes right down to it, is any source of information reliable? i dont really trust anything unless i see it happen myself. there have been too many occasions where something i read in an academic book was blatantly wrong. i knew it was wrong and ive seen it be wrong. you want to know for sure, figure it out yourself, and if you are feeling lazy there is always wikipedia/the internet/the news/the government/other humans/the voices in your head.

id be happy if you just stored the state of the filters in the save file. so that they stay as i set them when i exit and return.

a jaeger didnt seem like the makers of that moving understood how structural engineering works. like that ship/club would have broke in half if not supported by buoyancy. the kaiju have their own structural issues as well. meat is heavy and doesnt absorb damage very well (its main advantage is the ability to self heal, not absorb energy, see zerg). i found out on a hunting trip some years ago what kind of damage a tiny 7mm round can do to a deer's spine. now take a 15 inch battleship gun and shoot a kaiju with it. i figure you will get the same result. i think battletech is the most believable, but still far from practical (its primary awesomeness point is that it has awesome gameplay mechanics). i dont think its beyond the capacity to build something like that. loads are somewhat acceptable. you might have issues in your heavy and assault classes (i always preferred mediums and lights myself). as for the reactors, dont use the tokamak as the yardstick for how big a fusion reactor needs to be. physics require it to be that big because of probability of divergence and the fact that gyroradi are finite size, but thats entirely due to the toroidal nature of the core. other forms of fusion like polywells and dpf could result in reactors considerably smaller. the tokamak will go down in history as the brickphone of fusion reactors.