cantab

I don't think I can agree with that. I don't believe the typical buyer of a desktop computer for the home is a "regular user". Many are gamers, and while a well-made game shouldn't tax the CPU plenty of excellent games aren't well-made, KSP being a shining example. Some will be doing stuff like video editing; they might buy a Mac rather than a PC but either way they want a good chip inside it. Many are just going to be PC enthusiasts who want a system they can fix and upgrade not a sealed device, but they too are not unlikely to do things in software that tax the CPU. Whatever the reason, the typical buyer of a desktop wants performance. Meanwhile the "regular user" isn't buying a boring, boxy, bulky desktop computer. They're buying a laptop, or a tablet, or a hybrid, or maybe a dead cool looking all-in-one. For their needs sure, an i3 would be excellent, but a great many laptops and tablets have processors much worse than an i3. Intel Atoms are common, underpowered ARM chips on cheap no-name Android tablets are common, and the like. The needs may be less, but it's still no guarantee that everything will meet them.

Nobody expects the Cambridge Inquisition! Bill Phil.

I've long liked AMD's processors for offering great value, and of course they really got the 64-bit ball rolling thanks to making a backwards-compatible instruction set. I have a Phenom II X3 710 at the moment. But I'm sorry, but right now AMD can't compete with Intel, and I feel the way the current AMD architecture shares floating point units between pairs of cores is bad for gaming, and misleading marketing that doesn't actually help AMD. If they ditch that idea and actually make a core a proper core on their future CPUs I think they'll have something more fit to compare against Intel.

Looks awesome. BFE-#### , where it's a different number, would seem a sensible name. As for part specs, well high thrust but high mass, so sensible TWR, seems reasonable. The original - at least the files I have - massed 50 tons. For some comparison, the most powerful engine in the SpaceY pack is the Ratite cluster, 25 tons and 11,000 kN of thrust. I think KW Rocketry has something similar. So despite the comedy giant size, the BFE is actually fairly well balanced.

Regarding asteroids, I favour intercepting them in solar orbit. It takes a little more delta-V to get there, but that's delta-V without the asteroid in tow, and you can then adjust the asteroid's pass of Kerbin - most obviously, to aerocapture into Kerbin orbit - using only a little delta-V. There's a tutorial on solar orbit rendezvous, but the "trick" is to head out of Kerbin's SOI in the direction the asteroid is set to come in.

Oh, I absolutely agree that sound in Linux is a giant mess. The problem is developers have tried to solve it by adding more, and it's just made the mess bigger.

I completely didn't read it that way. But we've all been there! I did learn a trick to stop them tangling though: tie the ends together. A loop can't tangle like a straight string can.

It was a pretty good one. B737 put me onto the answer really by asking "why wires?" What was "the demanded best" - a mobile handsfree kit like I suspected, or something else? And I should have one in due course. Hopefully less "anything could fit" than my last, but it's always hard to judge when you're writing.

Flying around in the Icarus 2 doing visual surveys. Built to fit in the level 1 SPH, it's not got much power but it does the job. Just under 2 tons, nice and stable in FAR, and features a detachable cockpit and chute in case anything goes horribly wrong. I've since made an upgraded Mk2 one, with improved landing gear and three times the solars but otherwise unaltered. Service ceiling of either unknown as yet.

Granted. Your speed is unchanged, Sanic is slowed down. I wish my skin would stop being dry.

They aren't even announced yet, never mind released. Probably when they are out they'll take the absolute performance lead, because by then they'll be brand new and the 980 will be a year old.In any case, across the board AMD and nVidia graphics are pretty competitive with each other, except if the drivers let them down. Maybe nVidia's 980 is a bit faster than AMD's 290X, but then nVidia has no single card comparable to AMD's 295X2 (although a pair of 970s would be a similar price). Which makes it as much as anything down to personal preference - and there, people tend to stick with a brand that's done them well or switch if they have problems, which makes the drivers and software the important thing really. AMD's bigger problem, IMHO, is on the CPU side. They're doing alright commercially but they just can't compete with Intel on high-end performance at the moment.

I frequently wear headphones. I think we all do. And indeed, if I want to talk on my mobile while I'm driving then I'm "demanded" by law to use a hands-free kit which could be a wired headphones-like one.In fact, I'm going to guess, is the riddle specifically headphones?

Round Kerbin an equatorial orbit is easy to reach since you'll almost always be launching from an equatorial site. Round other planets, though, you might want to land at or launch from anywhere. An orbit passes over the range of latitudes equal to its inclination, so an equatorial orbit is only ever over the equator whereas a 30 degree inclined orbit passes over latitudes from 30° S to 30° N, which covers about half the area of the planet/moon.

Is it hair? Edit: @~^$. Beaten to it. OK then, is it wires?

If by stupidest you mean most awesome. You've sent me looking at your old work now.

My understanding is you need to * Accept the contract. * Start tracking an E class asteroid. I don't know if it needs to be newly spawned or just newly tracked. * Get that asteroid connected to the rest of your station and the whole thing in the appropriate location. Now, putting an E class around the Mun won't be easy. They range from 800 to 3000 tons. As always I recommend meeting one in solar orbit, then you can arrange an aerocapture at Kerbin, or potentially a helpful gravity assist off the Mun. Once you've wrangled it into the desired orbit, I strongly recommend having only *one* claw linking the asteroid to the rest of the station, multiple claws are infamous for attracting game bugs. The contract probably won't be profitable, but it will certainly be AWESOME.

My understanding is: The lift force on the plane is equalled by the downward force on the air. That's Newton's Third Law, there's no getting away from that. In free air, the downward force on the air accelerates it downwards. Near the ground, or in a wind tunnel, the force is transmitted through the air into the ground/floor. Which is why you don't see the deflection in a wind tunnel. The shape of an airfoil allows it to "pull" on the air flowing over it, as well as push the air flowing under it. Bernoulli's principle is another side of the same coin. Perhaps it's better to regard the higher speed of air above the wing as not the cause but the consequence of lower pressure above the wing.

Twitch being Twitch.

This is just a dead simple bash script. It takes a file of first names and spits out roster entries that you can copy and paste into your persistence file. Good if you want to make a whole bunch of custom-named Kerbals at once, rather than having to make them one at a time in Crew Manifest or similar. License: Public Domain #!/bin/bash # needs bash obviously. if you're on windows try cygwin to get it # noobish coding here but it works # takes one command line argument, the path to a file with the first names. plain text file, one name per line # outputs to stdout, redirect to a file if you want # you might want to do duplicate checking somehow while read line do name=$line brave=$(($RANDOM % 1000)) dumb=$(($RANDOM % 1000)) if ((RANDOM % 50 == 1)); then bads=True else bads=False fi echo " KERBAL" echo " {" echo " name = $name Kerman" echo " type = Crew" echo " brave = 0.$brave" echo " dumb = 0.$dumb" echo " badS = $bads" echo " state = Available" echo " ToD = 0" echo " idx = -1" echo " CAREER_LOG" echo " {" echo " flight = 0" echo " }" echo " FLIGHT_LOG" echo " {" echo " flight = 0" echo " }" echo " }" done < $1

So, I've been looking into flying wings. According to Wikipedia, "Sweeping the wing leading edge back, either as a swept wing or delta wing, and reducing the angle of incidence of the outer wing section allows the outer wing to act like a conventional tailplane stabiliser." But I've found that changing the angle of incidence isn't needed - just sweeping the wing enough will obtain longitudinal stability. For example, this infinite-fuel-powered flying wing: Static stability: https://flic.kr/p/qMrjjd Derivs: https://flic.kr/p/qMxpKv Is FAR simply assuming that change in incidence (ie "washout"), is Wikipedia wrong, or is something else going on? (And yes, I know my flying wing has yaw stability/control issues. I'm just looking at pitch first.)

Something to keep in mind is that almost all "pure" tablets can have a separate keyboard and mouse attached if you like. I'm typing this right now on a bog-standard PC keyboard attached via a USB OTG adapter to my Android phone. I just plugged it in and it works.

Ergo, "outer space" is needed, unless it's obvious from the context, to distinguish it from plain old space.

We talk about how far we've come, and yet in some ways we've come nowhere. Processing power gets squandered on abstraction and inefficiency, and has the user experience on PCs really improved much since the days of Windows 98? And the more software tries to be clever, the more it ends up being stupid, behaving in ways you don't expect or once.

NaN/10. Picture broken for me.

How about chalk on a blackboard? (But I think Moon is right anyway).