Nuke

boot disks were usually needed to boot a no frills system to run applications that pushed the limits of what the machine can do. these days computers have ridiculous amounts of resources and boot disks are usually unneccisary. you still need them if you want to run other systems like dos, linux, etc. if you need those systems set up permanent its easier to multiboot. for temporary usage, there is always sd cards and netboot.

intel recently bought out altera, one of the major fpga producers, plans are to make xeons with on die fpgas that can be used to accelerate certain algorithms to help server side applications. fpga's real benefit is versatility, it can be a robust single core processor one minute and a vector processor the next. you need to emulate an out of production legacy chip, you can, you need instructions for non standard data formats, it can do that too. you pretty much get to decide what kind of chip it is. downside is that an fpga is significantly slower than a processor or asic. not so much slow as cant support higher clock rates than hundreds of mhz (because of the increased propagation delays caused by internal routing of signals), you can still do stuff in parallel though. for some applications having a bank of gpus is better (ultimate solutions might stick a cpu, fpga, gpu, and neural net all on one die). should also point out that fpgas arent any more expensive than cpus or gpus. low end dev boards exist for $50 or less, not much more than an arduino or raspberry pi, and at the high end they can rival a high end cpu in terms of cost. its always going to be flexibility vs performance. you can be versatile with a bunch of virtual machines, but it is a serious performance hit over less convenient cross compiled code. typical users have more cpu than they need and so giving them interpreted software that is easier to develop certainly cuts down the cost. however in a server farm you are always going to want to run as close to the metal as possible to do the same job with less servers in order to cut costs. the lines are blurred in web applications where you need server side scripting environments but thats more of an exception to the rule.

i own a rc heli. i want to upgrade it with an imu so that i can give it some drone features. after getting a mockup working on an arduino and 10dof imu i realized that it did not update the intertial reference fast enough to be useful. so it quickly became apparent that i need an arm dev board of small stature. so my project has kind of been shelved for now. meanwhile im stripping parts off the chopper to build a hovercraft.

since i got my 3d printer ive come to the conclusion that it is both better and easier (and sometimes in my case neccisary, with a 4x8x5 build area on my upgraded printrbot play) to break the design into modular parts for a large number of reasons. as seductive as a 'one solid piece' print sounds, i do not even remotely see it as practical. many machines and devices fail because of one tiny part failure. for example where a 2 cent capacitor going bad disables your $1000 screen (ive fixed so many of those). so its nice when you can swap out a broken part with a working one. obviously if your entire vehicle is going to be one solid piece for the most part, then when a small part of that whole goes bad there is no way (other than a lot of ugly dremel work and friction stir welding) to do a swap. besides in a car many of the moving parts will need to be their own prints. you are going to need low friction joints, fortunately it is very easy to get some bearings and print tight friction fits for them. screw holes are also very easy to add to a print. i have certainly made good use out of my boxes of salvage screws from broken devices. adding things like captive nuts and tapped brass inserts for machine screws is fairly straightforward (one simple technique involves pushing them in with a temp controlled soldering iron regulated to the melt temp of the plastic). i think another awesome technique is to integrate simple stock materials to your prints or use the print as a skeleton for fiber-resin reinforcement (i want to use this technique for r/c aircraft wings). you can also in some cases use prints as positive molds for metal parts, some have even adapted their printers for paraffin wax for simple investment casting. lots of cool things you can do to complement the 3d printing technology in a way that goes far beyond what it alone is capable of.

i know that jet engines also take a few seconds for changes in their throttle settings to take effect. ksp seems to model that but with much shorter adjustment times.

way to break your own forum rules by bringing up politics harv, but i always did have a soft spot for rebels. :D anyway now that the flood gates are open: one thing i dont like about the whole situation is that in order to protect freedom of information you need to support the party who wants to poison us with co2 emissions and take away the civil rights of certain groups of people. two party system sucks.

it snowed twice but it already melted. we really dont get that much snow, couple heavy falls a year and a lot of light ones like we had a few days ago. i know last year we had a couple heavy snowfalls in late fall, and then nothing till febuary, where we had a couple more medium to heavy snowfalls. of course south east alaska is all about the rain. we make people from seattle look like fremen.

[quote name='ExaltedDuck']I didn't like windows 8. So I installed Mint. I like Mint.[/QUOTE] the biggest problem with linux is that you end up spending all your time operating the system, and no time at all using that system to run the software you actually want to run. i put 100 man hours into my raspberry pi tablet just trying to install a wifi adapter (which seems to have no pre-compiled arm compatible driver anywhere) to work. the problem remains unsolved and the device is unpowered on a shelf somewhere. though i did come to the conclusion that my power supply is lacking (needs more cells, also i need to re-print some parts of the case to make room for a 3rd cell, also speaker holes). running out of power in the middle of a long series of commands sucks.

[quote name='pincushionman']If you're worried about moving parts fouling up in a pistol-type weapon because the lubricant going away, you'd do something like the Metal Storm concept and have a stick of, say, ten rounds that are cast together and shoved into the chamber at once, individually fired from the front to the back by electronics. No casings or moving parts at all.[/QUOTE] those exist irl [video=youtube;q5Y5-Zw5TW0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5Y5-Zw5TW0[/video]

[quote name='SomeGuy12']Solid propellant has low ISP. These are like tiny millimeter sized pits in the bullet capable of tiny course corrections, making up for irregularities in the gun barrel and the enemies jumping out of the way.[/QUOTE] then what you really want is called a missile.

gunpowder works in space. what doesn't work is gun oil. all the lubricants that keep the gun in working order simply sublimate in a vacuum, after which time you are grinding metal. you can pop off a few shots before the gun jams up, but its gonna. you can get around the problem with engineering. minimize moving parts. for example striker and firing pin can be replaced with electronically primed rounds. systems have been demoed capable of a million rounds/minute, with tandem rounds and multiple barrels (looks more like a rocket launcher than a gun). most importantly the system has no moving parts other than bullets. i figure small arms in space would just be a scaled down version of that. probibly would be a pita to reload. you can also engineer better lubricants for vacuum operation, i think there are some candidates out there. but realistically if there was a need for guns in space, someone would have a product on the market in a week.

maintaining a good vacuum is essential to running most reactors. its likely going to be on a pid controller to keep levels below the desired threshold. pumps will kick on when the measured pressure in the chamber approaches the threshold. neutral atoms in particular are rather bad, they steal energy from the things you want hot, conduct it to the walls of the reactor and your plasma never gets hot enough to fuse. fusion products on the other hand are going to be at energy levels higher than the yet to fuse plasma and get ejected from confinement. then its not hard to get rid of them after that.

helium is probibly going to be removed by the vacuum system. for reactions that produce alpha particles (helium nucleus), you can let them pick up an electron (usually as part of a direct conversion system), which makes them neutral. then it can be removed by mechanical means. polywells would do this on the p-b11 reaction. i dont know how tokamaks would remove their alpha particles, but i think they physically impact the walls (energy is too high to contain by the magnetic fields) and pick up an electron there to become neutral.

ive always wondered how fast you can push an electric turbine. since i got my 3d printer ive been experimenting with a lot of ducted fan designs for various motors in my parts bin, with results ranging from 'thats cute' to 'omg what a monster' (usually depending on which motor i use). currently waiting on a new brushless motor for a centrifugal fan (stl file ready to go) for my hovercraft built out of trash. i saw [URL="http://hackaday.com/2015/11/16/ev-motor-not-powerful-enough-make-your-own/"]this build[/URL] the other day and was impressed. it has me wanting to re-wind some of my weaker motors with thick magnet wire to make them a little bit more powerful, and i certainly have the magnet wire for it. i suppose if you use superconducting magnets cooled by liquid nitrogen or whatever, magnetic bearings, and a powerplant like a polywell or dpf reactor, or the thing that the skunkworks is building (does it have a name?). i figure those are going to be the only powerplants small enough to fit on an aircraft, tokamaks, stellerators, and laser machines are all out (too big to fit on an aircraft unless hovercarrier). you can probibly push a fan to the point where centrifugal force will shatter any known material. its an engineering problem, though not as hard as building a fusion reactor.

i remember an episode of classic doctor who where the phrase is used by the cybermen, pretty sure the master used it once as well. i dont even think that was the original use of the phrase either. trek didnt invent it.

[quote name='Lohan2008']Fear of nuclear bombs dropping from orbit.[/QUOTE] you can drop inert masses from orbit and get nuke-equivalent results.

i am quite fond of tga myself. its like an 18 byte header followed by raw data, which you can do whatever you want with. ive also been able to hack bmp and uncompressed dds formats (i needed to dump a z buffer from a software renderer i was working on, and needed a 16 bit grayscale format).

house cats kill far more birds than power generation ever will.

chernobyl has a thriving ecosystem around it. fukushima will too in time. i like to think of nuclear disasters as learning experiences. sort of like how planes get safer every time one crashes.

its to keep the intake pointed into the airflow and to keep the thrust vector pointed at the cg.

reactor designs like this make me like the polywell more.

as an alaskan i say get your own damn water.

as i understand it cd is something you have to determine experimentally. the old way you stick a part in a wind tunnel and see what it does, nowadays computer models are good enough to test design models. a coefficient is really just a fudge factor anyway. it represents everything we do not know about aerodynamics.

i haven't seen the martian yet so i really dont want to vote yet. interstellar would win over gravity easy. i like that these kind of movies have become a trend and hope to see a lot more of them in the future.

sort of similar to a hypothetical problem ive always wondered about. in my scenario we are discovered by hostile aliens. they invade earth and start exterminating humans. unable to stop them, some humans steal a time machine and use it to send all our knowledge and technology back in time, giving it to ancient egypt or rome or whatever. idea is you ratchet up the tech level so that when the aliens arrive you can deal with them (assume accidental discovery, they were flying through on a 5000 year survey of their part of the galaxy and just found us on accident). if you want to pass the scientific method, and you give them a stack of the most important science papers in the last thousand years, the scientific method would end up requiring that they would have to re-verify all that knowledge before they could make progress on their own. and the technology, give the roman legions ak-47s, aircraft and nukes and see how long it takes them to take over/destroy the world. having the tech and not learning the discipline that comes with each technological advancement could be very destructive. to set limits on war and industry such that they dont put the world on an even more destructive path than we have. i always think that the aliens would show up to a dead planet and start terraforming. on top of that if you try to give them knowledge they might burn you for heresy. you would probibly have to show up with an army that can deal with any threat and forcibly teach them. even then there is the zulu scenario, where a primitive army with numbers can take out a smaller army with better tech (and why we didnt use that on the aliens is beyond me). there is also the obvious problem of infrastructure. just because you know how to make steel for example, doesn't mean you can use the most advanced process right away. you will probibly have to bring out iron age technology to help the egyptians bootstrap industry. its not just building factories you have to build everything that makes a factory, and everything to make the supplies the factory requires. you cant just shovel rocks in one door and computers out another. you dont just depend on the previous generation's knowledge but also what they built.