Nuke

just because it keeps company from some rough and shady individuals does not mean it that it is one itself. come on give ceres some love. pluto has charon to keep it company and they just dont care what the rest of the planets think of them. its not like they live all alone in a rough neighborhood or anything.

lua is a great little language that is extremely underrated. it starts out with a plain english syntax that is great for beginners. then you have more complex features like tables, which is probibly one of the most powerful data structures that you ever use. its like arrays, structs, and classes all rolled into one. as an extension to another program its great, but its amazing what you can do in standalone lua. you can roll out complete games and gui applications in no time at all. you might get a null reference.

idk you get a ccd, a mems gyro/accelerometer, magnetometer, a transceiver and of course a microcontroller to run the show. you could probibly arrange all those chips on top of a quarter and still have some space over for some tiny solar cells. you could also cram all that stuff into a single radhard package. only thing you really need is micro thrusters. we could probibly do chemical engines on a chip, tiny gas turbines have already been demoed. we know how ion engines can scale up, i wonder how much they scale down. perhaps you can use tiny piezo nozzles (like whats used in inkjet cartridges) to squirt hydrazine into a tiny combustion chamber, react with a tiny bit of catalyst and fire thrust out a tiny little nozzel. this sounds like the best bet. feep on a chip can come later. so i do some electronics and have a few dev boards all over the place. one is an imu board, which is about a square inch of area and is less than 3 grams, it has 4 chips (not counting the regulator and logic level converter) and support components. it doesnt have an mcu, camera, or transciever on it, but ive seen those in miniscule packages that could fit if you used both sides of the board (and would likely add a quarter gram to the board at most). obviously this board is not designed for space, its pcb is pretty thick and it has a bunch of headers on it for breadboard mounting. a self contained spacecraft on a chip would not need those, so im going to assume this extra weight will actually represent the weight of our engines. so we got a 3 gram space ship. say we have 4 quarter-millinewton hydrazine thrusters for a total of 1mn thrust. then you can make a little tiny hydrazine tank about the size of a typical capacitor, say with 2 cubic centimeters of volume. hydrazine has a density of 1.021 g/cm^3, so this tank has 2g of fuel. so our ship weights 5 grams fully loaded. hydrazine engine usually have an isp in the neighborhood of 250s. throw this into the rocket equation and i get 1252 m/s of delta-v. thats probibly enough for checking out the area around a space craft or small asteroid. but dont expect to make escape velocity. you could use a bigger tank, 20 grams of fuel gets you 5km/s of deltav. you can make it bigger but eventually you loose the benefits of a micro ship and are better off getting a full size probe.

once you get fuel scoops and a beam laser, its all piracy from there on out.

i havent played it in awhile. i think last time i gave up because i didnt like the way joysticks worked. they had a hard coded deadzone that annoyed me. maybe they fixed it (looks like they did, and they added a lot of cool stuff too).

also the os was small so if you needed to spin up a custom boot disk you could, i kinda do this with sd cards sometimes but its pretty much limited to ancient operating systems that can fit on a couple of gigs. i also do this with my rasberry pi, since i have 2 or 3 chips that i alternate based on what im doing. i also have freedos installed on a cf card (which pretty much has the same interface as ide) in a legacy pata port, which i use for old dos games. i had a baremetalos chip too, but there isnt a whole lot you can do with that, and there is no software to run.

technically yes. but ive never heard the term applied to a full size oven.

a computer sufficiently powerful enough to run an ai on would probibly be better off running sophisticated automation rather than ai.

it would only count as slavery if they have the ability to revolt and take over.

i think i would use large fusion powered rail guns. and then sling iron rods into space at escape velocity. its going to consume a large amount of the earth's mass to move it even slightly. ive always thought about moving icy objects about the size of pluto with nuclear thermal engines, where the whole of the object is to be used as propellant. the engines would need to be able to run on the various ices that compose the object. anything that is not ice gets filtered out and either utilized to support a population or loaded into railgun and ejected. one of these days im going to run the numbers and see if this is a viable method for interstellar generation ship.

for that there is cmd.exe actually im pretty damn old skool.

i would only bother with sports involving human powered aviation. i dont think any such sporting events currently exist. it takes a special kind of athlete to keep an aircraft in the sky.

i have never needed to rely on an operating system's search facilities. years of using dos have honed my file management skills to a fine point, and i like an os that mostly stays out of my way in this regard.

consistency is more important than speed. ive been launching programs by going to the start menu since around 1994. xp was actually the first os to start screwing with this. but fortunately classic start menu was still an option. after xp i could no longer rely on muscle memory to navigate my os, i had to stop and think how to do something, and that likely cost me more time than the os saved by being slightly more efficient. if we get to the point where we are carving up the ui and replacing it with something else every other version then we are probibly hurting users more than the os is saving them by working with the latest in hardware tech. i eventually got over the vista/7 start menu. the thing that i never got over with vista/7 was that it changed the names of all the icons in the control panel. when it comes right down to it i wouldn't mind using windows 8.1's guts with windows 2k's ui. thats why i kinda wish that windows would take a page from linux and make the ui completely modular.

bratwurst is great. was going to get some but store was out. sadface.gif

modern flat panels dont use much power compared to old crt screens.

one does not simply nuke meat.

my grill's regulator likes to freeze up sometimes. when this happens the valve never completely closes, and gas trickles out. for storage i usually have to unscrew the regulator from the tank and put a cap on the tank to prevent loosing all my gas and filling the shed up with a cloud of explosive death. once in a blue moon it freezes in the fully open position and will not shut down. one day i got the bright idea to dump hot water on the regulator to clear the block. somehow it made things worse, the gas started flowing at an alarming rate and the grill became a fireball (incidentally this is a good way to cook a frozen steak, assuming you want it rare in the middle). i presume i expanded the casing while the moving parts inside were still being cooled allowing more gas to flow than usual. anyway after about 30 seconds of inferno the valve snapped shut. ever since then i make damn sure that no gas is flowing before i walk away from the grill. you probibly had a stuck valve much like mine. if your fire extinguisher was a co2, the explosion might have been cause by rapid cooling of hot metal. you may have ruptured the gas lines in the control panel. releasing more gas into the inferno. regulator freezing usually indicates overfilled tanks, because the gas doesn't have room in which to vaporize prior to reaching the regulator.

convection ovens are pretty cool. i was house sitting/installing drywall for a guy while he was off in china. the kitchen was a mess and the range wasnt hooked up yet. but he had a convection oven. about the size of a microwave without all the horrible food coming out of it. i wouldn't mind having one of those if i had room for another kitchen gadget.

windows versions are a lot like star trek movies. only every other one is any good.

this is where im at with my game engine. the idea was to do a newtonian combat simulator and i work on it on and off. this whole thing is written in stand alone lua using nothing more than the libraries that come with lua for windows. iup provides the opengl context, then theres luagl (which is stuck at version 1.3). joystick support provided by using alien to interface with a dll for garys mod (i just googled joystick dll) and is worthy of some kind of hacking award. i would have used sdl but luasdl didnt want to cooperate. the engine also has freetrack support but it doesn't use it yet. i wrote all the 3d maths libraries from scratch. im old school so i did a quake style console (which can be used to issue in game commands and also write code while the game is running). physics is still a stub right now. its mostly just a basic newtonian model with the ability to apply arbitrary impulses to an object, which can be used in collision response (though there is no collision detection yet) or for thruster simulation. its not quite a game yet, it would need about a dozen major subsystems before i would even consider it such. i also have another engine that runs in c++, and compiles on my raspberry pi, though it uses a software rasterizer that doesnt work very well. the original idea was to prototype in lua and do a more robust implementation based on what works, though the lua engine still runs circles around it. i like to code with the bare minimum of libraries and frameworks like unity just get in the way. i also rather enjoy solving the more complex issues like physics simulation and collision detection where things like unity would solve them for you and you dont learn anything.

so were skipping the good version of windows this time around?

this case design is pretty cool, the intakes for practically everything face large grills in the case. so the video card, and power supply have their own isolated airflows, while the mobo and psu gets a massive flow from a 140mm fan. i only want to overclock to the bare minimum to make use of the memory. i want this to be a 3 year build. im going to be monitoring the heat while i do some serious benchmarks. im not to thrilled with intel's stock sinks, they always seem like they are about to fall off. they are not like the beasts that used to be fitted to the early p4 chips, that thing looked solid. or perhaps the large spring steel strap on some older amd rigs. you knew the thing was secure. they also seem to clog up with dust bunnies more rapidly than i would like. im going to have to shop around for one, and like i said, im not too sure about how much clearance i have for a sink.

listen to the power supply while its under load, if you hear any hissing at all, its probibly dying caps. im not beyond replacing dead capacitors in a psu. ive done it several times. be sure to cross every large cap and inductor with a large resistor. dont use your fingers, you might die. granddaddy used to just use a screw driver. because i am old and dont play many games. mostly old games and indie titles. its still probibly better than the gtx 560 im currently using which ran everything fine and dandy. there always next year. one of the benefits of being alaskan is that you get free money every fall. this year netted me a new comp, a big screen tv, and a full pantry.

thats where i science. i have a couple hundred left over in case something goes wrong or there is insufficient cooling or whatever. i looked at what newegg had and the only after market offerings looked worse than intel's stock cooler or two big to fit. also i didnt find any numbers on cpu cooler to psu clearence so im going to have to measure that before selecting a cooler. il probibly have to go through another vendor. if i like my thermal numbers i dont see any point putting more money into it.