Camacha

I guess you could slap on a fairing and go. I think you would get orbit, just without a payload. But whatever the case, it is obviously a very different degree of reuse. That is not surprising, since the Falcon 9 represents 35 years of progress. It is unnecessary that people feel they have to come to the rescue of the Space Shuttle. The thing was amazing for its day. This thing is amazing for today. Why get all worked up? The thing is, you could probably bolt a fairing to a Falcon 9 and launch it, land it and launch it again. Maybe you would just get orbit, maybe you would not. Doing that with the Space Shuttle would be impossible by design, for the simple reason you threw a vital part of the craft away.

There is no need to be offended. The Space Shuttle was a neat apparatus, but that 'one fuel tank' was not only a huge part of the craft, it was also vital to its operation. The boosters were so extensively rebuilt that they were practically manufactured new and the orbiter was overhauled to a large degree too. The facts are what they are.

That is why it was concluded that the Space Shuttle as a system did not refly, just parts of it. It was not capable of doing a refly, since the tank always needed to be built new. That is a pretty major and vital part. Considering everything is likely to be checked many times more than strictly needed, that might be a yes.

A huge part of the shuttle is the main tank and without it, it would not fly. The SpaceX first stage is, save for some aerodynamic issues, fully capable of flying independently. The two are not comparable.

That seems to happen more often. It is not really a reflight if half the craft is new. The Shuttle was neat, but the reusability was more of a sales pitch than it was reality.

It is obviously an April Fools' Day joke. Typically, companies have a press release about something crazy somewhere in the two weeks leading up to the day, though generally it is fairly close to it. Then on the day itself the big reveal comes that it was all a joke.

Planning ahead pretty much never works out in hardware land. Always look at and buy hardware at the moment you need it. The only exception might be a new series coming up, but that is holding out, rather than planning ahead.

Yes. They will release the update in the HEDT and server platforms, but the improvements will be deployed across the range. This planned obsolescence thing is blown way out of proportions and should not be taken as a rule. Stuff gets designed to last a certain amount of key presses, run hours etcetera, yes, but that is what engineers do and always have done. Because of this, consumer pressure on price ensures that these machines will not last decades. However, few, if any devices have an actual built in kill switch. Some examples will inevitably pop up, but in the overwhelming majority of the cases, it is simply a matter of designing a product to a price. You get what you pay for. Long story short: it sounds like you have no reason to upgrade. You are happy, so be happy Maybe get a battery replacement and, as always, make sure you you have proper backups, which means having at least two copies on two separate hard drives.

Both that bleakness and recent political developments I shall not mention could be considered your natural disasters

Since the MD12 was never built, the technology can be everything and is nothing at the same time. They had plans, but without a flying prototype, those are just that.

Is that not true for pretty much anything beyond the Moon?

Again? We just had two similar threads.

Surprisingly, Windows 7 has better performance than Windows 10 and appears to deal with things better.

Having two CCXs means having better thermal dissipation and cherry picked cores within a CCX. You do not get that with a single CCX. Somehow people are fooled into believing the two CCX setup makes the chip unsuitable for gaming, but that could not be further from the truth. There seems to be a minor penalty so far. AMD has announced that a new stepping will soon appear that should mitigate or fully fix the issue. Whatever the case, the chip as it stands is already an absolute performer. It baffles me that people have so much trouble looking at the bigger picture. These are relatively cheap chips with what looks to be awesome performance. What more could you want? It is a bit like going to the car dealership, getting a great deal on a really fancy car and then complaining that you do not want it, because a much more expensive car accelerates slightly faster. To make matters more confusing, most people never wanted to buy that more expensive car in the first place. The community confuses me sometimes. I like computers. I understand computers. The annoying little buggers.

Yes, AMD R5 had been released. Is will be very interesting to see how they perform and what the actual prices are going to be. Though they will most likely not beat the 7700K, most people would not have bought an i7 regardless. For more price concious gamers, this might be a very interesting product range. Also, hints are being dropped that an enthusiast HEDT platform might be released. You may have thought that the R7 range was intended to compete in that area, but it seems AMD has a platform with 16 cores and 32 lined up between their consumer and their server product ranges. If you are into VM's, rendering or other forms of serious computing, this could be the thing dreams are made of. Performance wise, the chips seem slated to compete with very, very expensive Xeon chips.

The dithering is real. Oh, the dithering! If I did not know better, I would have said this is something recent that was made to look old. I guess the original makers should take that as a compliment.

With these kinds of chips, the sticker price is not all that interesting. It is about the TCO, or Total Cost of Ownership. That often largely depends on power consumption and license fees, the latter of which are often dependent on core or processor count. It will be very interesting to see how competitive this product is. The 1800X being more power efficient than the 6900X (which is basically Xeon server silicon) is a good start, though.

While we are still reeling from the Ryzen release, AMD has announced their new Naples server chips. Up to 32 cores, 64 threads and octochannel memory in a single chip. If that was not enough already, the beta for Quake Champions has also been announced. Yes, a game in Quake 3 and Quake Live style. The beta does not seem to be limited, so enter if you are interested. Things just got real!

I am not sure about the exact model, because that greatly depends on local pricing, but going for a non-overclocking model makes sense if budget is somewhat tight. You do not have all the extra costly requirements for the PSU, cooling and motherboard, which should save you some cash. If you want to play BF1, you could find out how well it plays on an RX470. If that performance level is acceptable, that might be a sensible choice. Yes. It is almost certain that you will get a better price performance than with Intel, without the terrible single threaded speed AMD used to have. With a tight budget, waiting could very well pay. We do not know for sure, but it should be somewhere in Q2.

Yes and no. Generally, game systems with a fast processor are limited by the GPU and not the CPU. However, some modern games task the CPU a lot, so the CPU might become the issue in those cases. It should also be noted that people tend to upgrade a GPU much more often than a CPU. If you want to play games like BF1, I personally would probably look into buying a CPU that is a little bit quicker. Depending on budget, I would maybe look for a CPU that is a bit more powerful and reduce budget for the GPU accordingly. I would not advise upgrading later. Intel processors generally do not become much cheaper down the line, even when second hand. Buy things once and buy them right. Again, it might be worth waiting for the R3 and R5 release. You might pick up a very nice processor for a more acceptable price.

Do note that the RX480 is fairly potent compared to the Pentium. Also note that BF1 requires a lot of CPU power, so it you want to play that properly, the Pentium might struggle a fair bit.

Why do you recommend a better processor? Seeing how KSP runs fine on much slower and older processors and this processor is just about a quarter of the price of a 7600K, it seems a little overboard to recommend one of the more high end processors. The 7600K is faster, but not that much faster and commands a much, much higher price. Add to that the additional cooling, the overclocking capable motherboard and beefed up PSU and the total extra cost is easily 300 dollar and possibly a bit more. That is a lot of monetary units. That being said, it all much depends on whether other games will be played with this system too and what the expectancy of performance at what resolution and settings is.

Nah. Building a computer is easy, partly because it was designed to be. You do need to do a little homework, but information is plentiful, of high quality and with just the most basic knowledge, it is actually pretty hard to seriously damage anything. Male plug A goes into female plug A, and so forth. There are a few common pitfalls, like forgetting the stand-offs, but those are broadly advertised. No gambling is involved. Finding an obscure and unsupported BIOS takes a bit more digging, requires better judgement on what and, more importantly, what not to use, and can quickly lead to pretty much irrecoverable damage. Still a fun project, but a little more insight into the dos and don'ts of computing is required.

That Saturn dress looks like something that might be passable.

Well, we have been doctoring definitions to make it fit our system already. Why not throw this in too? The whole orbit clearing thing was a blatant exercise of having your definitions fit the desired outcome. I feel that a system with hundreds of planets does much more justice to the scale, complexity and variety of the solar system. We get to see many more gradients and subtleties and most of the stories become much more compelling. Jupiter is nice and all, but having Ceres and Vesta illustrate that the huge planet is messing things up in varying degrees, yet always thoroughly makes for a much more compelling story