Also: Which Space Computer is your favourite?
(I think the inverted slope ones deserve their own entry. All good Space cockpits have at least one of those, either hanging from the hinged trans-yellow ceiling, or surrounding the intrepid spacedude or dudette, buried deep within his or her windowless, heavily armoured vehicle.)
Aaah, this takes me back.
Install new version of Windows, discover that now some of the hardware for which you paid good money does not work any more, and will not ever be fixed. Buy new stuff, sucker. Thank you for playing.
Actually, one of the problems listed in the PC Perspective piece is exactly the same as it was back in the Win98-to-Win2000 days. Apparently positional audio won't work in many games in Vista, ever.
The same thing happened when people with Aureal Vortex-2-chipset sound cards upgraded from Win98. The sound card still worked, but only in stereo mode, and that was the end of it, no matter how hard you tried.
The Vortex 2 had much better sounding positional audio, then, than any alternative. It still sounds good today. But you've got to run Win98 to hear it.
(There might have been Win2000 drivers eventually, except that Aureal went bankrupt around the time Win2000 was coming out, after a legal battle with... Creative. Their assets were then bought by... Creative, who had no particular interest in the Vortex chips. And now, the wheel turns...)
To be fair, the parallel's not really a perfect one. Games that supported the Aureal 3D sound API and also the newer and crappier Creative one could be returned to proper functionality, back in 2000, if you bought a Creative sound card to replace your Vortex 2. Today, games that support both Creative's now-mature but still-somewhat-crappy API and the newer OpenAL standard should Just Work on your existing Creative card. Regrettably, though, the grand total of commercial games that support OpenAL at all appears to be 77, including some big names but excluding many others. Those others will have 3D sound on Vista only if they're patched to support OpenAL, which is Not Bloody Likely for nearly all of them, but is I suppose a bit more likely than it was back in 2000.
Ryan's complaint about his print server now being a paperweight reminds me of what Win2000 (and every other NT-series Windows version) did to ATA CD changers like this one. They were and are very cool pieces of hardware - six discs in barely more space than a standard single-disc drive! - but they were killed dead by WinNT and later. Win2000 expected you to manually mount and unmount the discs, rather than just switching 'em automatically like Win98 did. It was much faster to use a single disc drive and carry the rest of your CDs around in a wallet.
Microsoft have a Vista version of their Hardware Compatibility List ("currently only compatible with Internet Explorer 6 and above"), and an Upgrade Advisor you can run to see if there's stuff in your PC that's explicitly non-Vista-compatible. Anybody who is for some unfathomable reason thinking about getting Vista at this early date (what, you want to be absolutely totally tip-top ready for DirectX 10 games the very day they come out?) should, at least, run the Advisor.
On drilling down into the HCL to see what Creative sound cards are listed, I note that the answer appears to be "none". There's a small list of chipsets, not one of which is from Creative. So I suppose you should be grateful that your Creative card makes a noise at all.
The Advisor will also not save you if the insoluble problem that's waiting for you is that the print server on the other side of your house will never work with Vista. And it won't say a thing about software, including your non-OpenAL games.
"CATO" can stand for a number of things, but in rocketry it means an explosion very, very early in the flight.
Opinions differ about whether it stands for "Catastrophe At Take-Off" or something else, but whatever the exact term is, everybody agrees that it involves lots of fuel burning much too early, for one reason or another.
CATOs are often very entertaining, for people who do not have to pay for them.
I remember watching an excellent documentary about Peenemünde that included quite a lot of period footage of V2 tests...
...though obviously not with a voice-over nearly as good as this.
On the subject of voice-overs - if you have the choice of using the word "catastrophe" or the word "anomaly" in a situation like this...
...the former is better.
(And how about that dubbing of the World's Oldest Explosion Sound over the real thing, huh? I bet that show was produced by the same people who do the "World's Most Severely Padded Police Videos" series.)
When big (unmanned) rockets blow up, it's got a kind of... corporate... feel to it. You're not personally connected to the action and feeling sorry for whoever's losing his job over it.
When amateur rocketry enters CATO land, though, there's more room for sympathy. Some individual person usually invested considerable time and money in that thing, and wh-BANG, there it all goes to nowhere.
For some reason, though, I find this one quite funny:
This one doesn't have the same comic timing, though:
One kind of rocket malfunction that can segue from CATO status into a general flight problem is the "blow-by", in which in which exhaust gases get out through the top of the motor as well as the bottom.
Which is bad.
That'll learn me.
My current main computer has a couple of gigabytes of fancy Corsair "XMS3200" memory in it. The really fancy kind, with the almost useless dancing LED bar graphs on top.
It would appear that the useful life of one of those two modules, in almost constant use, running within spec at unremarkable temperatures, is about one year.
Ending... now.
There I was, peacefully composing an e-mail, when I was confronted with a blue screen. But a much worse one than usual. This one was dark blue, in big-scanlines text mode, and there was nothing on it. Not a thing.
Just blue, on both monitors.
Restart computer, get long repeated beeps. Which my kung fu tells me means a memory error.
Remove fancy RAM (taking opportunity to Rocket-Air a chinchilla or three worth of dust out). Leave boring RAM. Computer boots again.
(The boring RAM is the Geil stuff from this old review. It hasn't been used for nearly as many hours as the Corsair modules were, though.)
I'm down to a gig now. A gig, man. Jeez, man, I'm hurting here.
Actually, the silly LED graphs may actually have a function in this situation. Perhaps it's the module that has one amber LED flickering on power-up that's died. I'll do a bit more module-shuffling to identify the dud one - dual channel mode still works with one 512Mb and one 1Gb module (identical modules are not necessary, just recommended).
[I've done that now, and so am back up to 1.5 lopsided gigabytes of dual channel RAM, with one 512Mb Geil module plus the one remaining Corsair. With only one Corsair module at a time, the LEDs didn't do anything different on the bad module.]
M'verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market have an instant swap lifetime super-warranty for Corsair RAM that's been purchased from... just about exactly when I purchased this RAM, as it happens... but they don't stock these exact modules any more, so I may be waiting a bit for a replacement. No donations should be needed, however.
[Regrettably, it turns out that you can't return just one module from one of these Corsair pair-packs for a warranty replacement - it has to be both. I suppose that makes sense for all of the overclocking kids who at least think they need perfectly matched RAM, but I still think it's kind of stupid to have to return a perfectly good memory module. I wonder if I'll get something faster back?]
Incidentally, if you find yourself in a similar situation, it's important to make sure your new module - whether you're getting it under warranty or not - is good old "standard density" RAM, not the newer off-brand "high density" stuff that's sneaked into the 1Gb-and-bigger DDR module market, at a considerably lower price.
High density is cheaper, essentially, because it's crap. It breaks JEDEC specs to save a few bucks, and it won't work with a long list of motherboards, including pretty much anything made by Asus or Dell.
(Hey! A Dell-incompatibility problem that isn't their fault! Call the papers!)
UPDATE: I found another couple of 512Mb modules kicking around the place which gave me a decent-enough 2Gb, and so I took ages to get around to sending the RAM in for a warranty replacement. And, technically, it was a couple of months too old to qualify for the warranty here in Australia. But I still got a replacement (and without any do-you-know-who-I-am review-site customer service enhancement, either).
The replacement RAM took a month to arrive, though, presumably because the Australian distributor bounced the RAM back to the States for replacement. Still, I can't complain.
My replacement RAM is the same as the old stuff - XMS3200-with-LEDs. So the packaging has lots of "Best RAM of 2003!" awards printed on the back of it.
Way to make me feel old, guys.
So Penny Arcade has been screwed up for, oh, hours now, with no comic to go with the most recent news. No doubt it'll be fixed soon, but I just wasted a couple of minutes seeing whether I'd ad-blocked the comic image or something.
I did that because the excellent Pennypacker Firefox extension, which allows collaborative tagging of PA strips to replace the descriptive alt tags they all lost when PA "upgraded" its site, was showing me a bunch of tags under the invisible comic.
I automatically assumed those tags had been entered by people who, unlike me, were able to see the comic.
I guess I should have read them, huh.
If you've got your font sizes set larger than normal (in this case, because your 17 inch screen has 2304000 pixels), and you accept Microsoft's strong recommendation that you install IE7 (yes, Firefox is the default browser), the why-you-should-install dialog will not look the way Microsoft intended it to.
It will look like this.
I think the mangulation is in a particularly apposite spot. I don't know about you, but I've always thought IE had a very 
look.
Janez Jevnikar, possibly the world's fastest producer of panel van art:
Actually, that's unfair. Jevnikar's stuff, much more of which you can see on his site, is not nearly that hideous. There's not a Chick Riding A Reptile to be seen (see also).
He does seem to have a thing for pyramids, ringed planets, force fields and craggy mountains, though. Fair enough; so do the cover artists for the books which I, like Gabe, favour.
You may have seen this.
Thermite is not an explosive, but it can do a very good impression of one if there's water in the area. Or ice.
Pykrete would no doubt have held up better
(Oh, and do try to ignore the YouTube commenters and their d00d-this-is-what-s4ddam-used-to-bring-down-the-WTC theories.)
The clip's from a German show called "Clever!", which has its own video page here.
Any time I see a big-boom TV-show science demonstration these days I can't help but suspect it was faked, thanks to the scumbags at Brainiac, but this one does seem to be genuine.
I mean, forget water. Thermite will explosively boil zinc.
The bit at the end of that video is quite a bad idea if you're not wearing eye protection. And I'd keep my mouth shut, too. Violently heating any stone-like material can result in steam pockets inside it firing chips of hot rock at you at considerable speed.
While we're on a roll, I feel the need for a traditional pyro video, with shaky camerawork and autofocus hunting all over the place while a small thing glows in the middle of the frame.
That's pretty good. But it doesn't have a bunch of whooping drunks.
Ah, there you go.
There's a whole class of thermite reactions. The iron oxide and aluminium one is just cheap and powerful.
Here, for instance, is copper oxide and zinc:
The pros ignite their thermite with super-sparklers made for the purpose, which are easier to light than magnesium ribbon, fatter and hotter than standard sparklers, and very hard to extinguish.
These last two videos are from more Germans, this time netexperimente.de, whose YouTube profile page is here. There's a decent collection of other whooshes, oozes and bangs there, including a simple demonstration of the classic dust explosion (it's noisier if you jam the lid on harder...) that Adam and Jamie failed to perform back in '04. There are plenty of other classics, too, including a nice version of sugar and sulfuric acid - in which, essentially, the concentrated acid is so thirsty for water that it pulls it right out of the sucrose molecules, leaving a frothy mass of black carbon.
(If you're wondering what the deal is with the "burning snowball", it's a methane hydrate ball.)
And here's someone melting through a rock with a thermal lance...
...and then burning some pennies. As you do.
Modern US one cent coins are copper plated zinc, and zinc burns quite well if you get it hot enough.
If you inhale much of the zinc oxide smoke, though, you'll get ill. "Metal fume fever" has influenza-like symptoms, and zinc fumes are the most common cause (welders, who get it when they breathe the smoke while welding galvanised steel, call it "zinc flu"). It probably won't kill you, but it might.