I could really care less about the interactions with other races. I mean, how may different noises can they possibly make when I've got my boot on their throat (or throats, aliens ya know) and they're trying to get me to stop genociding their species.

I kinda liked fleet combat in MoO, but I'd rather see a full modernized redo of that vs. something that's going to focus more on diplomacy, which is what I'd have to say this is going to be since they want to spend so much time on how the aliens communicate.

Yeah, personally I haven't done SMT rework in about 15 years, Aoyue sure has brought the price down on rework stations, that's less than I paid for my Metcal, and that's just a basic iron. I don't want to remember how much we paid for some of the larger Metcal & Pace hand rework systems back in the day.

SMT rework by hand isint rocket science, but takes more tools than the average garage has.

Desoldering you use a custom tip for that socket/package type (one tip per package & they're not cheap). It's essentially a metal ring that heats the solder on all the pins at once. In the center of the assembly is a vacuum probe. You heat all the pins, melting all the solder & hit the button on the handpiece to suction the chip up off the board. Then clean up the pads on the board. Careful with the heat because you dont want to lift pads off the board, if you do then you have to either fix them, or make a new pads. And then if you manage to trash a via (conductivity path to a different board layer), then you've got to drill out a new one and you have to use a esd safe conductive drill with a resistance cutoff. You put a clip from the drill in contact with the layer you're trying to get to, drill down and when the drill tip makes contact with that layer the drill turns off because the circuit is complete. But it still sucks and if you don't know how all the board layers are put together you may end up trashing a trace a couple layers into the board and wrecking the whole thing.

Soldering it down you do this. Align all the chip legs on the pads. Then you can either run a small bead of solder paste across all the pins or use a wave soldering tip (small cup, uses surface tension to hold the solder in place) and drag the tip over all the pins. Heat on the pin & pad draws the solder down into the joints. If you put too much solder you might have to vac it back up and redo it if you've made bridges etc. Alignment is key, and keeping the part in position is key. I used to try and avoid using glue underneath because that made it difficult to get it back off if you needed to down the road.

Doing hand rework on that kind of stuff the hardest thing for me was dealing with smt chip caps, little bastards will crack if you heat em to fast, so you have to get a temp regulated hot plate, heat em up slow, then pick and place em quick with tweezers/needlenose & solder em down quick.

Pretty similar but instead of reading the comments first, I RTFA. Then *maybe* I'll go back and read the comments, if I need a laugh or something to rage about.

I'd say out of 20 headlines, I'll read maybe 10 summaries, 2 of those maybe the article, 1 of those the comments. Actually comments probably less, but I already had to jump to 20 headlines because I didn't want to get into an 'I'll read 0.5 of the comments' and I'm not changing it again.

Funny part on the poll though, back just before the turn of the century, the first time I found /. was because of one of the polls linked from somewhere else. Started checking regularly for the polls, then reading articles.

Come to think of it, same thing happened to me with fark, first it was a photoshop contest, and even though those are mostly dead now, they're still one of my fav news aggregators.

Windows 8: We Blue it...

Seriously? Nobody takes a crack at marketing calling the new one blue? If you thought windows 8 was bad, the new version is guaranteed to leave you blue... or something?

/I am dissapoint

Started on Apple II, then a little Atari Os, Commodore (20/64/128) later w/Geos, short AmigaOS stint, then Dos later w/Windows, then OS2 with an AIX fork

AIX Fork branched to Solaris, HPUX, later HPUX dropped AIX & Solaris still moving forward with a fistful of linux distributions, Redhat, SuSE back in the day, Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, even a little Yellowdog and a few others of others on that branch and it's still moving forward. Managed to stay away from OS/400, MVS, IRIX, Had to touch DGUX a couple times. Never got to play with NeXT. Wanted to take a look at BE a couple times but never bothered. Dear god I almost forgot SCO. I hated SCO. Never spent a lot of time with the actual BSD trunk either.

OS2 Fork primarily went back to windows after Warp and NT4 came out, that fork continues on the windows track but refuses windows 8. Server 2013 has some decent features though.

Smartphone os's, once we actually got to the point where you could choose, It's been flatline Android. Apple IOS, not to be confused with Cisco IOS (Because Apple's so original....) can stay where it is, which is away from me. Should Palm os and early variants fall under Smartphones? Or Should smartphones now fall under PDA's? Palm was decent I guess, ran it on their hardware and handspring when they were shipping.

Primarily for daily stuff, it's windows desktop to Solaris/AIX/Linux boxen that do custom work while windows servers handle support workloads (AD, things like that) and android to keep me in touch. I've got an ESX box next to my desk that's got a few different distro's on it too, but those are mostly for testing.

Reality is OS's are tools, and as much as most of you guys thrash different platforms, they've all got strengths and weaknesses. You need to pick the right tool for the right job based on capability, cost and compatibility.

Same.. ~92-95ms.

Goes from down here to Palo Alto then the SF Saviis handoff, loops a bit locally there, then chicago, elk grove and done. 50-60ms average rtt for the SF/Chicago leg.

You and me both brother... When I saw that article that's the first thing I said... 20 years? F*** I feel old :(

Sorry bro, my GPU doesn't support text acceleration. No sale here...

That's it! Those things were great!

* What's the best tool to wind back up chewed-up cassette tapes?
>>> By hand, Pen cap. Fast way, one of those electric stick screwdrivers with a pen cap shoved over the phillips bit.

* How long do you boil your hot dogs on the stove?
>>> Until the beer foam is gone

* How many stamps have you licked in one sitting?
>>> Not sure, how many did it used to take before you got that taste in your mouth and had to rinse it out?

* Which joystick was the best?
>>> Cant remember the name, had a metal shaft and a plastic ball at the end with a really short throw, was great for those olympics games where you'd have to go side to side to run. Think it was a tac something.

I hated 1200 baud modems when they first came out, 300 baud was pretty good for reading text at full transmission speed (600 probably would have been perfect), 1200 it was too fast and you had to start putting screen breaks in to pause the scroll.

Nobody is buying them because nobody makes them in decent sizes :( I'd buy a pair of 27-28" wuxga's today if I could find some with decent specs from a good manufacturer (those oddball korean ones you can only get on ebay don't count).

I'm still using a 26" viewsonic wuxga as my primary, 10 years ago I was on uxga crt's, and from there went wuxga to keep my vertical-ness. Now the biggest wuxga new I see around is a 24", so to keep 1600 vertical minimum (without turning it sideways shaddup about that already) I either have to move up to wqxga and squint or sit closer because high dpi scaling is still lacking in os's or go to a smaller display.

Having played Planetside 1 from beta (sill have cd's!) and for a few years after launch, a lot of the people I used to play that with were pretty excited about planetside 2, until we actually got to play it. The summary about it was pretty much this:
Everything you hated about planetside 1? We took it out.
Everything you liked about planetside 1? We dropped most of that too!
Things you thought were missing from Planetside 1? We put some of those in.

This one feels like pretty much a large map rip-off of all the other fps's out on the scene now, and I've taken to calling it Planetfieldfall2: modern agenda.

Graphics are pretty good, maps are still huge, but all the things that would make us get 20-30 people together to storm around and kick some butt together are gone. Thanks for nothing and you won't be getting any cash from me.

This comment is meant to be read on a future display. It is only 1 line high. If this text takes more than one line of text on your display you need to upgrade. I have no doubt that this will be modded up in the future when users realize my forward thinking capacity. Let's hear it for product teams that believe that displays are only useful for watching movies and we don't need vertical resolution.