Astronomer

No? Is it easier to control a plane with a mouse and kb?

Whoo-hoo! Way to go XI!!! I just got it running today and configured my Thrustmaster Joystick. I need a bit of practice before I jump deep into the fray. It's about time someone resurrected the air combat genre! I used to play several games of this type wayyy back in the day,

Very nice rig sir!

Congrats, and jealous! Welding and machining are skills that I wish I had picked up over the years. The deeper that I dive into some of my hobbies, the more I need them. Once I win the lottery, I'll carve out time to learn them. Looks like you have good piece of gear.

LOL!

Good to see you on the forums Mikey! Welcome to the on-boarding process towards becoming an official Idiot!

Ha! I'm of the "do first, read the manual/info later" school of doing things. LOL!

Thanks PingLo. I'll wait for the various patches before I do an upgrade. The regular updates are fine, but the full-version upgrades can cause havoc. I got my first PC in '87, if my memory is correct. It was an 8088 with 640k of RAM, and orange-on-black little monitor and a dot-matrix printer. I think it cost me around $2600. Before that we had TRS/80's (I believe) in school. All of our programs were stored on cassette tapes. The other little beast I'm playing with is a BeagleBone Black. I haven't decided what I'll use it for, but I have a couple of ideas that I'm mulling over. http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black

Hi Hxtr, I have 2 ML350 G5's. A bunch came back on lease return, so I picked and chose various chassis and parts. One is my media/storage server, the other one is running VMWare, and I've got 3 live virtual servers running and another 3-4 that I'm testing out various things on. Lots of great software appliances at http://www.turnkeylinux.org/. I also have a Dell T610 sitting on a shelf that needs memory and drives. All servers have redundant power supplies with spares sitting in a closet. I've got at least 2 hot-swap spares for each of the 2 RAID5 configs on the storage server.

My measly 14Tb NAS server in my basement (HP ML350 running bare-bones Ubuntu Linux with Universal Media Server, booting off 3 x15,000 RPM drives in RAID 5 with a hot-spare) bows forehead-to-floor to your rig. I'm seriously considering building one of these: http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibrations-storage-pod-3-0/ The cost of parts isn't too bad, though I think heat might be an issue with 45 hard drives in the chassis.

Hey, I tried to give the new "Dog Owner" medal to a buddy, but I got an error saying I didn't have permission to do so. Just an FYI.

Also it's a long weekend on both sides of the Canadian/US border. Thanksgiving up here.

Woot! Glad to hear the issue was resolved. Go Idiots!!!

Hi all, For some background, I've been in IT for a couple of decades now, and I'm also a hobbyist and a "hacker" in the pure sense: I like to take my gear and extend its capabilities beyond what the manufacturer intended. Who the heck are they to tell me what the limitations of my gear are? I've hacked my DVD ROM in my PC (hint: generally, all models in a given family are identical. The firmware has been crippled in the lower end. Buy the low end, and hack the firmware to give you the high-end model); hacked my routers; overclocked all my PC's and video cards; jailbroken my iPad, iPhone, Nexus 7 tablet, and PSP's etc. I also like to "roll my own" with my servers and their operating systems and the services running on them. One day at the office a few months ago, I noticed a Lenovo T-510 laptop with a smashed screen and beat-up body in the electronics recycling bin. I saw that it was of recent vintage, so I fished it out and took it home. I plugged in a monitor and a universal laptop power supply, turned it on....and there was a working laptop, a 2.66Ghz dual-core i5 with 4Gb RAM and a 500Gb hard drive. A Google search found me a replacement 15.4" screen for US$69. It arrived in a couple of days, and for a few months I ran it as a dual-boot Linux-Mint 15 and Windows 8 laptop. I've always wanted to build a "Hackintosh, that is, a standard PC running Mac OS X without the price-gouging for lower-powered equipment specs. I did some research and found that my laptop is well supported, with some caveats, for running OSX. Game on! I found a website that has many tools and great forums for getting you going (link at the end of this article as placing it here fucks up the formatting turning everything after it into a hyperlink). After buying a legal copy of OSX Mountain Lion from Apple's App Store (in my OSX Mountain Lion virtual machine on my main PC) and building an install USB key with a tool on Tonymacx86x.com, I went for the install. After 7 failures, I read the documentation and then did a perfect install, and now I have working Hackintosh. I've upped the memory to 8Gb and added 2 supported USB adapters: a latest-version Bluetooth and a wireless N networking. In parts, the whole thing cost me about $135, and it's a very capable and fast machine. Operating systems are another sub-hobby of the IT thing, and using this daily as my second PC allows me to better troubleshoot issues, when rarely necessary, with my wife's iMac. Link for instructions, discussion, and tools: http://www.tonymacx86.com/home.php

Nice box sir! Western Digital "RED" drives are great fro these enclosures.

*Yawn* Call me when you've got redundant petabyte arrays.

10/10 on the "AWESOME" meter!

I'm an EVGA fan. My last 5 cards were from them and I've have had no problems. I'm currently rocking 2 680's in SLI. Good luck with whatever card you end up with!

Happy birthday Slowfry! I wish the WAW servers were up so I could BBQ ya with my flame thrower!

Thanks for the update Rugger.

So....you're saying that you got to stare at a big rack while she rode a big one...? Happy Anniversary! Our 24th is coming up in February.

Congrats Chile! Don't think of it as 6 years. Think of it as 2190 days...!...ummm...errr...You're on the road to being a "lifer". Don't drop the soap!

It was on a remote highway in Labrador. There was a danger of the fire spreading to the nearby forest. The nearest fire department was likely several hundred miles/kilometers away, so this was easily the most effective, timely, and inexpensive means of putting it out. No one was seriously hurt in this accident.

If you bought it new, it's still under warranty. Contact ASUS. Their support (at least in Canada) is excellent. Re-installation of the OS will likely fix what ails it, if you can get hold of an install disk. What I'd suggest doing first, if you have access to another PC with a disk burner, is download Ultimate Boot CD http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/. Its a utility disk chock-full of legal and free software for diagnosing the crap out of your system. Hiren's Boot CD http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd is similar and excellent. Use either/both to eliminate (or diagnose) hardware or viruses/malware as the issue. Good luck!!!

One has to carefully weigh the value of a life vs a REALY FRIKKEN' COOL VIDEO!!!