As soon as I saw that NASA is upping "advertising" to convince young people they should care, I could sense the inherent stupidity. NASA should be doing actual science with that money rather than convincing young people they should have the money in the first place, that's their job. Government agencies shouldn't need a PR campaign, if they do, they're probably doing something stupid or unnecessary. No one needs to advertise to convince me that the post office is still a good idea even after the internet and private companies have taken a lot of their pre-eminence. The real problem boils down to the breakdown in communication between large and important blocks of society. In this case, between younger people and their parents and older peers. Confusing advertising with a need to communicate your mission is the first mistake. The assumption and it's the wrong assumption is that because of the youth revolution that gave us pop culture now, the children of the baby boom and their children are rebelling and unwilling to listen and communicate. This isn't the case. I know these people and I am one of those people and we genuinely want to dialog with our parents and grandparents. We're looking for mentors and new ways to communicate with you. Please don't confuse advertised youth rebellion and something like an IPOD for indifference or unwillingness to care. This isn't the majority. Advertising is no substitute for vision, leadership and communication.
I appreciate that this is designed to spur policy action as opposed to being a real solution but it points out the vested interest ecologists and climate change experts have in screaming about the sky falling and offering no engineering solutions. Yes, climate change is inevitable at this point. What we should be doing is talking about engineering solutions rather than ordering all economic activity to cease in the name of environmental salvation. The damage has been done. We need to implement effective engineering controls to limit the undesirable effects and if possible begin engineering our climate. Eventually that will mean barrier walls around major cities to prevent the ocean from coming in and probably underwater cities to support the growing populations but I don't accept the frankly stupid response of the NTS. Life is an uncontrolled experiment. Persisting in alarmism and rejecting any solution based on the industrial capabilities advanced economies have developed gets us no where. You can pray to Gaia however much you want and that will not stop the polar ice caps from melting. What is needed is a drive to perfect technologies that will adapt and preserve natural forms. These will take time and effort to design and implement and thus are exactly the type of solutions that environmentalists refuse to consider. They'd rather hug a tree than innovate.
With New Line in charge, Tolkien's masterpiece will finally get the car chase sequence it's needed for years. I mean "horses", nobody rides "horses" anymore. Come on, let's punch it up and give the hairy, sweaty, fanboys the film they deserve rather than the one they want.
Verhoeven is the man on this stuff. He and Pendray went head to head with some eggheads from either Caltech or Stanford on the whole rolling explanation for Wootz and knocked them on their ass. There's a big difference between a "tube like" structure and an actual carbon nanotube especially using a TEM or S/TEM. Speaking as a microscopist this explanation sounds kind of far-fetched. People see new and weird things with the TEM 95% of the time that doesn't mean it's what they say it is. I'd need to read a peer reviewed journal and see what they are actually seeing before I would buy into this.
And after that, why I failed in the 90's, *sob*. Remember, whether you really failed or not, you at least have to have something adverse so you can look good when your amazing comeback kicks in a decade later and you write an book explaining how wonderful you and your company are.
Let's face it, Seanbaby is our generations P.J. O'Rourke. Less articulate, less educated perhaps, but then aren't we all? He's the logical outcome of gonzo journalism mixed with MTV and the Internet.
Help me out. Is it okay to like a company that seems to have a solid business, charges fair prices for it's products, doesn't screw people it does business with and generally comes in pretty close to the performance leader? Or does that make me an "AMD fanboy?" I'm just going to throw that out there, I guess us "AMD fanboy's" have been quiet lately according to HEXUS. For the record, I won't do business with Intel.
Judge Friedman: "I find this game perfectly within the bounds of societal norms. Furthermore, I sentence Plaintiff's attorney to one swirlie in the downstairs bathroom. Bailiff, see that this sentence is carried out immediately. Case dismissed!"
[-)
Obviously the judge didn't get a look at the deleted "hot cocoa" mod for this game. Apparently, there is some code included in the unreleased build that if you re-enable it, lets your character choose whether to hire an unscrupulous lawyer character to "sue" the abusive bullies who are attacking the weaker NPC's. The mini-game basically has your character run back and forth between some piles of burning objectionable games, CD's and copies of the Bill of Rights and the more you fan the flames the higher your score and the more the lawyer pays you. Heck of a coincidence, huh?
And does anyone else notice that Jack is kind of naive? I mean, if he's after a Columbine simulator, I'd bet he'd wet his pants if he saw F.E.A.R. combat, which you can play for free. He's kind of sweet and old fashioned I find.
It depends. The last few years were rough on MS and Ph.D's in engineering but now it seems like the situation has improved. If you have a Ph.D and 5-7 years of experience you shouldn't have a problem. If less, than yeah, it's going to be more of an issue because if your having trouble getting a post-doc people are more likely to think you can't cut it.
Two questions really, can you re-locate from where you are now and do you know anyone in industry who can help you get in the door? The closest thing to a pure research unit in mechanical engineering I'm aware of is probably at the ITW Tech Center in Glenview, Illinois. I'm thinking specifically the Advanced Projects group, rather than Manufacturing Research. ITW is a good company to work for, but it would be pretty competitive and you do have to get results. I think it's really going to depend on your background. Third, you can always go the Materials route and horn in on the Materials Scientists turf since people will always hire a Mechanical Engineer before they hire a Materials Engineer. They'd rather have a good, stable, PhD grunt like yourself than some wild and crazy Material's Commando from out there U any day. So keep your chin up. It'll work out.
Who cares if its 5 pounds of silicon jammed into a 3 pound bag. This release means the 6800 GS in AGP just dropped in price. If you still have an nforce2 board or socket A system, that's the upgrade to grab. I've got the regular 6800 and it runs just about everything I want.
I'm not sure why you're ignoring my point about the design considerations on the platform. But be that as it may. People died on Challenger, people died on Columbia, I'd say that's pretty "awry" to use your words. Money is a consideration, fine, it's always a consideration. Time was a factor, okay, nothing new there. I've even been involved in some pretty screwed up engineering projects myself and I appreciate the arrogance call. I can be pretty arrogant if I do say so myself.
That doesn't change the facts in this situation. Ethics in technical professions have taken a decided backseat to careerism and head nodding acquiesance to the people in the corner office. It's sickening and frightening and I take it extremely seriously. Corners can be cut and mistakes can be made, but we do not let people die!
If it requires a resignation or a walkout on the part of the responsible technical personnel, it is their obligation and their duty to take that walk. "Not on our watch, will this go forward!" It may end a career. It may ruin a life. But we do not let the people who rely on us for their safety burn because of cowardice and a desire to look good. A bad doctor can kill one patient or several patients. An engineer who ignores their responsibility can kill hundreds or thousands.
Okay, you're out of Urbana, I'll give you a break. The experimental technique to test the fatigue life of a given composite is not in fact impossible. We take the material, it becomes a test article in the required configuration and we run that sucker under flight conditions for however many hours are required to establish an operational life safety factor. Aircraft manufacturer's do this type of testing all the time. Would that have been difficult for Rockwell, yes, would it have been cost prohibitive, probably, but it could have been done. The same way figuring out repairs to the heat tiles on-orbit could have been figured out before, but wasn't.
As for modelling lifetime effects on a given composite or polymeric material with computers I can probably refer you to a few papers, it's difficult and it involves a lot of tensors but work in that area has been on-going since the nineteen seventies.
The direct simulation approach is expensive, it's not easy and the test operation involves lots of manpower and time. But it can be done. As we like to say, the mechanical engineer's tell you "We can do that, but it will cost you." The materials engineer's say "We can do that, but it will really cost you!"
My main point of frustration is that you're taking a theoretical approach to a design problem that results from a completely different circumstance, which is impact on the leading edge. The leading edge and the shuttle airframe are not designed to be bullet proof. Our primary concern is heat dissipation and aerodynamic stability of the platform during orbit and de-orbit. That type of problem will kill your shuttle long before any type of fatigue or catastrophic failure in the composite matrix of the wing becomes an issue.
As for your fighter problem, sea-water contamination of the composites used in the F/A-18 has been a problem and was resolved once people realized the long-standing issue with aramid (exposure to water degrades the fibers). And you're not wrong about the catastrophic nature of composite failures, once it goes, it goes.
Polymers do behave differently from alloys certainly, and I understand your interest in the long term matrix stability as regards this catastrophy. But your basic assumption is in-correct. This material system is not designed to withstand heavy impact loads. I'm not angry at Rockwell, I'm angry at the Nasa adminstrators who assumed "foam" meant "harmless foam."
They didn't test the foam for impact effect until they'd managed to kill seven very good people. This is the type of thing we are trained as engineer's to prevent. I and every member of my Profession bear part of the responsibility for this disaster because our advice was not understood or we were not able to communicate effectively.
Apparently they don't know the lady engineers I know. Women are starting to dominate civil engineering and materials science even if it isn't obvious from surveys or industry literature. I can't speak for the mechanical engineers and stuff but this has been my experience.
In my degree program, the materials science major was so small that girls either equalled or out-numbered the guys in terms of enrollment. And there is such a shortage of people to replace metallurgists and civil and environmental people that any male bias has been lost to expediency. We hire the ladies or we can't get personnel.
The same is true for the military, the no women in combat rule has been OBE, overtaken by events. I think they've chosen a format that doesn't work for science. A soap opera is a stupid approach. My advice would be to do a show similar to the ER's and 24's. Have a female dominated accident re-construction team that goes in to analyze the results of major accidents, train de-railments, crane collapses, basic failure analysis. Is it a terror attack or not? Build on the premise and use good solid story telling. Science and engineering don't have to be boring. Soap opera's are boring,folks.
I am a materials scientist and I'm really tired of getting blamed when you avionics and mechanical people don't do your %$&#* homework! I quote
"Materials scientists tend to know little about how composite materials like the RCC panels age, especially in the harsh environment they had to endure"
Oh really, no kidding, well if you genius's had decided to fund that study we wouldn't be having this conversation, now would we?
I've got composite materials data out the wazoo. I'm sitting in a library filled with data on all types of polymer and composite materials, not to mention the original drafts of papers by guys like Lawrence Broutman. And because you aren't familar with catastrophic failure modes in composite pre-pregs and laminates, this is somehow my fault?
No one respects Materials Scientists, you don't listen, you don't understand basic fundamental principles and then you're surprised when things go wrong 20 years later?
And as for the foam problem, here's a hint, when a large object strikes another object at near supersonic speeds the impact, no matter the properties of the impacting object causes impact effects in the impacted material. If you wanted impact strength in that situation, you should have used titanium or a superalloy. It's not my fault NASA's managers slept through MS 200 when they got their undergraduate degrees. I spend days hitting composites with charpy and izod impact hammers, I should know.
In a lot of cases the hardware has exceeded the performance of the software. We see that in poorly written games, un-optimized hardware drivers and that company in Redmond who gets slammed here all the time.. What's their name again? Micro-something?
AMD and Intel both have reached the point where speed doesn't matter so much. You can have as many Gigahertz as you want, the software is still going to constrain the performance. Add in networking bottlenecks and people who have no problem with using dial-up at home and heat and Moore's law starts to move further down the list.
Is it important for servers. Absolutely. The home PC user may very well tap out at 30 or 40 Gigahertz core clock speed sometime in the future or maybe 8 individual cores. And new ways of moving charged particles (photonics and electron traps) may very well render the whole current technology totally irrelevant. The software has to improve and provide new capabilities in order for the hardware constraints to really have meaning.
Replace the stock fan with an aftermarket solution like a Vantec stealth for 5$. A fan is a lot cheaper than an entire aftermarket heatsink. For even better performance hook the fan to a fan speed controller and adjust to your ears content.
Uh, better hope the moisture doesn't build up in there when your cheap freezer hits the defrost part of the cycle. Moisture is not our computers friend, senior.
Right now I have custom profiles for F.E.A.R., Call of Duty 2 ( real helpful with all the keys you can use there), and I just use a default loadout for Unreal 2004 because I haven't re-mapped all the keys to my liking yet.
I'm still experimenting a little with different setups.
I also use it with Warhammer: Dawn of War (RTS) and will probably set it up for D&D Dragonshard and Battle for Middle Earth 2 when it comes out. Unfortunately, people tend to overlook the possibilities for RTS, but if you use the shift states and set up a custom build order ahead of time, you can be downright lethal.
Your average RTS player will learn a few tactics that work and stick with them but the N52 unlocks a whole bunch of possibilities for improved unit buffs and better control if you're managing units all across a battlefield. I also use it for playing DVD's (WinDVD) and it can work with graphical editing programs. Honestly, I really like the thing.
You can program any key layout you want for as many programs as you want and never have to bother with buying additional keyboard sets for the z-board. I picked mine up for $29.99. That's cheaper than any z-board I've seen anywhere plus the added costs of the "custom" inserts for each game you play. Who needs that.
Slashdot Mirror
As soon as I saw that NASA is upping "advertising" to convince young people they should care, I could sense the inherent stupidity. NASA should be doing actual science with that money rather than convincing young people they should have the money in the first place, that's their job. Government agencies shouldn't need a PR campaign, if they do, they're probably doing something stupid or unnecessary. No one needs to advertise to convince me that the post office is still a good idea even after the internet and private companies have taken a lot of their pre-eminence. The real problem boils down to the breakdown in communication between large and important blocks of society. In this case, between younger people and their parents and older peers. Confusing advertising with a need to communicate your mission is the first mistake. The assumption and it's the wrong assumption is that because of the youth revolution that gave us pop culture now, the children of the baby boom and their children are rebelling and unwilling to listen and communicate. This isn't the case. I know these people and I am one of those people and we genuinely want to dialog with our parents and grandparents. We're looking for mentors and new ways to communicate with you. Please don't confuse advertised youth rebellion and something like an IPOD for indifference or unwillingness to care. This isn't the majority. Advertising is no substitute for vision, leadership and communication.
You're not alone out there. Not to blatantly slashvertise, but I can tell by what you've written that you're a potential materials scientist. Intelligent, eloquent, and disgusted with how little people have invested in you. When you reach high school you may want to take a look at the Materials Camp program. http://www.asminternational.org/Content/Navigation Menu/ASMFoundation/Materials_Camp/StudentsMaterial sCamp/CampOverview.htmASM International Materials Camp
I appreciate that this is designed to spur policy action as opposed to being a real solution but it points out the vested interest ecologists and climate change experts have in screaming about the sky falling and offering no engineering solutions. Yes, climate change is inevitable at this point. What we should be doing is talking about engineering solutions rather than ordering all economic activity to cease in the name of environmental salvation. The damage has been done. We need to implement effective engineering controls to limit the undesirable effects and if possible begin engineering our climate. Eventually that will mean barrier walls around major cities to prevent the ocean from coming in and probably underwater cities to support the growing populations but I don't accept the frankly stupid response of the NTS. Life is an uncontrolled experiment. Persisting in alarmism and rejecting any solution based on the industrial capabilities advanced economies have developed gets us no where. You can pray to Gaia however much you want and that will not stop the polar ice caps from melting. What is needed is a drive to perfect technologies that will adapt and preserve natural forms. These will take time and effort to design and implement and thus are exactly the type of solutions that environmentalists refuse to consider. They'd rather hug a tree than innovate.
With New Line in charge, Tolkien's masterpiece will finally get the car chase sequence it's needed for years. I mean "horses", nobody rides "horses" anymore. Come on, let's punch it up and give the hairy, sweaty, fanboys the film they deserve rather than the one they want.
Verhoeven is the man on this stuff. He and Pendray went head to head with some eggheads from either Caltech or Stanford on the whole rolling explanation for Wootz and knocked them on their ass. There's a big difference between a "tube like" structure and an actual carbon nanotube especially using a TEM or S/TEM. Speaking as a microscopist this explanation sounds kind of far-fetched. People see new and weird things with the TEM 95% of the time that doesn't mean it's what they say it is. I'd need to read a peer reviewed journal and see what they are actually seeing before I would buy into this.
And after that, why I failed in the 90's, *sob*. Remember, whether you really failed or not, you at least have to have something adverse so you can look good when your amazing comeback kicks in a decade later and you write an book explaining how wonderful you and your company are.
Let's face it, Seanbaby is our generations P.J. O'Rourke. Less articulate, less educated perhaps, but then aren't we all? He's the logical outcome of gonzo journalism mixed with MTV and the Internet.
Help me out. Is it okay to like a company that seems to have a solid business, charges fair prices for it's products, doesn't screw people it does business with and generally comes in pretty close to the performance leader? Or does that make me an "AMD fanboy?" I'm just going to throw that out there, I guess us "AMD fanboy's" have been quiet lately according to HEXUS. For the record, I won't do business with Intel.
[-)
Judge Friedman: "I find this game perfectly within the bounds of societal norms. Furthermore, I sentence Plaintiff's attorney to one swirlie in the downstairs bathroom. Bailiff, see that this sentence is carried out immediately. Case dismissed!" [-)
Obviously the judge didn't get a look at the deleted "hot cocoa" mod for this game. Apparently, there is some code included in the unreleased build that if you re-enable it, lets your character choose whether to hire an unscrupulous lawyer character to "sue" the abusive bullies who are attacking the weaker NPC's. The mini-game basically has your character run back and forth between some piles of burning objectionable games, CD's and copies of the Bill of Rights and the more you fan the flames the higher your score and the more the lawyer pays you. Heck of a coincidence, huh?
And does anyone else notice that Jack is kind of naive? I mean, if he's after a Columbine simulator, I'd bet he'd wet his pants if he saw F.E.A.R. combat, which you can play for free. He's kind of sweet and old fashioned I find.
[-)
It depends. The last few years were rough on MS and Ph.D's in engineering but now it seems like the situation has improved. If you have a Ph.D and 5-7 years of experience you shouldn't have a problem. If less, than yeah, it's going to be more of an issue because if your having trouble getting a post-doc people are more likely to think you can't cut it.
Two questions really, can you re-locate from where you are now and do you know anyone in industry who can help you get in the door? The closest thing to a pure research unit in mechanical engineering I'm aware of is probably at the ITW Tech Center in Glenview, Illinois. I'm thinking specifically the Advanced Projects group, rather than Manufacturing Research. ITW is a good company to work for, but it would be pretty competitive and you do have to get results. I think it's really going to depend on your background. Third, you can always go the Materials route and horn in on the Materials Scientists turf since people will always hire a Mechanical Engineer before they hire a Materials Engineer. They'd rather have a good, stable, PhD grunt like yourself than some wild and crazy Material's Commando from out there U any day. So keep your chin up. It'll work out.
Who cares if its 5 pounds of silicon jammed into a 3 pound bag. This release means the 6800 GS in AGP just dropped in price. If you still have an nforce2 board or socket A system, that's the upgrade to grab. I've got the regular 6800 and it runs just about everything I want.
Apparently Starforce only protects games that really, really suck! I feel much better now.
I'm not sure why you're ignoring my point about the design considerations on the platform. But be that as it may. People died on Challenger, people died on Columbia, I'd say that's pretty "awry" to use your words. Money is a consideration, fine, it's always a consideration. Time was a factor, okay, nothing new there. I've even been involved in some pretty screwed up engineering projects myself and I appreciate the arrogance call. I can be pretty arrogant if I do say so myself.
That doesn't change the facts in this situation. Ethics in technical professions have taken a decided backseat to careerism and head nodding acquiesance to the people in the corner office. It's sickening and frightening and I take it extremely seriously. Corners can be cut and mistakes can be made, but we do not let people die!
If it requires a resignation or a walkout on the part of the responsible technical personnel, it is their obligation and their duty to take that walk. "Not on our watch, will this go forward!" It may end a career. It may ruin a life. But we do not let the people who rely on us for their safety burn because of cowardice and a desire to look good. A bad doctor can kill one patient or several patients. An engineer who ignores their responsibility can kill hundreds or thousands.
Okay, you're out of Urbana, I'll give you a break. The experimental technique to test the fatigue life of a given composite is not in fact impossible. We take the material, it becomes a test article in the required configuration and we run that sucker under flight conditions for however many hours are required to establish an operational life safety factor. Aircraft manufacturer's do this type of testing all the time. Would that have been difficult for Rockwell, yes, would it have been cost prohibitive, probably, but it could have been done. The same way figuring out repairs to the heat tiles on-orbit could have been figured out before, but wasn't.
As for modelling lifetime effects on a given composite or polymeric material with computers I can probably refer you to a few papers, it's difficult and it involves a lot of tensors but work in that area has been on-going since the nineteen seventies.
The direct simulation approach is expensive, it's not easy and the test operation involves lots of manpower and time. But it can be done. As we like to say, the mechanical engineer's tell you "We can do that, but it will cost you." The materials engineer's say "We can do that, but it will really cost you!"
My main point of frustration is that you're taking a theoretical approach to a design problem that results from a completely different circumstance, which is impact on the leading edge. The leading edge and the shuttle airframe are not designed to be bullet proof. Our primary concern is heat dissipation and aerodynamic stability of the platform during orbit and de-orbit. That type of problem will kill your shuttle long before any type of fatigue or catastrophic failure in the composite matrix of the wing becomes an issue.
As for your fighter problem, sea-water contamination of the composites used in the F/A-18 has been a problem and was resolved once people realized the long-standing issue with aramid (exposure to water degrades the fibers). And you're not wrong about the catastrophic nature of composite failures, once it goes, it goes.
Polymers do behave differently from alloys certainly, and I understand your interest in the long term matrix stability as regards this catastrophy. But your basic assumption is in-correct. This material system is not designed to withstand heavy impact loads. I'm not angry at Rockwell, I'm angry at the Nasa adminstrators who assumed "foam" meant "harmless foam."
They didn't test the foam for impact effect until they'd managed to kill seven very good people. This is the type of thing we are trained as engineer's to prevent. I and every member of my Profession bear part of the responsibility for this disaster because our advice was not understood or we were not able to communicate effectively.
If I was overly castigating, I apologize.
Apparently they don't know the lady engineers I know. Women are starting to dominate civil engineering and materials science even if it isn't obvious from surveys or industry literature. I can't speak for the mechanical engineers and stuff but this has been my experience.
In my degree program, the materials science major was so small that girls either equalled or out-numbered the guys in terms of enrollment. And there is such a shortage of people to replace metallurgists and civil and environmental people that any male bias has been lost to expediency. We hire the ladies or we can't get personnel.
The same is true for the military, the no women in combat rule has been OBE, overtaken by events. I think they've chosen a format that doesn't work for science. A soap opera is a stupid approach. My advice would be to do a show similar to the ER's and 24's. Have a female dominated accident re-construction team that goes in to analyze the results of major accidents, train de-railments, crane collapses, basic failure analysis. Is it a terror attack or not? Build on the premise and use good solid story telling. Science and engineering don't have to be boring. Soap opera's are boring,folks.
I am a materials scientist and I'm really tired of getting blamed when you avionics and mechanical people don't do your %$&#* homework! I quote
n Menu/ASMFoundation/Materials_Camp/StudentsMaterial sCamp/CampOverview.htm but it's an uphill battle.
"Materials scientists tend to know little about how composite materials like the RCC panels age, especially in the harsh environment they had to endure"
Oh really, no kidding, well if you genius's had decided to fund that study we wouldn't be having this conversation, now would we?
I've got composite materials data out the wazoo. I'm sitting in a library filled with data on all types of polymer and composite materials, not to mention the original drafts of papers by guys like Lawrence Broutman. And because you aren't familar with catastrophic failure modes in composite pre-pregs and laminates, this is somehow my fault?
No one respects Materials Scientists, you don't listen, you don't understand basic fundamental principles and then you're surprised when things go wrong 20 years later?
And as for the foam problem, here's a hint, when a large object strikes another object at near supersonic speeds the impact, no matter the properties of the impacting object causes impact effects in the impacted material. If you wanted impact strength in that situation, you should have used titanium or a superalloy. It's not my fault NASA's managers slept through MS 200 when they got their undergraduate degrees. I spend days hitting composites with charpy and izod impact hammers, I should know.
Materials science education in this country is woefully under-utilized. We're trying to change that http://www.asminternational.org/Content/Navigatio
Then remove the fan entirely and underclock the processor a bit. What exactly is your point?
In a lot of cases the hardware has exceeded the performance of the software. We see that in poorly written games, un-optimized hardware drivers and that company in Redmond who gets slammed here all the time.. What's their name again? Micro-something?
AMD and Intel both have reached the point where speed doesn't matter so much. You can have as many Gigahertz as you want, the software is still going to constrain the performance. Add in networking bottlenecks and people who have no problem with using dial-up at home and heat and Moore's law starts to move further down the list.
Is it important for servers. Absolutely. The home PC user may very well tap out at 30 or 40 Gigahertz core clock speed sometime in the future or maybe 8 individual cores. And new ways of moving charged particles (photonics and electron traps) may very well render the whole current technology totally irrelevant. The software has to improve and provide new capabilities in order for the hardware constraints to really have meaning.
Replace the stock fan with an aftermarket solution like a Vantec stealth for 5$. A fan is a lot cheaper than an entire aftermarket heatsink. For even better performance hook the fan to a fan speed controller and adjust to your ears content.
Uh, better hope the moisture doesn't build up in there when your cheap freezer hits the defrost part of the cycle. Moisture is not our computers friend, senior.
Yeah, I can understand that. I like my Razer mouse too.
Right now I have custom profiles for F.E.A.R., Call of Duty 2 ( real helpful with all the keys you can use there), and I just use a default loadout for Unreal 2004 because I haven't re-mapped all the keys to my liking yet.
I'm still experimenting a little with different setups.
I also use it with Warhammer: Dawn of War (RTS) and will probably set it up for D&D Dragonshard and Battle for Middle Earth 2 when it comes out. Unfortunately, people tend to overlook the possibilities for RTS, but if you use the shift states and set up a custom build order ahead of time, you can be downright lethal.
Your average RTS player will learn a few tactics that work and stick with them but the N52 unlocks a whole bunch of possibilities for improved unit buffs and better control if you're managing units all across a battlefield. I also use it for playing DVD's (WinDVD) and it can work with graphical editing programs. Honestly, I really like the thing.
Buy a Belkin Nostromo N52 or N50.
s ?Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=2071&pcount=&Product_Id=1 57024
http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.proces
You can program any key layout you want for as many programs as you want and never have to bother with buying additional keyboard sets for the z-board. I picked mine up for $29.99. That's cheaper than any z-board I've seen anywhere plus the added costs of the "custom" inserts for each game you play. Who needs that.