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Iron Crowned posted:That's actually pretty neat. I'm guessing there really isn't a recoil to it. Although I can't exactly tell what is initially propelling it out of the barrel. The same solid rocket fuel that propels it the rest of the way (plus whatever the primer contributes), it’s just that the barrel isn’t sealed. Think of the barrel as being more like a guide rail. The propellant is, apparently, nitrocellulose.
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Mar 16, 2016 18:06
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Platystemon posted:The same solid rocket fuel that propels it the rest of the way (plus whatever the primer contributes), it’s just that the barrel isn’t sealed. Think of the barrel as being more like a guide rail. AH, ok, I didn't parse that it used rocket fuel.
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Mar 16, 2016 18:09
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In addition to the inherent stability issue of the
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Mar 16, 2016 18:18
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Lowen SoDium posted:And UAC was a long overdue tightening of security and administrator privileges. It took a while before old apps were updated to not expect administrator privileges. (you can argue that UAC is a sloppy implementation, but windows running everything as Administrator by default was a HUGE part of all the security issues associated with Windows). The actual purpose of UAC was simply so that even if running as administrator, it would be annoying to use programs that performed lots of random unnecessary operations that required being administrator. Therefore, developers would want to fix their programs to be less annoying, which would have the side effect of making it possible to run as a normal user. (This was arguably necessary because there was a chicken and egg problem where everyone ran Windows as Administrator because software wouldn't run otherwise, but developers had no reason to make software run as a normal user if everyone just used the Administrator account.) However, the only real added security comes in if you take advantage of this to actually run as a non-administrator user. The problem is that I imagine that most home users still run Windows as Administrator all the time, so unless Microsoft hardens UAC or something, the real security issue hasn't been resolved. mystes has a new favorite as of 18:28 on Mar 16, 2016 |
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Mar 16, 2016 18:21
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mng posted:The next big thing will probably be a thing like case-less ammunition. That was done. HK G11:  4.7mm caseless ammunition, the bullet's just embedded in a block of propellant. Rotating breech accepts a round (loaded vertically), pivots to bring it in line with the chamber, fire, the whole barrel/breech/action/magazine assembly starts to recoil, breech spins around to accept another round. Without the requirement of an ejection cycle, the rate of fire is so high that it can fire a three-round burst before the recoil from the first round starts to be felt. One of the problems (in addition to the fact that the action's roughly as complicated as a watch and hence expensive as gently caress) is that a spent brass casing carries a lot of heat away with it. Without the empty casings as a heat sink, they had problems with ammunition cooking off. Supposedly they eventually came up with a formulation that's more tolerate of heat than standard cased propellant, but cookoff was still a concern because the weapon's still going to reach those temps if you keep firing it. The US Army looked at this and a number of other weapons as an M-16 replacement, but none of them were enough of an improvement to be worth the expense of carrying out the replacement.
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Mar 16, 2016 18:37
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mng posted:The next big thing will probably be a thing like case-less ammunition. One more step towards the M4A1 pulse rifle Caseless has already been and gone. Several issues with caseless. 1.Fragile ammunition. Your bullets REALLY need to be able to survive environmental exposure and be reliable and hard to damage. Caseless had the powder as a solid shell around the bullet which was prone to cracking and flaking and potential water damage. 2. Overly complex weapon. The actual functional guns they built were really very complex machines which themselves were more prone to malfunction and in turn no ejection port made it harder to clear jams and other issues. It becomes a problem when your ammo has cracked in half inside the chamber and your gun wont go into battery and becomes dangerous. 3. Cases have their own advantages. Firstly, cases tend to expand under firing which helps seal gases into the barrel and propel the bullet efficiently. Secondly and something people dont realize is that the case acts in itself as a "heatsink" that is then extracted from the weapon which helps cool down its operation. The H&K G11s had issues with overheating barrels because they are so sealed up the entire thing just becomes an oven. This isnt to say that stuff like that couldn't be fixed with different chemical compounds and better ways to put it all together but that bit of brass and primer ultimately is just a very good way of doing a task. Edit, beaten.
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Mar 16, 2016 18:41
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GWBBQ posted:This may be skewed since I work in an IT field, but the vast majority of criticism of Windows 8 I've heard boils down to whining that there isn't a "Make it look like Windows 98" button.
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Mar 16, 2016 18:53
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Phanatic posted:The US Army looked at this and a number of other weapons as an M-16 replacement, but none of them were enough of an improvement to be worth the expense of carrying out the replacement. Yeah, given how mature of a technology modern assault rifles are and how expensive and difficult it is to change the entire logistical chain of the U.S. Military, I really don't expect M-16s to get replaced by anything short of a total game-changing weapon, or if body-armor improves to the point that 5.56 is insufficent.
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Mar 16, 2016 19:05
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My Lovely Horse posted:A friend of mine just started a job at a place where they run Windows 7, but thanks to hundreds of old inflexible employees IT has to keep everything looking like Windows 3.1. Can't (won't?) change it on a per-user basis or make it so that your custom settings carry over to the next day, either. It's setting it every morning or working in some kinda weird retrofuturist alternate universe.
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Mar 16, 2016 19:21
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Phanatic posted:That was done. Oh yeah I know it's been tried and failed. The breakthrough would be when it's actually working.
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Mar 16, 2016 20:02
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Ratoslov posted:if body-armor improves to the point that 5.56 is insufficent. This happened. We built better 5.56. Specifically, the M855A1 Environmentally-Friendly Ball Round, which uses copper and exposed steel instead of copper and lead with internal steel penetrator. Despite not being labelled armor piercing, the M855A1 will cut through a Level III+ steel plate and proceed to gently caress things up on the biological end inside. The constant mutual obsolescence of arms and armor is really neat to watch happen. Phanatic posted:One of the problems (in addition to the fact that the action's roughly as complicated as a watch and hence expensive as gently caress)  Yeeeep.
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Mar 16, 2016 20:11
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Exit Strategy posted:Also, its possible to stop a Gyrojet round with your finger placed over the bore, as the velocity isn't there yet by the time it reaches the end of the pistol barrel. I thought that was just a myth and you'd end up with a pretty pained finger? But it is true that at extremely close range, the bullet has little to no penetrating power and is liable to barely lodge in the victim's flesh or even bounce off altogether. In terms of power, it is a bit more powerful than a .45 ACP pistol. The biggest problem the Gyrojet suffered from is that it needed carefully angled ports in the rear of the rocket to give it the gyroscopic spin. When a lot of ammo got accidentally made with one port partially blocked, the bullets spun wildly and landed nowhere near the point of aim. This could also happen if the ports got dirty, and the open ports let moisture in that made the propellant unreliable. It was also very difficult to load: you loaded single rounds through the top into the magazine like an old bolt-action battle rifle, then quickly slid a cover closed over the top because there was nothing blocking the top rocket from simply springing out of the gun under the spring pressure.
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Mar 16, 2016 22:17
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KozmoNaut posted:Oh no, not at all. I was 10 when Windows 95 came out, and it was such a mind-blowing experience when you were used to Win 3.x and MS-DOS. I've got a shrink-wrapped copy of Windows 98SE that I got from my dad when he was helping clean out old stuff from his job. I remember trying to install it on an older Athlon XP PC with 1GB of memory and the OS would freak because it didn't know how to handle more than 512MB. My dad would freak whenever I installed a game on our first real home PC, a little Acer P100 with 4MB EDO and (I think) a 1.2GB hard drive...especially when I installed Quake and it took almost 100MB of disk space 
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Mar 16, 2016 22:26
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chitoryu12 posted:I thought that was just a myth and you'd end up with a pretty pained finger? But it is true that at extremely close range, the bullet has little to no penetrating power and is liable to barely lodge in the victim's flesh or even bounce off altogether. I don't think I'd want my finger in the way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl6zcB83xng Here's a pretty good video showing everything up close: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98c2t_uK5Uo
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Mar 16, 2016 22:27
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Athenry posted:I don't think I'd want my finger in the way: It’s going like 20 fps at the muzzle. That’s jogging speed, and the bullet weighs only a few grams. I’d be more worried about a burn than a puncture.
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Mar 16, 2016 22:35
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This independent study calculated the velocity of the Gyrojet based on a different study's actual firings from 2003, claiming that the 2003 study was incorrectly calculated. Both studies gave a velocity of about 100 FPS 1 foot from the muzzle (which probably would painfully bounce off a person similar to a paintball gun hit). You'd likely end up at least with a sprained finger if you tried to block the barrel Looney Tunes style, but you're definitely safe from death from a contact shot. It's basically a difference in function. A normal bullet accelerates until it leaves the barrel, at which point inertia takes over and any gunpowder that didn't push the bullet out gets expended as fiery blast at the muzzle (this is why longer barrels increase velocity and accuracy). A Gyrojet rocket starts out slow and has constant acceleration until 60 feet, at which point the fuel is expended and the rocket is at its maximum velocity. It then slows down from there like a normal bullet. You can see it well in this video, where it's slowed down so you can clearly see the eruption of unused gas behind the bullet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt8YxU1mgWg
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Mar 16, 2016 22:37
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mng posted:Oh yeah I know it's been tried and failed. The breakthrough would be when it's actually working. If there's going to be a breakthrough in ammunition technology it's going to be something like electrically activated primers or "smart" bullets. Athenry posted:Here's a pretty good video showing everything up close: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98c2t_uK5Uo
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Mar 16, 2016 22:37
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chitoryu12 posted:
Yeah, but that's the kind of thing you deal with with a prototype. If it'd have been worth making real ones, that's not a showstopper or problem with the technology, it's just the kind of thing that gets refined when you move to the production stage.
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Mar 17, 2016 00:09
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Is it true that the carbine is just the pistol with basically cosmetic furniture that snaps on, or is it a different barrel at least? I'm assuming just adding an extra length to the barrel would work due to it not being rifled, and not being under much pressure. Also, did he include any rockets? I know they're rare and likely to be duds if you had or managed to find some, but I don't think I'd be able to resist trying to fire at least a few if I were in your shoes.
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Mar 17, 2016 04:31
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Bulgaroctonus posted:Is it true that the carbine is just the pistol with basically cosmetic furniture that snaps on, or is it a different barrel at least? I'm assuming just adding an extra length to the barrel would work due to it not being rifled, and not being under much pressure. I believe the carbine and rifle were just the exact same mechanism scaled up to rifle sizes. Also, Gyrojet rockets go for $50-100 individually so shooting them is almost literally like burning Benjamins.
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Mar 17, 2016 06:01
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On the subject of PIP, I had a TV card at one time about 15 years ago (and I swore some TVs had this feature) where it would scan the channels and put up a still shot of a scan of every channel in the form of a tile that could cover the screen. After about 9 channels or so, it would fill the screen, so it would blank the screen again and continue on with the next set of channels. I guess it was a quick way to see what was on without having to manually flip through them yourself. Probably not very useful in that in the modern age with hundreds of channels, on-screen guides, etc.
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Mar 17, 2016 06:09
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mystes posted:UAC is sort of lame because as far as I'm aware, Microsoft's stance is that the prompts you get when running as Administrator aren't even a security feature. They actually even weakened it for Windows 7 to make it less annoying which has resulted in various privilege escalation (if you can call them that; I guess that name presupposes that it's a security feature) vulnerabilities. Also because UAC would randomly declare whole folders (including user folders) 'suspect', so moving a .txt from one folder to another would bring up a big warning.
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Mar 17, 2016 06:12
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On the subject of HDD based mp3 players, I bought in early with a 15gb iPod. Bought it at circuit city for $350. Got it home and realized it was FireWire only. ANOTHER $50 later and it ruled. That was the old monochrome display and touch wheel ipod. 4 orange buttons too. I loved it. The audio quality was awesome and even though iTunes sucked hard dicks back then it was easier than burning mp3 CDs. The battery was poo poo though. After a year or so I opened it open and put a new battery in only to run it over with a forklift the next week. About that time phones with memory cards and mp3 capability became commonplace.
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Mar 17, 2016 06:21
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JediTalentAgent posted:On the subject of PIP, I had a TV card at one time about 15 years ago (and I swore some TVs had this feature) where it would scan the channels and put up a still shot of a scan of every channel in the form of a tile that could cover the screen. After about 9 channels or so, it would fill the screen, so it would blank the screen again and continue on with the next set of channels. I guess it was a quick way to see what was on without having to manually flip through them yourself. Probably not very useful in that in the modern age with hundreds of channels, on-screen guides, etc. I...think I had this same card. Was it a video card and tv tuner combo? I can not remember what it was called. e: AIT All In Wonder!  I got the All-in-Wonder Radeon for Christmas in like 2000ish and though it was the coolest god drat thing ever. I had to run a cable across the house on Christmas morning to just watch tv in another place 
Plinkey has a new favorite as of 06:32 on Mar 17, 2016 |
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Mar 17, 2016 06:24
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chitoryu12 posted:I believe the carbine and rifle were just the exact same mechanism scaled up to rifle sizes. Also, Gyrojet rockets go for $50-100 individually so shooting them is almost literally like burning Benjamins. gently caress, really?!? I know they're rare as poo poo, but even $50 is pretty crazy, even for a cartridge collector (not that I am one, just for instance). I could almost justify that once, like on New Years' Eve or something, but they don't actually explode or anything cool, just a bullet with a tiny rocket behind it, right? Sorry for being lazy about looking this up, I'm on my phone and on school wifi, their filters gets weird about poo poo like this. Also, there's a rifle and a carbine? I've only ever seen pics of the pistol and carbine, but maybe I just wasn't paying close attention.
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Mar 17, 2016 06:33
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Plinkey posted:I...think I had this same card. Was it a video card and tv tuner combo? I can not remember what it was called. Mine was just a dedicated TV card, but I think I had a few different ones over the years when I had an interest in amateur video making stuff as a hobby. There was sort of a window of time when they could be had for relatively cheap but still pretty powerful for what they could do. I know one had options in the settings to change it from NTSC, PAL, and all sorts of international video and I think radio standards. All-in-Wonders I guess are a dead thing now, as it appears that the last one was made about 8 years ago. It's sort of sad, but about 14 years ago I bought a Pinnacle AV/DV card on clearance I never got around to installing. Waiting until I got my new PC build done and never did it because at the time PCI slots were at a premium. At this point, I'm not even fully sure if I CAN even install it on Win 8.1 or not, if the software requires activation to work, etc.
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Mar 17, 2016 07:13
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Collateral Damage posted:something like electrically activated primers Remington came out with the EtronX primer in 2000. The rifles that fired them were about twice as expensive as their otherwise-identical percussion primer guns, the ammunition and primers themselves were more expensive, and there was no improvement whatsoever in performance (except in cold weather, the battery liked to crap out). The sole positive was that the gun could be turned off and made unfireable with a key instead of a clunky trigger lock. The whole system was withdrawn from market and scrapped in 2003.
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Mar 17, 2016 08:51
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 works pretty good
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Mar 17, 2016 11:06
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jyrka posted:Anywhere else had these cards for payphones in the 90s? I seem to recall I got the remaining cash in hand at a phone operator office. Potato Salad posted:
In this vein, I know we're not on 56k anymore, but inlining a 3400x2552 image just to show off something small is not kosher. Alas, the concept of having sense of the size of what you upload and post these days has gone the way of the dodo.  Plinkey posted:I...think I had this same card. Was it a video card and tv tuner combo? I can not remember what it was called.
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Mar 17, 2016 13:19
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Exit Strategy posted:
At least you could play a CD while you were waiting for it to cool 
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Mar 17, 2016 14:30
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Pilsner posted:... I still have an all All-in-Wonder card somewhere, it had a 3D Rage Pro chip so... it was not particularly good for games which is what I really wanted in the late 90s. Also recently got a USB DVB-T tuner originally for my car tablet install (FM tuner via SDR) but used it a couple of times with my latptop to. Works fine but I barely watch anything that's on regular TV so these things just don't get much use for me.
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Mar 17, 2016 14:46
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The All-in-Wonder doubled as a space heater when you had the tuner turned on. It was a pretty neat piece of equipment back in the day, though, even if the software was a bit uncooperative at times. It served my roommates and me well as part of a dedicated media machine in the living room--we could download movies, listen to music, watch TV, play games...all things that we can now do with our choice of several off-the-shelf machines at a fraction of the cost I paid for the parts, with no assembly necessary 
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Mar 17, 2016 15:21
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I have a little coax to USB Hauppage dongle that gets basic cable to my PC but it seems difficult to get a card nowadays that has the full tuner functionality of a cable box. I guess they don't want you filling cheap terabytes up with shows?
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Mar 17, 2016 17:01
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Efexeye posted:I have a little coax to USB Hauppage dongle that gets basic cable to my PC but it seems difficult to get a card nowadays that has the full tuner functionality of a cable box. I guess they don't want you filling cheap terabytes up with shows? HD home run devices are the way to go now. I have one set up for OTA into a next pvr backend and a handbrake task scheduled for every day at 4 am to encode the ts files to mkv and archive to my NAS so the shows get indexed by kodi and checked against tvdb... Etc
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Mar 17, 2016 17:21
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Plinkey posted:HD home run devices are the way to go now. I have one set up for OTA into a next pvr backend and a handbrake task scheduled for every day at 4 am to encode the ts files to mkv and archive to my NAS so the shows get indexed by kodi and checked against tvdb... Etc jesus christ i was more thinking of getting a tuner that could legally decode HBO and putting GoT on some blurays, but...gently caress man
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Mar 17, 2016 17:22
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Plinkey posted:HD home run devices are the way to go now. I have one set up for OTA into a next pvr backend and a handbrake task scheduled for every day at 4 am to encode the ts files to mkv and archive to my NAS so the shows get indexed by kodi and checked against tvdb... Etc ...I think I'll just buy a VCR
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Mar 17, 2016 17:28
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rndmnmbr posted:Remington came out with the EtronX primer in 2000. The rifles that fired them were about twice as expensive as their otherwise-identical percussion primer guns, the ammunition and primers themselves were more expensive, and there was no improvement whatsoever in performance (except in cold weather, the battery liked to crap out). The sole positive was that the gun could be turned off and made unfireable with a key instead of a clunky trigger lock. The whole system was withdrawn from market and scrapped in 2003. Metal Storm also failed. So you take a barrel, and instead of a conventional magazine you just stack the bullets in the barrel, with propellant in between each bullet, and the firing system is a set of electrical contacts that run up the interior of the barrel. Firing the gun sends an electrical impulse to the appropriate electrically-fired primer, that bullet fires, the bullet behind it expands to obturate the barrel and prevent discharge of the remaining rounds. Repeat as necessary. Pros: Ridiculously high rates of fire, they had a 36-barrel system firing at rates of up to 1.6 million rounds per minute. No moving parts, no ports for crud to get in, reliable operation. Cons: Turns out nobody needs ridiculously high rates of fire, especially when you can't reload the weapon in the field.
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Mar 17, 2016 17:38
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Plinkey posted:HD home run devices are the way to go now. I have one set up for OTA into a next pvr backend and a handbrake task scheduled for every day at 4 am to encode the ts files to mkv and archive to my NAS so the shows get indexed by kodi and checked against tvdb... Etc or you could just install plex and download the show like a sane human being
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Mar 17, 2016 17:50
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robodex posted:or you could just install plex and download the show like a sane human being I still torrent all my shows, is that an obsolete technology yet?
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Mar 17, 2016 17:55
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robodex posted:or you could just install plex and download the show like a sane human being His method, while clunky and cumbersome, is completely legal IANAL and this is based on my understanding of US personal-use laws brought about by VCRs while downloading is (usually) not. If he were to then share out those files, then it becomes piracy. Wanamingo posted:I still torrent all my shows, is that an obsolete technology yet? I stopped torrenting basically anything once streaming became so drat easy. Magnus Praeda has a new favorite as of 18:04 on Mar 17, 2016 |
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Mar 17, 2016 18:01
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