Dirk

We had a former officer in the Ukrainian army visit us one time. He was going to show off that he could field strip an AK with a blindfold on but he was unable to do it with an Arsenal because the parts are fitted so well. He said it was the first time he ever saw one made properly.

The Arsenals really are the best made AKs. Nice to see they brought the milled receiver double stack mags back. After the SLR 95 they got rid of those for over a decade.

I feel like if you just go up to someone with dark skin an say "happy kwanza" you are just racial stereotyping and there is a very good chance you will offend them. But anyway, I don't feel offended by someone wishing me a happy anything. Just because I don't share their beliefs doesn't mean I don't appreciate that they want to include me in their best wishes. I would feel flattered if someone wanted to include me in their traditions.

Well that makes a lot of sense really, it keeps the random MG trolls out, brings to light the community's opinion of someone before giving them admin, and puts to death the notion that that admin process is corrupt.

1. I second a shift into CSGO over time. 2. COD 4 as long as a moded hardcore S&D is one of them 3. Killing Floor as we already have a number of people in the community who play it. 4. Red Orchestra 2 because it has an extremely hardcore PC player base and large active community. Its the kind of place where people keep coming back to the same server if they like it. In the end we would need a server where a community will naturally form around it. The games that form communities are ones where players tend to frequent the same servers and the regular players begin to know each other. Some games seem to lend themselves to this better than others. The main problem is that to stick this requires a dedicated group of people to keep the server alive for a while. You need to be friendly, fun, and welcome the new comers. Make sure they are likely to come back. It seems to me that this is where previous servers have failed. To work you need to have a group of people from SG make the new game "their game" and be extremely active on it consistently. Otherwise there will never be a recognizable group of people playing and people are less likely to keep coming back. Its the people playing on the server that bring players back time and time again, not the server its self. Now, I am only speaking from my own experience but I believe I have hit the nail on the head. I became involved in SG after playing the PB server with the same group of people until I began to know them. When I was hosting a MOHAAS server, the server never had any traffic untill I spent a week playing nothing but that and actively engaged in conversation with the new players. Eventually enough of those players were coming back that the server staying populated on its own. If I could get a new server to stay popluated in a game that has only 200 servers left and a player base that has been shrinking since 2004 then im sure SG could easily pull this off if members of the community, even if just a few friendly faces, made sure to stay on the servers and make any newcomers feel welcome.

If anyone is still looking for a member or wants to start a team hit me up. I have been missing from CSS for 5 weeks or so, seem to have missed some stuff.

I would say replace the clutch AFTER he is done learning how to use it.

I said DONT put it in an oven. When you look up reflowing online they always say to do that but its a stupid idea. BoM does have a point though... dont do this unless you actualy know what you are doing. In my case it was an out of waranty card that was going to be trashed otherwise and I spend several hours reading profesional guides on how to do it.

It only takes one afternoon to learn to use a manual. And unless you are a complete idiot there isnt any real risk of destroying the clutch. Just remember that stalling is almost always letting the clutch out too fast not lack of throttle.

First thing is to go though troubleshooting. Isolate various parts to see what is the problem. If you have a spare machine or parts that works best but there are other steps you can take. If your motherboard is giving errors check your manual for what those errors are. If not, I would say first check every connection, unplugging and replugging them all, the pluggs from the PSU often come undone. Then test the ram by first reseating it, then testing each stick on its own (one in the machine at a time) and and then by using a known working replacement. If the machine is not powering on at all (no fans or anything) check the power supply. If the machine is powering on and you have confirmed that the other components work then its probably the GPU. In my case I had a second 9800GTX so confirming the dead card was easy. If you have confirmed it to be graphics card failure then I would say reflowing it is worth a shot. Basicly you remove the heat sink from the GPU and carefully apply heat (I did 650 degrees) with a hot air gun to the GPU its self. I covered the rest of the card in aluminum foil to protect it from the heat. The idea is that cards commonly fail when the solder joins between the GPU and the board crack. The heating melts the solder again and fixes the cracks. That in mind you need to make sure that the card is NOT moved at any time while the solder is still hot. I would say read how to properly do this first and make damn sure your card is dead first because this does risk damaging the card. When I did this on my first 9800GTX it went from completely dead to working fine again. It should be noted that this might only fix the problem temporarily. The solder joints may crack again or they might not be completely fixed by the process. In my case the card lasted annother 6 months before it failed in the same way again. Of course, while a likely cause of GPU failure, broken solder joints are not always the problem so this may not work at all. I is also possible to replace the solder points completely but that brings in a whole new level of difficulty. p.s. some people say you can do this in an oven. It probably does work sometimes but its unreliable and you are likely to get nasty toxic stuff in your oven. Capacitors dont like ovens. so dont do it. and yes this is also how you fix the red rings of death.

So what actually happened to it? My 9800 GTX broke and I was able to fix it. Perhaps yours is fixable too.

about the 3ds. might want to wait for this bundle http://zelda.com/link-between-worlds/

I was a blue mountain this Summer. The Westin there is rather nice. Would love to see the place with snow on the slopes. Its an 18 hour drive for me so I dont think I will be back any time soon.

No idea. Every car I drive is manual though so its not ALL Americans. I was driving an R/T Challenger and the manual is what gets all the attention lol. So few Challengers have manuals that people notice them. The one I really cant understand at all is why AMG never puts manuals in their cars. FFS its a 500+ HP two door coupe and you can only buy it with an auto box.

See... that's why trucks are annoying. My friend in his f350 hit a BMW like mine and nearly drove over it. FFS.

I was more distracted by the GBA's lack of a back-light lol

Thats why the prebuilt system had two smaller SSDs striped. Large SSDs are too expensive to make sense but you can get multiple small ones and set them up in a RAID array. The data is written across all drives simultaneously so that you enjoy the combined storage space of however many drives you have but as the read/write loads are spread across multiple drives, you are multiplying the speed as well. That being said, if you use lots of storage space and dont care about access times that much, HDDs are still far less expensive.

Don't worry. You will have plenty of practice holding a controller like that. The Wii U's controler has EXACTLY the same layout. As did the GBA. Those two systems feel fine to hold so I cant imagine the 2DS is any worse. Actually, I always felt the GBA style layout was better because you have a larger grip area and don't have to hold the thin edges of the system.

9800GTX+ FTW

yes. raid 0 is striped, raid 1 is mirrored and raid 1+0 is striped mirrors. And as to the storage capacity issue. I have been using a 500GB HDD for 2 years now and its not quite full yet. Just don't install your whole damn game library at once and put massive files (like hd video) on an external drive if you really need to. I have at least 3 dozen games installed though and am only using 340GB. I guess it just depends on what you are using it for. edit: oh, if you can, get a raid controller. better than having the on-board one. you dont need it though.

It says he is using it striped (raid 0) so why shouldn't he get two? Thats 500 GB of ultra fast storage for you. Some people will buy large numbers of cheap small SSDs for just such a thing. Just a side note though, make backups often. You cant recover data from a failed SSD and in a stripe you are doubling the risk of failure (however small it is). Also avoid windows 8, its awkward as hell. Other than that it looks fine to me.

They are also coming out with a 2DS so that might be an option if you don't care about the 3d.

Not even a single mention of WoT... the shame. But in all seriousness the game that should really be looked at is CSGO. We already have a CSGO server and CSGO has slightly more than twice the player base as CSS right now.