Domain: monkeysvsrobots.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to monkeysvsrobots.com.
Stories · 8
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F-117A Stealth Fighter Retired
zonker writes "Nearly 30 years ago Lockheed Martin's elite Skunk Works team developed what would become the F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter. A few of their earlier projects include the SR-71 Blackbird and U2 Dragon Lady spy planes. Today is the last for the Stealth Fighter, which is being replaced by the F-22 Raptor (another Skunk Works project)." -
Opensource Code More Refined Than Closed?
zonker writes "In this poorly titled cnet story (as opposed to an earlier story stating a similar theme), a company named Reasoning says that at first open source code has marginally worse quality than closed source code of the same maturity, but it tends to become better refined through the open-natured development process than closed source. They mention Apache and Linux as examples, however they don't mention the 'competitors' they tested against by name. ." -
A Conference About Spam
zonker writes "January 17th will be the first (annual?) meeting of the Spam Conference held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The informal meeting will feature Paul Graham, John Graham-Cumming, John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper among others (possibly including ESR though he hasn't yet confirmed). The free conference will consist of a number of talks about new ways to combat the growing spam problem, after which everyone's going out and getting some Chinese food. Should be an informative and fun meeting and a chance to meet some interesting people." -
Working Bayesian Mail Filter
zonker writes "A real, working honest to god Bayesian spam filter. I've been waiting for something like this for a while (since I first read Paul Graham's research paper on this very topic a few weeks ago). Well here's POPFile, a small but extremely effective Perl script that runs on just about any system Perl does. After just a little training was I able to get very effective filtering out of it. From what I understand the new email client that comes with OS X Jaguar has a feature similar to this, but I don't know if it is true Bayesian. Hopefully this kind of feature will become more prevalant in client software as I see the Google results for it are growing." -
Non-Invasive Networking - HomePNA vs. HomePlug?
zonker asks: "I live in a relatively new, moderately sized home that doesn't have conduit in the walls, nor does it have extra wires for networking. I am investigating getting a broadband connection, but first I have to decide how I will connect the network for the 6 computers in the house. As per the owners, I am not allowed to drill holes in the walls, and as per my girlfriend, I am not allowed to run Cat5 through the halls, so I am looking at my alternatives: wireless, HomePNA, and HomePlug. I'm afraid the house is a little too big for wireless without getting expensive, so it looks like either phonewire, or electric-wire. I've done some initial googling for people's opinions of these products and my quick findings where that magazine and website reviews seem to be favorable of some of them, while personal accounts seem to vary wildly. What solutions have worked for you? Are these things ready for primetime? Or should I suck it up and buy a few WAP's to extend the radius of a wireless network?" -
Comparing the DVRs?
zonker asks: "We are getting hooked up with Dish Network Satellite TV this weekend and opted to go with one of their PVR (personal video recorder) plans. I started wondering if anyone has done any technical reviews or comparisons of the video quality (not just features) of the various digital video recorders out there (TiVo, DishPVR, ReplayTV, etc.). I am curious mostly about recorded video quality compared to the source video. All of them make claims to have various recording 'speeds' like VCR's. VCR's analog output is predictable (fuzzy recording with bits of static here and there, worse when signal quality is bad). However digital recorders have varying levels of pixelization. I was curious which ones fared the best and if anyone has comments on either systems?" -
New GPS Satellite Launched
zonker writes "A U.S. Air Force Delta 2 rocket launched a new GPS satellite today to add to the collection of 27 up there. This new GPS satellite is one of seven now in orbit as a replacement for an earlier generation of GPS. May be of interest to the GPS folks out there." -
Is There Still A Need For Glide?
zonker asks: "Now that nVidia has picked up 3dfx is there still want or need for glide on other cards? I have a TNT2 card and have some old games that require glide. I can't run them natively, so I either have to use software rendering mode or a wrapper (they all kinda suck, though). With the new 3dfx purchase, and the current state of affairs with DirectX, etc., is there any warrant for asking nVidia to release Glide drivers for their nVidia chips? Or is this something that will forever be relegated to Glide wrappers? I know Creative was working on one. I personally would like native drivers, but..."