I've flown electric RC heli's. Anything big enough to carry a camera and transmitter would get about 10-15 minutes flight time MAX on the best, most expensive LiPoly batteries made.
Low altitude mapping. That's all this is good for. There are guys who do it as a business now, using regular RC.
Loved my insight, got 58MPG lifetime, 70 on the highway.
I don't the tech is baked enough to make me do it again though. It was horridly uncomfortable and loud on long road trips. Would be great for just running errands though.
A point worth noting - Mine cost 19grand, and just traded in at 8,000 (right on its book). If I had bought a comparably priced Civic at the same time, and just traded it in with the same miles, I would have gotten 12,000.
You just don't get the kind of spam I get. I was a dilligent user of spamassassin this last year. I spent plenty of time tweaking it. I was sailing along just like you, with spam assassin about 95% effective. Note that with my spam load on three mailboxes, this meant I still got a dozen or so spams a day, and a disturbing number of false positives. THen about three weeks ago, the floodgates openned, and I started getting 50 a day through spamassassin, and no matter how I tweaked, it just worked.
I switched to mailblocks. Spent 5 minutes uploading my address book. Haven't had a SINGLE spam through yet.
Challenge response is the answer. Not the LONG TERM answer, as posters have pointed out, but a perfect short term answer.
Doesn't Pause Live TV
on
New Linux PVR Box
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's the nail in the coffin on this one. I couldn't believe it when I read it. TO skip commercials, you have to record an entire program, then watch it.
Pricewise it's right about on the money (read some of the other posts making comparisons). It's not as cheap as some used POS Tivo or Replay, but compared to buying the comparable Tivo w/ subscription and a DVD player, it's pretty close.
The problem is that its not a true home theatre PC - It's clearly not designed to push hi-def displays, doesn't mention anything about pre-tweaked resolutions etc... The folks who are going to buy something like this want the perfect box, and this isn't it, so they end up just building it themselves, and (here come the flames) the near universal consensus is that XP is currently the best way to drive a HTPC - vastly more options for Codecs, tweakers, etc... Continuous stable driver support for all the mpeg2 encoders and high end audio cards, etc...
You CAN do this with Linux, sure. You CAN do anything with Linux, but sometimes Linux is not actually the best tool for the job.
One of the great myths propogated by the motion picture industry is that your eye can't detect changes in framerates over X (30 is usually the number tossed around, or 24). It's hooey. The rods and cones in your retina all refresh at different rates, and not in synch with each other. Your eyeball is not a digital system, its an analog one.
I, and most hardcore gamers, can not only tell the difference between 45 and 100 fps, but it makes a very real difference in my response times. I simply do better if I play at a high resolution, high contrast, with a high framerate. So much so that I will tweak the settings in any game to be able to run the max resolution at the highest framerate, even if I have to turn off the pretty stuff and kill my sound quality to do it.
As for AA, no I can't tell you whether I am looking at 16XAA or 8XAA without seeing them side by side. I can however tell you instantly whether I have at least 4Xaa and I am in a flight sim (where it REALLY makes a difference)...
Cut the editorializing crap please
on
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
All of these sites do decent work, I read them daily, and they all PILE ON when something is released that is a POS. Whatever axe you have to grind, keep it to yourself or back it up please.
I have BOTH bleeding edge cards right now, and unfortunately for NVDA, it's just plain "true" that the Radeon's are top dog at the moment. If you don't believe them, run your own benchmarks.
It sucks, but it's better than dialup. It's unlike any other form of web experience. I often get quite high burst speeds for downloads and the like, but the latency makes surfing kind of a "click - wait - whooosh" experience.
Games are impossible of course, except low latency gaming like chess, magic, or some RTS games. I use dialup for twitch gaming still - sigh...
The company has been easy to deal with, it's the technology that's a bore. Damn speed of light and all that.
Note - speed and experience are VERY dependant on group usage - about 9PM evenings your speeds go down to dialup, 9AM in the morning is awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
I've flown electric RC heli's. Anything big enough to carry a camera and transmitter would get about 10-15 minutes flight time MAX on the best, most expensive LiPoly batteries made.
Low altitude mapping. That's all this is good for. There are guys who do it as a business now, using regular RC.
Loved my insight, got 58MPG lifetime, 70 on the highway.
I don't the tech is baked enough to make me do it again though. It was horridly uncomfortable and loud on long road trips. Would be great for just running errands though.
A point worth noting - Mine cost 19grand, and just traded in at 8,000 (right on its book). If I had bought a comparably priced Civic at the same time, and just traded it in with the same miles, I would have gotten 12,000.
There is NO resale market for them. NONE.
You just don't get the kind of spam I get. I was a dilligent user of spamassassin this last year. I spent plenty of time tweaking it. I was sailing along just like you, with spam assassin about 95% effective. Note that with my spam load on three mailboxes, this meant I still got a dozen or so spams a day, and a disturbing number of false positives. THen about three weeks ago, the floodgates openned, and I started getting 50 a day through spamassassin, and no matter how I tweaked, it just worked.
I switched to mailblocks. Spent 5 minutes uploading my address book. Haven't had a SINGLE spam through yet.
Challenge response is the answer. Not the LONG TERM answer, as posters have pointed out, but a perfect short term answer.
That's the nail in the coffin on this one. I couldn't believe it when I read it. TO skip commercials, you have to record an entire program, then watch it.
Pricewise it's right about on the money (read some of the other posts making comparisons). It's not as cheap as some used POS Tivo or Replay, but compared to buying the comparable Tivo w/ subscription and a DVD player, it's pretty close.
The problem is that its not a true home theatre PC - It's clearly not designed to push hi-def displays, doesn't mention anything about pre-tweaked resolutions etc... The folks who are going to buy something like this want the perfect box, and this isn't it, so they end up just building it themselves, and (here come the flames) the near universal consensus is that XP is currently the best way to drive a HTPC - vastly more options for Codecs, tweakers, etc... Continuous stable driver support for all the mpeg2 encoders and high end audio cards, etc...
You CAN do this with Linux, sure. You CAN do anything with Linux, but sometimes Linux is not actually the best tool for the job.
Ohh... thank you for the erudite and technical rebuttal...
Uhh...
Is this any different than my P4 with the 1ghz FSB? Granted, I had to OC it a teensy weensy bit, but that took all of 30 seconds...
One of the great myths propogated by the motion picture industry is that your eye can't detect changes in framerates over X (30 is usually the number tossed around, or 24). It's hooey. The rods and cones in your retina all refresh at different rates, and not in synch with each other. Your eyeball is not a digital system, its an analog one.
I, and most hardcore gamers, can not only tell the difference between 45 and 100 fps, but it makes a very real difference in my response times. I simply do better if I play at a high resolution, high contrast, with a high framerate. So much so that I will tweak the settings in any game to be able to run the max resolution at the highest framerate, even if I have to turn off the pretty stuff and kill my sound quality to do it.
As for AA, no I can't tell you whether I am looking at 16XAA or 8XAA without seeing them side by side. I can however tell you instantly whether I have at least 4Xaa and I am in a flight sim (where it REALLY makes a difference)...
All of these sites do decent work, I read them daily, and they all PILE ON when something is released that is a POS. Whatever axe you have to grind, keep it to yourself or back it up please.
I have BOTH bleeding edge cards right now, and unfortunately for NVDA, it's just plain "true" that the Radeon's are top dog at the moment. If you don't believe them, run your own benchmarks.
It sucks, but it's better than dialup. It's unlike any other form of web experience. I often get quite high burst speeds for downloads and the like, but the latency makes surfing kind of a "click - wait - whooosh" experience.
Games are impossible of course, except low latency gaming like chess, magic, or some RTS games. I use dialup for twitch gaming still - sigh...
The company has been easy to deal with, it's the technology that's a bore. Damn speed of light and all that.
Note - speed and experience are VERY dependant on group usage - about 9PM evenings your speeds go down to dialup, 9AM in the morning is awesome.
Grot