9th Annual AUV Competition Results

Sean.D.Matthews writes "This weekend the 9th Annual Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Competition was held in San Diego. This year, teams were challenged to complete three tasks including finding a docking station, dropping markers in marked bins along a pipeline, and surfacing in a recovery zone marked by an acoustic pinger. Teams from MIT, Cornell, Duke and eighteen others competed for the grand prize. After an intense final round, the University of Florida's Team SubjuGator walked away with the victory for a second year in a row. Interestingly, the UF team ran Windows XP embedded on SubjuGator's on-board computer."

Comments

My MacPro Sucks

[Jerk City Troll]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you MacPro/Leopard fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a MacPro (a quad core Xeon with 1GB RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my 2.5GHz G5 running OS X 10.4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even TextMate is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Mactels, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its PowerPC counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My Dual G4 with 128 megs of ram runs faster than this 3 ghz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.