Civilization, on the harder levels, does cheat. On the easier difficulty levels, though, the AIs are penalized to keep them from getting too strong too quickly. I'm not sure about Civ4, but in Civ3 it is possible to set up the game such that the only meaningful advantage the AIs have is that they know all the terrain before exploring.
Freeciv is also notorious for having a ruthless warmongering AI, but once you get used to it, the game is pretty easy, and the beginner levels have been tamed.
I would recommend group theory for most any CS major who wants to do anything beyond simple programming, if only to give them a better understanding of modulus arithmetic. I have yet to see a student use the % when they aren't told.
The distinction does hold for many schools, particularly public schools. Far too often, the CS department teaches just basic computer programming, usually just Java. At my university, most of the CS grads don't even know when they can declare a method as static and only use that keyword for the main.
How about NeXTSTEP, now known as OS X? I'd say it is doing fairly well for a non-Windows OS. It's objects are subclassable, and really neat things can be done with ObjC Categories. Consider that the first web browsr was pretty much a subclass of the NSText class. Not-Invented-Here syndrome may be a problem, but I don't think that is a major limiting factor for the platform.
Have you actually used an Intel Mac with Rosetta? Sure, PowerPC binaries are noticeably slower, but even 3d games are have decent performance in Rosetta. Or are you talking about the "Classic" OS9 environment for PowerPC based Macs? That transition is over, and I never heard any performance complaints about Classic - it was early OS X software that was slow. Or maybe you are talking about the 68k to PowerPC transition - I can't imagine a 68k program on a G3 being slower than on a 68k.
Sure, Microsoft has been very good about backwards compatibility, with a few exceptions. But consider that Apple has changed CPU architectures with fewer problems than some of the Windows rewrites. The Intel transition is worse than previous migrations for Apple.
A lot of people do not realize just how much of the healthcare costs in the US are a result of the insurance industry. I know a doctor who does not process insurance claims at his practice. Since he does not need to pay somebody to do that vast amount of paperwork, he passes the savings along to his patients. He charges $45 per appointment, and provides the paperwork for the patient to handle the insurance.
I think that nearsightedness is a poor example. Consider that the few people who do shoot for a living or for food have scopes or sights these days. On the other hand, everybody in my family who is nearsighted reads profusely from the age of five, and we are all college-educated (or in the process). I would even believe that all the reading (and computer use) has been the primary cause of my nearsightedness.
Hawk-quality vision just doesn't matter much anymore. Considering that my glasses block most UV rays, my nearsightedness has indirectly helped protect me from other vision problems.
I'm not sure about the threading capabilities of CE5, but 32 processes seems like it would be tough to do much in the way of internet apps on the device. I know that there is a mozilla port to CE, so it is obviously possible, but there can't be much room to have multitasking. Also, there is not much point in restricting the PID to 5 bits and the address space to 25 bits, when all ARM processors now support full 32bit operation.
I expect 10.5 to be much faster on Intel, particularly the core 2 systems that support 64bit processing. However, those systems are already so responsive that it won't feel much faster. Optimizations just give Apple the headroom to squeeze in more features without slowing things down.
The difference between what you are asking for and what they want to offer is about $100. Considering that the retail version can cut out things like the generator, it could cost less to produce. Selling that at 3x the cost would still be very cheap by Western standards.
Nevermind that whole sandbox thing. MS still wants IE and Windows to be inseperable and even indistinguishable. If the average customer can comprehend what an alternative web browser is, MS has failed, because that user can probably also comprehend what an alternative OS is.
Do you even know what uClibc is and why is matters on a computer with 64 megabytes of RAM? I understand that compiler optimizations don't do much for performance, especially on a decent computer. Hence the need for a chroot - the host system is not gentoo. But it should be obvious that a program that fits in RAM will be faster than one that doesn't.
Your analogy is reasonable right up to the point where you blame people with AIDS for the disease that weakens their immune systems. Windows users can stop using windows whenever they want (with a little bit of effort to switch) but AIDS sufferers cannot cure themselves.
Full disclosure and an apology is an appropriate response to a mistake like this. So is holding the contractor responsible. In this case, Apple would be foolish not to demand that the contractor stop using windows machines to test the ipods.
You have to keep in mind that the vulnerability that allows the ipods to infect user's pcs is the same flaw that infected the contractor's pcs in the first place. Apple is right to be upset that their contractors were using a competitor's inferior product.
It only takes a few hours with a fast computer to build a uClibc based gentoo system in a chroot and transfer it to a pentium class machine. The resulting system can surf the web faster than any version of windows, even with Firefox. (OK, so FF was using glibc, so what?) Not even Opera on Win 3.11 was more responsive. The boot time was also faster than Win9x. OO.o and Writely were a bit slower than Office 97, but they looked nicer and had better interfaces.
Sure, running a full redhat distro on an old box like that doesn't work, but it is not hard to build a linux system that outperforms windows across the board.
Not Mormon, but definitely conservative protestant Christian. One quick fact - in my council, the last digit of the troop number denotes what type of church the troop is chartered to. 1 for LDS, 4 for Presbyterians, 0 for Methodist, etc.
You are right that BSA has become more outspoken about which religious morals you have to believe in. I am amazed that there are Jews and Catholics in scouts still.
Your comment almost perfectly hits the mark. The only thing is that there are still a few troops that accomplish the original purpose. They are actively being repressed by the higher levels, but there are ways to deal with them. It is only through the efforts of a few extremely patient and caring men, mostly Eagles, that some troops can stick to BP's ideals. Unfortunately, these men are almost entirely absent from the organization above the troop level.
Please! As soon as I can find credible information about this, I'm going to start complaining to my council, BL, National Council, etc. They might be able to get away with making this a minor award, but making it a MB is just plain wrong. For starters, not many scout even know how to pirate music. I live in one of the geekiest areas of the nation, and only one other scout in my troop knows anything about computers beyond simple email and IMing. Traditionally, the merit badges fell into two categories: outdoor skills, such as backpacking and climbing, and career oriented badges that introduce boys to a new field. The only exceptions were the Eagle-required badges such as First Aid and the Citizenship badges. This new thing is way out of line.
Scouting in America is way too Republican. Most of BSA's moral policies are fine, but this is way over the line. At risk of agreeing with a bunch of old farts and former Scoutmasters, I'll say that political correctness and excessive patriotism have really wrecked Scouting in recent years. It is now much harder to teach the things that really matter: leadership and citizenship. The new standards for suburban life prevent most kids from ever being put into situations where they are the decision-makers. Even the Eagle Scout award is rapidly becoming meaningless.
Having the GPU on the same chip or die as the CPU would reduce the latency by several orders of magnitude and allow a much higher clock for the bus between the two. The memory access could also be improved dramatically, depending on how it was implemented.
I think the first example of this integration we see will use the HyperTransport bus and a single package with CPU and GPU on different dies, though fabbed on the same process. This could be done with an existing AMD socket and motherboard.
Before this happens, though, I think we will see graphics cards on HTX slots. For those who do not know, HTX slots were introduced in a recent revision of the HyperTransport standard. They allow an add-in card to communicate with the CPU with much lower latency and higher bandwidth than PCIe, and no controller in between. The add-in card could even have another CPU on it, and the performance would be comparable to current AMD SMP systems. A GPU on an HTX card could have its own RAM, and be able to access system RAM much faster than PCIe allows. The neat thing is that with HT, the CPU would probably be able to use the graphics RAM as though it were system RAM.
Note that Nvidia is a member of the HyperTransport Consortium due to their chipset business, and they could easily have HTX cards in their labs right now.
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Civilization, on the harder levels, does cheat. On the easier difficulty levels, though, the AIs are penalized to keep them from getting too strong too quickly. I'm not sure about Civ4, but in Civ3 it is possible to set up the game such that the only meaningful advantage the AIs have is that they know all the terrain before exploring.
Freeciv is also notorious for having a ruthless warmongering AI, but once you get used to it, the game is pretty easy, and the beginner levels have been tamed.
I would recommend group theory for most any CS major who wants to do anything beyond simple programming, if only to give them a better understanding of modulus arithmetic. I have yet to see a student use the % when they aren't told.
The distinction does hold for many schools, particularly public schools. Far too often, the CS department teaches just basic computer programming, usually just Java. At my university, most of the CS grads don't even know when they can declare a method as static and only use that keyword for the main.
It sounds to me that the mass producers are putting the designers out of business, so the "new" content is just more of the same.
How about NeXTSTEP, now known as OS X? I'd say it is doing fairly well for a non-Windows OS. It's objects are subclassable, and really neat things can be done with ObjC Categories. Consider that the first web browsr was pretty much a subclass of the NSText class. Not-Invented-Here syndrome may be a problem, but I don't think that is a major limiting factor for the platform.
Have you actually used an Intel Mac with Rosetta? Sure, PowerPC binaries are noticeably slower, but even 3d games are have decent performance in Rosetta. Or are you talking about the "Classic" OS9 environment for PowerPC based Macs? That transition is over, and I never heard any performance complaints about Classic - it was early OS X software that was slow. Or maybe you are talking about the 68k to PowerPC transition - I can't imagine a 68k program on a G3 being slower than on a 68k.
Sure, Microsoft has been very good about backwards compatibility, with a few exceptions. But consider that Apple has changed CPU architectures with fewer problems than some of the Windows rewrites. The Intel transition is worse than previous migrations for Apple.
A lot of people do not realize just how much of the healthcare costs in the US are a result of the insurance industry. I know a doctor who does not process insurance claims at his practice. Since he does not need to pay somebody to do that vast amount of paperwork, he passes the savings along to his patients. He charges $45 per appointment, and provides the paperwork for the patient to handle the insurance.
You seem to know very little about teachers and laptops. Are you, by chance, a teacher?
>No, no! That was for Carly!
And Dunn!
I think that nearsightedness is a poor example. Consider that the few people who do shoot for a living or for food have scopes or sights these days. On the other hand, everybody in my family who is nearsighted reads profusely from the age of five, and we are all college-educated (or in the process). I would even believe that all the reading (and computer use) has been the primary cause of my nearsightedness.
Hawk-quality vision just doesn't matter much anymore. Considering that my glasses block most UV rays, my nearsightedness has indirectly helped protect me from other vision problems.
I'm not sure about the threading capabilities of CE5, but 32 processes seems like it would be tough to do much in the way of internet apps on the device. I know that there is a mozilla port to CE, so it is obviously possible, but there can't be much room to have multitasking. Also, there is not much point in restricting the PID to 5 bits and the address space to 25 bits, when all ARM processors now support full 32bit operation.
I expect 10.5 to be much faster on Intel, particularly the core 2 systems that support 64bit processing. However, those systems are already so responsive that it won't feel much faster. Optimizations just give Apple the headroom to squeeze in more features without slowing things down.
The difference between what you are asking for and what they want to offer is about $100. Considering that the retail version can cut out things like the generator, it could cost less to produce. Selling that at 3x the cost would still be very cheap by Western standards.
If anything, his responses imply one thing:
Windows==IE
Nevermind that whole sandbox thing. MS still wants IE and Windows to be inseperable and even indistinguishable. If the average customer can comprehend what an alternative web browser is, MS has failed, because that user can probably also comprehend what an alternative OS is.
Then they will get in trouble for plugging in their ipod, virus or not.
Do you even know what uClibc is and why is matters on a computer with 64 megabytes of RAM? I understand that compiler optimizations don't do much for performance, especially on a decent computer. Hence the need for a chroot - the host system is not gentoo. But it should be obvious that a program that fits in RAM will be faster than one that doesn't.
So neither company will go down in flames anytime soon. They are still competing, but they are not fighting for their lives.
Interestingly enough, some of NeXT's best sccess stories come from people in situations like you describe.
Your analogy is reasonable right up to the point where you blame people with AIDS for the disease that weakens their immune systems. Windows users can stop using windows whenever they want (with a little bit of effort to switch) but AIDS sufferers cannot cure themselves.
Full disclosure and an apology is an appropriate response to a mistake like this. So is holding the contractor responsible. In this case, Apple would be foolish not to demand that the contractor stop using windows machines to test the ipods.
You have to keep in mind that the vulnerability that allows the ipods to infect user's pcs is the same flaw that infected the contractor's pcs in the first place. Apple is right to be upset that their contractors were using a competitor's inferior product.
It only takes a few hours with a fast computer to build a uClibc based gentoo system in a chroot and transfer it to a pentium class machine. The resulting system can surf the web faster than any version of windows, even with Firefox. (OK, so FF was using glibc, so what?) Not even Opera on Win 3.11 was more responsive. The boot time was also faster than Win9x. OO.o and Writely were a bit slower than Office 97, but they looked nicer and had better interfaces.
Sure, running a full redhat distro on an old box like that doesn't work, but it is not hard to build a linux system that outperforms windows across the board.
Not Mormon, but definitely conservative protestant Christian. One quick fact - in my council, the last digit of the troop number denotes what type of church the troop is chartered to. 1 for LDS, 4 for Presbyterians, 0 for Methodist, etc.
You are right that BSA has become more outspoken about which religious morals you have to believe in. I am amazed that there are Jews and Catholics in scouts still.
Thanks for posting this. It really helps me narrow down my protests to the guilty council.
Your comment almost perfectly hits the mark. The only thing is that there are still a few troops that accomplish the original purpose. They are actively being repressed by the higher levels, but there are ways to deal with them. It is only through the efforts of a few extremely patient and caring men, mostly Eagles, that some troops can stick to BP's ideals. Unfortunately, these men are almost entirely absent from the organization above the troop level.
Please! As soon as I can find credible information about this, I'm going to start complaining to my council, BL, National Council, etc. They might be able to get away with making this a minor award, but making it a MB is just plain wrong. For starters, not many scout even know how to pirate music. I live in one of the geekiest areas of the nation, and only one other scout in my troop knows anything about computers beyond simple email and IMing. Traditionally, the merit badges fell into two categories: outdoor skills, such as backpacking and climbing, and career oriented badges that introduce boys to a new field. The only exceptions were the Eagle-required badges such as First Aid and the Citizenship badges. This new thing is way out of line.
Scouting in America is way too Republican. Most of BSA's moral policies are fine, but this is way over the line. At risk of agreeing with a bunch of old farts and former Scoutmasters, I'll say that political correctness and excessive patriotism have really wrecked Scouting in recent years. It is now much harder to teach the things that really matter: leadership and citizenship. The new standards for suburban life prevent most kids from ever being put into situations where they are the decision-makers. Even the Eagle Scout award is rapidly becoming meaningless.
Having the GPU on the same chip or die as the CPU would reduce the latency by several orders of magnitude and allow a much higher clock for the bus between the two. The memory access could also be improved dramatically, depending on how it was implemented.
I think the first example of this integration we see will use the HyperTransport bus and a single package with CPU and GPU on different dies, though fabbed on the same process. This could be done with an existing AMD socket and motherboard.
Before this happens, though, I think we will see graphics cards on HTX slots. For those who do not know, HTX slots were introduced in a recent revision of the HyperTransport standard. They allow an add-in card to communicate with the CPU with much lower latency and higher bandwidth than PCIe, and no controller in between. The add-in card could even have another CPU on it, and the performance would be comparable to current AMD SMP systems. A GPU on an HTX card could have its own RAM, and be able to access system RAM much faster than PCIe allows. The neat thing is that with HT, the CPU would probably be able to use the graphics RAM as though it were system RAM.
Note that Nvidia is a member of the HyperTransport Consortium due to their chipset business, and they could easily have HTX cards in their labs right now.