Or you could use quicksort from a standard library (remember that encapsulation thing in C++)? Why reinvent the wheel?
The computer science education, in terms of algorithms, comes into play when you're deciding what code to use in the first place. If you don't know / don't care about the complexity of various solutions, you're likely to go with what you know. If you don't know a quicksort exists, you're not going to use it. A computer science degree usually:
- gives you a language-neutral background knowledge of common algorithms - helps you understand the complexity of algorithms - teaches you which solutions are optimal, so you're not trying to improve something that can't get any better
Learning your way around Visual Studio isn't a bad thing. It opens up a lot of (Windows) job opportunities. Not to say that's the only thing. There are plenty of Java and Unix jobs out there. But knowing your way around the Windows tools only increases the number of jobs you can apply for. And that's never a bad thing.
I notice the problem from the opposite perspective. That is: some of us who work in the computer industry would actually enjoy teaching. But to become a teacher in most places you need at least a master's degree.
In the computer industry I can make more money. A degree often isn't required at all because most companies use technical interview questions to weed out candidates who don't know their stuff.
The U.S. needs more teachers, period. But to compete with other industries, schools need to *lower* the master's degree education bar, compensate by making job interviews more difficult, and adjust salaries based on performance reviews. Just like the software industry.
That won't cure all the problems (like funding) but it's a start.
So the big question is, what happens if user mode breaks the promise, either intentionally or through lousy programming? If the program fucks up [...]
If the programmer didn't know any better, he wouldn't be calling vmsplice() in the first place. Rather, he'd just be using a plain write(), which would work fine, minus the performance boost.
Well the new company I work at is a publisher of casual games, does a few games in-house but mostly publishes for 3rd parties. I don't work on games, however.
Also some of the guys I used to work with in the game industry went off to start their own company. They sold games through my current company. So I got my foot in the door because of the people I knew. Which is often the most productive method of finding a new job.
Another friend of mine went the recruiter route but he found a recruiter who was paid based on a percent of the salary of the new hire. Often times it's the reverse - they get more money if they can get you hooked up at a lower pay-rate. So if you come across one of the former - work with those guys - they are great.
I worked as a game developer for several years. I loved the work, but I was underpaid and it definitely hurt my personal life (i.e. I had none).
During my last project, we were actually told by management that a 60 hour week was now mandatory (with all of us being salaried). That's when I gave them my 2 week notice.
Note that I often put in more than 60 hours in a week before that. But it was my choice, sort of. I needed to do it to get the work done but no one was saying I had to punch a clock.
This sort of jackass management behavior went on through every game project I worked on. Not only are the devs on a 5 year burnout cycle, but the game industry seems to attract some of the most juvenille and inexperienced managers I've ever seen. These are the wannabe corporate ladder climbers who couldn't get jobs at real companies. They promise deadlines to publishers that they can't possibly hit and then work their devs to death in an attempt to meet them.
The only other time I've seen such incompetence was with some of the dot-bombs of the late 90s. But in the game industry this goes on more often than not.
Contrast that with where I am now. I'm a senior dev working on a lot of technically interesting code. It's not games anymore but guess what? I work 9 - 6 and I make 2x what I was paid as a game developer.
Sure game dev was my passion but mismanagement has a way of changing your priorities. Would I professionally work on games again? Sure. But only if I owned the company.
Let me clarify that last post by saying you have to set up a standard V4L decoder (software decoder) to playback MPEG-4 files. The default is the hardware encoder -- entitled "PVR250/350" , which can only playback MPEG-2.
I would assume this is also the case with a PVR-250 but it really isn't a big deal. Just have to switch the decoder.
The PVR-350 and PVR-500 are roughly the same price. I have a 350 and I'm pretty happy with it.
One nice thing about the 350 is that you can record and playback at the same time, all in hardware. Which leaves your entire CPU free to do commercial flagging. That gets the flagging pretty close to realtime so you can start watching a show only a couple mins after the start time and avoid the commercials. Having the CPU free is also great for transcoding.
That said, the 350 is still a single tuner, unlike the 500. So they each have pros and cons. I never heard anything about whether or not MythTV supports the 350, but it doesn't seem like their issue anyhow. The support is needed in X and the ivtv driver. Hauppauge donated some 350s to the KnoppMyth guys, so their latest versions have some fairly good setup scripts to get your XF86Config set up properly if you're an owner of that card.
Please note that I believe this can happen with ANY large religion. In the U.S. it just happens to be Christianity. Politicians and public figures know that religion can be abused as a means of controlling the masses (see: the recent Mohammed cartoon debacle in the Arab world for a good example...)
Yeah when I wrote my initial post, I was looking for a better word for "religious right". It is too broad with many interpretations. The rest of my post tried to clarify it but I'll try another paragraph instead of a word.
I meant: conservative Christians, often fundamentalist, who think freedom of speech is fine as long as it agrees with their beliefs. They often disregard the Constitution (ex: separation of church and state). They often have an attitude of: who cares about privacy because my faith is strong and therefore I'm doing nothing wrong.
They are missing the whole point. When we give up personal liberties, or specialize on a single religion, we chip away at the foundation of our government. It becomes more a dictatorship and less a system of checks and balances, however inefficient that may be.
I know not all Christians fall into that category, but the ones who do, are in large part supportive of the current Republican party.
You also forget that members of the military, reserves, national guard, etc. are still citizens with friends and relatives. Some of the soldiers would not take kindly to orders directing them to kill other U.S. citizens.
I have to disagree. An overriding theme of most militaries is dehumanization. On the battlefield, the killing of human beings is referred to by disconnected terminology like "taking out a target". A soldier, trained to carry out orders without question will not resist. Even if an order is illegal, a soldier risks jail or execution if he or she cannot prove that fact before a military kangaroo court.
Sounds like you haven't served in the U.S. military. We are, believe it or not, thinking people, not automatons. First of all, we aren't *allowed* to perform police duties on American soil under normal circumstances. But I know even if martial law were declared, many of us would simply refuse to conduct operations against Americans for the purpose that is being discussed here. Would I shoot someone who shot at me first? Sure. But I believe American commanders are smart enough to know their troops don't want to kill other Americans. You'd probably see operations conducted in more of an anti-riot style than a war style - i.e. lockdown with curfews, tear gas and other crowd control measures,... the whole nine yards.
This sort of thing comes and goes. Right now we're in a particularly controlling phase. But we had it before in the early 50s with McCarthy. Just substitute communist/red for terrorist. The major difference today is that the technology for surveillance is better. The aggressive use of it by a hawk Bush administration is no different than the 50s though.
As most of you know, the attack on personal liberties was beaten back in the 60s, through the hard work and organization of many individuals, mostly sparked by the Vietnam war.
However, the Republican party *has* changed since the 50s. They used to be the party for minimalist government, states' rights, etc. In the 80s, they realized that the ordinary voter doesn't really care about those things at least not on a high priority. So they went after the Christian right (and, by extension, the South). For years, the Democrats had been winning elections by pulling the southern Democrats but the Republicans got a foothold by reinventing themselves as the "family values" party.
So back to the original post. The religious right (mostly Christian in this country) has little respect for personal liberties. Feathers may get ruffled by me saying this, but on the topic of free speech, they are little different from other large religious groups like Islam or Judaism. They would quickly adopt surveillance policies and impose their morals on others if they thought it brought more people in line with their beliefs.
That attitude is enhanced by a presidential administration that not only supported them to get votes, but believes as they do. Top that off with the threat of terrorism (however minor now, they still bring it up to keep the public on edge), and you have a new McCarthyism.
The Libertarian party is far more like the "old" Republican party than the current administration is.
Will the attack on personal freedoms ebb again? I believe it will. But we will have to work hard to change the direction things are going right now. People will have to stand up and say enough is enough. Some people will have to get arrested unfairly. And we're definitely going to have to get out and vote.
The 9/11 attack hurt America long after the initial deaths of individuals. The government has started taking away our freedoms, handing the terrorists a political victory. The sad part is that this administration doesn't see it.
still responsible for the social security tax (11% or so once you include the employer portion)
That is actually around 15% (and you pay all of it if you are self-employed. Gotta love how the small businessman who is the "backbone" of America gets treated at tax time).
The middle class pay a similar amount, with a higher nominal rate being offset by fat mortgage deductions
The amount you can put on your itemized deductions from a mortgage is soon to decrease. A lot. Thank your Congressmen for screwing the middle class once again. Don't even get me started on the changes to bankruptcy law.
Even without breaking any laws, rich people will pay less taxes because they essentially pay no sales, tolls, or sin taxes and they often shop around for lower tax countries to park their money. Capital is also favorably treated, and most of their income comes from capital.
Capital gains tax itself is a large hit, BUT those gains don't count as wages and therefore you don't pay Social Security on them. Meaning more money for you to reinvest to expand even further. And yes I view Social Security as a tax because at the rate the current system is going, they'll make it so I have to be 90 before I can take any money out of it. Thanks for managing my retirement for me, USA.
About the only remaining tax-shelter for the middle class is a Roth IRA. If you're looking into one, though, I highly recommend converting an existing 401k or conventional IRA into a Roth so you can skirt the contribution limit and start out with more funds to play with.
In most cases, the total run-time cost of garbage collection is lower than that of malloc/free memory management, at the cost of higher on-average memory usage (which can obviously destroy performance if you end up having to swap). On the other hand, application-tuned manual memory management using pooled allocation is generally faster than GC. Whether or not pooled allocation increases memory usage as much or more than GC depends on many things. Another consideration is that although GC often consumes less total CPU cycles than malloc/free, non-incremental collectors tend to use those cycles in big batches, which can produce GC 'pauses'. That's bad for some applications. Incremental collectors can minimize this effect, but only with some cost in CPU cycles.
At the company I used to work for, we handled our own memory management (to the point of overriding new and delete, and creating our own memory pool for certain tasks).
The three main problems this addresses in a game are: memory fragmentation, control of the AMOUNT of memory usage, and control of the TIMING of de/allocation.
In a game, especially a PS/2 game, memory is a premium. You want to keep the code as streamlined as possible so you have enough memory to load levels that are a reasonable size.
Memory allocation is a CPU hit as well, especially deletion, as many others mentioned already. A GC usually cannot be relied upon to cleanup at opportune times in a game. For example, I might want to free objects when the player is in a menu but never when he's in combat.
But am I against GC in general? Hell no. It is very helpful in avoiding programmer error and making applications more secure. It also provides a better C++ environment. Ever try writing code that uses exceptions w/o a GC, and you'll soon be pulling your hair out.
I do, however, have a problem with not being able to give 1 cent to the artist, without HAVING to give $1 to the record company. THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is the theft we should all be discussing.
No one forced the artist in question to sign a contract with a big label. If the artist wants to keep all sales proceeds to himself, then he should do his own marketing. If he wants to put out a record under an indy label, then he's free to do that. If he wants to sign with a big label to get the fame and distribution channels, then he should be well aware of the large cut the label is going to take.
More importantly, it isn't true that you get both a sonic blast and a torpedo explosion. The torpedo may explode-as-in-disintegrate from the sonic blast, but it won't explode-as-in-high-explosives. Modern torpedoes are detonated electronically, not by impact.
1) Large torpedoes... say, the Mk-48 variety as opposed to Mk-46, are not really designed to explode on a target. They explode near the target, displacing a lot of water. The ship then gets drawn into the void, possibly breaking in half in the process. So there's not really an issue of the reactor withstanding a large torpedo explosion: it won't.
2) The radiation is more or less irrelevant. Even if the rods were not dropped and the reactor was not stopped, deep ocean is about the best place for it to be. Water is a very good radiation container. In fact, most nuclear subs don't shield the bottom part of the reactor compartment's hull at all, since people don't walk beneath the reactor. Anyhow, the radiation is not much of an issue unless the boat sunk in a shallow area, in which case it could be cleaned up.
1. Having some facility to record your calls on demand is a good idea for dealing with this. When this sort of thing happens, start recording.
2. If caller-id is blocked, you can use *57 to generate a log at the phone company containing the true origin of the call. It will not be available to you but it is held for some time (30 days? -- I'd have to check on that) and can be retrieved through a subpoena. So if someone breaks the law like this, or by making threatening calls, and you are mad enough, you can do something about it.
Just a small perspective from someone who has been deployed to a lot of places:
I agree with you that hindsight is 20/20. However I do not agree with G.W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq.
I did agree with the first Gulf War. I thought we did the right thing. Iraq invaded another nation, one that we were more-or-less on friendly terms with. We pushed the invaders out.
The current situation in Iraq though, was completely unnecessary. I held that opinion before the war, and I hold it now. I also believe that Bush and his close advisors to some degree premeditated an Iraq invasion even before he got into office. He wanted to be a "war president" and 9/11 was just an excuse to kick things into gear.
Afghanistan was a smart and reasonable reaction to the 9/11 attack. Iraq was not. And even if Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction... so what? Many countries do - including many we are not on good terms with: Pakistan, India, North Korea, China, and don't forget of course, we're hypocrites because we have chemical, biological AND nuclear weapons of our own.
I was USNA class of 94, so yeah I heard all the little catch phrases also. But most people really *did* work hard on academics because GPA is a major influence on your class ranking. Want that last pilot billet? Better start studying.
Also, I was a systems engineering major. I think 80+% of my class fell into type 1 (engineering) majors. So yes there were a few people skating by with political science or English, but that wasn't the majority by a long shot.
And finally, the Naval Academy's graduation rate is a lot higher than most other colleges in the U.S. So while I agree with some of the things you said about lack of American work ethic, I think the Naval Academy is not a particularly good example.
The thing which I can not fathom about the American nuclear power policy is that they are encouraged to make HUGE reactors. (Had to look this up for nuclear physics class at one point) The US Navy has an almost perfect record with identical, small reactors.
They don't have to worry about shielding and containment as much as civilian powerplants. In a submarine, in particular, the bottom portion of the reactor is barely shielded by more than the hull. The ocean does the job just fine.
Most of the time in port, you're connected to shore power so the reactor isn't running. And out to sea, if something truly catastrophic happened, worst case, you could scuttle the entire boat. A land based reactor is a much different story.
Just don't tell the Greenpeace activists who might be worried about dolphins brushing up along the hull and getting a dose.
WWII subs are not a good example because they didn't dive very deep, and they were diesel powered, meaning they couldn't stay submerged very long on battery before they were forced to surface to run their engines.
Modern nuclear subs actually do put a lot of power into buoyancy adjustments, and yes that's the correct spelling:). In particular "hover mode" cycles a shitload of water per second (that's the highly specific non-classified term for you). The purpose is to create a very stable platform for launching weapons, missiles, whatever, with no forward motion.
Without either forward motion, or hover tanks, standard buoyancy adjustments would not keep the ship stable and it would tend to tilt one way or another, especially after launching its payload.
Standard buoyancy adjustments aren't nearly as power intensive, but they are used more often than in WWII, since subs now dive very deep and may have to adjust for thermal layers and other ocean / weather events.
The plane adjustments are used differently depending on the desired effect. The stern planes adjust the orientation of the ship, while the bow planes allow you to move up and down without tilting much. This is important with subs nowadays because of their sheer length. One degree of tilt could put you at 7-10 feet of difference from bow to stern, which is a big deal when you're at periscope depth and don't want to breach.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could use quicksort from a standard library (remember that encapsulation thing in C++)? Why reinvent the wheel?
The computer science education, in terms of algorithms, comes into play when you're deciding what code to use in the first place. If you don't know / don't care about the complexity of various solutions, you're likely to go with what you know. If you don't know a quicksort exists, you're not going to use it. A computer science degree usually:
- gives you a language-neutral background knowledge of common algorithms
- helps you understand the complexity of algorithms
- teaches you which solutions are optimal, so you're not trying to improve something that can't get any better
Learning your way around Visual Studio isn't a bad thing. It opens up a lot of (Windows) job opportunities. Not to say that's the only thing. There are plenty of Java and Unix jobs out there. But knowing your way around the Windows tools only increases the number of jobs you can apply for. And that's never a bad thing.
I notice the problem from the opposite perspective. That is: some of us who work in the computer industry would actually enjoy teaching. But to become a teacher in most places you need at least a master's degree.
In the computer industry I can make more money. A degree often isn't required at all because most companies use technical interview questions to weed out candidates who don't know their stuff.
The U.S. needs more teachers, period. But to compete with other industries, schools need to *lower* the master's degree education bar, compensate by making job interviews more difficult, and adjust salaries based on performance reviews. Just like the software industry.
That won't cure all the problems (like funding) but it's a start.
So the big question is, what happens if user mode breaks the promise, either intentionally or through lousy programming? If the program fucks up [...]
If the programmer didn't know any better, he wouldn't be calling vmsplice() in the first place. Rather, he'd just be using a plain write(), which would work fine, minus the performance boost.
It could blow the tread off. So it's not a direct threat to the crew or the tank's weaponry, but losing mobility is not a good idea most of the time.
Well the new company I work at is a publisher of casual games, does a few games in-house but mostly publishes for 3rd parties. I don't work on games, however.
Also some of the guys I used to work with in the game industry went off to start their own company. They sold games through my current company. So I got my foot in the door because of the people I knew. Which is often the most productive method of finding a new job.
Another friend of mine went the recruiter route but he found a recruiter who was paid based on a percent of the salary of the new hire. Often times it's the reverse - they get more money if they can get you hooked up at a lower pay-rate. So if you come across one of the former - work with those guys - they are great.
I worked as a game developer for several years. I loved the work, but I was underpaid and it definitely hurt my personal life (i.e. I had none).
During my last project, we were actually told by management that a 60 hour week was now mandatory (with all of us being salaried). That's when I gave them my 2 week notice.
Note that I often put in more than 60 hours in a week before that. But it was my choice, sort of. I needed to do it to get the work done but no one was saying I had to punch a clock.
This sort of jackass management behavior went on through every game project I worked on. Not only are the devs on a 5 year burnout cycle, but the game industry seems to attract some of the most juvenille and inexperienced managers I've ever seen. These are the wannabe corporate ladder climbers who couldn't get jobs at real companies. They promise deadlines to publishers that they can't possibly hit and then work their devs to death in an attempt to meet them.
The only other time I've seen such incompetence was with some of the dot-bombs of the late 90s. But in the game industry this goes on more often than not.
Contrast that with where I am now. I'm a senior dev working on a lot of technically interesting code. It's not games anymore but guess what? I work 9 - 6 and I make 2x what I was paid as a game developer.
Sure game dev was my passion but mismanagement has a way of changing your priorities. Would I professionally work on games again? Sure. But only if I owned the company.
Sorry forgot I wasn't logged in.
Let me clarify that last post by saying you have to set up a standard V4L decoder (software decoder) to playback MPEG-4 files. The default is the hardware encoder -- entitled "PVR250/350" , which can only playback MPEG-2.
I would assume this is also the case with a PVR-250 but it really isn't a big deal. Just have to switch the decoder.
The PVR-350 and PVR-500 are roughly the same price. I have a 350 and I'm pretty happy with it.
One nice thing about the 350 is that you can record and playback at the same time, all in hardware. Which leaves your entire CPU free to do commercial flagging. That gets the flagging pretty close to realtime so you can start watching a show only a couple mins after the start time and avoid the commercials. Having the CPU free is also great for transcoding.
That said, the 350 is still a single tuner, unlike the 500. So they each have pros and cons. I never heard anything about whether or not MythTV supports the 350, but it doesn't seem like their issue anyhow. The support is needed in X and the ivtv driver. Hauppauge donated some 350s to the KnoppMyth guys, so their latest versions have some fairly good setup scripts to get your XF86Config set up properly if you're an owner of that card.
And one final word:
Please note that I believe this can happen with ANY large religion. In the U.S. it just happens to be Christianity. Politicians and public figures know that religion can be abused as a means of controlling the masses (see: the recent Mohammed cartoon debacle in the Arab world for a good example...)
Yeah when I wrote my initial post, I was looking for a better word for "religious right". It is too broad with many interpretations. The rest of my post tried to clarify it but I'll try another paragraph instead of a word.
I meant: conservative Christians, often fundamentalist, who think freedom of speech is fine as long as it agrees with their beliefs. They often disregard the Constitution (ex: separation of church and state). They often have an attitude of: who cares about privacy because my faith is strong and therefore I'm doing nothing wrong.
They are missing the whole point. When we give up personal liberties, or specialize on a single religion, we chip away at the foundation of our government. It becomes more a dictatorship and less a system of checks and balances, however inefficient that may be.
I know not all Christians fall into that category, but the ones who do, are in large part supportive of the current Republican party.
However, there was another person wearing a Support the Troops shirt. She was asked to leave but did not get arrested. Fair?
r est/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/02/01/sheehan.ar
You also forget that members of the military, reserves, national guard, etc. are still citizens with friends and relatives. Some of the soldiers would not take kindly to orders directing them to kill other U.S. citizens.
... the whole nine yards.
I have to disagree. An overriding theme of most militaries is dehumanization. On the battlefield, the killing of human beings is referred to by disconnected terminology like "taking out a target". A soldier, trained to carry out orders without question will not resist. Even if an order is illegal, a soldier risks jail or execution if he or she cannot prove that fact before a military kangaroo court.
Sounds like you haven't served in the U.S. military. We are, believe it or not, thinking people, not automatons. First of all, we aren't *allowed* to perform police duties on American soil under normal circumstances. But I know even if martial law were declared, many of us would simply refuse to conduct operations against Americans for the purpose that is being discussed here. Would I shoot someone who shot at me first? Sure. But I believe American commanders are smart enough to know their troops don't want to kill other Americans. You'd probably see operations conducted in more of an anti-riot style than a war style - i.e. lockdown with curfews, tear gas and other crowd control measures,
This sort of thing comes and goes. Right now we're in a particularly controlling phase. But we had it before in the early 50s with McCarthy. Just substitute communist/red for terrorist. The major difference today is that the technology for surveillance is better. The aggressive use of it by a hawk Bush administration is no different than the 50s though.
As most of you know, the attack on personal liberties was beaten back in the 60s, through the hard work and organization of many individuals, mostly sparked by the Vietnam war.
However, the Republican party *has* changed since the 50s. They used to be the party for minimalist government, states' rights, etc. In the 80s, they realized that the ordinary voter doesn't really care about those things at least not on a high priority. So they went after the Christian right (and, by extension, the South). For years, the Democrats had been winning elections by pulling the southern Democrats but the Republicans got a foothold by reinventing themselves as the "family values" party.
So back to the original post. The religious right (mostly Christian in this country) has little respect for personal liberties. Feathers may get ruffled by me saying this, but on the topic of free speech, they are little different from other large religious groups like Islam or Judaism. They would quickly adopt surveillance policies and impose their morals on others if they thought it brought more people in line with their beliefs.
That attitude is enhanced by a presidential administration that not only supported them to get votes, but believes as they do. Top that off with the threat of terrorism (however minor now, they still bring it up to keep the public on edge), and you have a new McCarthyism.
The Libertarian party is far more like the "old" Republican party than the current administration is.
Will the attack on personal freedoms ebb again? I believe it will. But we will have to work hard to change the direction things are going right now. People will have to stand up and say enough is enough. Some people will have to get arrested unfairly. And we're definitely going to have to get out and vote.
The 9/11 attack hurt America long after the initial deaths of individuals. The government has started taking away our freedoms, handing the terrorists a political victory. The sad part is that this administration doesn't see it.
I agree and let me flush this out a tad more:
still responsible for the social security tax (11% or so once you include the employer portion)
That is actually around 15% (and you pay all of it if you are self-employed. Gotta love how the small businessman who is the "backbone" of America gets treated at tax time).
The middle class pay a similar amount, with a higher nominal rate being offset by fat mortgage deductions
The amount you can put on your itemized deductions from a mortgage is soon to decrease. A lot. Thank your Congressmen for screwing the middle class once again. Don't even get me started on the changes to bankruptcy law.
Even without breaking any laws, rich people will pay less taxes because they essentially pay no sales, tolls, or sin taxes and they often shop around for lower tax countries to park their money. Capital is also favorably treated, and most of their income comes from capital.
Capital gains tax itself is a large hit, BUT those gains don't count as wages and therefore you don't pay Social Security on them. Meaning more money for you to reinvest to expand even further. And yes I view Social Security as a tax because at the rate the current system is going, they'll make it so I have to be 90 before I can take any money out of it. Thanks for managing my retirement for me, USA.
About the only remaining tax-shelter for the middle class is a Roth IRA. If you're looking into one, though, I highly recommend converting an existing 401k or conventional IRA into a Roth so you can skirt the contribution limit and start out with more funds to play with.
- SEAL
In most cases, the total run-time cost of garbage collection is lower than that of malloc/free memory management, at the cost of higher on-average memory usage (which can obviously destroy performance if you end up having to swap). On the other hand, application-tuned manual memory management using pooled allocation is generally faster than GC. Whether or not pooled allocation increases memory usage as much or more than GC depends on many things. Another consideration is that although GC often consumes less total CPU cycles than malloc/free, non-incremental collectors tend to use those cycles in big batches, which can produce GC 'pauses'. That's bad for some applications. Incremental collectors can minimize this effect, but only with some cost in CPU cycles.
At the company I used to work for, we handled our own memory management (to the point of overriding new and delete, and creating our own memory pool for certain tasks).
The three main problems this addresses in a game are: memory fragmentation, control of the AMOUNT of memory usage, and control of the TIMING of de/allocation.
In a game, especially a PS/2 game, memory is a premium. You want to keep the code as streamlined as possible so you have enough memory to load levels that are a reasonable size.
Memory allocation is a CPU hit as well, especially deletion, as many others mentioned already. A GC usually cannot be relied upon to cleanup at opportune times in a game. For example, I might want to free objects when the player is in a menu but never when he's in combat.
But am I against GC in general? Hell no. It is very helpful in avoiding programmer error and making applications more secure. It also provides a better C++ environment. Ever try writing code that uses exceptions w/o a GC, and you'll soon be pulling your hair out.
Anyhow just my $.02
SEAL
I do, however, have a problem with not being able to give 1 cent to the artist, without HAVING to give $1 to the record company. THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is the theft we should all be discussing.
No one forced the artist in question to sign a contract with a big label. If the artist wants to keep all sales proceeds to himself, then he should do his own marketing. If he wants to put out a record under an indy label, then he's free to do that. If he wants to sign with a big label to get the fame and distribution channels, then he should be well aware of the large cut the label is going to take.
More importantly, it isn't true that you get both a sonic blast and a torpedo explosion. The torpedo may explode-as-in-disintegrate from the sonic blast, but it won't explode-as-in-high-explosives. Modern torpedoes are detonated electronically, not by impact.
Two comments here:
1) Large torpedoes... say, the Mk-48 variety as opposed to Mk-46, are not really designed to explode on a target. They explode near the target, displacing a lot of water. The ship then gets drawn into the void, possibly breaking in half in the process. So there's not really an issue of the reactor withstanding a large torpedo explosion: it won't.
2) The radiation is more or less irrelevant. Even if the rods were not dropped and the reactor was not stopped, deep ocean is about the best place for it to be. Water is a very good radiation container. In fact, most nuclear subs don't shield the bottom part of the reactor compartment's hull at all, since people don't walk beneath the reactor. Anyhow, the radiation is not much of an issue unless the boat sunk in a shallow area, in which case it could be cleaned up.
1. Having some facility to record your calls on demand is a good idea for dealing with this. When this sort of thing happens, start recording.
2. If caller-id is blocked, you can use *57 to generate a log at the phone company containing the true origin of the call. It will not be available to you but it is held for some time (30 days? -- I'd have to check on that) and can be retrieved through a subpoena. So if someone breaks the law like this, or by making threatening calls, and you are mad enough, you can do something about it.
Just a small perspective from someone who has been deployed to a lot of places:
I agree with you that hindsight is 20/20. However I do not agree with G.W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq.
I did agree with the first Gulf War. I thought we did the right thing. Iraq invaded another nation, one that we were more-or-less on friendly terms with. We pushed the invaders out.
The current situation in Iraq though, was completely unnecessary. I held that opinion before the war, and I hold it now. I also believe that Bush and his close advisors to some degree premeditated an Iraq invasion even before he got into office. He wanted to be a "war president" and 9/11 was just an excuse to kick things into gear.
Afghanistan was a smart and reasonable reaction to the 9/11 attack. Iraq was not. And even if Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction... so what? Many countries do - including many we are not on good terms with: Pakistan, India, North Korea, China, and don't forget of course, we're hypocrites because we have chemical, biological AND nuclear weapons of our own.
Considering I've had to swim in excess of 12 miles, I'd say that if the U.S. claims it is 3, we certainly understand that no one agrees with us.
- SEAL
I was USNA class of 94, so yeah I heard all the little catch phrases also. But most people really *did* work hard on academics because GPA is a major influence on your class ranking. Want that last pilot billet? Better start studying.
Also, I was a systems engineering major. I think 80+% of my class fell into type 1 (engineering) majors. So yes there were a few people skating by with political science or English, but that wasn't the majority by a long shot.
And finally, the Naval Academy's graduation rate is a lot higher than most other colleges in the U.S. So while I agree with some of the things you said about lack of American work ethic, I think the Naval Academy is not a particularly good example.
SEAL
The thing which I can not fathom about the American nuclear power policy is that they are encouraged to make HUGE reactors. (Had to look this up for nuclear physics class at one point) The US Navy has an almost perfect record with identical, small reactors.
They don't have to worry about shielding and containment as much as civilian powerplants. In a submarine, in particular, the bottom portion of the reactor is barely shielded by more than the hull. The ocean does the job just fine.
Most of the time in port, you're connected to shore power so the reactor isn't running. And out to sea, if something truly catastrophic happened, worst case, you could scuttle the entire boat. A land based reactor is a much different story.
Just don't tell the Greenpeace activists who might be worried about dolphins brushing up along the hull and getting a dose.
WWII subs are not a good example because they didn't dive very deep, and they were diesel powered, meaning they couldn't stay submerged very long on battery before they were forced to surface to run their engines.
:). In particular "hover mode" cycles a shitload of water per second (that's the highly specific non-classified term for you). The purpose is to create a very stable platform for launching weapons, missiles, whatever, with no forward motion.
Modern nuclear subs actually do put a lot of power into buoyancy adjustments, and yes that's the correct spelling
Without either forward motion, or hover tanks, standard buoyancy adjustments would not keep the ship stable and it would tend to tilt one way or another, especially after launching its payload.
Standard buoyancy adjustments aren't nearly as power intensive, but they are used more often than in WWII, since subs now dive very deep and may have to adjust for thermal layers and other ocean / weather events.
The plane adjustments are used differently depending on the desired effect. The stern planes adjust the orientation of the ship, while the bow planes allow you to move up and down without tilting much. This is important with subs nowadays because of their sheer length. One degree of tilt could put you at 7-10 feet of difference from bow to stern, which is a big deal when you're at periscope depth and don't want to breach.