CMD.EXE Is 32 Times Slower Than Gnome-Terminal!

Linux has an abundance of excellent terminal applications. Since I use the command line a lot, I want text output that is as fast as possible. Interestingly, I did not ever manage to find any decent comparison of their effectiveness in terms of speed, memory consumption and ease of use. And I was of the opinion that the ubiquitous xterm was a likely candidate for a terminal with less memory footprint. Well I couldn't have been further from the truth.

Martin Ankerl benchmarked a number of terminals available in Linux including xterm, gnome-terminal, KDE konsole, wterm, eterm and aterm. He even included MS Windows' CMD.EXE for comprehensive comparison. Well, his results surprised me a lot. The two most weird facts are:

• CMD.EXE is almost 32 times slower than gnome-terminal! (OMG...)
• Xterm which is probably the most widely used terminal, is also the slowest one
  

And his findings indicate gnome-terminal and konsole as the best choice of terminals for its speed. And by speed I mean the speed of execution of commands in it and not the program's startup time. But the down side is that these two terminals consume a significant amount of memory. For example, Gnome-terminal is found to consume around 45 MB.

Martin states that he found wterm as the best bet for a low memory footprint with just 6.5 MB consumption. And it is sufficiently fast in executing. xterm loses in this department too with each instance consuming around 16 MB.

Take a look at full benchmark details.

For the impatient here is the brief conclusion:

• If you want speed, use gnome-terminal or konsole.
• If you are low on memory, use wterm, rxvt, or Eterm.
• xterm is slow.

World Map Of Internet Connectivity

Care to know the level of Internet connectivity in your country ? Or rather, you would like to know which all areas in the world are the most densely wired. Well here is a pictorial representation of the density of Internet connection.

The aptly named "Internet Map" is the creation of Cris Harrison. To create the set of visual maps, he made use of the data from the DIMES project which is a distributed scientific research project, aimed to study the structure and topology of the Internet - a purely volunteer effort on the lines of SETI@HOME project.

Not surprisingly, Europe, USA and Japan lead in the most wired areas in the world.

View the full set of maps of the internet connectivity across the world at Cris Harrison's site.

Train Your Own Virtual Army!

If you've ever been frustrated with the artificial intelligence (AI) in video games, then you are a prime candidate for Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives (N.E.R.O.), a cross-platform combat game where the key to winning is training your own intelligent non-player characters. On the field of play, the only rule is "let the best AI win."

N.E.R.O. was first developed in 2003 at the University of Texas at Austin (UT). At UT's 2003 GameDev conference, AI researcher Ken Stanley proposed a game based around the idea of training soldier robots in real time, then pitting them against each other. It grew into an ongoing research project that involves a number of UT faculty and students.

The game has two distinct modes. In training mode, you play in a virtual sandbox, setting up enemies and obstacles, then unleashing your robot teams on them. The robots use neural networks to respond to game events, so you teach them by issuing rewards or penalties for events such as hitting a target, avoiding getting hit themselves, and standing their ground.

When you think you have a decent team, you can save your work and enter battle mode. Choose from a variety of arenas, then send your 'bots into combat against one of the included demo teams, or against another player over the network.

The game is built using the proprietary Torque game engine, but free binaries are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. The new version is numbered 2.0 and marks the first major update released to the public since 2005. The Linux download is a gzipped tarball; download and extract it anywhere on your system. The game is compiled for 32-bit Intel architecture Linux only, and requires OpenAL for sound. From within the extracted directory, you can start the game by running ./nero.bin

For quick introduction to N.E.R.O. features take a look at their trailer movie.

Read more:
[AI versus AI: N.E.R.O. on Linux]
[NERO game evolves to version 2.0]
[The official N.E.R.O. website]