Tony K's Blog

Some thoughts about war strategy in Clash of Clans Clan wars pit an equal number of players from two teams against each other over 24 hours. Each player may attack twice--once on two different players. For an attack, a player may be awarded 0, 1, 2, or 3 stars. 0. When the player neither beats the town hall nor achieves 50% damage. 1. When the attacker either beats the town hall or achieves 50% damage. 2. When the attacker destroys the town hall and achieves over 50% damage, but not total annihilation. 3. Total destruction of the defender. A team gets points only for the max stars achieved against each defender. So if one player gets two stars and the next attacker gets 1 star on the same player, the team is awarded 2 stars. For descriptive purposes, when I talk about player 1 it is the most powerful person on a team. Higher numbers are progressively weaker players. Strategy During War Given this structure, it is possible for only the top half of the players to attack ...

--> I have mentioned previously that I am a big fan of Andrew Tobias. Recently, he posted on his blog  the claim that climate "deniers" were massively funded by corporate interests.  I sent him the following note. "You said, "The connection between the climate-change deniers and the Republican budget enthusiasts is that both are massively funded by corporate interests , now entirely unleashed by the Republican Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision.  That’s the one that stacks the political system even more heavily in favor of the rich and powerful, and allows their influence to be hidden. " "For the record, I am a big fan and we are on the same side politically. Scientifically we differ, and this thing about climate-change deniers being funded by corporate interests is simply not true as far as I can tell. People point to XOM funding someone for 25 M illion dollars or so. Compare that to the forces of climate change "proponen...

We did it. We bought a Windows computer. It hurts real bad. We needed a PC that could run Microsoft Project, and I didn't want to go through the Virtual PC rigamarole on a Mac. It hurts.

I am a big fan of what is sometimes called grid computing. In essence, a master computer doles out work to other computers on the network, which would do some portion of the processing, return results, and fetch a new work unit. Probably the best known effort on these lines is the SETI at Home project. The effort that I am really into though is Stanford's Folding at Home . It is a grid or distributed computing project that is investigating proteins and how they assemble themselves or fold. Through this effort, they are hoping to understand and maybe eventually cure dieases like cancer, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's. The client software can be installed either as a screensaver or as a service (I recommend service). It runs in the background on a low priority and the system software takes care of making sure that the user has good performance with his real work. The program works with Windows PCs, Macintosh, or Linux. I am a member of Team 18 MacAddict4Life . This is...

My name is Tony and I am a Macaholic. I own a few shares of Apple stock and have been a Mac User and owner since I bought my Mac Plus in about 1986 or so. I have reviewed software, supported computers, worked with user groups, and am an advanced user of most of the standard programs. There is little doubt in my mind that even since the first days of the Lisa, Macs have represented not only a better product, but also a better value. When Macs first came out they were not cheap, but the beauty of them is that they came in a single package with just about everything you needed. PCs on the other hand were much cheaper, but... If you actually wanted to use them you were stuck with plunking down a whole lot more money to get up to the same capability of a Mac. This holds true today too. I'll write more about Macs later.