On modern hardware, on an internal network, "a second or two" is an eternity. Instead of worrying about what would happen if all 60,000 people used the app at once (unlikely), I'd find the bottlenecks you have now and fix those.
Prioritize. You have statistics already about typical usage, and typical wait and service times. Fix the problem that exists, instead of the problem that doesn't, but might someday.
No, Nyquist guarantees that you can *exactly* reproduce any bandwidth-limited signal if you sample at *greater* than twice the bandwidth of the signal. If you're at exactly twice the highest freq, you'll have problems if you're 180 degrees out of phase, like you said. But Nyquist does not say >=, it says >.
Mathematically, this works just fine, because you can sample the amplitude exactly. Practically, there are no perfect A/D converters, or D/A converters, so you have some loss due to phase mismatch at the higher frequencies. And 16 bits means that you'll have quantization error.
This is why CD's are sampled at 44khz (we can generally hear up to 20khz) to give us 2khz of wiggle room at the upper end.
You are completely right as far as your economic analysis.
But what's truly worrying is not that we have a trade deficit, which isn't necessarily bad. What bothers people are the political implications of other countries owning massive quantities of the U.S. public debt. The real cause of this is the U.S. government inflating its currency to pay for expensive political projects and favors (like, say, wars, subsidies, social security, and medicare prescriptions); the trade deficit only exacerbates the problem.
The largest hidden tax on U.S. citizens is inflation of the dollar, but we really don't see it beyond 4 or 5 percent because other countries until now have highly valued the U.S. dollar, keeping dollars and treasury bills as a stable reserve currency.
Our government is spending money like it's going out of style, and they're just printing more dollars to pay for a lot of it. The Chinese hold enough of the U.S. debt that they could sell off their dollar reserve and create a global "run on the bank" as every country in the world tries to sell off the dollars they hold in reserve before the selling price hits rock bottom.
At that point, you'd see the value of the dollar cut in half or more overnight, and there would be massive panic and depression. The point is, there is NOTHING we could do to stop this. The Chinese hold all the cards in this scenario. The fact that the U.S. government let this happen is a complete abrogation of responsibility on their part. Should we find ourselves in a small recession and tax revenue drops, causing the government to devalue the currency enough that the Chinese want out, a small recession could turn into a huge depression.
Now, will this happen? That depends. Do you think the U.S. government will reign in spending, save social security by severely cutting benefits, tell people that universal health care is an economic impossibility in our current condition, eliminate the prescription drug plan, and remove all agricultural subsidies and not start any wars?
Or will they continue spending as they have been and pretend nothing's wrong so long as they get elected, while their financial advisors are buying gold, real-estate, and bullets in record numbers?
But what if they don't care? The Chinese don't have a history of being enamored of the global free market. They might be willing to cut of their nose to spite their face, especially if their new middle class gets too uppity for the party's taste.
Our massive debt that the Chinese control means that they could sink their economy and ours with a single move. It's like a financial nuclear bomb, only the Chinese have the only trigger.
I'm all for globalism, but the massive amount of debt the U.S. government is creating isn't going to go away, and there will be consequences eventually.
If they're ready. Learning by doing has a tremendous cost associated with it when it means you're blowing up rockets in order to learn that your GPS guidance system has some bugs in it you didn't account for.
Frankly, it surprises the hell out of me that they're using GPS as the primary guidance system. Any amount of radio interference and you'll end up with problems. It might be ok once you get up in the air enough to correct for temporary loss of signal, but near the ground, yer screwed.
The only difference you'd see is in the run time performance of the compiler. As in, it's possible your code would compile faster.
I know lots of Gentoo people think compilers are some magical things, but it's just a translator that takes input and produces output. The output is the same *every time* if the input doesn't change. Sure, you can tweak the compiler with optimization flags and such, but if I use the same flags on a different computer, I get the same output, no matter what hardware I'm running on. Otherwise, distributing binaries wouldn't work at all.
The compiler is not doing some complex analysis of your hardware every time it compiles a program.
In order to do that sort of optimization, you need to have run-time statistics, which gcc does NOT take advantage of. The advanced Java compilers and run times, sure, maybe.
I'm surprised that Gentoo copied about half of what's so great about FreeBSD and stopped there.
FreeBSD operates just like Gentoo, only after it compiles each "port", it creates a package and installs that with a package manager. They also store those packages in a repository for each release. That way, if you don't feel like compiling, you can grab the pre-compiled package. If that doesn't work, or there aren't packages available, or you need special compilation options set, you can always compile from source within the ports directory.
This works exceptionally well not only because the ports repository is very well maintained, but because there's always that fallback mode so you're not stuck when binary installs don't work.
And because they distribute packages in addition to source, problems with incompatibilities are much easier to spot for a particular relase.
I wish somebody would make a Linux distribution that operates just like FreeBSD. I wish I had time to do it. If Gentoo compiled to debian packages so you could use binary packages and source, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
NetBSD even has a cross-platform implementation of FreeBSD's ports system called pkgsrc. It already works on Linux, but no disto I know of uses it as a default.
"What kind of economy do we want? And, what do we need to achieve it?"
Free market. End government supported monopolies to the extent possible.
I don't see why a private company doesn't set up a city-wide 802.11 wireless network. Businesses and private owners would be likely to let the company use the very small space required for the equipment, since customers would find wireless access attractive. Vending machines operate on this kind of principle, and there is no shortage of those.
It's nice to think that government could take care of the infrastructure instead, but do you trust the same people who can't fix potholes in asphalt with managing and maintaining a wireless LAN?
I don't, especially since after the network is installed, there's no political gain for maintaining it. It's the same reason great sysadmins whose systems never fail are typically seen as unnecessary.
From the article and comments, I can't tell if the reason they're shutting this down is because the water is too hot to run the reactor efficiently, or if the waste water temperature violates some rule about the temperature of downstream water.
If it's the latter, depending on the limit, it might indeed be feasible to cool the water at the expense of efficiency. You wouldn't need to cool it below the incoming temperature, necessarily, just cool enough to be slightly under the limit, which may be much higher than 90F.
Waste from nuclear power comes in the form of hot water.
Right now, abundant availability of hot water is the least of Alabama's problems.
But maybe you're suggesting it's economically feasible to transport hot water from Alabama to somewhere else. Then you have to argue that your method of transporting hot waste water is overall more efficient than transporting electricity that can heat the cold water that already exists in the place you want it.
If you can find a way to transport hot water more efficiently than you can transport electicity, then I think you should do it.
Oh, but be careful about the political minefield you're about to step in when some journalist tells people that they're showering in cancer water from Alabama.
I didn't mean originality in the sense you should be creative when you write history, but that there's a real opportunity for useful research and work to be done that hasn't yet. We have huge amounts of historical data that nobody looks at -- letters, newspapers, photographs, government documents -- all waiting to be compiled into something pertinent.
"The science people think the arts people are concerned with trivial, easy stuff."
I'm not so sure this is the case. A lot of mathematically oriented and engineering people I know are also very gifted artists, writers, and musicians. I'm a decent guitar player, and I'd never call what musicians do easy. Same for writers of literature, what have you.
Personally, I don't have much respect for the intellectual endeavors of the typical college English department because there doesn't seem to be much content to what they do. It's either argumentation based on opinion or unverifiable guesses as to other people's intentions...or criticism. They don't produce anything original, like say, historians, economists, artists, musicians, etc.
If they were all there striving to be the next Shakespeare, instead of the next expert on Shakespeare, I think I'd have more respect for what they do.
I'm sure part of the problem is one of funding, and the idea that you have to fund "research." To me, the idea of conducting research into literature (as opposed to producing literature) is ludicrous, but a whole academic industry has been built up to do just that.
Or he had a 2.5 average due to boredom and frustration, and moving him to the advanced class gave him the motivation to get the A.
This isn't unheard of. In 1st grade I was considered "slow" and was at the bottom of my class. The teacher assumed I was stupid. I was bored and daydreamed constantly instead of doing the color, cut and paste dittos, which were assinine.
After maxing out a standardized IQ test (a fact that the school tried to hide from my parents) my parents thankfully realized what the problem was and sent me to a private school, where I excelled.
I'm so thankful that I went to grade school twenty years ago, instead of today. Today I would have been diagnosed with ADHD, put on drugs, and gone through life labelled a dunce.
Public schools really get my dander up, because this sort of thing is so common. There is so much blame to go around, and all of it is well-deserved. Bad teachers who don't give a crap, teachers unions, stupid politics, PTO moms who bulldoze the schoolboard into making ridiculously bad decisions...I could go on and on. There is hardly a punishment great enough for people responsible for ruining promising childrens' lives.
Home schooling used to seem like such a wacky idea, but my wife and I are seriously considering it instead of dealing with all this crap. That my tax money still goes to supporting a hopelessly broken system that does almost more harm than good pisses me off to no end.
"while in intellectual circles there is value attached to art and literature, there remains a general disdain within these circles for science and scientists."
I think this is true, but what do you think is the cause of this?
I just think that for the things you mentioned, there is probably just no good way for an easy to use, WSIWYG editor to handle things correctly without some sort of artificial intelligence.
Some people will want it to act one way, while other will want the complete opposite. That might be true for the same person working on two different documents.
I think that something like LyX, or even LaTeX, offers a much saner solution to the problems that exist in Word. The "specific concept" you mentioned might just be that WYSIWYG isn't such a great idea after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha, ok, you got me.
I guess we could nuke New York, too, if we wanted.
On modern hardware, on an internal network, "a second or two" is an eternity. Instead of worrying about what would happen if all 60,000 people used the app at once (unlikely), I'd find the bottlenecks you have now and fix those.
Prioritize. You have statistics already about typical usage, and typical wait and service times. Fix the problem that exists, instead of the problem that doesn't, but might someday.
No, Nyquist guarantees that you can *exactly* reproduce any bandwidth-limited signal if you sample at *greater* than twice the bandwidth of the signal. If you're at exactly twice the highest freq, you'll have problems if you're 180 degrees out of phase, like you said. But Nyquist does not say >=, it says >.
Mathematically, this works just fine, because you can sample the amplitude exactly. Practically, there are no perfect A/D converters, or D/A converters, so you have some loss due to phase mismatch at the higher frequencies. And 16 bits means that you'll have quantization error.
This is why CD's are sampled at 44khz (we can generally hear up to 20khz) to give us 2khz of wiggle room at the upper end.
You are completely right as far as your economic analysis.
But what's truly worrying is not that we have a trade deficit, which isn't necessarily bad. What bothers people are the political implications of other countries owning massive quantities of the U.S. public debt. The real cause of this is the U.S. government inflating its currency to pay for expensive political projects and favors (like, say, wars, subsidies, social security, and medicare prescriptions); the trade deficit only exacerbates the problem.
The largest hidden tax on U.S. citizens is inflation of the dollar, but we really don't see it beyond 4 or 5 percent because other countries until now have highly valued the U.S. dollar, keeping dollars and treasury bills as a stable reserve currency.
Our government is spending money like it's going out of style, and they're just printing more dollars to pay for a lot of it. The Chinese hold enough of the U.S. debt that they could sell off their dollar reserve and create a global "run on the bank" as every country in the world tries to sell off the dollars they hold in reserve before the selling price hits rock bottom.
At that point, you'd see the value of the dollar cut in half or more overnight, and there would be massive panic and depression. The point is, there is NOTHING we could do to stop this. The Chinese hold all the cards in this scenario. The fact that the U.S. government let this happen is a complete abrogation of responsibility on their part. Should we find ourselves in a small recession and tax revenue drops, causing the government to devalue the currency enough that the Chinese want out, a small recession could turn into a huge depression.
Now, will this happen? That depends. Do you think the U.S. government will reign in spending, save social security by severely cutting benefits, tell people that universal health care is an economic impossibility in our current condition, eliminate the prescription drug plan, and remove all agricultural subsidies and not start any wars?
Or will they continue spending as they have been and pretend nothing's wrong so long as they get elected, while their financial advisors are buying gold, real-estate, and bullets in record numbers?
I'm betting on #2.
They can't if they care about their economy.
But what if they don't care? The Chinese don't have a history of being enamored of the global free market. They might be willing to cut of their nose to spite their face, especially if their new middle class gets too uppity for the party's taste.
Our massive debt that the Chinese control means that they could sink their economy and ours with a single move. It's like a financial nuclear bomb, only the Chinese have the only trigger.
I'm all for globalism, but the massive amount of debt the U.S. government is creating isn't going to go away, and there will be consequences eventually.
When I put my, uh, hat on backwards, you know, I, uh, I uh, I feel like a Toyota truck, you know.
Thanks, I'll check that out.
Good point. It would be interesting to see the material production vs. total production cost for them.
If they're ready. Learning by doing has a tremendous cost associated with it when it means you're blowing up rockets in order to learn that your GPS guidance system has some bugs in it you didn't account for.
Frankly, it surprises the hell out of me that they're using GPS as the primary guidance system. Any amount of radio interference and you'll end up with problems. It might be ok once you get up in the air enough to correct for temporary loss of signal, but near the ground, yer screwed.
The only difference you'd see is in the run time performance of the compiler. As in, it's possible your code would compile faster.
I know lots of Gentoo people think compilers are some magical things, but it's just a translator that takes input and produces output. The output is the same *every time* if the input doesn't change. Sure, you can tweak the compiler with optimization flags and such, but if I use the same flags on a different computer, I get the same output, no matter what hardware I'm running on. Otherwise, distributing binaries wouldn't work at all.
The compiler is not doing some complex analysis of your hardware every time it compiles a program.
In order to do that sort of optimization, you need to have run-time statistics, which gcc does NOT take advantage of. The advanced Java compilers and run times, sure, maybe.
I'm surprised that Gentoo copied about half of what's so great about FreeBSD and stopped there.
FreeBSD operates just like Gentoo, only after it compiles each "port", it creates a package and installs that with a package manager. They also store those packages in a repository for each release. That way, if you don't feel like compiling, you can grab the pre-compiled package. If that doesn't work, or there aren't packages available, or you need special compilation options set, you can always compile from source within the ports directory.
This works exceptionally well not only because the ports repository is very well maintained, but because there's always that fallback mode so you're not stuck when binary installs don't work.
And because they distribute packages in addition to source, problems with incompatibilities are much easier to spot for a particular relase.
I wish somebody would make a Linux distribution that operates just like FreeBSD. I wish I had time to do it. If Gentoo compiled to debian packages so you could use binary packages and source, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
NetBSD even has a cross-platform implementation of FreeBSD's ports system called pkgsrc. It already works on Linux, but no disto I know of uses it as a default.
"no matter who knowledgeable or correct your opinion is."
Opinions don't belong in encyclopedias. Facts do. Maybe this is why you've had trouble?
No, just the gun owners whose guns only shoot sideways.
To me, that meant this:
(scream 'YES)
"What kind of economy do we want? And, what do we need to achieve it?"
Free market. End government supported monopolies to the extent possible.
I don't see why a private company doesn't set up a city-wide 802.11 wireless network. Businesses and private owners would be likely to let the company use the very small space required for the equipment, since customers would find wireless access attractive. Vending machines operate on this kind of principle, and there is no shortage of those.
It's nice to think that government could take care of the infrastructure instead, but do you trust the same people who can't fix potholes in asphalt with managing and maintaining a wireless LAN?
I don't, especially since after the network is installed, there's no political gain for maintaining it. It's the same reason great sysadmins whose systems never fail are typically seen as unnecessary.
Sure was. Trying to locate two cities that weren't there anymore was a pretty big logistical problem, even for the Japanese.
And we're killing people in oil producing countries, even better!
We're sooooo close to Greenpeace hopping on board with this whole Iraq thing.
From the article and comments, I can't tell if the reason they're shutting this down is because the water is too hot to run the reactor efficiently, or if the waste water temperature violates some rule about the temperature of downstream water.
If it's the latter, depending on the limit, it might indeed be feasible to cool the water at the expense of efficiency. You wouldn't need to cool it below the incoming temperature, necessarily, just cool enough to be slightly under the limit, which may be much higher than 90F.
Waste from nuclear power comes in the form of hot water.
Right now, abundant availability of hot water is the least of Alabama's problems.
But maybe you're suggesting it's economically feasible to transport hot water from Alabama to somewhere else. Then you have to argue that your method of transporting hot waste water is overall more efficient than transporting electricity that can heat the cold water that already exists in the place you want it.
If you can find a way to transport hot water more efficiently than you can transport electicity, then I think you should do it.
Oh, but be careful about the political minefield you're about to step in when some journalist tells people that they're showering in cancer water from Alabama.
I didn't mean originality in the sense you should be creative when you write history, but that there's a real opportunity for useful research and work to be done that hasn't yet. We have huge amounts of historical data that nobody looks at -- letters, newspapers, photographs, government documents -- all waiting to be compiled into something pertinent.
"The science people think the arts people are concerned with trivial, easy stuff."
I'm not so sure this is the case. A lot of mathematically oriented and engineering people I know are also very gifted artists, writers, and musicians. I'm a decent guitar player, and I'd never call what musicians do easy. Same for writers of literature, what have you.
Personally, I don't have much respect for the intellectual endeavors of the typical college English department because there doesn't seem to be much content to what they do. It's either argumentation based on opinion or unverifiable guesses as to other people's intentions...or criticism. They don't produce anything original, like say, historians, economists, artists, musicians, etc.
If they were all there striving to be the next Shakespeare, instead of the next expert on Shakespeare, I think I'd have more respect for what they do.
I'm sure part of the problem is one of funding, and the idea that you have to fund "research." To me, the idea of conducting research into literature (as opposed to producing literature) is ludicrous, but a whole academic industry has been built up to do just that.
Or he had a 2.5 average due to boredom and frustration, and moving him to the advanced class gave him the motivation to get the A.
This isn't unheard of. In 1st grade I was considered "slow" and was at the bottom of my class. The teacher assumed I was stupid. I was bored and daydreamed constantly instead of doing the color, cut and paste dittos, which were assinine.
After maxing out a standardized IQ test (a fact that the school tried to hide from my parents) my parents thankfully realized what the problem was and sent me to a private school, where I excelled.
I'm so thankful that I went to grade school twenty years ago, instead of today. Today I would have been diagnosed with ADHD, put on drugs, and gone through life labelled a dunce.
Public schools really get my dander up, because this sort of thing is so common. There is so much blame to go around, and all of it is well-deserved. Bad teachers who don't give a crap, teachers unions, stupid politics, PTO moms who bulldoze the schoolboard into making ridiculously bad decisions...I could go on and on. There is hardly a punishment great enough for people responsible for ruining promising childrens' lives.
Home schooling used to seem like such a wacky idea, but my wife and I are seriously considering it instead of dealing with all this crap. That my tax money still goes to supporting a hopelessly broken system that does almost more harm than good pisses me off to no end.
"while in intellectual circles there is value attached to art and literature, there remains a general disdain within these circles for science and scientists."
I think this is true, but what do you think is the cause of this?
"where the secrecy is so thick that nobody is quite sure what's going on."
:-)
That's been done, over and over. See any David Lynch movie.
I just think that for the things you mentioned, there is probably just no good way for an easy to use, WSIWYG editor to handle things correctly without some sort of artificial intelligence.
Some people will want it to act one way, while other will want the complete opposite. That might be true for the same person working on two different documents.
I think that something like LyX, or even LaTeX, offers a much saner solution to the problems that exist in Word. The "specific concept" you mentioned might just be that WYSIWYG isn't such a great idea after all.