The parent was indeed giving good advice. Your advice, however, is not prudent. Every year you delay getting a mortgage, is a full year of rent you could have been using to pay down one. Even if the interest rate on the mortgage was 15% or 20% (which it isn't), and even if there was no tax deduction (which there is), it would still be in your interest to get a mortgage.
The main point I was taking issue with, which I hope even you would agree with, was the advice that one "get a mortgage as big as you can afford." The grandparent post wasn't maknig a choice between renting and owning (I agree that owning is usually better), the grandparent was advising investors to get the most expensive home they can afford, instead of getting a less expensive home that actually meets their needs.
And this different is crucial. Getting "the biggest house your paycheck will allow" leaves no margin of error. The investor will be in trouble if they can not afford to keep their investment.
With a more modest investment, the investor is more likely to realize the gains, because they are less likely to be crushed by the debt in a cash crunch. Investors who think about the long term are more likely to gain and less likely to flame out.
The key to success in real estate is simple: Buy Young. Buy a house as soon as you can manage it, put down as little as you can, get as big a mortgage as your paycheck can handle, and buy in the nicest part of town that you can afford
This is not good financial advice. You are right, that an investor should start early to see the most gain (due to compounding). However, what you are advising is that someone go into more debt than they need to, "get as big a mortgage as your paycheck can afford," in order to invest.
For many years, this young investor will be paying someone else -- the bank -- rather than paying themselves. At the same time, the investor will has taken on a great financial burden, "[as much] as your paycheck can afford." Having put themselves into a bad position (they don't have much cash), they are now much more likely to fall into bankruptcy. Why? Because now they are more likely to have a cash crunch.
Further, all of this investor's eggs are in one basket. If their local real estate market turns sour, in particular at a time when they have to move, then they're in trouble.
I would advise the following. 1) start young. 2) take on as little debt as possible, as debt has a negative 5%-8% rate of return, and 3) diversify your investments to maximize your return over the long-term while minimizing short-term downturns.
Compilers often cannot optimize even simple code for a given architecture, because the architecture itself and its rules for execution are complex. For instance, depending on what tricks you use, running the Stream benchmark on an Opteron can run at 1.5GB/s assuming correct code and alignment, but no compiler flags, 2.2GB/s with the "obvious" flags on gcc (-O3 -m64), and over 3GB/s with the Portland Group's pgcc and using multiple arcane flags.
Even a simple sequential read loop that exceeds the L1 cache can benefit greatly from the appropriate cache hints in the assembly (prefetchnta and its variants).
Toss in a second processor and a NUMA architecture, and everything gets even more fun.
For examples of the hacks you can do on Opterons that vastly improve simple C code speed, take a look at the stream.c source and see AMD's technical pubs no. 25112, 24592, and 32035.
Opteron-based systems have excellent memory bandwidth - 6.4 GB/s per processor bidirectional. I believe they do very well on the Stream benchmark and with real-world memory intensive applications.
MediaWiki (as used in The Wikipedia and The Metaweb) automatically treats "ISBN xxx" as a dynamic link to a customizable list of ISBN-aware sites like Amazon, Powell's Books, and the Library of Congress.
I would also look for prior art in Alexa's existing patents and public software. In the latter case, I believe zBubbles, Alexa Internet's comparison shopping tool from 1999/2000, did dynamic linking from pages to products, going so far as to insert product links (bubbles) into pages as the user visits them.
After you download zBubbles, whenever you visit a commerce site that the software is programmed to compare against, a small icon in the corner of your Web browser changes color. Then, next to the product that you're viewing, small Z icons appear. When you click an icon, a "bubble" pops up to cover one-fifth of your screen. The bubble shows you where else you can buy the product, or related products, and it links to websites that may offer a cheaper price or even a better product. The bubble also tells you if Amazon sells the product and, if it does, you can buy the product from Amazon without leaving the site you're visiting. (It also links to customer product reviews housed on Amazon.)
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Re:Not a problem (yet)
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Even adding the length restriction, you are still mapping from a large space (the space of all binary strings of length n > 160) to a small space (the space of all binary strings of length 160), so there will still be collisions.
basically each computer attempts to initiate a connection to the other computer on a port that has been agreed to in advance. the first computer to attempt will fail, due to the firewall on the other end. however, his firewall will now be expecting return traffic originating from the port that his computer attempted to connect to. therefore, the second connection attempt, from the other computer, will succeed. now, both firewalls are allowing return traffic through in response to a connection initiated from inside the firewall. all the supernode has to do is allow for negotiation of timing and source and destination port numbers, and the rest is quite simple
I think Safeweb's Triangle Boy proxy client used this method, but for the purpose of getting through national firewalls (China, Saudi Arabia) rather than local ones.
For a time, anyone could download this client, but now, all I can find about it are old links and this Internet Archive copy of the Triangle Boy whitepaper.
If anyone is maintaining the source, please let me know.
Locking is done as a last resort in the face of persistent vandalism. When a page is locked, ordinary users (anon and registered) cannot edit it. However, administratores can still edit the page. Additionally, the parallel discussion page for the entry is still editable.
Except for one exception - the front page of the Wikipedia - locks are never permanent, and usually last for 1 to 3 days. This small amount of time is enough for revert wars to cool off and for most vandals to lose interest in the page.
I haven't looked at these articles recently, but typically, even entries on controversial topics like Osama bin Laden are unlocked most of the time.
I have thought about why articles are rarely locked - it's not just that the community values contribution, but also that the technology makes it so easy to undo vandalism, that many vandals lose interest. Additionally, by giving vandalism a rather short life on popular pages, which is by definition where vandalism would be the most visible, it discourages others from doing the same. The lifespan of vandalism on a popular page is measured in minutes.
The site makes it easier to undo an edit than to create it. If there weren't a version history and a revert feature, I suspect that vandalism would be a much greater problem.
I think the real problem is that you failed to establish your credibility in the discussion. The user who deleted your link looked at your previous contributions and that, combined with his concerns about the contribution in question being unsupported (that is, there was no other site to check to confirm that the content was real) led them to delete your link.
In reading the discussion, I think they could have done more effort to validate the contributed document, but given limited time and energy, they made a justifiable call.
The US hardly stockpiles stuff like this for internal emergencies - let alone disasters half a world away...
During the Cold War, the US had many stockpiles across the country - major cities probably had hundreds. These Civil Defense bomb shelters contained food and medicine to keep people alive in the aftermath of a nuclear war. I imagine the stockpiles were also used during natural disasters.
You can still see signs for these shelters on many civic buildings from this period.
Alan makes two key points in his parent post. I'd like to add that I've followed (and occasionally admin-ed) the Wikipedia for two years now. Every time I've described the Wikipedia to someone, they say "that will never work!" (sometimes adding "... once it becomes popular.")
Yet they now use the Wikipedia regularly.
The value of the Wikipedia is that it is convenient, comprehensive, and easily improved. It gives type-a researchers the chance to fix errors.
Somehow, without fascist policies or restrictive algorithms, the Wikipedia gets it right. It's a remarkable balance of social conventions and freedom. Many other group efforts have gotten the balance wrong (Usenet and DMoz come to mind), putting control in the wrong place or in the wrong measure to failing allow the community to grow while maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio.
Yes, I am aware that military pre-positioned caches aren't ideal for humanitarian relief, but certainly, they contain food and transportation, so would be useful without modification.
Governments could recognize the humanitarian potential and create caches designed for relief work, prepositioning medical and engineering support equipment.
The story description ends with: Apropos of nothing, I saw a movie in the theaters a few days ago. At the official start time, the lights dimmed. Then there were 14 minutes of commercials (Pepsi, hair mousse, cologne, etc.) followed by 13 minutes of movie trailers (which are also advertising, of course), followed by a few minutes of junk, followed by a 100-minute movie.
This is one of the reasons why geeks download screeners instead of going to the theaters. Theaters provide the worst of all worlds - you pay and you have to watch ads. Also, the audio and video experience can be inferior to what you would get at home with a DVD.
1) DSL is a fixed point to point connection. It's hard to take it with you if you move, and you have no hope at all of roaming.
2) It's expensive to roll out. The ISP needs to put their hardware in every telephone central office (CO).
Also, some cities (like Boston) have a large number of crufty old phone lines that are not suitable for DSL, so rollouts involve rewiring neighborhoods or sorting through lots of existing copper pairs to find the few that are clean enough to use.
Satellite data services are coming down in price - they're not cheap yet, but they're getting there.
The internet dishes that RVs use cost ~ $10k for hardware and installation with a monthly service cost starting at $100. See this page about the Internet Archive's bookmobile for details. Here's a photo (small, large)of their network connection.
The vendor, Motosat, claims download speeds of 400kb/s and up, with upload speeds of 30-90 kb/s. So you would have enough bandwidth to serve a single high latency low bitrate shoutcast stream, maybe, but it's primarily for download.
--Pat
The parent post makes a good point. Most of the SW / HW RAID arguments in this discussion focus on write performance. If the data you are writing is coming from a 100Mb/s ethernet connection, then that connection will saturate before your RAID system does.
It's arrogant for a bureaucrat to decide how to dole out resources.
We have this in the US -- we just call it an HMO. Instead of government bureaucrats who are, in theory, accountable, we have corporate bureaucrats who are totally unaccountable making our medical decisions. Oh yes, and our employers have a say in whether our treatments too (they along with the HMO select which drugs and treatments are covered).
Yes, the US is different from Canada, but when it comes to non-heroic health care, we could do much better.
According to the grandparent post, per-capita costs are the same in the US and Canada, so their high taxes are equivalent to our high premiums, except they cover everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
And this different is crucial. Getting "the biggest house your paycheck will allow" leaves no margin of error. The investor will be in trouble if they can not afford to keep their investment.
With a more modest investment, the investor is more likely to realize the gains, because they are less likely to be crushed by the debt in a cash crunch. Investors who think about the long term are more likely to gain and less likely to flame out.
--Pat
This is not good financial advice. You are right, that an investor should start early to see the most gain (due to compounding). However, what you are advising is that someone go into more debt than they need to, "get as big a mortgage as your paycheck can afford," in order to invest.
For many years, this young investor will be paying someone else -- the bank -- rather than paying themselves. At the same time, the investor will has taken on a great financial burden, "[as much] as your paycheck can afford." Having put themselves into a bad position (they don't have much cash), they are now much more likely to fall into bankruptcy. Why? Because now they are more likely to have a cash crunch.
Further, all of this investor's eggs are in one basket. If their local real estate market turns sour, in particular at a time when they have to move, then they're in trouble.
I would advise the following. 1) start young. 2) take on as little debt as possible, as debt has a negative 5%-8% rate of return, and 3) diversify your investments to maximize your return over the long-term while minimizing short-term downturns.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
After I wrote this, I actually tried testing the Opteron bandwidth, and even a simple tuned read loop runs at 4.5GB/s, not 6.4GB/s
(Opteron 242, PC2700 RAM)
--Pat
Even a simple sequential read loop that exceeds the L1 cache can benefit greatly from the appropriate cache hints in the assembly (prefetchnta and its variants).
Toss in a second processor and a NUMA architecture, and everything gets even more fun.
For examples of the hacks you can do on Opterons that vastly improve simple C code speed, take a look at the stream.c source and see AMD's technical pubs no. 25112, 24592, and 32035.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Opteron-based systems have excellent memory bandwidth - 6.4 GB/s per processor bidirectional. I believe they do very well on the Stream benchmark and with real-world memory intensive applications.
--Pat
I would also look for prior art in Alexa's existing patents and public software. In the latter case, I believe zBubbles, Alexa Internet's comparison shopping tool from 1999/2000, did dynamic linking from pages to products, going so far as to insert product links (bubbles) into pages as the user visits them.
Here's a description of zBubbles from the Motley Fool, 3 Jan 2000:
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.eduEven adding the length restriction, you are still mapping from a large space (the space of all binary strings of length n > 160) to a small space (the space of all binary strings of length 160), so there will still be collisions.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
I think Safeweb's Triangle Boy proxy client used this method, but for the purpose of getting through national firewalls (China, Saudi Arabia) rather than local ones.
For a time, anyone could download this client, but now, all I can find about it are old links and this Internet Archive copy of the Triangle Boy whitepaper.
If anyone is maintaining the source, please let me know.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Except for one exception - the front page of the Wikipedia - locks are never permanent, and usually last for 1 to 3 days. This small amount of time is enough for revert wars to cool off and for most vandals to lose interest in the page.
I haven't looked at these articles recently, but typically, even entries on controversial topics like Osama bin Laden are unlocked most of the time.
I have thought about why articles are rarely locked - it's not just that the community values contribution, but also that the technology makes it so easy to undo vandalism, that many vandals lose interest. Additionally, by giving vandalism a rather short life on popular pages, which is by definition where vandalism would be the most visible, it discourages others from doing the same. The lifespan of vandalism on a popular page is measured in minutes.
The site makes it easier to undo an edit than to create it. If there weren't a version history and a revert feature, I suspect that vandalism would be a much greater problem.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
In reading the discussion, I think they could have done more effort to validate the contributed document, but given limited time and energy, they made a justifiable call.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
The US hardly stockpiles stuff like this for internal emergencies - let alone disasters half a world away...
During the Cold War, the US had many stockpiles across the country - major cities probably had hundreds. These Civil Defense bomb shelters contained food and medicine to keep people alive in the aftermath of a nuclear war. I imagine the stockpiles were also used during natural disasters.
You can still see signs for these shelters on many civic buildings from this period.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Alan makes two key points in his parent post. I'd like to add that I've followed (and occasionally admin-ed) the Wikipedia for two years now. Every time I've described the Wikipedia to someone, they say "that will never work!" (sometimes adding "... once it becomes popular.")
Yet they now use the Wikipedia regularly.
The value of the Wikipedia is that it is convenient, comprehensive, and easily improved. It gives type-a researchers the chance to fix errors.
Somehow, without fascist policies or restrictive algorithms, the Wikipedia gets it right. It's a remarkable balance of social conventions and freedom. Many other group efforts have gotten the balance wrong (Usenet and DMoz come to mind), putting control in the wrong place or in the wrong measure to failing allow the community to grow while maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Yes, I am aware that military pre-positioned caches aren't ideal for humanitarian relief, but certainly, they contain food and transportation, so would be useful without modification.
Governments could recognize the humanitarian potential and create caches designed for relief work, prepositioning medical and engineering support equipment.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
This is one of the reasons why geeks download screeners instead of going to the theaters. Theaters provide the worst of all worlds - you pay and you have to watch ads. Also, the audio and video experience can be inferior to what you would get at home with a DVD.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
"POS designers need to start hiring graphic designers though. Some of the interfaces are god damn ugly and unprofessional."
They're called POS designers for a reason.
--Pat
By the way, I'm comparing DSL to WiMax, not DSL to T1s.
--Pat
1) DSL is a fixed point to point connection. It's hard to take it with you if you move, and you have no hope at all of roaming.
2) It's expensive to roll out. The ISP needs to put their hardware in every telephone central office (CO).
Also, some cities (like Boston) have a large number of crufty old phone lines that are not suitable for DSL, so rollouts involve rewiring neighborhoods or sorting through lots of existing copper pairs to find the few that are clean enough to use.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
See my profile for my credentials :)
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
The internet dishes that RVs use cost ~ $10k for hardware and installation with a monthly service cost starting at $100. See this page about the Internet Archive's bookmobile for details. Here's a photo (small, large)of their network connection.
The vendor, Motosat, claims download speeds of 400kb/s and up, with upload speeds of 30-90 kb/s. So you would have enough bandwidth to serve a single high latency low bitrate shoutcast stream, maybe, but it's primarily for download. --Pat
The parent post makes a good point. Most of the SW / HW RAID arguments in this discussion focus on write performance. If the data you are writing is coming from a 100Mb/s ethernet connection, then that connection will saturate before your RAID system does.
--Pat
If that's what you're holding, I'm not going anywhere near your fingers.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
We have this in the US -- we just call it an HMO. Instead of government bureaucrats who are, in theory, accountable, we have corporate bureaucrats who are totally unaccountable making our medical decisions. Oh yes, and our employers have a say in whether our treatments too (they along with the HMO select which drugs and treatments are covered).
Yes, the US is different from Canada, but when it comes to non-heroic health care, we could do much better.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu