Interesting article you linked to. They highlight Walmart's awesome power to push prices down and bring effeciency to the market place. However, they try to push this idea that its making america poor by pushing manufacturing jobs overseas.
I tend to think this is a VERY mistaken view. So people in America decided they had better alternatives than working to make jeans for Chinese prices + shipping. What were these alternatives? Well, they probably had to innovate and bring massive operational and management effeciently using TECHNOLOGY.
There is no way you could expect the vast number of technology jobs we have today without walmart. I have no doubt they have not only dropped prices but created better jobs for Americans. Yeah, its sad Levi has no American plants. But would you rather your kid be a business consultant/systems engineer/*insert white collar job here* or work in a levi's plant. That's the real question.
Are you talking about the amplitude of the rises and falls? Are you talking about the timing? Why do those things really matter? Certainly no body can predict very well when we will see bust/booms nor how extreme they will be. Please clarify what you mean by business cyles and why you feel they matter.
We tend to view volatility as a bad thing, but certainly the most important thing is that the economy in general is rising. Said another way, the most important thing is that trend line through real GDP is rising.
Perfect exampe of the effects of higher taxes. I right know someone who is in management in a large privately held company. They are currently evaluating whether or not -- primarily due to taxes -- they should move their organization to Switzerland. That certainly means less jobs in America and ironically, less tax revenue.
Especially in the current environment of corporate globalism, taxes are becoming a bertrend-competition type environment. Personally, this is another reason why taxing the rich is a bad idea. They tend to have better resources to reallocate their money to places it won't get taxed.
The site you sent me as some serious flaws, for one thing the charts are whacked. You can't hardly read the axises. Take for example Real GDP growth rate vs. top income tax rate. This is completely and utter meaningless. Completely unadjusted for any other macroeconomic effects. There is so much multicollinearity here I just don't even want to try to begin why this is so wrong. Then to say the correlation coeffecient is.06 is basically nothing.. but slightly positive. I'm willing to bet my house on the fact that running a freakin' linear regression on that data has absolutely zero power. It's so mindless to run a linear regression on a graph that looks like that.. it certainly scares me that anyone with a sense of integrity would even try it.
If you wanted an appropiate model it would have to adjust for business cycles, test to make sure the relationship isn't to a power or log. Certainly you would expect tax rates to be a lagged predictor of economic success. That should be accounted for. Probably the previous years GDP would need to be in the MLR. Certainly 9/11 would need to be a dummy variable. Really even an MLR is a bad model to try to fit it at all. Some of the new sophisticated EWMA-esque prediction models having been trying to capture GDP growth as a function of currently observeable values. I specifically saw a Demo of Forecast Pro where they were doing this.
I really think a statistical model to attempting to measure the effects of tax rates is probably wrong though. There are so many variables it is going to be VERY hard to isolate the tax rate. I think we need to see a theory on why increasing taxes would be beneficial.
Certainly for low level of the tax rates this is true. The government needs enough money to enforce contracts, stop assasinations, theft, etc. The best way they could do this would be through taxing negative externalities, from a social benefit perspective.
I personal think that taxing exchange of capital (i.e. corporate income tax) is a really bad idea. Corporations are by nature very fluid. It doesn't make sense to tax at that point anyway. Why not tax at the personal level?
Now back to that website.. lets look at another graph. Top tax rate vs. Change in employment... Whoah. Let's say during a boom a tax increase is put into place, a bust occurs and tax rates go down. Does this mean that the tax increase is responsible? Hardly. Let's say a tax increase is implemented in a bust, and a boom begins.. the unemployment rate decreases. Does this mean the tax rate increase is valid?
These poeple statistics and use of graphics is so misleading and completely nonsensical I can't hardly believe an organization that claims to be about the economy would publish it. To be fair, you did warn me.:)
The Cato's article did rely heavily on anecdotal evidence. While anecdotal
Actually, you would expect that tax rates would take over a year to kick in. It's not like company's are going to instantly reevaluate all of the projects they had previously declined. People respond to incentives but it takes time to realign to the new set of incentives when they change.
I don't know if a tax rate "drives" the economy, but all of our economic theories certainly postulate that it will strongly influence the economy (as I laid out in my original response).
Tracking such a thing in real life is very difficult due to the shure number of variables. However, as that article outlines, we do tend to see growth linked to lower tax rates. Countries with high tax rates tend to have slower economies and countries with lower tax rates tend to have faster economies. Compare Sweden (high taxes) and Switzerland (lowest taxes and richest country in the EU).
If you could show that the economy does not respond to tax rate changes, you would categorically destroy just about every macro-economic theory. The same thoeries which dictate how the prime rate (strongly influenced by the Fed) affect the economy, also say the tax rate will influence the economy.
Of course, the discount rate will work faster, since it can be changed instantly. However, the tax rate change should have longer lasting effects.
You said it's hard to understand [why increasing tax rates would be bad] because you first have to link to business cyles.
I assumed you misused the term business cycle to mean "business growth." Since I don't see why business cycles (Bust and booms) would be revelents to this conversation at all.
Can you explain why you feel a link between the tax rate and business cycles are necessary? It seems to me you only need a link between the tax rate and total production (wealth created).
Read this for some emperical data showing it DOES influence the economy. Further, it argues why those purporting it doesn't influence the economy are wrong.
Considering what an ineffecient bureacracy the government is, I would tend to think YES.
The government works without direct incentives. They get to take your money. People working without incentives don't have much reason to help you. Witness your state DMV office.
Consider that person working for the government is someone who CAN'T be working in private industry more effeciently. Consider you have to pay for that person whether or not you desire their services.
Putting future generations in debt is a bad thing. However, leveraging (i.e. debt) the future to smooth market volatility is probably pretty smart. Regardless of what you hear in the media, the United States really don't have a debt problem. Look at the government debt/GDP ratio. When I took macro about a year ago the ratio was like %6.
The governments strategy right now is simple: * Increase government spending (bolsters economy) * Reduce taxes (Bolster economy) * Lower interest rates (Bolsters the economy, technically the Fed sets this not the government)
Once the economy heats up both of the first two items will be harder to change since they are set by legislator not by the Fed.
What is interesting is that it appears that changing the tax rate has basically no effect on government revenue beyond the year of the change within the observed values of tax rates in the united states.
That is, there seems to be an equilbrium between taxes decreasing with economic growth within a range of tax rates.
Intuitively, this makes sense if you think of it like follows.
Consider a %90 tax rate. Basically no body would want to do anything, but the government would get A LOT of every transaction. The economy would be terrible at the government would be poor.
Consider a %1 tax rate. There would be a lot of activity but the government would get very little. The economy would be hot, government would be poor (but less than in the first case.
Now consider something like %10. You would expect it to not be too burdensome on ecomomy and yet make the government rich. If you think about it, you can see it makes sense that for reasonable values of the tax rate, you would expect that the economic growth and tax rate would tend to balance out. Primarily by choosing a tax rate you end up setting the growth of your economy.
Re:That's real...profound
on
Superball!
·
· Score: 1
Western Washington University != George Washington University != University of Washington != Washington University [in St. Louis](where I am attending).
Typically misconceptions though. Whenever I say I go to Washington University people tend to associate it more with Seattle than George Washington (D.C.) though. Even though we're ranked higher than both!:)
G.W. is super expensive though. I thought $27,000 a year for tuition was expensive... It looks like they make you buy the meal plan at G.W. too. That's so annoying for commuter students.
If tax cuts have nothing to do with economic growth then ALL free-market economic models need to be rethought. The current models of economy are based on the fact that people respond to incentives.
That is, if you offer somebody more they will do some amount more. They will take more risks.
Now let's take two scenarios, a.20 tax rate and a.80 percent tax rate. I'm using huge differences just to make the difference really clear.
Now let's say I'm considering a new business. If the business fails I lose $300,000. Now let's say if I'm successful(%50) I get net income of $1m. If the tax rate is.20 I get $800,000. If the tax rate is.8 I get $200,000.
Obviously, in the later case I'm not interested in this project. However, it is a good project and would have tended to bring economic benefit. But it didn't take place.
If your friend found that the tax rate has nothing to do with the economy, he should have published that! If he could show rigorously that is true, he would flip modern economics on its head. However, I strongly believe people DO respond to taxes.
Think of it like this, "I am I willing to spend an hour at work to get a box of corn flakes?" "Am I willing to work an hour to get a nice night out?" This is the how the tax rate will affect peoples decisions. Oh yeah, and the richest coutry in the world (GDP/capita) would be Switzerland, which also has some of the lowest taxes in the world...
I go to Wash U in St. Louis and actually know one the guys working on the project. I've also met Jon Turner, however I haven't met Lockwood. Him and some other professors sold some ATM technology to cisco back in the dot-com era and got crazy rich.
Anyway, you can find out all about their project at the applied research labratory FRX website:
Have you ever bought from this eswar.com? Are they really legit?
I can't help but to think "Hi my name is Eswar. I am old and have been very greedy and now need to disparse my money to charities. I will give you %10.... all you have to do is by books from..."
Instead of using confusing inches, the size of the drive should also be described in how many lengths of human hair would span it. 50000x25000x10000HH drive:)
Eek. I should have thought before posting. That's the same order, without spaces. 10 lines now... can anyone else think of a more clever way to do this? (and not doing stuff like sticking the entire while block in the conditional statement or something):)
#include #include int main(int argc, char **argv) {
int i;
for (i = argc; i argc; i--) {
print(argv[i]);
} }
I also seriously doubt that scientific numerical operations would run that much slower in Perl. I could be disproved on this.. but I doubt it. Especially if whatever mathematically thing you're wanting to compute relies on hashes for data structures:)
I see so many people here falling into the contra-positive of the broken window fallacy it is scaring me.
There is a shop with a store front window. A vandal comes by and throws a rock right through the window. At first the store owner is disstressed about this. However, he then realizes even though he has to pay for a new window and installer. The window guy will in turn hire a plumber, who will buy a sandwich, the chef will buy a microwave, the consumer electronics guy will buy something from his shop. It will be great for everyone. Accordingly, he decides we need more vandals to make the world a better place. You heard a lot of this weak argument during 9/11. Although, 9/11 is more complex since it involved huge sums of insurance money, reinsurers, etc.
What is wrong with this argument? Well, the answer is simple the store owner would have spent his money on something else beside the window. While the window guy is certainly happy, the refridgerator guy is now seriously bumming that he didn't get a sale. Or let's say he bought the window instead of shoes, the shoe guy would be bumming.
Now I have seen several people arguing the South Korean government subsidizing memory is bad for the United States. This the broken window fallacy in REVERSE. When someone gives you something it is a net positive. It's better than if you had made it yourself. You now have money you can spend on other things. While it might be hard for micron its GOOD for computer users. They will have more money to spend on new nVidia GeForce 5800FX Ultra Deluxe Turbo Gold Millenium Edition cards or whatever.
Remember, other peoples governments giving us money (even in the form of memory) is a good thing for our economy. Don't be led into this fallacy that its more important to keep our money "internal." The greedy strategy tends yield an amazingly near optimal solution. Government intervention will always lead something ineffecient taking place.
Yes, there is the case where there could be a strategic move to lower prices to force out a competitor and in the long term raise prices. However, this market has way too many firms for any one firm to gain that kind of control.
I would much rather have more money rather than letting the U.S. government and Micron have it. As a side note, luckily they didn't implement quotas which would have just given Hynix the ability to sell at a higher price...
I have a WD drive, I thought that it went bad. But I actually discovered it was a buggy chipset. I sent for a replacement and I had a new drive cross-shipped, that arrived in about 3days. Not bad.
By the time it arrived however I realized that my current drive was fine. So I sent back the drive they sent me. When I called and explained the situation they explained how the waranty works becauxe I was interested in maybe just keeping the extra drive.
The drive they send you has a 30 day waranty, however when they receive your old drive its waranty is transferred to the new drive. So if you wanted to, you could actually call for another RMA on your 3yr waranty harddrive. Pretty cool.
No, It's not a good thing for Iraq for GSM to be implemented. GSM is really aging. The only way to get even moderately high-speeds is using the piggy-back GPRS. Reconstructing GSM to be 3G is very difficult transition path. If it weren't for Quallcom's patents on CDMA, nobody would be using GSM which is based on TDMA.
I really like some of the stuff GSM has done with respect to the phones themselves, such as the use SIMM card for storing the phones information. But CDMA is by far the technically superior solution, however patent incumbered. Building an infrastructure from the ground up on TDMA technology is just brain-dead politics.
Synchronization is an issue on non-smp boxes too. It can very easily introduce dead-lock. Remember, that a synchronized function simply tries to obtain a lock on all of the variables accessed within.
public class A { public A() { int a, b; public synchronized foo() { a = 6; b = 7; } public synchronized void bar() { System.out.println("a = " + a + " b = " + b); } } Now consider the case where foo() gets the lock on variable a, a context switch takes place, bar gets the lock on b. Dead lock. A dead-lock detection algorithm will have to kick in and steal the lock from one of them, which is very expensive.
Using synchronized methods is very dangerous from a performance perspective. Anytime you introduce a synchronized method you have to search your code for potential dead-lock conditions. Further, you have to consider how the synchronized code will reduce concurrency.
Suppose you have:
public class A () { int a,b; public synchronized void foo() { System.in.read(); System.out.println("a = " + a + " b = " + b); } public synchronized void bar() { a += b; b++; } }
Obviously, if your goal is do a lot more additions, synchronized is bad. The whole time you're waiting for user input, no addition can be done. Again, a potentially huge performance hit, even on non-smp.
Synchronization is a locking mechanism. You have to take into full account the objects you are locking and how it will affect the concurrency of your program. You must consider when you should use a synchronized function or more fine locking controls (e.g. placing a.lock(), b.lock() after the read above).
I agree with you, this article is certainly no better than the the the myths it attempts to debunk.
FYI, there is the OpenFT protocol supported by giFT It is completely decentralized, has meta-information, last time I was on it had consistently between 400 and 500 users.
It runs on Linux, windows, and probably most other *nix platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they do own a lot of DOS and sued microsoft over it not that long ago...
e ID=8045
http://www.winntmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Articl
Interesting article you linked to. They highlight Walmart's awesome power to push prices down and bring effeciency to the market place. However, they try to push this idea that its making america poor by pushing manufacturing jobs overseas.
I tend to think this is a VERY mistaken view. So people in America decided they had better alternatives than working to make jeans for Chinese prices + shipping. What were these alternatives? Well, they probably had to innovate and bring massive operational and management effeciently using TECHNOLOGY.
There is no way you could expect the vast number of technology jobs we have today without walmart. I have no doubt they have not only dropped prices but created better jobs for Americans. Yeah, its sad Levi has no American plants. But would you rather your kid be a business consultant/systems engineer/*insert white collar job here* or work in a levi's plant. That's the real question.
Are you talking about the amplitude of the rises and falls? Are you talking about the timing? Why do those things really matter? Certainly no body can predict very well when we will see bust/booms nor how extreme they will be. Please clarify what you mean by business cyles and why you feel they matter.
.06 is basically nothing.. but slightly positive. I'm willing to bet my house on the fact that running a freakin' linear regression on that data has absolutely zero power. It's so mindless to run a linear regression on a graph that looks like that.. it certainly scares me that anyone with a sense of integrity would even try it.
:)
We tend to view volatility as a bad thing, but certainly the most important thing is that the economy in general is rising. Said another way, the most important thing is that trend line through real GDP is rising.
Perfect exampe of the effects of higher taxes. I right know someone who is in management in a large privately held company. They are currently evaluating whether or not -- primarily due to taxes -- they should move their organization to Switzerland. That certainly means less jobs in America and ironically, less tax revenue.
Especially in the current environment of corporate globalism, taxes are becoming a bertrend-competition type environment. Personally, this is another reason why taxing the rich is a bad idea. They tend to have better resources to reallocate their money to places it won't get taxed.
The site you sent me as some serious flaws, for one thing the charts are whacked.
You can't hardly read the axises. Take for example Real GDP growth rate vs. top income tax rate. This is completely and utter meaningless. Completely unadjusted for any other macroeconomic effects. There is so much multicollinearity here I just don't even want to try to begin why this is so wrong. Then to say the correlation coeffecient is
If you wanted an appropiate model it would have to adjust for business cycles, test to make sure the relationship isn't to a power or log. Certainly you would expect tax rates to be a lagged predictor of economic success. That should be accounted for. Probably the previous years GDP would need to be in the MLR. Certainly 9/11 would need to be a dummy variable. Really even an MLR is a bad model to try to fit it at all. Some of the new sophisticated EWMA-esque prediction models having been trying to capture GDP growth as a function of currently observeable values. I specifically saw a Demo of Forecast Pro where they were doing this.
I really think a statistical model to attempting to measure the effects of tax rates is probably wrong though. There are so many variables it is going to be VERY hard to isolate the tax rate. I think we need to see a theory on why increasing taxes would be beneficial.
Certainly for low level of the tax rates this is true. The government needs enough money to enforce contracts, stop assasinations, theft, etc. The best way they could do this would be through taxing negative externalities, from a social benefit perspective.
I personal think that taxing exchange of capital (i.e. corporate income tax) is a really bad idea. Corporations are by nature very fluid. It doesn't make sense to tax at that point anyway. Why not tax at the personal level?
Now back to that website.. lets look at another graph. Top tax rate vs. Change in employment... Whoah. Let's say during a boom a tax increase is put into place, a bust occurs and tax rates go down. Does this mean that the tax increase is responsible? Hardly. Let's say a tax increase is implemented in a bust, and a boom begins.. the unemployment rate decreases. Does this mean the tax rate increase is valid?
These poeple statistics and use of graphics is so misleading and completely nonsensical I can't hardly believe an organization that claims to be about the economy would publish it. To be fair, you did warn me.
The Cato's article did rely heavily on anecdotal evidence. While anecdotal
Actually, you would expect that tax rates would take over a year to kick in. It's not like company's are going to instantly reevaluate all of the projects they had previously declined. People respond to incentives but it takes time to realign to the new set of incentives when they change.
I don't know if a tax rate "drives" the economy, but all of our economic theories certainly postulate that it will strongly influence the economy (as I laid out in my original response).
Tracking such a thing in real life is very difficult due to the shure number of variables. However, as that article outlines, we do tend to see growth linked to lower tax rates. Countries with high tax rates tend to have slower economies and countries with lower tax rates tend to have faster economies. Compare Sweden (high taxes) and Switzerland (lowest taxes and richest country in the EU).
If you could show that the economy does not respond to tax rate changes, you would categorically destroy just about every macro-economic theory. The same thoeries which dictate how the prime rate (strongly influenced by the Fed) affect the economy, also say the tax rate will influence the economy.
Of course, the discount rate will work faster, since it can be changed instantly. However, the tax rate change should have longer lasting effects.
You said it's hard to understand [why increasing tax rates would be bad] because you first have to link to business cyles.
I assumed you misused the term business cycle to mean "business growth." Since I don't see why business cycles (Bust and booms) would be revelents to this conversation at all.
Can you explain why you feel a link between the tax rate and business cycles are necessary? It seems to me you only need a link between the tax rate and total production (wealth created).
Read this for some emperical data showing it DOES influence the economy. Further, it argues why those purporting it doesn't influence the economy are wrong.
Considering what an ineffecient bureacracy the government is, I would tend to think YES.
The government works without direct incentives. They get to take your money. People working without incentives don't have much reason to help you. Witness your state DMV office.
Consider that person working for the government is someone who CAN'T be working in private industry more effeciently. Consider you have to pay for that person whether or not you desire their services.
Putting future generations in debt is a bad thing. However, leveraging (i.e. debt) the future to smooth market volatility is probably pretty smart. Regardless of what you hear in the media, the United States really don't have a debt problem. Look at the government debt/GDP ratio. When I took macro about a year ago the ratio was like %6.
The governments strategy right now is simple:
* Increase government spending (bolsters economy)
* Reduce taxes (Bolster economy)
* Lower interest rates (Bolsters the economy, technically the Fed sets this not the government)
Once the economy heats up both of the first two items will be harder to change since they are set by legislator not by the Fed.
What is interesting is that it appears that changing the tax rate has basically no effect on government revenue beyond the year of the change within the observed values of tax rates in the united states.
That is, there seems to be an equilbrium between taxes decreasing with economic growth within a range of tax rates.
Intuitively, this makes sense if you think of it like follows.
Consider a %90 tax rate. Basically no body would want to do anything, but the government would get A LOT of every transaction. The economy would be terrible at the government would be poor.
Consider a %1 tax rate. There would be a lot of activity but the government would get very little. The economy would be hot, government would be poor (but less than in the first case.
Now consider something like %10. You would expect it to not be too burdensome on ecomomy and yet make the government rich. If you think about it, you can see it makes sense that for reasonable values of the tax rate, you would expect that the economic growth and tax rate would tend to balance out. Primarily by choosing a tax rate you end up setting the growth of your economy.
Western Washington University != George Washington University != University of Washington != Washington University [in St. Louis](where I am attending).
:)
Typically misconceptions though. Whenever I say I go to Washington University people tend to associate it more with Seattle than George Washington (D.C.) though. Even though we're ranked higher than both!
G.W. is super expensive though. I thought $27,000 a year for tuition was expensive... It looks like they make you buy the meal plan at G.W. too. That's so annoying for commuter students.
If tax cuts have nothing to do with economic growth then ALL free-market economic models need to be rethought. The current models of economy are based on the fact that people respond to incentives.
.20 tax rate and a .80 percent tax rate. I'm using huge differences just to make the difference really clear.
.20 I get $800,000. If the tax rate is .8 I get $200,000.
That is, if you offer somebody more they will do some amount more. They will take more risks.
Now let's take two scenarios, a
Now let's say I'm considering a new business. If the business fails I lose $300,000. Now let's say if I'm successful(%50) I get net income of $1m. If the tax rate is
Obviously, in the later case I'm not interested in this project. However, it is a good project and would have tended to bring economic benefit. But it didn't take place.
If your friend found that the tax rate has nothing to do with the economy, he should have published that! If he could show rigorously that is true, he would flip modern economics on its head. However, I strongly believe people DO respond to taxes.
Think of it like this, "I am I willing to spend an hour at work to get a box of corn flakes?" "Am I willing to work an hour to get a nice night out?" This is the how the tax rate will affect peoples decisions. Oh yeah, and the richest coutry in the world (GDP/capita) would be Switzerland, which also has some of the lowest taxes in the world...
I go to Wash U in St. Louis and actually know one the guys working on the project. I've also met Jon Turner, however I haven't met Lockwood. Him and some other professors sold some ATM technology to cisco back in the dot-com era and got crazy rich.
Anyway, you can find out all about their project at the applied research labratory FRX website:
http://www.arl.wustl.edu/arl/projects/fpx/
No, that's the EXACT wording as what I submitted. Troll and Offtopic on my own submission? Look at the blurb z4ce writes...
I submitted this story and it shows up as rejected yet it got posted.. strange...
2003-11-13 20:26:47 Forbes Examines SCO Subpoenas (articles,caldera) (rejected)
Slashcode bug or what?
I would imagine about as much as a 100watt light bulb... All of the 100 watts has to end up as heat in your room some how.. :)
Ian
Have you ever bought from this eswar.com? Are they really legit?
I can't help but to think "Hi my name is Eswar. I am old and have been very greedy and now need to disparse my money to charities. I will give you %10.... all you have to do is by books from..."
Ian
Instead of using confusing inches, the size of the drive should also be described in how many lengths of human hair would span it. 50000x25000x10000HH drive :)
Eek. I should have thought before posting. That's the same order, without spaces. 10 lines now... can anyone else think of a more clever way to do this? (and not doing stuff like sticking the entire while block in the conditional statement or something) :)
char * reverse(char *src) {
char *dest = malloc(strlen(src));
char *buf = malloc(strlen(src));
while(tok=strtok(src," ")) {
sprintf(dest, "%s %s",tok,buf);
strcpy(buf,dest);
}
free(buf);
return dest;
}
Alright, true. You did say function. I missed that.
char * reverse(char *src) {
char *dest = malloc(strlen(src));
while(tok=strtok(src," ")) strcat(dest,tok);
return dest;
}
Of course, it certainly is much more beautiful in Perl. sub &reverse { join(' ', reverse(split)); }
Certainly, in the general case, I can easily see any program that does heavily text maniplation being at least 4 times as large in C.
Ian
Aw come on, its not that bad in C:)
:)
#include
#include
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
int i;
for (i = argc; i argc; i--) {
print(argv[i]);
}
}
I also seriously doubt that scientific numerical operations would run that much slower in Perl. I could be disproved on this.. but I doubt it. Especially if whatever mathematically thing you're wanting to compute relies on hashes for data structures
Ian
Actually, this guy adjusted in terms of "work-time" rather than dollars. That should adjust for the effect you just mentioned.
From either a shell prompt on linux or a command prompt on windows type:
netstat -na
Connected IP addresses cannot be hidden. Even if there wasn't netstat you could sniff the line or list open file handles...
Ian
I see so many people here falling into the contra-positive of the broken window fallacy it is scaring me.
There is a shop with a store front window. A vandal comes by and throws a rock right through the window. At first the store owner is disstressed about this. However, he then realizes even though he has to pay for a new window and installer. The window guy will in turn hire a plumber, who will buy a sandwich, the chef will buy a microwave, the consumer electronics guy will buy something from his shop. It will be great for everyone. Accordingly, he decides we need more vandals to make the world a better place. You heard a lot of this weak argument during 9/11. Although, 9/11 is more complex since it involved huge sums of insurance money, reinsurers, etc.
What is wrong with this argument? Well, the answer is simple the store owner would have spent his money on something else beside the window. While the window guy is certainly happy, the refridgerator guy is now seriously bumming that he didn't get a sale. Or let's say he bought the window instead of shoes, the shoe guy would be bumming.
Now I have seen several people arguing the South Korean government subsidizing memory is bad for the United States. This the broken window fallacy in REVERSE. When someone gives you something it is a net positive. It's better than if you had made it yourself. You now have money you can spend on other things. While it might be hard for micron its GOOD for computer users. They will have more money to spend on new nVidia GeForce 5800FX Ultra Deluxe Turbo Gold Millenium Edition cards or whatever.
Remember, other peoples governments giving us money (even in the form of memory) is a good thing for our economy. Don't be led into this fallacy that its more important to keep our money "internal." The greedy strategy tends yield an amazingly near optimal solution. Government intervention will always lead something ineffecient taking place.
Yes, there is the case where there could be a strategic move to lower prices to force out a competitor and in the long term raise prices. However, this market has way too many firms for any one firm to gain that kind of control.
I would much rather have more money rather than letting the U.S. government and Micron have it. As a side note, luckily they didn't implement quotas which would have just given Hynix the ability to sell at a higher price...
I have a WD drive, I thought that it went bad. But I actually discovered it was a buggy chipset. I sent for a replacement and I had a new drive cross-shipped, that arrived in about 3days. Not bad.
By the time it arrived however I realized that my current drive was fine. So I sent back the drive they sent me. When I called and explained the situation they explained how the waranty works becauxe I was interested in maybe just keeping the extra drive.
The drive they send you has a 30 day waranty, however when they receive your old drive its waranty is transferred to the new drive. So if you wanted to, you could actually call for another RMA on your 3yr waranty harddrive. Pretty cool.
No,
It's not a good thing for Iraq for GSM to be implemented. GSM is really aging. The only way to get even moderately high-speeds is using the piggy-back GPRS. Reconstructing GSM to be 3G is very difficult transition path. If it weren't for Quallcom's patents on CDMA, nobody would be using GSM which is based on TDMA.
I really like some of the stuff GSM has done with respect to the phones themselves, such as the use SIMM card for storing the phones information. But CDMA is by far the technically superior solution, however patent incumbered. Building an infrastructure from the ground up on TDMA technology is just brain-dead politics.
Synchronization is an issue on non-smp boxes too. It can very easily introduce dead-lock. Remember, that a synchronized function simply tries to obtain a lock on all of the variables accessed within.
public class A {
public A() {
int a, b;
public synchronized foo() {
a = 6;
b = 7;
}
public synchronized void bar() {
System.out.println("a = " + a + " b = " + b);
}
}
Now consider the case where foo() gets the lock on variable a, a context switch takes place, bar gets the lock on b. Dead lock. A dead-lock detection algorithm will have to kick in and steal the lock from one of them, which is very expensive.
Using synchronized methods is very dangerous from a performance perspective. Anytime you introduce a synchronized method you have to search your code for potential dead-lock conditions. Further, you have to consider how the synchronized code will reduce concurrency.
Suppose you have:
public class A () {
int a,b;
public synchronized void foo() {
System.in.read();
System.out.println("a = " + a + " b = " + b);
}
public synchronized void bar() {
a += b;
b++;
}
}
Obviously, if your goal is do a lot more additions, synchronized is bad. The whole time you're waiting for user input, no addition can be done. Again, a potentially huge performance hit, even on non-smp.
Synchronization is a locking mechanism. You have to take into full account the objects you are locking and how it will affect the concurrency of your program. You must consider when you should use a synchronized function or more fine locking controls (e.g. placing a.lock(), b.lock() after the read above).
I agree with you, this article is certainly no better than the the the myths it attempts to debunk.
FYI, there is the OpenFT protocol supported by giFT It is completely decentralized, has meta-information, last time I was on it had consistently between 400 and 500 users.
It runs on Linux, windows, and probably most other *nix platforms.
Ian