IA-32 sucks like the c-language sucks. It sucks like SOAP over HTTP sucks. In other words, it is just an intermediate platform. A communication protocol between the compiler and the hardware. If the protocol changed too often say the Motorol 6800 -> Motorola 68k -> IBM/Motorola PowerPC as Apple has done, then you loose a LOT of 3'rd party support. It is expensive to develop high-performance general-purpose software for an architecture that keeps changing. The biggest issue is that you can't attract new support if you don't have a large established base. It's just economics.. Risk is a cost. Uncertainty equates to risk. Firms choose the lowest overall cost.
So anyway IA-32 hardware has translated IA-32 instructions into completely different representations for over a decade now.. No CPU has actually run IA-32 instructions in all that time. NexGen was the first company to do 100% translation of IA-32 into internal RISC instructions (with Registers that didn't map exactly to the 8 GRPs). AMD and Cyrix quickly followed suite. And finally Intel dumped their direct instruction translation with their Pentium Pro line.
The main negatives of instruction translation is the extra work that has to be done. But this hurts pipeline misses more than anything else. If you just have a sequence of instructions then you'd never notice the added delay, and an IA-32 compatible CPU could dance with the best of them.
While it's true that Motorola 68K CPU's tended to be faster for each generation, they also tended to run on more demanding hardware and software, so the overall system was slower than a comparable PC. First MAC's verses DOS (no competition in performance). Later the AMD / Intel wars brought about faster CPUs' for a short time. Then when the faster PowerPC came out, the video graphics wars had started and it was an embarrasement to the MAC how few video cards you could put into it thereby restricting yourself to several months behind the video-wars and thereby the performance curve.
Most of this was circumstantial history. But so is the development of HTTP as a base-line transport for so many client-server applications today. It's there, it has a proven track-record. Firewalls support it. Proxies support it. 3'rd party integration is there. Build XML-RPC, build SOAP, build java-script/server integration to emulate a client-side application. It's archaic, but the cost is so low, and the developer expertise is so high, that alternatives are simply not considered.
The Intel Itanium was an excellent processor. It is one of the fastest CPU's out there for scientific computing. But's also one of the most primative. There is no instruction translation (of course because it's a 1'st generation CPU), so it can't adapt to bad compiled code. It's also an example of throwing money and resources at a design problem. But the Itanium has not been touted for it's mild nich superiority, but instead lambasted for lack of practical backward compatibiilty. IA-32 was designed into the Itanium instruction set, yet the impeedence mismatch between IA-32 and IA-64 pushes the performance envelop back into the stone ages. Not even Linux with it's hardware egnostic mantra could not save Itanium. The risks/costs were simple too great.
Depending on your language of choice. Container-based singleton management is an excellent design pattern. In Java, spring and picocontainer manage setter / constructor injection of singletons; possibly even hiding the fact that some objects are session-scope, request-scope or even non-singletons.
The code is managed by an XML file (or some external configuration); you get the effect of singletons, but the extensibility to swap out which implementation of the interface/base-class you use in which environment. And as you expressed concern, you don't have to worry about running multiple applications with isolated singletons. The component-manager is an instance variable (not a singleton), so you can have multiple isolated environments within the same application.
Makes testing a LOT easier too. If you use abstract / interface classes everywhere, you can easily swap out mock-instances for testing purposes. (having a testing-environment component-manager configuration file).
I'm speaking from the Java side, but the basic concept should be applicable to C++ if there aren't already implementations.
Remember the "prohibiting free exercise thereof" is more important than the unwritten "separation of church and state"
I agree that the government walks a fine line as it can't prohibit free worship. If a particular religion requires praying outside, and the only place you can do it is in a public park, then obviously there's going to be contention with the "officially sanctioned" use of public land for religious purposes. Some would argue that if a state-official happens to partake in the ritual on the public land, then they are infringing on non-member's rights. I do think, however, that this goes too far. Even the president of the United States is allowed to express bigoted opinions about the exclusive correctness of one subculture. The electing minority have hated presidents for less.
But understand the other end of the spectrum. Around the time that the US was founded, you were either for the state-church, or you were exiled / persecuted / killed. Many people who do not share the majority faith (myself included) are sensitized towards the possibility of this form of persecution coming back to haunt us. The moral-majority feels it is divine right to promote their ideals at the expense of non-believers. and often singleing out non-believers. Some even feel tremendous bigotry and are willing to take people's lives for their cause. America is full of examples where the "moral majority" persecuted individuals and groups. Secularism is a backlash from these European AND American roots.
Secularism is based on the belief that we can't trust the majority. History has shown time and again that we can't. So the United States has thus-far chosen to willfully restrict the proliferation of religious doctrine (the ultimate in justifying otherwise illegal/immoral activity). As a long enough period of time passes, and people forget their roots, they will make attempts to undo these artifical isolations. As an example, we placed "Under God" into the Pledge back in the 50's and 60's out of nationalism and anti Russianism (Communism has nothing to do with Atheism; marxism maybe). If you're Muslim, it's innappropriate to refer to God by any other name than Allah. If you're Athestic, having to say the pledge is to lie in public.
Forcing the pledge on someone is no different than forcing Jews to merely say "I accept Jesus Christ as the son of God". They may or may not care about such simple words, and may or may not be willing to die to avoid saying them. The pledge is something that allows you to state your nationalism. But part of this nation has been disagreement, so by singling out those that reject a religious ammendment to the pledge is to purposefully "exile" a minority subculture from expousing their nationalisitic pride.
The fight for secularism often has to do with government mandated institutions. If you are required by law to partake in an institution, and your local community is bigoted, then it is possible that you will be persecuted, not by the government, but indirectly through the hand of the government. Unfortunately, the most outspoken case of secularism aren't usually good examples of this, so Secularism gets a bad name.
I don't recall his name, but the man fighting to remove "Under God" from the pledge, and fighting to prevent their school for saying prayers, is a perfect example of bad publicity for the secular movement. He and his daughter aren't personally being violated in any way, except for his sense of repulsion. He's fighting for a vague principle of hypothetical oppression (the daughter doesn't even care). That unsubstantial situation is likely to do more harm, causing backlash from those that feel they are losing their sense of religion in this country. Such a situation is likely to over-compensate back towards a non-secular state. And thus, ironically, produce the sort of oppression that such secularists fight against.
In summary, Secularism and Non-Secularism are like ying-and-yang, never being rid of one another, but rather never staying in imbalance for long.
If you're working on a small project by yourself, there's really no nead for the overhead of a version control system.
I completely disagree.. I version-control much of my home directory. This includes several of my dot-files and my home-bin-directory (for useful little non-system tools). Granted, this implies that I use a UNIX/Linux system.
Moreover, even simple one-off projects can get out of hand if you EVER have to move files around. Lets say you have a project that you only ever intended to run on one machine.. But then you're at work, home, friends-house or whatever, and you wanted to remember how you did some part of it. Well, the easiest thing to do, of course is ssh/ftp the files over.. Ok great... But now, that project gets updated. Months pass... Now you're on your friends machine and you've forgotten that changes have been made, so you don't re-copy the files back over.. Or lets say you used the copied image as a starting point, and you've made several changes since, adding new files. Now you have to manually compare each and every file to see if any are changed... So you don't even bother, and now you have a fork.
The key is that version-control allows you to organize your text-files. It's like putting them into a filing cabinet intead of literally leaving them scattered over your virtual desk-top. It promotes modularity and reuse, since you'll always be confident of the entire history of the file or project. You'll know with complete confidence that you could quickly build a project based on a previous one. It's the difference between writing one huge c-main function and creating header-files with separately compiled modules.
There's also one incredibly useful feature of version control.. An undelete that actually works. Lets say you "rm -r" your files. Lets say you use vi and accidently hit the caps lock and type for a little while without looking (all you need accidently do it type zz in that process and the changes are irreversable). Lets say a program goes wankers and starts modifying files indescriminately (say you use a text-formatting tool and it gives you unexpected results). These things happen over time.
In the old days, you'd hear people using word-processors and the phrase "save often" was used. checking in a version is like saving a known good copy. If you remember your 1980's days, you were far more use to complete catastropy. Now good system administrators perform nightly backups, but a) you lose all the work that current day b) when you quit the night before may not have been the files most perfect state over the past 24 hours. I know when I code, I'm perfectly willing to leave a document unfinished because a movie just came on, or I have a head-ache.
Next, often people set up separate users/directory-paths for which to manage the revsion control. Or even if you have group-write permissions, the files are stored on a separate host. This means that you have an added level of security from catostrophic demise. rm -r on your home directory means you've only lost the data since you last considered it stable. If you're disciplined, even a partition corruption won't hurt you.
Once you have a system, it takes 20 seconds to enter a project into a version control system. You just get into the habbit of doing so, and you reap the benifits.
If the memory leaks on someone else's system, it isn't my problem, is it?
There are very few types of memory leaks in Java, and they are very well understood and isolated. Compare that with C++ which has a greater propensity to leak memory than even c (since many c programmers use the stack instead of dynamic allocation wherever possible).
In Java, if you have a memory leak, you'll learn about it very quickly, and the memory error/stack-trace/profileability can usually quickly point you in the right direction (fixed-sized class memory, v.s. user-cached-and-not-released objects). In C++, for a sufficiently large app, good luck closing up the sieve.
Your pain of java means you are most likely familiar with AWT or Swing, which, depending on your VM, can be slow or a memory hog. Moreoever, many Java applications are not tuned to use a realisitic memory size, so there is a slow ramp-up period of excessive garbage collection until a desireable configuration is acquired by the VM. In production environments, this sort of tuning is done prior to roll-out.
The key difference is that DOS / Windows and even Mac applications are not generally designed for multi-month up-time. So the main difference between Java and non-Java-like applications is not readily apparent to the casual user.
I do agree, however, that for sufficiently small application life-cycles (such as the UNIX program "ls"), java is innappropriate. But this, again, falls into the category of applications not meant to be run for multiple months.
My Viewsonic VP171b consumes 33W and generates a bit of heat. Part of it is the very bright back-lighting. Could also be due to high refresh rate. The 21" version consume 70W. A quick look and just about all viewsonic's are in the 30W range.
But wouldn't a better environmental option be to enable power saving mode with an LCD screen? Double-whammy.
Just as a technicality, if power-saver mode is enabled for both a CRT and LCD, then your power-savings almost dissapears.. Average use per day would be like 4 hours M-F, for like 45 weeks / year. 4 * 5 * 45 * 70 = 63k W-hr or more like 3 pounds of savings per year. Hardly a double-wammy. I'm assuming that power-saving mode has equal power dessipation in both LCD and CRT.
OK, I'm nieve. How do you do that - disconnect from a running display?
Screen is not graphical but instead a pts (pseudo-terminal) multiplexer. Meaning a background process sits inbetween your pts port and your real terminal. "Screen" accepts all output (logs some fraction and dumps history-overflow), such that the underlying applications have no ability to determine whether there's a physical terminal at the other end or not. By accepting all input, it prevents applications from pausing once 2k of stdout has been queued but not sent/accepted. It's similar to redirection output to/dev/null, except that pts-inquieries won't fail (because you're talking to a real pts instead of a generic file). The biggest advantage, of course, is that an end user can disconnect or reconnect from the intermediate "screen" multiplexer (given the appropriate permissions).
Another feature of screen is similar to "virtual desktop". Since you have a multiplexer, "screen" allows a single physical terminal to switch between multiple pts channels.. So if you have a dial-up-modem (direct terminal, not TCP/IP), you can have dozens of different "windows" with different applications running in each (multiple vi windows, several command prompts, several log files, etc). If the modem hangs up, you dial back in, and type "screen -r", and you're back as if nothing had happened. You're alternative was to run all applications with "nohup myapp myargs" and if the modem hung up, then stdout would be redirected to a file.. This way you don't lose the output or have an interruption in say a slow compilation. But the problem is that you can't regain interactive access to a something like vi window. (Course, text editors have their own recovery capabilities).
So the original poster was trying to say that they wanted these incredibly valuable features in a graphical form. vnc and rdesktop allow a user that has their network connection broken to be reconnected without the underlying graphical applications ever being made aware of the interruption. With X and a static IP-address, there are time-out issues. And more commonly we move to different machines or different access points and thus necessarily can not recover a graphical session with X.
X was designed as client-server with state. It is this state that necessarily prevents it from acting like VNC or rdesktop. "screen", vnc, and rdesktop keeps it state on the machine with the running application. X keeps the state on the machine with the physical monitor/keyboard/mouse. I believe the original idea of this design decision was to distribute resources. The application server only performs tasks related to function, not display. Graphics becomes simply the ability to handle events and send graphical commands to a network access point. The terminal is then responsible for all resources related to interpreting graphical commands. This is similar to the postscript paradigm. postscript is a series of "logo" like commands (draw a box from this point to this point), and the printing resource determins how to render the fonts/color schemes, etc. Unlike postscript, however, X graphical commands aren't encapsulatable into a portable relocatable format since there is bidirectional communication going on.
Another particular of X is its peer-application structure. To run X, in addition to the terminal software and the physical applications, you need a font-server and a window manager. While this is great for pluggability (and even clusterability; running a single-threaded graphical program across 4 different machines), it necessarily provides greater latency for even simple tasks.
vnc merely adds a multiplexing layer to the back-end of X or windows, just like screen. So vnc necessarily adds a layer of overhead to the graphical process. More importantly there is an impeedence mismatch between the graphical transport of vnc and that of X. X is designed to send postscript-like graphical commands (draw a square of this size fi
I am actually glad you can't "prove" that God exists nor that everything started from a sterile big bang...
I argue that you could not prove that God or the big bang exist, but you can easily disprove them. All one would need is sufficient evidence that is at least as trustworthy as the feeling that the sun will come up tomorrow (or any such qualitative measurement). Take for example the possibility of information time travel (or time tunneling); something that as yet can only be considered hypothetical and as a thought-excercize. By this I mean the ability to acquire information from a period of the past which skips all the time in between the past event and the current measurement (thereby not being polluted by intermediate events). My hypothesis comes purely from simplistic views of other forms of quantum tunneling (which unfortunately would suggest this only works at the atomic level, and not at a macro-scopic level).
Given this or more simply some yet undiscovered archeological evidence, we may find that sacred texts of the world are individually flawed due to the perspectives of their authors of the events written about. If such events where experienced by today's man they might not generate similar levels of inspiration / divination, and would be unlikely to have attained such followings. While it is entirely possible that the events would seem as miraculous today as then, or that such evidence is necessarily unobtainable by the holy power(s) that be, finding such evidence would provide great pause. Much like the rather frustrating Michelson's (sp?) "null result" on the directionalty of the speed of light.
My point here is mainly that the basis of modern faith is not an intrinsic belief system.. We don't instinctively "feel" that there was a big bang. And we don't instinctively "feel" that we need to go to confession every Sunday. These were concepts passed down to us by our respected elders. Some religious and scientific figures work on the fore-front of these concepts and help mold them; refining the contradictions away. The question is whether the pillars of the faith; the key "stories" a) happened as they were described and b) imply what is currently said about them. This is the case both for religion and science. The link between past and future is our collection of cognitive causalities. Religion asks the moral question, and science asks the physical question, but both are questions of cause and effect. And both are subject to constant review.
I personally am content in disbeliving the factuality of all sacred texts I've read/read-of thus far, but can offer no further counter-proof than is available to the common believer; a loose collection of lesser probabilities of events and the greater likelihood of sacred construction evolving out of religion's inherent societial strength (as is apparent in the absolute diversity in religion, similar to the diversity of life).
In conclusion, what I have described is obviously the disproving of the factual points of certain passed-down religions, which is obviously different than disproving God. But I will make the assertion that one defines their God not as "omnipotent", but as one they would recognize by the stories told of them.
To support this, recognize that in Judao-Christian-Islam (and Hindu), the God and the Devil(s) seem to have super-natural powers. Merely healing or raising a city would not allow one to distinguish between the two. In Judao-Christian-Islam in particular, this is important for there can be only one God. To call the Devil a God would be blasphamy. Yet one could not know one from the other except that all of these religions state that one intrinsicly recognizes the difference. Thus there are characteristics aside from mere apparent omnipotence that defines them.
Thus by refuting the factualness of sacred stories, one's God becomes unknowable. If Mosus carved the 10 commandments himself, if Jesus was merely a wise/clever man, if Abraham and Mohammad merely
No I call people who target and kill civilians with car bombs terrorists. You can call them freedom fighters if you want but if you can't tell the difference you have bigger problems.
Ok, then we should invade Ireland, all of Africa, and most of middle and south America.. Because these people have "freedom fighters/ terrorists" as well. Oh, and we should probably have layed genocide to the southern US states for when they terrorized the north prior and during the civil war.
Terrorism is a facade that the establishment lays on the heads of insurgents. Freedom fighters is a facade that the oppressed lays on their own insurgency. The point is that the political process has broken down, and there are large segments of society which do not have representation. It is highly likely that they will rebell.. Yes there are those power-mongers which don't care about representation, but merely want to overthrow the government for their self rule, but this sort of activity doesn't tend to inspire an entire nation into revolt. You need a cause, and that cause can only exist if there is a voice that isn't being respected (much less heard).
But, please, show me an example of a case were the United States intentionally attacked civilian targets in Iraq for only that purpose.
During both Iraqi invasions, America took out ALL radio communication centers with smart bombs.. Yes they were targeted, but you better believe your ass that civilians that had nothing to do with the government died on those days.
The pentegon, the political centers, and our financial centers were the targets of Osamma's attack; these were just as strategic as the civilian communication centers of Iraq. (in terms of the limited attacking resources). They didn't bomb hospitals, nuclear power plants, dams or schools. They were military targets, aimed at crippling a nation; not destroying it.. And guess what, to a large extent, they were successful. Do not underestimate or make primitive your enemy, for they will surely over-come you. Great nations in history have fallen exactly because of such underestimations.
Not to say that Bush is evil per se. Just a meglomaniac manipulative weasle frat boy.
It has been said (on last weeks' Bill Mawr by one of the Kennedy's in a book of theirs) that a prominent member of the Regan administration who carried over as the secretary of the interior in the current Bush administration has made public statements that "I don't know how many years we have left before the second comming", and thus "waste not, want not".
If you honestly believe that there are resources that would go to waste if not used before a deadline, then it would be logical to consume them away today. Of course, this would require absolute certainty, since you'd have no backup plan.
While this may or may not be true, consider that if you know that your term is limited and you won't personally have to clean up the messes you make (more than 8 years down the line), then why wouldn't you make use of every resource at your disposal today (at the expense of someone else having to clean it up).
In terms of natural resources, there's always the more expensive "natural energy" sources. We can always desalinate ocean water; we can always grow food in a lab; we can always resort to high nuclear / geo-thermal / wind / solar power sources. The only caveat is that resources will cost tremendously more.. BUT, there's an interesting catch. If it costs more, then we have inflation. If we have inflation then suddenly our past debts are less of a burden. Sure we could have an economic crisis, but again, that's somebody else's problem. They key is that the world won't end; it's very resilient.
I think the key is that we'll run out of resources some-day, the Bush doctrine merely says "what's the difference between running out tomorrow or in 100 years, it's only the difference of one generation".
Thus, don't be too quick to call this logic evil or stupid or illogical. There is obvious cost-benifit analysis going on.. The problem is that some segments of society are being given highest priority; garuntees, while the remainder have a potential saving plan that may or may not pay off. It's not very different from saying that we have to garuntee a social safety net and the rich have to pay for it. The poor may very well only get poorer in such a situation (loss of fundamental motivation), and the rich may dwindle in number, thereby having the whole system collapse. So there is no correct answer, it's just a matter of "who's your daddy?".
Lastly, on arrogance, all you need to do is watch a military movie or watch the apprentice to see why arrogance is promoted in the commanding ranks. Better to be a "strong and inspiring leader" than be correct but late and dead. Look at hitler, his charisma and self-confidence inspired a nation into what must have seemed to some insiders as insanity. But after suppression after WWI, massive economic collapse, etc, the people were starving for leadership. And they would only accept the strong confident type. After 9/11, the common people of America also wanted a confident leader, and Bush unfortunately provides this. You can't be openly rational, by expressing your concerns, doubts, and temporary confusions to the public. This has to happen behind closed doors. The governed can't know your weaknesses (in terms of not being perfect in simply knowing the correct answers). This is why businesses deliberate behind closed doors. So Kerry's rational, inquisitive, non-self-assured (non-arrogant) approach isn't sitting well with the public.
We like to look at a clever turn of events, then look back and see "who was clever enough to perfectly predict this". We call them gamblers, pioneers, people with great fore-sight. While some of it is true (people who stick to the fundamentals and don't gyrate with the current fads), a lot of it is shere luck. The survivors are falsely inspirational, because it's easy to trace back through decendants and look at how only 1 in 1,000 surived a great calamity. What's hard is to look at that initial 1
The other replyer did a good job, but missed your question, which was that you have to recompile on every execution.
On SUN, -server means that a full JIT is applied to all code before it is run (though some enhancements might not be possible until a few runs are performed; run-time profiling / enhancements). -client means that code is only JIT'd if it's run more than a few times (meaning it's a hot-spot which is worth trading off compile-time for run-time). While -client does a good amount of inital JITing, you can see that there's not a terrible amount of performance difference between -client and -server. At least not compared to gcj.
This should convince you that the overhead of compiling is nothing compared to the amount of work being executed. In my experience, runing tomcat with -server v.s. -client is night-and-day as far as load-time is concerned (2 to 3 times slower to get into a state ready to accept web-requests), but I don't notice tremendous differences in runtime performance (compilation is hidden in between web requests). What does this say about the differences between tomcat and the benchmark? Again that there must be several orders of magnitude more time spent executing than loading.
If you wanted to write "ls" in java, then yes, you'd prefer something LIKE gcj (don't know what their load time is so I can't say with certainty). Something that does very little, and thus wants a minimalist foot-print is not going to like java. Even perl was too much over-head a few years ago for most small tasks, which is why awk, sed are still in use today, even though perl totally blows them out of the water for even the most trivial tasks. Today machines are fast enough that the human-perceivable difference in latency goes away. Perhaps when we reach 10GHZ VLIW 1024reg CPUs and have 1TB of RAM, the latency of "java -server" will go away too. Note multi-CPU / hyper-threading isn't going to help single-application load-time.
SUN JVM 1.5 has already started to do what you're essentially asking though; they've pre JIT'd most of the rt.jar file. Much of this file is used for even the most trivial possible hello-world application, so it made sense to pre-store that material. I suspect in future versions, we'll see dynamicly cached JIT code, which would tremendously improve start-up time. Of course, with major java applications (web servers, database wrappers) the only time you tend to restart java is when you're upgrading the jar files, so who knows if anyone really cares.
From where I sit, other than Oil, nothing is really rising.
Well, the CPI shows steady manageable inflation, but I've seen lots of inflation in my personal life. Only problem is that I haven't been scientific about which years which consumer items trippled in price. Most items I've noticed have gone up by 50% to 100%. Blockbuster rentals, on average were about $3, now there's up to $4.75. Movie going use to cost $7, and now costs $9, AND the matinee (formerly $5, now $7) has been moved from 5pm down to noon (reducing to almost zero the number of times I can make it).
Don't even mention housing prices or renting (though I demonstrate in another article how I think this is Bush's direct fault as well as a reaction to the market bubble, and not an inflation factor), but the net result is that rent goes up (as property value, taxes, etc go up). Cell phone sur-charges have gone up from $1 to $7 for a $40 plan (effectively rasing the cost of an average plan from $41 to $47). Cable bill goes up with inflation. Electric fluxuates too often for me to get a good idea.
As I said, not a scientific measurement, but I definitely notice inflation.
Oil prices, I would argue are more dynamic and thus would be hard to calculate inflation levels, but I would be willing to bet that we'll never see $10/barrel again. This will have ramifications throughout all sectors of the economy, given enough time.
That being said, I agree that the biggest fear is losing the status as a nexus for world funds. We represent something like 90% of all monetary exchanges (people first change their money into dollars, then change it into the currency of their neighboring country). We also have the largest physical number of debt dollars, while simultaneously demonstrating a reasonable ability to pay off the debt in the far future, and thus people feel good parking their extra money here.. There is another good part about this though.. We are the worlds largest consumer.. People want to sell to us.. Problem is that they don't buy too much from us (at least not proportionately). Thus the market would normally deflate the US dollar. But this would make their products more expensive to US consumers, so China, Taiwan, Japan, etc all decide to use all their excess trade-deficit dollars to purchase US bonds. This way their desired exchange rates are maintained. Our Gov. bonds are safe resting houses for money they otherwise aren't ready to spend.
If Japan, for example, decided to rest their excess money in the EU, they would have to first take their US bond money out of the US; exchanging it for Euros. This exchange rate is already getting bad. Doing so will only promote the problem and provide larger losses.. Also, don't forget that they still have to keep money inside the US to keep their desired relative price levels, so they can't simply take their profit in Yen then buy directly from the EU at the Yen Euro rate. Individual companies can, but the government (who acts on their behalf) can not. Losing their exchange rate means Hondas suddenly get more expensive, etc. (They can only obsorb so much loss of profit).
But certainly, any loss in confidence in US bonds will require an increase in interest rate. I just don't think it will be a rapid or even a dramatic event.
Finally, The Fed is [supposedly] independent of the Treasury, and thus could give a crap about short-term Government revenue targets. The Fed is tasked with inflation, employment GDP management. So long as the Fed believes there are unemployed people and that inflation is not incombent, they can maintain low interest rates all they want. The Fed literally prints money when it purchases US Bonds.. It keeps interest rates low BY purchasing Bonds. So in effect, what the Fed is doing is purchasing back bonds owned partially by the Japanese or Europeans or what-have-you. If the Bonds mature while in Fed hands, the Fed forgives the debt and doesn't require the Government to pay back the matured bond. Th
Without deficit spending the government could only spend what it had received from taxes in a particular year.
The problem isn't whether we should allow deficit spending. Certainly there is no way of knowing what the next years' income will be. The problem is that we are budgeting expendetures which exceed all projected income. It's fine to be optimistic and budget for the best case revenue, but to knowingly spend more than you'll make in the foreseeable future is something that requires serious scrutiny. Surely being in a legitimate war where the future of your country is at stake is adaquate excuse for deficite spending. In fact, these usually involve what are called "war bonds", which are easier for the government to deal with. If you're in a depression, then you come up with some package like "The new deal".
Now, as best I can figure, Bush believed he could squander the future to make today better, and somehow come out ahead. He squandered international acceptance in hopes that the ends would justify the means in Iraq and Afghanistan (the jury is still out on Afghanistan, but it's too shadowed by Iraq, so everybody is willing to use it as a compromise tool).
He squandered our comparatively wonderful deficit level. Hopeing that by borrowing today, the economy would pass off this recession and thus be in a better fiscal standing tomorrow. As far as I can tell, the reasoning is that by both spending more and borrowing more (so as to burden the citizens less), companies would operate with an extra boost, consumers would have a new burst of spending capability, and the government wouldn't have to cut back on spending (which might add to the bubble of retracted purchases).
There is a flaw in this direction. The primary tax break dollars went not to businesses, but to would-be entrepeneurs. This type of money typically goes to the stock market / bond market. By simultaneously keeping bond rates low, there is a bigger incentive to put money into the stock market instead of bond market (and companies also have less competition for selling corporate bonds). But people haven't trusted the stock market since the crash; while some companies might have become "bargains", most are still over priced (by virtue of PE-ratios). So people are throwing their money into safe real-estate (the one thing that hasn't been hurt by the crash).
So Bush really only helped the real-estate market. Take the inheritance tax away as well, and by-golly, this is the best place to put your money bar-none. Course places like DC (my area) are expected to be bubble markets and thus not be as safe as initially believed; but time will tell.
The bigger problem is the consumers.. You can't sell anything unless you have buyers; and with the exception of military hardware, there aren't many avid buyers. Why are we in such a rut? Think of he stock market crash of 29. People were doing so well, that they were being optimistic.. They saw that having money ment that you could make more money. Seeing this success happen again and again gives a sense of confidence. Thus people start making consumer purchases based on projected future income levels. We start buying on "credit". I too was a victim of this mindset. I was layed off right along with the bubble, and my new income level could barely even make the interest payments, much less continue my previously purchasing level. Thankfully I primarily purchased assets instead of expending that money (e.g. I'm still using all that nice electronic equipment I bought in that day).
So when the bubble hit, consumers saw that their projected income levels were a thing of the past. But instead of just adjusting their budget to new income levels, they had to pay off their back-debt. Suddenly there was zero disposable income. (I'm exaggerating obviously). Of what I hear on the radio (NPR), apparently all income levels had this problem. People that make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year were spending well beyond their means jus
While I respect what you're trying to say, the fact of the matter is that American Soldiers and Politicians are not being very respectful of civilian casualties. Just today on CNN, there was a controversy about a released camera footage of a air-targeted bomb which hit calmly walking civilians. It is hard to believe from the footage that the slowly walking line of people were covert militia. Michael Moore's movie showed soldiers talking about shooting at anything that moved at first.
While, it is natural in a war situation, especially with 18 year old troops, to have bad judgement on whom to shoot, my problem is that I am not seeing reconciliation for these atrocities. Moreover, I'm hearing self-praise for how well we're "targeting" to avoid civilian casualties.. How many weddings need to be destroyed before there is a public appology for our less than perfect Army. To say that we only hit 5 building suspected of military importance and avoided damaging non-targets is great. But such numbers are fantacy. If the aftermath of the cosovo war is any basis, our ability to target and actually hit desired targets is good for homeland propaganda, and not much else.
Yes, it's better than carpet bombing to be sure, but please be respectful of our occupied countries, for fear of God's wrath if not the impending retaliatory terrorism.
Funny thing, is that when reagan got into office, the debt servicing was less than.1% of the budget. When Poppa Bush left it was at about 13% of the budget. When Clinton left, it was less than 10%. Now, it is something like 17%.
Hehe, and don't forget that the Fed is being nice to Mr. Bush by keeping interest rates low.. This means that the "burden" is far less than it would normally be. All this new deficit spending is going into the newer low-interest bonds, as well as payment for the maturing bonds. Pretty soon, the rates will be higher, so "rolling over" the debt is going to get MUCH more expensive.
Sad thing is that the candidates only expect to half the deficit spending within 4 years, not eliminate it. Hopefully GDP increases and thereby tax revenues, otherwise we may see a downward spiral (a la USSR) much sooner than our comfort.
No, it isn't. Nice try, though. No it isn't, yes it is..Ahh.. I love these sorts of baseless arguments. Ok, I'll bite.
I agree and disagree with the previous poster. Bush is basing some of his policies on the old Testiment.. If he specifically quotes a reference from the old testiment instead of the new testiment, it either shows that he's not careful about his references, or he's strategically trying to win the minds of both Christians AND Jews (who would otherwise discout New Testiment passages). Either way, it's politics. We gain little insight into Bush's mind when he quotes a passage. I personally do not believe he is a biblical scholar; only a casual follow who understands the political benifits of referencing the bible. If this is true, then it serves little purpose to delve too deeply into the significance of particular passages he quotes. It's likely something he's come across and seems to promote his agenda: Gays bad, Muslims bad, Prostilitizing good.
Good thing we know that God actually did write the Bible.
And it's a good thing we're all Catholics so we can trust that the Holy Roman Catholic church was completely unbiased in which of the thousands of books available by 300AD were God's true voice, and which were to be labled as heretical (I don't remember the exact phrase the nicene counsil used).
And it's good that a few dozen of the heretical books, such as those in the Dead sea area can so easily be distinguished from the correct ones.. You can tell by the leather binding that God obviously choose because of it's styleishness. That way we know for certain that Jesus didn't Marry Ms. Magdaline and have children.
Shoot, but then there are the tablets of Moroni (mormon bible in translation), and other discovered works that are the corner-stone of some of America's most financially successfull branches of Christianity.
Personally I think God just likes watching us solve puzzles.:)
God's word does change...hence the sending of his son, Jesus Christ.
And the sending of 500 separate and incompatible Christian branches (each claiming to know God's more modern word, and knowing that all other 499 branches are doomed to hell).. Damn, you're good.
As for me, I'd rather the President be a man of conviction, who makes decisions and stands by them (even if I don't always agree with them).
What does this have to do with Bush? He is only good at making you think he is a man of conviction. He purposefully chooses vague words which make it hard to see he's back-tracking, giving in, giving up, etc. He says one thing to the American people when petitioning for the war in Iraq, then says the opposite to the UN in a superficial attempt to gain their support. He makes Ossamma the primary target and focus of his speaches for the first several months post 9/11, then uses Alkaida, then WMD, then Sadam, then back to nameless "terrorists", because polls show that that still works.
He expresses seriousness and one-mindedenss for our educational system, but only long enough to win the election (no child left behind). Now we have a token accountability system which costs more than states can afford, and no word from the administration how how to resolve this in his next 4 years. conviction? perhaps, but no follow-through. (And lets' not forget that his conviction for pushing accountability on the school board is uni-lateral, his administration wants nothing to do with accountability himself.. So what he actually "strongly believes" is beyond me).
Conviction of faith-based organizations.. Perhaps. This is a classic example of conviction. But I don't know what he thinks he is; maybe southern lynch-mob baptist, but he certainly doesn't demonstrate the Christianity that I know.. Where is "turn the other cheeck", "being meek", "being humble" [at least before God and in reguards to him], "making your yes mean yes, and your no mean no" (referring to his changing positions over time, and the likelihood of alterior motivations for going to war in Iraq in the first place), "forgive our transgressors", "giving your shirt to the man who asks for your cloak" [referring to fully paying our dues to UN / World Bank / IMF or maintaining Social Security], "no eye for an eye" [revenge against Aurthor Andersen, Iraq, Martha Stuert, which suspiciously keeping Haliburton and MS on a do-not-touch list].
In fact, which philosophy do you think that Bush actually adopts from his "favorite philospoher, Jesus Christ"? I can't think of any. The ONLY philosophy I can see is the promotion of the concept of Christianity, which is recurrently the "promotion of the concept of Christianity". I personally grew up under a Christian label (Catholocism), and I greatly cherish most of the above philosophies, though I have personally rejected the Christian rite (ritual / mysiticism, e.g. the prime motivation to adhere to the above philosophies). But many Christians today seem to reject the above philosophies in actual practice, but cling to the core rites (which were mostly symbolic interpretations of what Jesus really intended; apparent because virtually all of modern practiced Christianity comes from writings after Jesus). Bush, being a politician obviously clings to the best sales tactics, which is that "he supports Christianity", just like the appropriate response to the question of foreign trade is, "I support a strong US dollar", even though you have no clue what that means (and you're not supposed to; it definitely does NOT mean having many times greater value than other currencies, since that would kill our economy. At best it means being a primary focus of international trade).
In all of the above, I am not supporting Kerry, since I could not argue that he has any more conviction than Bush. I like McCain myself; he's the only candidate that I haven't seen flounder on topics, nor does he seem to be a personal sales-man like both Bush and Kerry are. Course that's why McCain lost the primaries last time around.
This might be the end of the hacked by Chinese index pages!" Reader Kent adds
If you use https, then China couldn't hack your pages today. Now if you're implying that even https could be hacked, then quantum encryption doesn't provide you any benifit.
The reason is that you can only quantumly encrypt a single point-to-point channel (haven't read the article, so you could make a lier out of me). And unless you have a direct connection to the end-point in question, you're going to have to go through a gateway. That gateway necessarily needs to see the contents of your message [header]. And more importantly I believe all chinese internet connections run through state-owned gateways.
Additionally, even fiber-optics have limited range, and I suspenct that the quantum-encrypted messages are passing through such a medium. Thus there must be repeaters which will establish separate quantum connection segments. Each repeater is a possible exploit point. (Again, the article could prove me wrong).
While I wasn't completely careful, I don't believe BS is in order.
Second of all, a capacitor and a transistor aren't the same at all! How are you going to dope the air between two conductors with an N or a P channel?
I don't see how you can say this.. A Field Effect transistor functions on the principle of the capacitive effect. Yes the NPN/PNP junctions are a separate operation, but the basis of controlling them is through capacitance. Likewise, it is my understanding that the basis of this communication mechanism is fields. All that capacitance needs is a dialectric to inhibit direct current, so what's the problem here? The chips can use non-conductive contact points.
The signals are carried on metal when they're inside the chip!
Certainly, but metal does not conduct through semiconductors directly efficiently. The aluminum/copper contact points have several layers of composites to provide a gradual change in material (band gap) condusive to the flow of electrons.
Every contact point is a discontinuity which causes reflection (noise), and every bend of the metal causes phase shifting (more noise). Thus what I was trying to say (though you are correct in that what I wound up writing is confusing), is that routing the contacts out to an end of the chip and traferring to ever larger contact points until finally reaching the massive external pins, then physically contacting PCB contacts that travel several centimeters, then reversing the process is likely to be a longer trip than a non-conductive purely-field based effect. Yes it's possible that routing the signals through to the capacitive contact points could have their own deficiencies possibly even worse than running outside with standard wires; but my initial impression is that it's a cleaner design.
Do you really think someone is sitting their manually punching hundreds of pins on millions of CPUs?
You misunderstood what I meant by "manual".. This implied mechanical operation.. Which a machine by definition does.. This is as opposed to the etching process which is infinitely more precise. The soldering process is one of the main reasons for my above ranting about using external wires. It represents a large reflection point due to non-uniform material.
Just to clearify to the un-initiated. It is the exact same technique that allows CMOS transistors to work (the basis of most CPU transistors).
CMOS-FET = Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor - Field Effect Transistor
That's semiconductors separated by oxide (oxidized silicone or glass) to allow fields derived from differing voltages on either side of the glass to affect conductivity and thereby provide actuatable signals. All this new system does is replace the Oxide with something else; namely the walls of the outside of the chip and the unavoidable air-gap.
Obviously this alternate medium is not as efficient as normal hyper-thin glass, BUT it's more efficient than transferring physical electrons from silicon to copper and amplifying it such that you can induce a measurable current down the coppy wire several centimeters away. More-over, it's more practical to etch micro-wire paths on the edge of a chip than to manually pin-punch chips like we do today. We can make such signal points smaller and more articulate.
The ONLY problem (as outlined in the article) is keeping these micro-signals aligned.. If you're off by even half a capacitive cell, then you're fields aren't going to be strong enough, and depending on cell-spacing, you're likely to generate noise to adjacent cells.
Add to this some context. * Most web applications are not written in C++/C * More and more client-applications are being written in Java/.Net due to maintainability * There is an impedance mismatch between OO systems and RDBMS systems ** Bridging this gap often involves very non-performant abstractions: *** wrapping bean-objects around rows *** storing intermediate copies of beans for caching *** making copies of beans for transactional purposes. *** redundantly applying data-constraint rules
Essentially re-inventing the RDBMS wheel.
Thus, if you're already going to write the application in Java, then there is a tremendous advantage to avoiding the performance bottlenecks of the impedance mismatch.
Think of what a c/c++ database does in the best case.. It compiles a SQL script, loads internal relationships to columns/rows.. Accesses the in-memory indexes, and then formats/serializes the in-memory rows for output.
Java has to deserialize the text-stream, instantiate numerous objects; possibly unicodifying the data. Then whatever abstraction layers may be applied to the raw object-array result-set have to be applied.
If the data was locally available, then it could be stored in such a way that, for read-only access, it might be possible to avoid copying, and merely have it return a wrapper for the raw data. Zero latency, and practically zero additional extra work. While this is effectively the same as cached data, here we only store the data once on disk and once in memory.
"hsqldb" is an example that pretty much does the above. You still get a SQL interface if you desire though. Only catch is that hsqldb isn't as feature-rich as many RDBMS systems yet. I'm sure the IBM java-database is merely a feature-rich sister of hsqldb.
And don't forget that many java API's still use raw c-code to do intensive or tight-data-structure work.
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Wow. I guess the IA-32 platform really does suck.
IA-32 sucks like the c-language sucks. It sucks like SOAP over HTTP sucks. In other words, it is just an intermediate platform. A communication protocol between the compiler and the hardware. If the protocol changed too often say the Motorol 6800 -> Motorola 68k -> IBM/Motorola PowerPC as Apple has done, then you loose a LOT of 3'rd party support. It is expensive to develop high-performance general-purpose software for an architecture that keeps changing. The biggest issue is that you can't attract new support if you don't have a large established base. It's just economics.. Risk is a cost. Uncertainty equates to risk. Firms choose the lowest overall cost.
So anyway IA-32 hardware has translated IA-32 instructions into completely different representations for over a decade now.. No CPU has actually run IA-32 instructions in all that time. NexGen was the first company to do 100% translation of IA-32 into internal RISC instructions (with Registers that didn't map exactly to the 8 GRPs). AMD and Cyrix quickly followed suite. And finally Intel dumped their direct instruction translation with their Pentium Pro line.
The main negatives of instruction translation is the extra work that has to be done. But this hurts pipeline misses more than anything else. If you just have a sequence of instructions then you'd never notice the added delay, and an IA-32 compatible CPU could dance with the best of them.
While it's true that Motorola 68K CPU's tended to be faster for each generation, they also tended to run on more demanding hardware and software, so the overall system was slower than a comparable PC. First MAC's verses DOS (no competition in performance). Later the AMD / Intel wars brought about faster CPUs' for a short time. Then when the faster PowerPC came out, the video graphics wars had started and it was an embarrasement to the MAC how few video cards you could put into it thereby restricting yourself to several months behind the video-wars and thereby the performance curve.
Most of this was circumstantial history. But so is the development of HTTP as a base-line transport for so many client-server applications today. It's there, it has a proven track-record. Firewalls support it. Proxies support it. 3'rd party integration is there. Build XML-RPC, build SOAP, build java-script/server integration to emulate a client-side application. It's archaic, but the cost is so low, and the developer expertise is so high, that alternatives are simply not considered.
The Intel Itanium was an excellent processor. It is one of the fastest CPU's out there for scientific computing. But's also one of the most primative. There is no instruction translation (of course because it's a 1'st generation CPU), so it can't adapt to bad compiled code. It's also an example of throwing money and resources at a design problem. But the Itanium has not been touted for it's mild nich superiority, but instead lambasted for lack of practical backward compatibiilty. IA-32 was designed into the Itanium instruction set, yet the impeedence mismatch between IA-32 and IA-64 pushes the performance envelop back into the stone ages. Not even Linux with it's hardware egnostic mantra could not save Itanium. The risks/costs were simple too great.
Depending on your language of choice. Container-based singleton management is an excellent design pattern. In Java, spring and picocontainer manage setter / constructor injection of singletons; possibly even hiding the fact that some objects are session-scope, request-scope or even non-singletons.
The code is managed by an XML file (or some external configuration); you get the effect of singletons, but the extensibility to swap out which implementation of the interface/base-class you use in which environment. And as you expressed concern, you don't have to worry about running multiple applications with isolated singletons. The component-manager is an instance variable (not a singleton), so you can have multiple isolated environments within the same application.
Makes testing a LOT easier too. If you use abstract / interface classes everywhere, you can easily swap out mock-instances for testing purposes. (having a testing-environment component-manager configuration file).
I'm speaking from the Java side, but the basic concept should be applicable to C++ if there aren't already implementations.
Remember the "prohibiting free exercise thereof" is more important than the unwritten "separation of church and state"
I agree that the government walks a fine line as it can't prohibit free worship. If a particular religion requires praying outside, and the only place you can do it is in a public park, then obviously there's going to be contention with the "officially sanctioned" use of public land for religious purposes. Some would argue that if a state-official happens to partake in the ritual on the public land, then they are infringing on non-member's rights. I do think, however, that this goes too far. Even the president of the United States is allowed to express bigoted opinions about the exclusive correctness of one subculture. The electing minority have hated presidents for less.
But understand the other end of the spectrum. Around the time that the US was founded, you were either for the state-church, or you were exiled / persecuted / killed. Many people who do not share the majority faith (myself included) are sensitized towards the possibility of this form of persecution coming back to haunt us. The moral-majority feels it is divine right to promote their ideals at the expense of non-believers. and often singleing out non-believers. Some even feel tremendous bigotry and are willing to take people's lives for their cause. America is full of examples where the "moral majority" persecuted individuals and groups. Secularism is a backlash from these European AND American roots.
Secularism is based on the belief that we can't trust the majority. History has shown time and again that we can't. So the United States has thus-far chosen to willfully restrict the proliferation of religious doctrine (the ultimate in justifying otherwise illegal/immoral activity). As a long enough period of time passes, and people forget their roots, they will make attempts to undo these artifical isolations. As an example, we placed "Under God" into the Pledge back in the 50's and 60's out of nationalism and anti Russianism (Communism has nothing to do with Atheism; marxism maybe). If you're Muslim, it's innappropriate to refer to God by any other name than Allah. If you're Athestic, having to say the pledge is to lie in public.
Forcing the pledge on someone is no different than forcing Jews to merely say "I accept Jesus Christ as the son of God". They may or may not care about such simple words, and may or may not be willing to die to avoid saying them. The pledge is something that allows you to state your nationalism. But part of this nation has been disagreement, so by singling out those that reject a religious ammendment to the pledge is to purposefully "exile" a minority subculture from expousing their nationalisitic pride.
The fight for secularism often has to do with government mandated institutions. If you are required by law to partake in an institution, and your local community is bigoted, then it is possible that you will be persecuted, not by the government, but indirectly through the hand of the government. Unfortunately, the most outspoken case of secularism aren't usually good examples of this, so Secularism gets a bad name.
I don't recall his name, but the man fighting to remove "Under God" from the pledge, and fighting to prevent their school for saying prayers, is a perfect example of bad publicity for the secular movement. He and his daughter aren't personally being violated in any way, except for his sense of repulsion. He's fighting for a vague principle of hypothetical oppression (the daughter doesn't even care). That unsubstantial situation is likely to do more harm, causing backlash from those that feel they are losing their sense of religion in this country. Such a situation is likely to over-compensate back towards a non-secular state. And thus, ironically, produce the sort of oppression that such secularists fight against.
In summary, Secularism and Non-Secularism are like ying-and-yang, never being rid of one another, but rather never staying in imbalance for long.
-Michael
If you're working on a small project by yourself, there's really no nead for the overhead of a version control system.
I completely disagree.. I version-control much of my home directory. This includes several of my dot-files and my home-bin-directory (for useful little non-system tools). Granted, this implies that I use a UNIX/Linux system.
Moreover, even simple one-off projects can get out of hand if you EVER have to move files around. Lets say you have a project that you only ever intended to run on one machine.. But then you're at work, home, friends-house or whatever, and you wanted to remember how you did some part of it. Well, the easiest thing to do, of course is ssh/ftp the files over.. Ok great... But now, that project gets updated. Months pass... Now you're on your friends machine and you've forgotten that changes have been made, so you don't re-copy the files back over.. Or lets say you used the copied image as a starting point, and you've made several changes since, adding new files. Now you have to manually compare each and every file to see if any are changed... So you don't even bother, and now you have a fork.
The key is that version-control allows you to organize your text-files. It's like putting them into a filing cabinet intead of literally leaving them scattered over your virtual desk-top. It promotes modularity and reuse, since you'll always be confident of the entire history of the file or project. You'll know with complete confidence that you could quickly build a project based on a previous one. It's the difference between writing one huge c-main function and creating header-files with separately compiled modules.
There's also one incredibly useful feature of version control.. An undelete that actually works. Lets say you "rm -r" your files. Lets say you use vi and accidently hit the caps lock and type for a little while without looking (all you need accidently do it type zz in that process and the changes are irreversable). Lets say a program goes wankers and starts modifying files indescriminately (say you use a text-formatting tool and it gives you unexpected results). These things happen over time.
In the old days, you'd hear people using word-processors and the phrase "save often" was used. checking in a version is like saving a known good copy. If you remember your 1980's days, you were far more use to complete catastropy. Now good system administrators perform nightly backups, but
a) you lose all the work that current day
b) when you quit the night before may not have been the files most perfect state over the past 24 hours. I know when I code, I'm perfectly willing to leave a document unfinished because a movie just came on, or I have a head-ache.
Next, often people set up separate users/directory-paths for which to manage the revsion control. Or even if you have group-write permissions, the files are stored on a separate host. This means that you have an added level of security from catostrophic demise. rm -r on your home directory means you've only lost the data since you last considered it stable. If you're disciplined, even a partition corruption won't hurt you.
Once you have a system, it takes 20 seconds to enter a project into a version control system. You just get into the habbit of doing so, and you reap the benifits.
If the memory leaks on someone else's system, it isn't my problem, is it?
There are very few types of memory leaks in Java, and they are very well understood and isolated. Compare that with C++ which has a greater propensity to leak memory than even c (since many c programmers use the stack instead of dynamic allocation wherever possible).
In Java, if you have a memory leak, you'll learn about it very quickly, and the memory error/stack-trace/profileability can usually quickly point you in the right direction (fixed-sized class memory, v.s. user-cached-and-not-released objects). In C++, for a sufficiently large app, good luck closing up the sieve.
Your pain of java means you are most likely familiar with AWT or Swing, which, depending on your VM, can be slow or a memory hog. Moreoever, many Java applications are not tuned to use a realisitic memory size, so there is a slow ramp-up period of excessive garbage collection until a desireable configuration is acquired by the VM. In production environments, this sort of tuning is done prior to roll-out.
The key difference is that DOS / Windows and even Mac applications are not generally designed for multi-month up-time. So the main difference between Java and non-Java-like applications is not readily apparent to the casual user.
I do agree, however, that for sufficiently small application life-cycles (such as the UNIX program "ls"), java is innappropriate. But this, again, falls into the category of applications not meant to be run for multiple months.
My Viewsonic VP171b consumes 33W and generates a bit of heat. Part of it is the very bright back-lighting. Could also be due to high refresh rate. The 21" version consume 70W. A quick look and just about all viewsonic's are in the 30W range.
But wouldn't a better environmental option be to enable power saving mode with an LCD screen? Double-whammy.
Just as a technicality, if power-saver mode is enabled for both a CRT and LCD, then your power-savings almost dissapears.. Average use per day would be like 4 hours M-F, for like 45 weeks / year. 4 * 5 * 45 * 70 = 63k W-hr or more like 3 pounds of savings per year. Hardly a double-wammy. I'm assuming that power-saving mode has equal power dessipation in both LCD and CRT.
OK, I'm nieve. How do you do that - disconnect from a running display?
/dev/null, except that pts-inquieries won't fail (because you're talking to a real pts instead of a generic file). The biggest advantage, of course, is that an end user can disconnect or reconnect from the intermediate "screen" multiplexer (given the appropriate permissions).
Screen is not graphical but instead a pts (pseudo-terminal) multiplexer. Meaning a background process sits inbetween your pts port and your real terminal. "Screen" accepts all output (logs some fraction and dumps history-overflow), such that the underlying applications have no ability to determine whether there's a physical terminal at the other end or not. By accepting all input, it prevents applications from pausing once 2k of stdout has been queued but not sent/accepted. It's similar to redirection output to
Another feature of screen is similar to "virtual desktop". Since you have a multiplexer, "screen" allows a single physical terminal to switch between multiple pts channels.. So if you have a dial-up-modem (direct terminal, not TCP/IP), you can have dozens of different "windows" with different applications running in each (multiple vi windows, several command prompts, several log files, etc). If the modem hangs up, you dial back in, and type "screen -r", and you're back as if nothing had happened. You're alternative was to run all applications with "nohup myapp myargs" and if the modem hung up, then stdout would be redirected to a file.. This way you don't lose the output or have an interruption in say a slow compilation. But the problem is that you can't regain interactive access to a something like vi window. (Course, text editors have their own recovery capabilities).
So the original poster was trying to say that they wanted these incredibly valuable features in a graphical form. vnc and rdesktop allow a user that has their network connection broken to be reconnected without the underlying graphical applications ever being made aware of the interruption. With X and a static IP-address, there are time-out issues. And more commonly we move to different machines or different access points and thus necessarily can not recover a graphical session with X.
X was designed as client-server with state. It is this state that necessarily prevents it from acting like VNC or rdesktop. "screen", vnc, and rdesktop keeps it state on the machine with the running application. X keeps the state on the machine with the physical monitor/keyboard/mouse. I believe the original idea of this design decision was to distribute resources. The application server only performs tasks related to function, not display. Graphics becomes simply the ability to handle events and send graphical commands to a network access point. The terminal is then responsible for all resources related to interpreting graphical commands. This is similar to the postscript paradigm. postscript is a series of "logo" like commands (draw a box from this point to this point), and the printing resource determins how to render the fonts/color schemes, etc. Unlike postscript, however, X graphical commands aren't encapsulatable into a portable relocatable format since there is bidirectional communication going on.
Another particular of X is its peer-application structure. To run X, in addition to the terminal software and the physical applications, you need a font-server and a window manager. While this is great for pluggability (and even clusterability; running a single-threaded graphical program across 4 different machines), it necessarily provides greater latency for even simple tasks.
vnc merely adds a multiplexing layer to the back-end of X or windows, just like screen. So vnc necessarily adds a layer of overhead to the graphical process. More importantly there is an impeedence mismatch between the graphical transport of vnc and that of X. X is designed to send postscript-like graphical commands (draw a square of this size fi
I am actually glad you can't "prove" that God exists nor that everything started from a sterile big bang...
I argue that you could not prove that God or the big bang exist, but you can easily disprove them. All one would need is sufficient evidence that is at least as trustworthy as the feeling that the sun will come up tomorrow (or any such qualitative measurement). Take for example the possibility of information time travel (or time tunneling); something that as yet can only be considered hypothetical and as a thought-excercize. By this I mean the ability to acquire information from a period of the past which skips all the time in between the past event and the current measurement (thereby not being polluted by intermediate events). My hypothesis comes purely from simplistic views of other forms of quantum tunneling (which unfortunately would suggest this only works at the atomic level, and not at a macro-scopic level).
Given this or more simply some yet undiscovered archeological evidence, we may find that sacred texts of the world are individually flawed due to the perspectives of their authors of the events written about. If such events where experienced by today's man they might not generate similar levels of inspiration / divination, and would be unlikely to have attained such followings. While it is entirely possible that the events would seem as miraculous today as then, or that such evidence is necessarily unobtainable by the holy power(s) that be, finding such evidence would provide great pause. Much like the rather frustrating Michelson's (sp?) "null result" on the directionalty of the speed of light.
My point here is mainly that the basis of modern faith is not an intrinsic belief system.. We don't instinctively "feel" that there was a big bang. And we don't instinctively "feel" that we need to go to confession every Sunday. These were concepts passed down to us by our respected elders. Some religious and scientific figures work on the fore-front of these concepts and help mold them; refining the contradictions away. The question is whether the pillars of the faith; the key "stories" a) happened as they were described and b) imply what is currently said about them. This is the case both for religion and science. The link between past and future is our collection of cognitive causalities. Religion asks the moral question, and science asks the physical question, but both are questions of cause and effect. And both are subject to constant review.
I personally am content in disbeliving the factuality of all sacred texts I've read/read-of thus far, but can offer no further counter-proof than is available to the common believer; a loose collection of lesser probabilities of events and the greater likelihood of sacred construction evolving out of religion's inherent societial strength (as is apparent in the absolute diversity in religion, similar to the diversity of life).
In conclusion, what I have described is obviously the disproving of the factual points of certain passed-down religions, which is obviously different than disproving God. But I will make the assertion that one defines their God not as "omnipotent", but as one they would recognize by the stories told of them.
To support this, recognize that in Judao-Christian-Islam (and Hindu), the God and the Devil(s) seem to have super-natural powers. Merely healing or raising a city would not allow one to distinguish between the two. In Judao-Christian-Islam in particular, this is important for there can be only one God. To call the Devil a God would be blasphamy. Yet one could not know one from the other except that all of these religions state that one intrinsicly recognizes the difference. Thus there are characteristics aside from mere apparent omnipotence that defines them.
Thus by refuting the factualness of sacred stories, one's God becomes unknowable. If Mosus carved the 10 commandments himself, if Jesus was merely a wise/clever man, if Abraham and Mohammad merely
No I call people who target and kill civilians with car bombs terrorists. You can call them freedom fighters if you want but if you can't tell the difference you have bigger problems.
Ok, then we should invade Ireland, all of Africa, and most of middle and south America.. Because these people have "freedom fighters/ terrorists" as well. Oh, and we should probably have layed genocide to the southern US states for when they terrorized the north prior and during the civil war.
Terrorism is a facade that the establishment lays on the heads of insurgents. Freedom fighters is a facade that the oppressed lays on their own insurgency. The point is that the political process has broken down, and there are large segments of society which do not have representation. It is highly likely that they will rebell.. Yes there are those power-mongers which don't care about representation, but merely want to overthrow the government for their self rule, but this sort of activity doesn't tend to inspire an entire nation into revolt. You need a cause, and that cause can only exist if there is a voice that isn't being respected (much less heard).
But, please, show me an example of a case were the United States intentionally attacked civilian targets in Iraq for only that purpose.
During both Iraqi invasions, America took out ALL radio communication centers with smart bombs.. Yes they were targeted, but you better believe your ass that civilians that had nothing to do with the government died on those days.
The pentegon, the political centers, and our financial centers were the targets of Osamma's attack; these were just as strategic as the civilian communication centers of Iraq. (in terms of the limited attacking resources). They didn't bomb hospitals, nuclear power plants, dams or schools. They were military targets, aimed at crippling a nation; not destroying it.. And guess what, to a large extent, they were successful. Do not underestimate or make primitive your enemy, for they will surely over-come you. Great nations in history have fallen exactly because of such underestimations.
Not to say that Bush is evil per se. Just a meglomaniac manipulative weasle frat boy.
It has been said (on last weeks' Bill Mawr by one of the Kennedy's in a book of theirs) that a prominent member of the Regan administration who carried over as the secretary of the interior in the current Bush administration has made public statements that "I don't know how many years we have left before the second comming", and thus "waste not, want not".
If you honestly believe that there are resources that would go to waste if not used before a deadline, then it would be logical to consume them away today. Of course, this would require absolute certainty, since you'd have no backup plan.
While this may or may not be true, consider that if you know that your term is limited and you won't personally have to clean up the messes you make (more than 8 years down the line), then why wouldn't you make use of every resource at your disposal today (at the expense of someone else having to clean it up).
In terms of natural resources, there's always the more expensive "natural energy" sources. We can always desalinate ocean water; we can always grow food in a lab; we can always resort to high nuclear / geo-thermal / wind / solar power sources. The only caveat is that resources will cost tremendously more.. BUT, there's an interesting catch. If it costs more, then we have inflation. If we have inflation then suddenly our past debts are less of a burden. Sure we could have an economic crisis, but again, that's somebody else's problem. They key is that the world won't end; it's very resilient.
I think the key is that we'll run out of resources some-day, the Bush doctrine merely says "what's the difference between running out tomorrow or in 100 years, it's only the difference of one generation".
Thus, don't be too quick to call this logic evil or stupid or illogical. There is obvious cost-benifit analysis going on.. The problem is that some segments of society are being given highest priority; garuntees, while the remainder have a potential saving plan that may or may not pay off. It's not very different from saying that we have to garuntee a social safety net and the rich have to pay for it. The poor may very well only get poorer in such a situation (loss of fundamental motivation), and the rich may dwindle in number, thereby having the whole system collapse. So there is no correct answer, it's just a matter of "who's your daddy?".
Lastly, on arrogance, all you need to do is watch a military movie or watch the apprentice to see why arrogance is promoted in the commanding ranks. Better to be a "strong and inspiring leader" than be correct but late and dead. Look at hitler, his charisma and self-confidence inspired a nation into what must have seemed to some insiders as insanity. But after suppression after WWI, massive economic collapse, etc, the people were starving for leadership. And they would only accept the strong confident type. After 9/11, the common people of America also wanted a confident leader, and Bush unfortunately provides this. You can't be openly rational, by expressing your concerns, doubts, and temporary confusions to the public. This has to happen behind closed doors. The governed can't know your weaknesses (in terms of not being perfect in simply knowing the correct answers). This is why businesses deliberate behind closed doors. So Kerry's rational, inquisitive, non-self-assured (non-arrogant) approach isn't sitting well with the public.
We like to look at a clever turn of events, then look back and see "who was clever enough to perfectly predict this". We call them gamblers, pioneers, people with great fore-sight. While some of it is true (people who stick to the fundamentals and don't gyrate with the current fads), a lot of it is shere luck. The survivors are falsely inspirational, because it's easy to trace back through decendants and look at how only 1 in 1,000 surived a great calamity. What's hard is to look at that initial 1
The other replyer did a good job, but missed your question, which was that you have to recompile on every execution.
On SUN, -server means that a full JIT is applied to all code before it is run (though some enhancements might not be possible until a few runs are performed; run-time profiling / enhancements). -client means that code is only JIT'd if it's run more than a few times (meaning it's a hot-spot which is worth trading off compile-time for run-time). While -client does a good amount of inital JITing, you can see that there's not a terrible amount of performance difference between -client and -server. At least not compared to gcj.
This should convince you that the overhead of compiling is nothing compared to the amount of work being executed. In my experience, runing tomcat with -server v.s. -client is night-and-day as far as load-time is concerned (2 to 3 times slower to get into a state ready to accept web-requests), but I don't notice tremendous differences in runtime performance (compilation is hidden in between web requests). What does this say about the differences between tomcat and the benchmark? Again that there must be several orders of magnitude more time spent executing than loading.
If you wanted to write "ls" in java, then yes, you'd prefer something LIKE gcj (don't know what their load time is so I can't say with certainty). Something that does very little, and thus wants a minimalist foot-print is not going to like java. Even perl was too much over-head a few years ago for most small tasks, which is why awk, sed are still in use today, even though perl totally blows them out of the water for even the most trivial tasks. Today machines are fast enough that the human-perceivable difference in latency goes away. Perhaps when we reach 10GHZ VLIW 1024reg CPUs and have 1TB of RAM, the latency of "java -server" will go away too. Note multi-CPU / hyper-threading isn't going to help single-application load-time.
SUN JVM 1.5 has already started to do what you're essentially asking though; they've pre JIT'd most of the rt.jar file. Much of this file is used for even the most trivial possible hello-world application, so it made sense to pre-store that material. I suspect in future versions, we'll see dynamicly cached JIT code, which would tremendously improve start-up time. Of course, with major java applications (web servers, database wrappers) the only time you tend to restart java is when you're upgrading the jar files, so who knows if anyone really cares.
From where I sit, other than Oil, nothing is really rising.
Well, the CPI shows steady manageable inflation, but I've seen lots of inflation in my personal life. Only problem is that I haven't been scientific about which years which consumer items trippled in price. Most items I've noticed have gone up by 50% to 100%. Blockbuster rentals, on average were about $3, now there's up to $4.75. Movie going use to cost $7, and now costs $9, AND the matinee (formerly $5, now $7) has been moved from 5pm down to noon (reducing to almost zero the number of times I can make it).
Don't even mention housing prices or renting (though I demonstrate in another article how I think this is Bush's direct fault as well as a reaction to the market bubble, and not an inflation factor), but the net result is that rent goes up (as property value, taxes, etc go up). Cell phone sur-charges have gone up from $1 to $7 for a $40 plan (effectively rasing the cost of an average plan from $41 to $47). Cable bill goes up with inflation. Electric fluxuates too often for me to get a good idea.
As I said, not a scientific measurement, but I definitely notice inflation.
Oil prices, I would argue are more dynamic and thus would be hard to calculate inflation levels, but I would be willing to bet that we'll never see $10/barrel again. This will have ramifications throughout all sectors of the economy, given enough time.
That being said, I agree that the biggest fear is losing the status as a nexus for world funds. We represent something like 90% of all monetary exchanges (people first change their money into dollars, then change it into the currency of their neighboring country). We also have the largest physical number of debt dollars, while simultaneously demonstrating a reasonable ability to pay off the debt in the far future, and thus people feel good parking their extra money here.. There is another good part about this though.. We are the worlds largest consumer.. People want to sell to us.. Problem is that they don't buy too much from us (at least not proportionately). Thus the market would normally deflate the US dollar. But this would make their products more expensive to US consumers, so China, Taiwan, Japan, etc all decide to use all their excess trade-deficit dollars to purchase US bonds. This way their desired exchange rates are maintained. Our Gov. bonds are safe resting houses for money they otherwise aren't ready to spend.
If Japan, for example, decided to rest their excess money in the EU, they would have to first take their US bond money out of the US; exchanging it for Euros. This exchange rate is already getting bad. Doing so will only promote the problem and provide larger losses.. Also, don't forget that they still have to keep money inside the US to keep their desired relative price levels, so they can't simply take their profit in Yen then buy directly from the EU at the Yen Euro rate. Individual companies can, but the government (who acts on their behalf) can not. Losing their exchange rate means Hondas suddenly get more expensive, etc. (They can only obsorb so much loss of profit).
But certainly, any loss in confidence in US bonds will require an increase in interest rate. I just don't think it will be a rapid or even a dramatic event.
Finally, The Fed is [supposedly] independent of the Treasury, and thus could give a crap about short-term Government revenue targets. The Fed is tasked with inflation, employment GDP management. So long as the Fed believes there are unemployed people and that inflation is not incombent, they can maintain low interest rates all they want. The Fed literally prints money when it purchases US Bonds.. It keeps interest rates low BY purchasing Bonds. So in effect, what the Fed is doing is purchasing back bonds owned partially by the Japanese or Europeans or what-have-you. If the Bonds mature while in Fed hands, the Fed forgives the debt and doesn't require the Government to pay back the matured bond. Th
Without deficit spending the government could only spend what it had received from taxes in a particular year.
The problem isn't whether we should allow deficit spending. Certainly there is no way of knowing what the next years' income will be. The problem is that we are budgeting expendetures which exceed all projected income. It's fine to be optimistic and budget for the best case revenue, but to knowingly spend more than you'll make in the foreseeable future is something that requires serious scrutiny. Surely being in a legitimate war where the future of your country is at stake is adaquate excuse for deficite spending. In fact, these usually involve what are called "war bonds", which are easier for the government to deal with. If you're in a depression, then you come up with some package like "The new deal".
Now, as best I can figure, Bush believed he could squander the future to make today better, and somehow come out ahead. He squandered international acceptance in hopes that the ends would justify the means in Iraq and Afghanistan (the jury is still out on Afghanistan, but it's too shadowed by Iraq, so everybody is willing to use it as a compromise tool).
He squandered our comparatively wonderful deficit level. Hopeing that by borrowing today, the economy would pass off this recession and thus be in a better fiscal standing tomorrow. As far as I can tell, the reasoning is that by both spending more and borrowing more (so as to burden the citizens less), companies would operate with an extra boost, consumers would have a new burst of spending capability, and the government wouldn't have to cut back on spending (which might add to the bubble of retracted purchases).
There is a flaw in this direction. The primary tax break dollars went not to businesses, but to would-be entrepeneurs. This type of money typically goes to the stock market / bond market. By simultaneously keeping bond rates low, there is a bigger incentive to put money into the stock market instead of bond market (and companies also have less competition for selling corporate bonds). But people haven't trusted the stock market since the crash; while some companies might have become "bargains", most are still over priced (by virtue of PE-ratios). So people are throwing their money into safe real-estate (the one thing that hasn't been hurt by the crash).
So Bush really only helped the real-estate market. Take the inheritance tax away as well, and by-golly, this is the best place to put your money bar-none. Course places like DC (my area) are expected to be bubble markets and thus not be as safe as initially believed; but time will tell.
The bigger problem is the consumers.. You can't sell anything unless you have buyers; and with the exception of military hardware, there aren't many avid buyers. Why are we in such a rut? Think of he stock market crash of 29. People were doing so well, that they were being optimistic.. They saw that having money ment that you could make more money. Seeing this success happen again and again gives a sense of confidence. Thus people start making consumer purchases based on projected future income levels. We start buying on "credit". I too was a victim of this mindset. I was layed off right along with the bubble, and my new income level could barely even make the interest payments, much less continue my previously purchasing level. Thankfully I primarily purchased assets instead of expending that money (e.g. I'm still using all that nice electronic equipment I bought in that day).
So when the bubble hit, consumers saw that their projected income levels were a thing of the past. But instead of just adjusting their budget to new income levels, they had to pay off their back-debt. Suddenly there was zero disposable income. (I'm exaggerating obviously). Of what I hear on the radio (NPR), apparently all income levels had this problem. People that make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year were spending well beyond their means jus
While I respect what you're trying to say, the fact of the matter is that American Soldiers and Politicians are not being very respectful of civilian casualties. Just today on CNN, there was a controversy about a released camera footage of a air-targeted bomb which hit calmly walking civilians. It is hard to believe from the footage that the slowly walking line of people were covert militia. Michael Moore's movie showed soldiers talking about shooting at anything that moved at first.
While, it is natural in a war situation, especially with 18 year old troops, to have bad judgement on whom to shoot, my problem is that I am not seeing reconciliation for these atrocities. Moreover, I'm hearing self-praise for how well we're "targeting" to avoid civilian casualties.. How many weddings need to be destroyed before there is a public appology for our less than perfect Army. To say that we only hit 5 building suspected of military importance and avoided damaging non-targets is great. But such numbers are fantacy. If the aftermath of the cosovo war is any basis, our ability to target and actually hit desired targets is good for homeland propaganda, and not much else.
Yes, it's better than carpet bombing to be sure, but please be respectful of our occupied countries, for fear of God's wrath if not the impending retaliatory terrorism.
Funny thing, is that when reagan got into office, the debt servicing was less than .1% of the budget. When Poppa Bush left it was at about 13% of the budget. When Clinton left, it was less than 10%. Now, it is something like 17%.
Hehe, and don't forget that the Fed is being nice to Mr. Bush by keeping interest rates low.. This means that the "burden" is far less than it would normally be. All this new deficit spending is going into the newer low-interest bonds, as well as payment for the maturing bonds. Pretty soon, the rates will be higher, so "rolling over" the debt is going to get MUCH more expensive.
Sad thing is that the candidates only expect to half the deficit spending within 4 years, not eliminate it. Hopefully GDP increases and thereby tax revenues, otherwise we may see a downward spiral (a la USSR) much sooner than our comfort.
No, it isn't. Nice try, though.
No it isn't, yes it is..Ahh.. I love these sorts of baseless arguments. Ok, I'll bite.
I agree and disagree with the previous poster. Bush is basing some of his policies on the old Testiment.. If he specifically quotes a reference from the old testiment instead of the new testiment, it either shows that he's not careful about his references, or he's strategically trying to win the minds of both Christians AND Jews (who would otherwise discout New Testiment passages). Either way, it's politics. We gain little insight into Bush's mind when he quotes a passage. I personally do not believe he is a biblical scholar; only a casual follow who understands the political benifits of referencing the bible. If this is true, then it serves little purpose to delve too deeply into the significance of particular passages he quotes. It's likely something he's come across and seems to promote his agenda: Gays bad, Muslims bad, Prostilitizing good.
Good thing we know that God actually did write the Bible.
:)
And it's a good thing we're all Catholics so we can trust that the Holy Roman Catholic church was completely unbiased in which of the thousands of books available by 300AD were God's true voice, and which were to be labled as heretical (I don't remember the exact phrase the nicene counsil used).
And it's good that a few dozen of the heretical books, such as those in the Dead sea area can so easily be distinguished from the correct ones.. You can tell by the leather binding that God obviously choose because of it's styleishness. That way we know for certain that Jesus didn't Marry Ms. Magdaline and have children.
Shoot, but then there are the tablets of Moroni (mormon bible in translation), and other discovered works that are the corner-stone of some of America's most financially successfull branches of Christianity.
Personally I think God just likes watching us solve puzzles.
God's word does change...hence the sending of his son, Jesus Christ.
And the sending of 500 separate and incompatible Christian branches (each claiming to know God's more modern word, and knowing that all other 499 branches are doomed to hell).. Damn, you're good.
As for me, I'd rather the President be a man of conviction, who makes decisions and stands by them (even if I don't always agree with them).
What does this have to do with Bush? He is only good at making you think he is a man of conviction. He purposefully chooses vague words which make it hard to see he's back-tracking, giving in, giving up, etc. He says one thing to the American people when petitioning for the war in Iraq, then says the opposite to the UN in a superficial attempt to gain their support. He makes Ossamma the primary target and focus of his speaches for the first several months post 9/11, then uses Alkaida, then WMD, then Sadam, then back to nameless "terrorists", because polls show that that still works.
He expresses seriousness and one-mindedenss for our educational system, but only long enough to win the election (no child left behind). Now we have a token accountability system which costs more than states can afford, and no word from the administration how how to resolve this in his next 4 years. conviction? perhaps, but no follow-through. (And lets' not forget that his conviction for pushing accountability on the school board is uni-lateral, his administration wants nothing to do with accountability himself.. So what he actually "strongly believes" is beyond me).
Conviction of faith-based organizations.. Perhaps. This is a classic example of conviction. But I don't know what he thinks he is; maybe southern lynch-mob baptist, but he certainly doesn't demonstrate the Christianity that I know.. Where is "turn the other cheeck", "being meek", "being humble" [at least before God and in reguards to him], "making your yes mean yes, and your no mean no" (referring to his changing positions over time, and the likelihood of alterior motivations for going to war in Iraq in the first place), "forgive our transgressors", "giving your shirt to the man who asks for your cloak" [referring to fully paying our dues to UN / World Bank / IMF or maintaining Social Security], "no eye for an eye" [revenge against Aurthor Andersen, Iraq, Martha Stuert, which suspiciously keeping Haliburton and MS on a do-not-touch list].
In fact, which philosophy do you think that Bush actually adopts from his "favorite philospoher, Jesus Christ"? I can't think of any. The ONLY philosophy I can see is the promotion of the concept of Christianity, which is recurrently the "promotion of the concept of Christianity". I personally grew up under a Christian label (Catholocism), and I greatly cherish most of the above philosophies, though I have personally rejected the Christian rite (ritual / mysiticism, e.g. the prime motivation to adhere to the above philosophies). But many Christians today seem to reject the above philosophies in actual practice, but cling to the core rites (which were mostly symbolic interpretations of what Jesus really intended; apparent because virtually all of modern practiced Christianity comes from writings after Jesus). Bush, being a politician obviously clings to the best sales tactics, which is that "he supports Christianity", just like the appropriate response to the question of foreign trade is, "I support a strong US dollar", even though you have no clue what that means (and you're not supposed to; it definitely does NOT mean having many times greater value than other currencies, since that would kill our economy. At best it means being a primary focus of international trade).
In all of the above, I am not supporting Kerry, since I could not argue that he has any more conviction than Bush. I like McCain myself; he's the only candidate that I haven't seen flounder on topics, nor does he seem to be a personal sales-man like both Bush and Kerry are. Course that's why McCain lost the primaries last time around.
This might be the end of the hacked by Chinese index pages!" Reader Kent adds
If you use https, then China couldn't hack your pages today. Now if you're implying that even https could be hacked, then quantum encryption doesn't provide you any benifit.
The reason is that you can only quantumly encrypt a single point-to-point channel (haven't read the article, so you could make a lier out of me). And unless you have a direct connection to the end-point in question, you're going to have to go through a gateway. That gateway necessarily needs to see the contents of your message [header]. And more importantly I believe all chinese internet connections run through state-owned gateways.
Additionally, even fiber-optics have limited range, and I suspenct that the quantum-encrypted messages are passing through such a medium. Thus there must be repeaters which will establish separate quantum connection segments. Each repeater is a possible exploit point. (Again, the article could prove me wrong).
While I wasn't completely careful, I don't believe BS is in order.
Second of all, a capacitor and a transistor aren't the same at all! How are you going to dope the air between two conductors with an N or a P channel?
I don't see how you can say this.. A Field Effect transistor functions on the principle of the capacitive effect. Yes the NPN/PNP junctions are a separate operation, but the basis of controlling them is through capacitance. Likewise, it is my understanding that the basis of this communication mechanism is fields. All that capacitance needs is a dialectric to inhibit direct current, so what's the problem here? The chips can use non-conductive contact points.
The signals are carried on metal when they're inside the chip!
Certainly, but metal does not conduct through semiconductors directly efficiently. The aluminum/copper contact points have several layers of composites to provide a gradual change in material (band gap) condusive to the flow of electrons.
Every contact point is a discontinuity which causes reflection (noise), and every bend of the metal causes phase shifting (more noise). Thus what I was trying to say (though you are correct in that what I wound up writing is confusing), is that routing the contacts out to an end of the chip and traferring to ever larger contact points until finally reaching the massive external pins, then physically contacting PCB contacts that travel several centimeters, then reversing the process is likely to be a longer trip than a non-conductive purely-field based effect. Yes it's possible that routing the signals through to the capacitive contact points could have their own deficiencies possibly even worse than running outside with standard wires; but my initial impression is that it's a cleaner design.
Do you really think someone is sitting their manually punching hundreds of pins on millions of CPUs?
You misunderstood what I meant by "manual".. This implied mechanical operation.. Which a machine by definition does.. This is as opposed to the etching process which is infinitely more precise. The soldering process is one of the main reasons for my above ranting about using external wires. It represents a large reflection point due to non-uniform material.
Just to clearify to the un-initiated. It is the exact same technique that allows CMOS transistors to work (the basis of most CPU transistors).
CMOS-FET = Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor - Field Effect Transistor
That's semiconductors separated by oxide (oxidized silicone or glass) to allow fields derived from differing voltages on either side of the glass to affect conductivity and thereby provide actuatable signals. All this new system does is replace the Oxide with something else; namely the walls of the outside of the chip and the unavoidable air-gap.
Obviously this alternate medium is not as efficient as normal hyper-thin glass, BUT it's more efficient than transferring physical electrons from silicon to copper and amplifying it such that you can induce a measurable current down the coppy wire several centimeters away. More-over, it's more practical to etch micro-wire paths on the edge of a chip than to manually pin-punch chips like we do today. We can make such signal points smaller and more articulate.
The ONLY problem (as outlined in the article) is keeping these micro-signals aligned.. If you're off by even half a capacitive cell, then you're fields aren't going to be strong enough, and depending on cell-spacing, you're likely to generate noise to adjacent cells.
Add to this some context.
* Most web applications are not written in C++/C
* More and more client-applications are being written in Java/.Net due to maintainability
* There is an impedance mismatch between OO systems and RDBMS systems
** Bridging this gap often involves very non-performant abstractions:
*** wrapping bean-objects around rows
*** storing intermediate copies of beans for caching
*** making copies of beans for transactional purposes.
*** redundantly applying data-constraint rules
Essentially re-inventing the RDBMS wheel.
Thus, if you're already going to write the application in Java, then there is a tremendous advantage to avoiding the performance bottlenecks of the impedance mismatch.
Think of what a c/c++ database does in the best case.. It compiles a SQL script, loads internal relationships to columns/rows.. Accesses the in-memory indexes, and then formats/serializes the in-memory rows for output.
Java has to deserialize the text-stream, instantiate numerous objects; possibly unicodifying the data. Then whatever abstraction layers may be applied to the raw object-array result-set have to be applied.
If the data was locally available, then it could be stored in such a way that, for read-only access, it might be possible to avoid copying, and merely have it return a wrapper for the raw data. Zero latency, and practically zero additional extra work. While this is effectively the same as cached data, here we only store the data once on disk and once in memory.
"hsqldb" is an example that pretty much does the above. You still get a SQL interface if you desire though. Only catch is that hsqldb isn't as feature-rich as many RDBMS systems yet. I'm sure the IBM java-database is merely a feature-rich sister of hsqldb.
And don't forget that many java API's still use raw c-code to do intensive or tight-data-structure work.