Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Folks:

An older relative who uses AOL dialup (their last customer?) was asking for advice on a new PC to buy. I said “Since you have Verizon FiOS and an old analog tube TV, maybe you should consider getting a Sony Internet TV and just read email and write documents on that. Then you’d have a nice HDTV and could do your computing from your easy chair.” A Sony 40-inch “Google TV” costs $800, about the same as a decent PC. It comes with a wireless keyboard. It runs the Google Chrome browser. I assume it has an Gmail app. Is it practical for reading email and doing word processing with Google Docs as well as generally surfing the Web?

I’m wondering if a big issue would be the viewing distance and consequent small size of text. Currently this dialup user is viewing a 17″ VGA screen. Text is fuzzy and there isn’t much screen space, but he is sitting at a conventional desk so is pretty close to the screen.

Or should he wait another year when he can expect to be able to surf the Web and read Gmail on a typical microwave or toaster oven?

Thanks in advance for comments.

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One issue that has come up in Wealth, War and Wisdom is the amount that Germany owed in reparations following World War I. From a quick Google search, it seems that Germany owed about 83 percent of its GDP at the time and had to pay 2.5 percent of GDP every year. Conventional history textbooks present this as an unbearably high burden that Germans could not handle and therefore they needed to vote for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

Attitudes toward debt must have changed considerably since the 1920s. Japan owes more than 200 percent of GDP. The U.S. governments (federal, state, and local) owe about 100 percent (flashy ource; boring source; Washington Post). The U.S. debt service as a percentage of GDP is forecast to rise to 3.1 percent (source) for federal debt alone. If we add another 2 percent for the states, which is probably too low since they pay a highest interest rate than the feds, that’s 5 percent of GDP or double what the Germans supposedly could not possibly afford. This page of 2010 data indicates that the world average for debt service was 4.6 percent of GDP.

What has changed such that 2.5 percent was considered unbearable in 1918 but 4.6 percent is normal today?

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I stopped by my favorite bike shop, ATA Cycle in Concord, Massachusetts, to pick up my ten-year-old Trek hybrid. For $250 they replaced the persistently troublesome rear derailleur and shifter (one of the things that I’ve never figured out about bicycles is why a repair or tune-up almost always costs more than an entire new bike from Walmart or Costco). The owner, Husam Sahin, a road biking enthusiast from Turkey, said “they only made that drivetrain for one year and now you know why”.

Casually leaning up against the counter was a Storck road bike. “It’s a carbon fiber frame from Germany,” Sahin explained. “All of the components are from Japan, though. I’m delivering another one just like it over there in the window.” He demonstrated the motorized Shimano derailleurs, powered by a lithium battery just underneath the back of the seat. “The battery is good for 1000 miles,” Sahin noted, “and there are eight shift buttons in different places around the handlebars.”

Was there a big market for a bicycle like that? “It’s $10,000 just for the frame and $25,000 with all of the components,” Sahin noted, “but still there is a two-month waiting list. On the other hand, I can’t sell any $500 bicycles to young people.” He arranged his hands like a teenager playing a video game with his thumbs.

[http://nbda.com/articles/industry-overview-2010-pg34.htm shows that the number of adult-sized bicycles sold in the U.S. is currently about the same as in 1986, a year in which the population was 240 million (22 percent smaller than today), the real GDP per capita was supposedly smaller, and the real cost of a bicycle was no doubt higher due to the lack of Chinese imports (the average price of a bicycle today, including kids’ bikes, is just $79 or $38 in 1986 money).]

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Walking around your yard and see a 3-4″ limb or entire tree trunk that needs to be cut through? The lightweight ARS Pruning Folding Turbocut Saw fits nicely in a coat pocket. It is infinitely superior to the Fiskars equivalent sold at Home Depot and not much more expensive. I own two already, so think that I will buy a slightly longer non-folder ARS saw: ARS Straight Blade Professional Arborist Saw. Also worth considering: ARS pruner.

[This is part of my personal scheme to help our Japanese brothers and sisters recover from the tsunami.]

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As the U.S. economy’s growth continues to disappoint, various folks are calling for an increase in government spending. If U.S. businesses aren’t expanding then government should step in and do the spending and hiring itself. In the classical economic analysis of this process (see Keynesian economics) there is no adjustment made for the fact that government spending might not be as efficient as private business spending.

As the owner of a very small Boston-based helicopter charter company, I spent one morning this week with a very bright and experienced FAA safety inspector who drove out to my house in his government-issued car to inspect our records. This helicopter charter operator is licensed in the special “single pilot 135” category, which generally means that the owner is the pilot and nobody else can fly paying customers. The FAA inspector, however, was working from a checklist that applies to all 135 operators. We went through a bunch of questions relating to how familiar was I with the procedures for hiring additional pilots and making sure that I had checked with their previous employers to find out if they’d ever failed a drug test. The FAA inspector also looked at my monthly duty time records to make sure that I hadn’t flown more than 1400 hours in the preceding 12 months (FAR 135.67). No Boston helicopter charter company with a single helicopter has ever flown more than about 50 hours per year, but we went through page after page of reports showing either 0 hours flown or 0.5 hours flown. Finally, the FAA inspector looked at my random drug testing program to make sure that everything was in place. I’m subject to the same drug testing requirements as United Airlines. I am the drug testing coordinator for our company, so I am responsible for scheduling drug tests and surprising employees when it is their turn to be tested. As it happens, I’m also the only “safety-sensitive employee” subject to drug testing, so basically I’m responsible for periodically surprising myself with a random drug test. As a supervisor, I need to take training so that I can recognize when an employee is on drugs. But I’m also the only employee, so really this is training so that I can figure out if I myself am on drugs. As an employee, I need to take a second training course so that I learn about all of the ways that my employer might surprise me with a random drug test and find out about drug use. But I’m also the employer so really I’m learning about how I might trap myself.

Given the costs of this guy’s salary, pension, government-issued car, supervisor, and office space, I estimate that the records inspection cost the U.S. taxpayer $500. Just a handful of these inspections, therefore, would have paid for an online system that would eliminate the need for inspectors to drive around to folks’ hangars and houses.

Five minutes after the FAA inspector left, I received a phone call. “I’m from the FAA and we’d like to schedule an audit of your drug testing program.” I remarked that a fully qualified FAA inspector was barely out of the driveway and had just gone through every document that I had on the subject. “He was from the FSDO (Flight Standards District Office)? That’s a completely different department. We’re going to send two inspectors up from Atlanta next month.” Why two? “We always send them in pairs.” What did they want? “We’re going to fax you a detailed list of all of the information that we need and you should immediately contact your drug testing provider (Lexis/Nexis) to tell them that you’re being audited. There is a bunch of information that you can get only from them. As soon as you get the fax, you should re-fax it to Lexis/Nexis.” I said that I didn’t have a fax machine, so he promised to send the information via U.S. mail. It could not be emailed.

As we also deal with some separate FAA maintenance regulators, I think it is fairly likely that we will meet with more FAA employees this year than with paying charter customers (most of the business is sightseeing or flight instruction; those activities are regulated separately and by different FAA employees; we have a separate drug-testing program for the sightseeing operation).

The FAA performs a valuable service in conducting checkrides with charter pilots and looking at maintenance records, though what they do has considerable overlap with our insurance company, which employs its own check airmen. But the paperwork inspection and drug testing program audits (this is our second) are done at a cost that would bankrupt any private enterprise that was subject to competition. My interactions with other government agencies have been much more limited, but I don’t see why they would be different, on average, than the FAA. If so, government stimulus money is not a substitute for private spending because the government spends money in ways that no private business or individual would choose to spend money.

[Update: This posting read out loud in Congress by a U.S. Air Force veteran.]

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An awesome new biology journal paper showing how just how wrong a distinguished professor sitting at a desk at Harvard University can be. It is also a good example of the hubris of those modern scientists who believe themselves to be vastly smarter than their 19th century forebears.

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I’ve started to read Wealth, War and Wisdom, a book that supposedly answers the question of what investments are best-suited to preserving value despite large-scale catastrophes. The author, Barton Biggs, is a former Morgan Stanley executive who now manages a $1 billion hedge fund. He’s also a World War II buff, apparently, and tries to correlate stock market performance with events that, in retrospect, were turning points in the war. Biggs claims that investors were much better at predicting the future of the war than were politicians, journalists, and military experts. So far it is not fully convincing but it is a unique look at World War II history in which battles are significant primarily for their effect on world markets!

Skimming ahead, I’m not sure how practical the book will prove to be as an investment guide. In Japan stocks and urban land proved to be good investments for investors who bought prior to the destruction of World War II. Farm land, on the other hand, did not do well. In France, by contrast, land and gold came through the war much better than stocks. In nearly every country afflicted by war, stocks outperformed bonds for the periods 1900-1949 and 1940-1949. One caveat that Biggs offers is that you can’t buy and hold individual stocks, since once-promising companies inevitably decay (computer nerds get branded as dullards by Biggs: “IBM and Intel were once great innovating companies, but now they are corporate research laboratories. Bill Gates was the innovator, not Microsoft”). How does Biggs, a professional money manager collecting fat fees, recommend to his readers that they maintain a diversified equities portfolio? Through low-cost index funds: “It pains me to write it, but professional investors don’t do much better [than individual investors picking stocks and underperforming the S&P] on a statistically significant, risk-adjusted basis.”

Biggs’s strongest recommendation is to avoid being Jewish, especially in Europe: “German Jews, brilliant cultured, and cosmopolitan as they were, were too complacent. They had been in Germany so long and were so well established, they simply couldn’t believe that there was going to be a program that would endanger them. … As a result the German Jews had relatively little wealth outside of Germany, and reacted sluggishly to the rise of Hitler…”. Other regions of the world get some coverage as well: “In Iraq the wealthy Iraqi Jews who had lived there for centuries misjudged how fast and ruthlessly Saddam Hussein … would move to expropriate their wealth. … The same calamity befell the Indonesian Chinese who failed to anticipate the rapidity of the fall of Sukarno. … No matter how safe and secure your home country appears, even if it’s the United States, every truly wealthy person should have some assets elsewhere. History suggests that nothing is forever. … New Zealand recently has become the Shangri-la of choice for paranoid American hedge-fund grand masters. Currently wealthy Russians are paying up for residential properties in London, New York, and the south of France.”

Given the fact that the U.S. has not experienced a war on its soil since 1865 and that he is writing mostly for an American audience, Biggs seems a little obsessed with war. On the other hand, being invaded and conquered has been the most dramatic cause of wealth destruction throughout human history. And the U.S. has been at war for much of the past 70 years (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States for the full list). Who is to say that if we keep starting wars we won’t eventually lose one badly enough to find the enemy here in Boston?

[One thing that we can’t fault Biggs for is timing the market for readers of books about surviving financial crises. According to the Amazon reader reviews, the hardcover hit the streets in January 2008, just one month after the U.S. economy entered the Great Recession, and came out in paperback in October 2009, just a few months after the recession officially ended (July 2009).]

More: Read Wealth, War and Wisdom.

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Folks:

I’d like to spec out the required front-end server hardware for a database application with the following characteristics:

• Oracle server in the back end with at least 30 CPUs (existing machine; not sure how many cores in each CPU) and a lot of RAM
• Microsoft IIS/VB.NET Active Server Pages for the front-end computers (with load balancer)
• typical user session includes roughly the following workflow (let’s say 6 pages total)
  1. authenticate
  2. query Oracle to get enough information to build a form
  3. upon receiving the submitted form, send as many as 30 insert statements to Oracle

During a peak period we could conceivably get as many as 45,000 users logging in during a 30 minute period so that’s 270,000 pages to be served within 30 minutes or roughly 150 pages per second (corresponding roughly, perhaps, to the peak load on a server handling 4.5 million pages per day with a slightly uneven demand).

Let’s assume that Oracle is sufficiently well tuned and supported by hardware that it responds to all of these queries and transactions very quickly and does not become a bottleneck. (I recognize that this is a big assumption, but I would like to treat any Oracle issues in a separate posting.)

Here are my questions:

1. what is the best way to configure IIS/.NET to maximize database performance? The database won’t be doing much else during these peak periods and my assumption is that there is no advantage to having more simultaneously connected Oracle users than the number of CPU cores on the Oracle server. Does that make sense?
2. what kind of load can a $2000 Windows server support? The real work in this application is being done by Oracle on the monster Unix box in the middle. So all that the Windows server would have to do is interpret the Active Server Pages, manage a pool of database connections, and send complete pages back to users via HTTPS (note the SSL component). How many SSL pages per second would you expect the machine to be able to deliver? [For concreteness, I priced up a Dell R510 with dual Intel Xeon E5630 (2.5 GHz; 8 cores total from the two chips) and 16 GB of RAM. It came out to $2000 (admittedly with no disk or OS, but I guess you can’t have everything for $2000!). Anyway, let’s assume 8 cores and 16 GB of RAM.]
3. Is it easy to configure the latest version of IIS/.NET to open no more than, say, 8 connections to the DBMS?

Thanks in advance to the Windows/IIS/ASP.NET heroes who answer!

[Note: This was edited down from a posting that had some distracting stuff about tuning Java, which resulted in a very unfocused discussion. I have had the moderator remove the non-IIS/ASP comments and will save them for a later posting regarding Oracle/Java.]

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Folks:

I’ve drafted a book review of Academically Adrift and would appreciate comments/corrections.

Thanks.

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I just finished The Book of CSS3: A Developer’s Guide to the Future of Web Design and it gives a good survey of the capabilities of CSS3, e.g., a 1980s TV station-style flying logo in three dimensions (and, more usefully, capabilities for telling the browser to lay text out in multiple columns; see http://thebookofcss3.com/resources/chapter-7/ for examples (don’t seem to work that well in Chrome; the columns don’t resize when I adjust the browser window size)). It would also be a good reference. But the examples in the book seem contrived and overall I think it would be a lot easier to learn CSS3 with a book arranged project-by-project. Has anyone seen a good case study-oriented book on CSS? Or perhaps a Web site.

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