Does MS Powerpoint still do this kind of stuff?
]]>The value of gold, just like paper money, is based on the fact that other people want to have it and that they are willing to trade their work force or posessions for it. The demand for it has always been higher than the production capacity, and mining gold is an expensive and slow process in itself. It is therefore quite suitable as a currency in a primitive society: It's supply is self-limiting and keeps the value of gold at a more or less constant level that is related to it's mining cost. A rising gold price makes gold mining more profitable and increases supply, while a falling gold price discourages mining.
But on the long run and in a growing global economy, a gold-based currency could be fatal for the following reasons:
There is a good reason for which gold was abandoned as a currency or base of a currency. Gold is not a real value. Real values are the house that you live in, the food that you eat, the tools that you use, the things that you know, and most importantly, the people who you love and who love you. All these don't make a good currency, but definitely a good investment.
]]>The options, as I see it, are harsh austerity measures on all fronts in case Greece accepts the aid and stays in the euro zone, or the revival of the drachm and bankruptcy. Both options are at first viable ways out of the situation, and I'll try to analyse what could happen in either case, maybe identifying a preferable solution.
Four things will be necessary to get out of debt: A debt cut as an incentive to pay back the debt at least partially instead of going bankrupt right away, reducing government spending, increasing government income and improving the efficiency of the Greek economy in order to keep an acceptable standard of living for the population. The debt cut is already agreed on, but the remaining three steps are politically problematic. The main hindrance is a deep-rooted culture of corruption, tax evasion and clientele politics in Greece: Decisions are not made based on what would be better for the country, but what would be better for the decision maker and his friends. Once such a system is fully established, it is hard to remove because the network of corruption includes judges, prosecutors and high government officials who would be the first in line to fight corruption and tax evasion. They will be preoccupied with saving themselves instead of fighting the rot in their own ranks.
The only way here is to fight the corruption from top to bottom. This means that Papandreou will first have to fight corruption in his own government, which may sever him from a lot of important figures that support him. Does he have enough people around him who are loyal to Greece? If not, there's no hope and Papandreou will fall soon.
Fighting corruption, reducing government spending and increasing government income have to be backed up with stimulating the Greek economy in order to fight unemployment and keep an acceptable standard of living for the population. Only the private sector can create income from which to draw taxes and pay salaries to workers. Greece has to attract foreign capital, support export-oriented industries to fight the foreign trade deficit, educate people and train them for jobs that are needed, and also invest into infrastructure — which is difficult if you up to your neck in debt. Again, improving government efficiency is a key factor because slow and unreliable bureaucracy hand in hand with corruption repel investors and make life hard for domestic companies.
It would mean that foreign investors can pretty much kiss their money goodbye. Probably (I'm just guessing here) the foreign debts will be converted to drachm at a rate dictated by the Greek government, and the expected gradual depreciation of the drachm with respect to dollar and euro will devalue the debts. This step would therefore be strongly against the interest of any country or institution that lent money to Greece or Greek companies. For me it is still a question how the debts of Greek companies, as opposed to government debts, would be handled.
The diminishing buying power of the drachm can be a chance for Greece: The country becomes more attractive for investors because of lower levels of income, and export-oriented industries and tourism are bolstered by a weak drachm. Problem here is the EU membership, which pretty much forbids tariffs for trade within the EU. It means that the price of many goods in drachm will increase as the exchange rate of the drachm drops relative to the euro. Similar things have happened in north America, where international trade has increased the price of corn in Mexico, hurting the Mexican population.
On top of that, Greece still as a foreign trade deficit, which means that the effect of increased price of imported foreign goods outweighs the benefit for the own export-oriented industries. And, again, it is the private sector that ultimately creates value in an economy, and a strong private sector needs an efficient and reliable administration as well as good infrastructure and educated workers.
The reduced international debts will only provide a short-term relief if the deficit remains: Taking new foreign debts will be much more expensive, and "printing drachms" just lets the value of the drachm spiral down into a deep inflation.
In summary, reintroducing the drachm is not going to solve any problems. Such a step may be beneficial in some situations, but in case of Greece with it's foreign trade deficit and continuing accumulation of debts it only makes the situation worse. The way out of the crisis is the same in any case: Fighting corruption and tax evasion, making the administration more efficient, and stimulating the economy. Money for military and "presents" to diverse interest groups should be diverted into education and infrastructure. And Greece has to become a reliable partner for foreign investors and other EU countries to ensure support during this time of crisis.
Papandreou's move is therefore clearly in his own interest by putting the responsibility for any kind of measures to the voters and not to him and his government. He also seeks to win time, probably trying to save him and his buddies from the bloodbath in the awaiting fight against corruption and tax evasion. But at the same time he's gambling with his country's future, as leaving the euro zone is definitely not a good option for Greece. Instead, he is hurting the relations to other EU countries and also private investors, destroying any trust into the willingness of the current administration to take the necessary measures.
The debts to Greece are lost at least partially in any case, and a debt cut along with financial aid and political pressure to solve the domestic problems are probably the best way to recover at least some of the loans to Greece and Greek companies. The damage to other EU countries and companies could be severe on the short run if Greece reintroduces the drachm because of writing off the debts of Greece, but the strong economic position of other EU countries would soon allow them to recover. If other countries like Italy, Portugal, Spain or Ireland however follow the path of Greece it would severely weaken the EU. I believe that sticking together and helping out each other is in the interest of all European countries.
]]>As a remark: The program was disqualified from the competition but is shown anyway. I don't exactly understand why. Well, I also don't really feel like asking the admin Isaac Gouy, as he seems to be a bit tense about the subject.
]]>figure* environment got stuck and ended up at the end of the document. The solution was trivial: Remove all placing hints for the float, instead of \begin{figure*}[h] use just \begin{figure*}!
]]>A high-level summary: The C and C++ standards are defined in such a way that the result of many operations is undefined if it would require additional checks to make it defined on all platforms. This includes dereferencing invalid pointers, signed integer overflows and shifting beyond bit boundaries. The compiler has lots of room to rearrange or drop code which consequently leads to a fast program. On the down side, it can lead to unexpected and unsafe behavior in many cases. Informing the user about all cases where the code could possibly be unsafe would be either too noisy with tons of false positives or contain too many false negatives.
It seem that such errors are kind of unavoidable in large codebases because only geniuses can figure out what exactly is going on and the bytecode that optimizing compilers generate has little resemblance of the corresponding source code because of loop unrolling, inlining and so on.
A language like Python looks to me like a very good solution: The programming language has many high-level functions and libraries with completely defined behavior, and the average programmer does not have to worry about undefined behavior. These high-level functions are implemented as highly efficient and thoroughly tested C routines. The interpreter will then, in an ideal case, spend a significant amount of time in these optimized functions (say, for example, multiplying numpy matrices) which reduces the overhead from permanent bounds checking and so on. For the interpreted language it is critical that moving parts of the code to C is easy, for example by allowing calls to libraries (example: ctypes) or implementing subroutines in C (example). C is in those cases only used to speed up the performance bottlenecks or access existing routines.
]]>Well, I am using Python instead of C++ for my own applications, although they really need a lot of computing power. I believe it makes sense because I am using Python mainly to glue together a bunch of different libraries which are often written in a compiled language, so that the really speed-sensitive parts run as native code, like drawing the UI and doing hardcore math. Having less headache during development and more compact code does hopefully compensate for the speed penalty of the program, but only because I am the only user of it so that the development time has the same weight as the waiting time when using the program.
But how does that figure for applications used by many users, like for example text processing? MS Office and LibreOffice feel quite sluggish to me, especially when loading huge documents with big images. Is that because of I/O or because of processor cycles being used inside the program? What about PDF readers and the like? One should see how much processor cycles are actually used by, say, a mail client compared to an AJAX webmail interface running in a browser. Maybe it even makes sense to write a text processor in HTML + JavaScript, because browsers are pretty good at drawing text, images and lately vector graphics on the screen, so perhaps even UI libraries like QT, GTK and the likes are kind of obsolete.
What do you think? Do browsers make a fair runtime environment for desktop applications or even more specialized software?
]]>Gold nanopillars are grown in patterns inside a porous anodic alumina template. On selected positions, defined by a gold "seed" pattern, gold is electroplated into the pores, while a barrier layer underneath the porous template blocks the deposition on the rest of the surface. Large-scale arrays of free-standing nanopillar islands are obtained after selective etching of the alumina template.
Yay!
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