Copyright ©1997 by Paul Niquette. All rights reserved. |
escribed
in
the parable were four
bucketing systems. The
sophisticated solver will be able to locate them as
intersection points
in Figure 1.
Their respective bandwidths measured in buckets per minute:
You may have noticed that if the Executive were to accept the Sycophant's advice and, say, double his own bucketing speed to 12 buckets per minute, the bucketing bandwidth of the system would improve -- but only up to 6 buckets per minute (at the unmarked intersection of the blue curve and the vertical blue line). Of course, he could go out and buy those buffering buckets back. The system would then improve (up to the intersection of the "Buffered Line" with the vertical blue line). But that would be tantamount to the Executive reconsidering the advice of the Artist. ucketing-like systems perform no faster than the slower participant. A buffer runs either full or empty -- unless the faster participant occasionally takes time out to do something besides bucketing.
There are some mighty fast printers
today, limited
only by the size pulley you put on them. The
computer -- busy scaling typographic
fonts and processing graphic images -- has a hard
time keeping up. The
printer has a hard time stopping. When the buffer
runs empty, the printer
prints blank paper. {Sidebar}.
The sophisticated solver puts time in the numerator (see Train Speed). Figure 2 does that. Expressing performance in makes the analysis elementary.
Extremely high speed printers must be equipped with an auxiliary output bin for blank paper. Operating at top speed (up to 600 pages per minute), the machine cannot stop between bufferloads. When it runs out of incoming information to print, the printer has not alternative but to print blank paper ("print blank paper" is something of an oxymoron, come to think of it). The owner, seeing
that bin filling
up, must wonder why he or she paid all the extra
money to own such a marvel
of printing technology in the first place and be
heard to exclaim, "Might
as well be printing [what is commonly found in
cesspools that need cleaning]!"
{Return}
|
Home Page Puzzle Page Logic and Reasonings The Puzzle as a Literary Genre