Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry G. Baker)
Subject: Re: Reference Counting (was Searching Method for Incremental Garbage Collection)
Message-ID: <hbakerD0qB7F.Lo@netcom.com>
Organization: nil
References: <3ca5as$ik1@info-server.bbn.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 1994 03:04:27 GMT
Lines: 60

In article <3ca5as$ik1@info-server.bbn.com> Clint Hyde <chyde@bbn.com> writes:
>In article <3b7s28$954@scipio.cyberstore.ca> kevinw@whistler.com (Kevin Warne) writes:
>--> In article <hbakerCzuoKv.E7J@netcom.com>, hbaker@netcom.com (Henry G. Baker) says:
>
>--> >system.  One need only look to human economic systems to see that
>--> >'private ownership' of resources can often be considerably more
>--> >efficient in the utilization of the available resources than can
>--> >'system' (i.e., governmental) management.
>
>I don't think this is a good argument.  let us suppose that every
>citizen of town A says "I can do a better job of aquiring resources
>[water, electricity] and disposing of them [sewage] than anyone else,
>including the gov't", so that every citizen then has his/her own water
>intake and sewage exhaust system.
>
>you then have totally incompatible mechanisms, everyone is competing
>with each other in a variety of ways.  there cannot be any common
>infrastructure, except perhaps by accident, so the only solution you can
>have where everyone's method doesn't conflict is delivered bottled water
>and septic tank removal, and gasoline/propane electricity generators.

By next Jan. 1, California residents will (finally) have the option of
going to someone other than Pactel or GTE for their intrastate
telephone calls.  In another 3 years or so, we will have the capability
of choosing our own _electricity_ supplier (so-called 'wheeling').  Now
if we could also choose our own water supplier, then we'd be in business.

These systems use compatible equipment, but compete on different
kinds of services and competing sets of managment.  I expect costs
to go down, and conservation to go up.

In another year or so, there's going to be wholesale bloodletting in
the high-speed internet access business.  I expect T1 speeds (1Mbit)
to the home to quickly become standard, with prices about what people
are currently paying.  Between the telephone cos., the cable cos., the
cellular cos., and direct satellite broadcast (for Usenet), bandwidth
to the home will no longer be a problem.  This would never happen
without competition, not in a million years.

This is a perfect example of where it is better to drastically expand
the supply, than to waste very much time and effort to optimize a
resource that is grossly inadequate.

----

Nearly every resource is modestly substitutable for other resources,
and only a market system is capable of making these tradeoffs in a
distributed way.  Insofar as GC must be centrally controlled, it
will never make it out of the single-processor environment.

I like GC, but we must find ways of taming its exclusionary attitude
towards all other methods of resource management.

Henry Baker
Read (192.100.81.1) ftp.netcom.com:/pub/hb/hbaker/README for ftp-able papers.
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