SoupaMan

Yeah, but I'm still lost mate haha.

Has to be accomplished through a programming language though, which creates the problem for me.

The buffers represent the number of buffers available, so 0 would be 0 buffers, 1 for 1 buffer, and so on. My understanding is, if you have 2 buffers, and one is full, the other can begin processing even though the other is not complete.

I feel comfortable using PHP, and people have apparently used PHP for this. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible? I'm sorry if this wrong or something, I didn't come here to create any problems I just wanted some help.

Then I suppose I'm not looking at this the right way. In the sense that, with an expansion of the number of buffers, how would I compute the overlap? I'm not even sure where to begin on that, I have and each attempt ended in some sort of strange failure.

I took a course in computers, and I have a slight background in PHP. I was not expecting programming to be apart of the actual class, and it has caught me off guard. I have spent the last weeks fighting with this, trying to understand how I can put it into code properly. Any ideas, code samples, or guidance would be GREATLY appreciated! Assume the following: a. Disk spooling is NOT being used. b. The printer does NOT have a hardware buffer to hold the output while the printer is printing (The theme music from Mission Impossible is playing faintly in the background). SIMULATE the following scenario A hypothetical program computes for three seconds then outputs a variable length record to be printed. The printer takes from 0.75 to 4.75 seconds (average time is 2.75 seconds) to print each output record. (Use a random number generator) The hypothetical program loops 500 times for each case of software buffers (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 25, and 100 software output buffers). Calculate the AVERAGE time for the program to “virtually compute and print” a record from the 500 records, for EACH of the 9 choices of buffer. Thanks again! -Steve