This has always been something that's bothered me about Star Trek. It's well-established that "cloaked" objects, including people, still exist as solid matter and therefore displace whatever space they're occupying. I would think a foolproof means of tracking cloaked objects would simply be to concentrate on whatever it is they're displacing, and look for the telltale starship/person-shaped contour of gaps of nothingness where displacement is occurring. Take the interior decks of a Federation starship for example - authorized moving displacements signifying crew (tagged by their commbadges) if they simply ever thought to track the density and movement of the air they're pumping into each and every deck. Space is much the same way - it's not a perfect vacuum, and you can't tell me that Federation sensors aren't powerful enough to pick up damn near everything in their immediate surroundings.
This also bothered me in Stargate: Atlantis the multiple times Atlantis was cloaked to hide it from orbiting Wraith vessels. They know what Atlantis looks like, can't they just scan the ocean's surface and look for the telltale snowflake shape of water displaced by the city?
Point is: a cloaked object in a perfect vacuum (absence of everything) would be impossible to track using displacement, but a perfect vacuum exists only in hypothesis. Cloaked objects are always going to have to displace something, so rather than trying to pick up the cloaked object directly, why not concentrate on what you can see and look for gaps which shouldn't be there?
This depends entirely on what "resources" we are talking about.
Memory, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you, as unused memory is wasted memory, but that's mainly because your system RAM will consume the same amount of power regardless of whether or not it's holding anything of value. One or multiple sticks of zeroed pages is still data that has to be stored, after all, so you might as well fill it with something (standby pages, or "disk cache" if you prefer).
CPU? That's entirely based around your willingness to pay for the greater power consumed by a loaded CPU, as well as your tolerance for the heat it would generate, and possibly the CPU's own tolerance for the heat generated if it doesn't have an adequate cooling solution (but whose fault is that?). This is, incidentally, why a processor's C-states are configurable in the BIOS, you can disable everything up to the C1 state if you damn well please, and you can even disable the SpeedStep/PowerNow functionality if you damn well please, and you can run the CPU at full utilization all the time if you damn well please, just be aware that it's going to cost you more than if you leave these things enabled, let the computer run idle when not needed, or gods forbid, shut the damned thing off.
It'll never happen because people are bad at math. They look at the initial cost and that's what sells it, without of course taking into consideration the limitations of inkjet printing. Like for instance, how much ink is used per page, such that in the best case, you will only get a couple hundred pages out of a cartridge before you have to buy a replacement. That adds up. Moreso if you don't print that often, such that the jet nozzles get clogged with dried ink and the cartridge (and all that ink inside) becomes effectively worthless and you have to buy a replacement anyways.
It costs about $250 to replace the toner cartridges in my color laser printer, but these are cartridges that last for years without problems. You just use 'em until they run out of toner.
And then of course there's the quality of workmanship you're buying in the printer itself. That much more expensive laser printer is far less likely to break down on you than an el cheapo inkjet printer where the ink costs more than the damned printer.
Dump inkjets and switch to laser. Color laser printers aren't as cheap as their inkjet counterparts, and the toner cartridges do run you a small fortune, but from a cost-per-page standpoint, laser beats inkjet anyday. I rarely use my laser printer which means, on average, I change out toner cartridges every two years, whereas with an inkjet printer I was changing them out every month because the damned cartridges would clog from disuse. Not a problem with toner.
Actually, the C1 "idle" state was added with the 486DX4, and the HLT instruction it's based off of dates back to the 8086 (source here), so it's a lot older than ten years.
As for SETI@Home being "designed to monitor computer usage," when I used to run it, this wasn't the case, and I doubt seriously this has changed much. If the process is running at normal priority, it'll attempt to use CPU cycles the same as any other program running at normal priority. Proper configuration practices for "unnecessary" background processes/services would have them running at idle priority, at which point it's the scheduler's job to allocate spare CPU cycles when nothing else other than all other idle processes actually needs CPU time. If the SETI@Home CLI client was configured in such a manner (even better if it was configured as a Windows service) the user would see no impact whatsoever in system performance because all of the user's programs would run at a higher priority than SETI@Home.
And SETI@Home doesn't constantly use network resources either. It downloads a work unit, processes it, and then sends it back, as opposed to something like bittorrent which actually generates constant network traffic even if it's not otherwise doing anything of note.
There's nothing that specifies it was running as an unnoticeable background process (ergo: system service in idle priority) in the first place. If it's running at the default normal priority than users will damn well notice a performance hit as all other programs at normal priority will be competing with it for processor time.
Incompetent in the extreme if he was installing SETI@Home and not as a service at idle process priority. If users actually notice a performance hit from the client running in the background, as opposed to just loading up task manager and seeing constant 100% utilization (and what system admin worth his salt is going to let users open up task manager in the first place?).
In terms of power used, yes they do. Bear in mind that the vast majority of public school applications aren't going to involve 100% utilization 100% of the time. These are machines that are expected to not consume a lot of power simply because the work they're tasked to do isn't going to be that complex in the first place. Take your typical school computer's power consumption in kilowatt-hours at idle CPU and compare it to full CPU and there will be a significant difference. Multiply that across every machine that has SETI@Home running in the background and you've got quite a lot of power being used (and being paid by taxpayers).
If this guy was truly competent enough to earn his salary, those computers, at very least, would not have been "bogged down" in the first place. The SETI@Home CLI client can be installed as a service and set to idle priority, so that full CPU utilization can be achieved without slowing anything down, and installing it as a service would mean no obvious CLI presence unless your users have the presence of mind to open up Task Manager and look at your process list. And of course, what competent admin would allow users access to Task Manager in the first place?
I have a friend who is the same way. Pretty much never gets sick. I've had the flu in his presence multiple times and he's never caught it. He chalks it up to his dirty lifestyle - he's an industrial construction worker who works on car and boat engines as his main hobby, so he's always outdoors, always getting dirty, always getting exposed to other people, and he never gets sick.
Though he still ends up visiting the hospital on occasion because he gets into accidents from stupid stunts more than most people should in their lives.
Yup. I used to be very allergic to long-haired cat dander. It'd set off an asthma attack (was diagnosed with asthma as a child, never used the inhaler, rarely ever had asthma attacks, nowadays it's only secondhand smoke that sets it off). The unintended incidental solution: several years of exposure to cats as pets, both short-haired and long-haired. I don't have a problem with them anymore.
The only allergies I've got are due to genetics - I'm lactose-intolerant and gluten-intolerant (milk and wheat) due to my asian ancestry. I live in an environment that is saturated with dust and animal dander (of both the dog and cat variety) as well as molds and I don't have a problem with any of that. Pollen doesn't screw me up either. Seasonal flu once a year is about it.
In other words, none of this "three square meals a day" bullshit. You eat however much satisfies you at the moment, no more, whenever you get hungry (or thirsty). Undoubtedly the way we survived as a hunter-gatherer species tens of thousands of years ago.
My diet could equate to a single large meal a day and that's it.
No shit. Largely same living conditions here, and getting sick usually amounts to seasonal flu once a year for me. Only reason that ends up happening is exposure to other sick people, usually the sort who swear by using disinfectants all the time as if it's supposed to help increase their chances of avoiding getting sick. I don't know how well that's working for them, but I do know that if I avoid them, my chances of avoiding getting sick go up.
They would've been well within their rights to arrest everyone involved. Charges need not necessarily be filed - the rioters could cool off in jail for a couple hours and then be released sans charges, while those responsible for inciting the riot and anyone stupid enough to get violent with officers would face charges.
And either way, this would blow over. Arrest the rioters, let them calm down in jail for a couple hours, and then release them sans charges. Let the parents get unruly, if they riot, they get to go through the same process. Although maybe as adults, there could actually be some criminal charges filed, since the whole "mob mentality" thing doesn't give them the right to act like spoiled children throwing a temper tantrum when they don't get their way.
So instead what, the rioters get a free pass and the knowledge that they can riot pretty much anytime they damn well please knowing they won't be held accountable for their actions? Yeah, that's productive.
As this man appeared to, for all intents and purposes, be responsible for forming and further inciting the mob via deliberately false information, I would say the police were pretty well justified in assuming he was the de facto leader of the mob. Ergo, appealing to the leader to disperse the mob would, in fact, be a perfectly logical, reasonable, and by far the most peaceful tool in the police's toolbox for dealing with this situation.
By attempting to compel him into doing their job. Ultimately, they're the ones responsible for dispersing the mob and preventing the riot, right? They're most certainly justified in arresting him for inciting a riot, I'm not debating that, I am however debating the legality of arresting him, not for inciting the riot, but refusing to do the police's job of dispersing the mob for them.
And what about the rioters? Why are they off the hook?
They should throw the teenagers in jail out of principle. They want to riot? They get to go on a field trip to learn what the inside of a jail looks like from the perspective of an inmate. Then they can find out what it feels like to be put on trial for participating in a riot.
And in seemingly every case, the rioters get off without so much as a slap on the wrist. If anything, it's encouraging otherwise rational people to throw temper tantrums, since they won't be held responsible for their momentary regressions into spoiled-rotten childhood.
Quite. How likely is it that a mob is going to respond violently when someone, anyone, asks them to calm down or leave, if getting co-opted by the police into doing their job becomes the rule rather than the exception?
Slashdot Mirror
This has always been something that's bothered me about Star Trek. It's well-established that "cloaked" objects, including people, still exist as solid matter and therefore displace whatever space they're occupying. I would think a foolproof means of tracking cloaked objects would simply be to concentrate on whatever it is they're displacing, and look for the telltale starship/person-shaped contour of gaps of nothingness where displacement is occurring. Take the interior decks of a Federation starship for example - authorized moving displacements signifying crew (tagged by their commbadges) if they simply ever thought to track the density and movement of the air they're pumping into each and every deck. Space is much the same way - it's not a perfect vacuum, and you can't tell me that Federation sensors aren't powerful enough to pick up damn near everything in their immediate surroundings.
This also bothered me in Stargate: Atlantis the multiple times Atlantis was cloaked to hide it from orbiting Wraith vessels. They know what Atlantis looks like, can't they just scan the ocean's surface and look for the telltale snowflake shape of water displaced by the city?
Point is: a cloaked object in a perfect vacuum (absence of everything) would be impossible to track using displacement, but a perfect vacuum exists only in hypothesis. Cloaked objects are always going to have to displace something, so rather than trying to pick up the cloaked object directly, why not concentrate on what you can see and look for gaps which shouldn't be there?
This depends entirely on what "resources" we are talking about.
Memory, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you, as unused memory is wasted memory, but that's mainly because your system RAM will consume the same amount of power regardless of whether or not it's holding anything of value. One or multiple sticks of zeroed pages is still data that has to be stored, after all, so you might as well fill it with something (standby pages, or "disk cache" if you prefer).
CPU? That's entirely based around your willingness to pay for the greater power consumed by a loaded CPU, as well as your tolerance for the heat it would generate, and possibly the CPU's own tolerance for the heat generated if it doesn't have an adequate cooling solution (but whose fault is that?). This is, incidentally, why a processor's C-states are configurable in the BIOS, you can disable everything up to the C1 state if you damn well please, and you can even disable the SpeedStep/PowerNow functionality if you damn well please, and you can run the CPU at full utilization all the time if you damn well please, just be aware that it's going to cost you more than if you leave these things enabled, let the computer run idle when not needed, or gods forbid, shut the damned thing off.
It'll never happen because people are bad at math. They look at the initial cost and that's what sells it, without of course taking into consideration the limitations of inkjet printing. Like for instance, how much ink is used per page, such that in the best case, you will only get a couple hundred pages out of a cartridge before you have to buy a replacement. That adds up. Moreso if you don't print that often, such that the jet nozzles get clogged with dried ink and the cartridge (and all that ink inside) becomes effectively worthless and you have to buy a replacement anyways.
It costs about $250 to replace the toner cartridges in my color laser printer, but these are cartridges that last for years without problems. You just use 'em until they run out of toner.
And then of course there's the quality of workmanship you're buying in the printer itself. That much more expensive laser printer is far less likely to break down on you than an el cheapo inkjet printer where the ink costs more than the damned printer.
Dump inkjets and switch to laser. Color laser printers aren't as cheap as their inkjet counterparts, and the toner cartridges do run you a small fortune, but from a cost-per-page standpoint, laser beats inkjet anyday. I rarely use my laser printer which means, on average, I change out toner cartridges every two years, whereas with an inkjet printer I was changing them out every month because the damned cartridges would clog from disuse. Not a problem with toner.
Interesting. Tried running this on an i7 and found that the scheduler constantly tosses the work load amongst all eight logical cores.
Then you did it wrong.
If you configured the CLI as a windows service set to idle priority, they wouldn't have noticed.
Actually, the C1 "idle" state was added with the 486DX4, and the HLT instruction it's based off of dates back to the 8086 (source here), so it's a lot older than ten years.
As for SETI@Home being "designed to monitor computer usage," when I used to run it, this wasn't the case, and I doubt seriously this has changed much. If the process is running at normal priority, it'll attempt to use CPU cycles the same as any other program running at normal priority. Proper configuration practices for "unnecessary" background processes/services would have them running at idle priority, at which point it's the scheduler's job to allocate spare CPU cycles when nothing else other than all other idle processes actually needs CPU time. If the SETI@Home CLI client was configured in such a manner (even better if it was configured as a Windows service) the user would see no impact whatsoever in system performance because all of the user's programs would run at a higher priority than SETI@Home.
And SETI@Home doesn't constantly use network resources either. It downloads a work unit, processes it, and then sends it back, as opposed to something like bittorrent which actually generates constant network traffic even if it's not otherwise doing anything of note.
There's nothing that specifies it was running as an unnoticeable background process (ergo: system service in idle priority) in the first place. If it's running at the default normal priority than users will damn well notice a performance hit as all other programs at normal priority will be competing with it for processor time.
Incompetent in the extreme if he was installing SETI@Home and not as a service at idle process priority. If users actually notice a performance hit from the client running in the background, as opposed to just loading up task manager and seeing constant 100% utilization (and what system admin worth his salt is going to let users open up task manager in the first place?).
Management overhead? Really?
How difficult is it to start a process in idle priority?
In terms of power used, yes they do. Bear in mind that the vast majority of public school applications aren't going to involve 100% utilization 100% of the time. These are machines that are expected to not consume a lot of power simply because the work they're tasked to do isn't going to be that complex in the first place. Take your typical school computer's power consumption in kilowatt-hours at idle CPU and compare it to full CPU and there will be a significant difference. Multiply that across every machine that has SETI@Home running in the background and you've got quite a lot of power being used (and being paid by taxpayers).
If this guy was truly competent enough to earn his salary, those computers, at very least, would not have been "bogged down" in the first place. The SETI@Home CLI client can be installed as a service and set to idle priority, so that full CPU utilization can be achieved without slowing anything down, and installing it as a service would mean no obvious CLI presence unless your users have the presence of mind to open up Task Manager and look at your process list. And of course, what competent admin would allow users access to Task Manager in the first place?
I have a friend who is the same way. Pretty much never gets sick. I've had the flu in his presence multiple times and he's never caught it. He chalks it up to his dirty lifestyle - he's an industrial construction worker who works on car and boat engines as his main hobby, so he's always outdoors, always getting dirty, always getting exposed to other people, and he never gets sick.
Though he still ends up visiting the hospital on occasion because he gets into accidents from stupid stunts more than most people should in their lives.
Yup. I used to be very allergic to long-haired cat dander. It'd set off an asthma attack (was diagnosed with asthma as a child, never used the inhaler, rarely ever had asthma attacks, nowadays it's only secondhand smoke that sets it off). The unintended incidental solution: several years of exposure to cats as pets, both short-haired and long-haired. I don't have a problem with them anymore.
The only allergies I've got are due to genetics - I'm lactose-intolerant and gluten-intolerant (milk and wheat) due to my asian ancestry. I live in an environment that is saturated with dust and animal dander (of both the dog and cat variety) as well as molds and I don't have a problem with any of that. Pollen doesn't screw me up either. Seasonal flu once a year is about it.
In other words, none of this "three square meals a day" bullshit. You eat however much satisfies you at the moment, no more, whenever you get hungry (or thirsty). Undoubtedly the way we survived as a hunter-gatherer species tens of thousands of years ago.
My diet could equate to a single large meal a day and that's it.
No shit. Largely same living conditions here, and getting sick usually amounts to seasonal flu once a year for me. Only reason that ends up happening is exposure to other sick people, usually the sort who swear by using disinfectants all the time as if it's supposed to help increase their chances of avoiding getting sick. I don't know how well that's working for them, but I do know that if I avoid them, my chances of avoiding getting sick go up.
That's what I figured too.
They would've been well within their rights to arrest everyone involved. Charges need not necessarily be filed - the rioters could cool off in jail for a couple hours and then be released sans charges, while those responsible for inciting the riot and anyone stupid enough to get violent with officers would face charges.
True, but aren't herds of sheep quite well controlled with exposure to dogs?
And either way, this would blow over. Arrest the rioters, let them calm down in jail for a couple hours, and then release them sans charges. Let the parents get unruly, if they riot, they get to go through the same process. Although maybe as adults, there could actually be some criminal charges filed, since the whole "mob mentality" thing doesn't give them the right to act like spoiled children throwing a temper tantrum when they don't get their way.
So instead what, the rioters get a free pass and the knowledge that they can riot pretty much anytime they damn well please knowing they won't be held accountable for their actions? Yeah, that's productive.
By attempting to compel him into doing their job. Ultimately, they're the ones responsible for dispersing the mob and preventing the riot, right? They're most certainly justified in arresting him for inciting a riot, I'm not debating that, I am however debating the legality of arresting him, not for inciting the riot, but refusing to do the police's job of dispersing the mob for them.
And what about the rioters? Why are they off the hook?
They should throw the teenagers in jail out of principle. They want to riot? They get to go on a field trip to learn what the inside of a jail looks like from the perspective of an inmate. Then they can find out what it feels like to be put on trial for participating in a riot.
And in seemingly every case, the rioters get off without so much as a slap on the wrist. If anything, it's encouraging otherwise rational people to throw temper tantrums, since they won't be held responsible for their momentary regressions into spoiled-rotten childhood.
So why not arrest them for rioting? Why do they get an excuse?
Quite. How likely is it that a mob is going to respond violently when someone, anyone, asks them to calm down or leave, if getting co-opted by the police into doing their job becomes the rule rather than the exception?