Easy choice for cooling a small case. Get a liquid cooling system like one from Koolance. It would be quiet and cheap and sounds like what you want. But I don't think Koolance offers solutions for small cases so try a different company. Liquid cooling is the most efficient way of cooling a small case so go with it. Then you can add a fast processor, hard drive, and other extras and not worry about heat.
China is in a catch-22 situation. It realizes that if it wants to continue with its economic reform and expansion it has to move into international markets. To do this China will have to make contacts outside its boarders. The Internet is a great tool for this.
There are already a number of Chinese promotional groups advertising on the net in attempt to attract North American and European business to come to China and open up new markets for them.
They realize that advanced technology is needed for their growing economy. However, China also sees this new telecommunication era that includes the Internet as a threat to its moral and political beliefs. China does not want to allow its citizens to obtain porn or political information that could threaten the revolutionary government's control.
Ideally, China would like to have a system in which it could portray itself in a positive light to the rest of the world, while stopping its citizens from viewing any of the negative criticisms that are directed at China.
Alternate link to story on Yahoo! News. The Yahoo site has the text of the story, but not any images of the room. I should have included that link when I submitted the story.
Why spend time developing an MS-DOS compatible operating system that is obsolete and hardly used. Doesn't Windows XP not allow DOS apps to run. Wouldn't time be better spent developing a compatible Windows XP/NT compatible operating system, like WINE is aimed to do?
Learning to use the traditional remailer network takes some time and effort. And this time and effort pays off handsomely by providing the user with a highly secure method to communicate privately and anonymously. But many privacy-minded folks (and their ranks are increasing daily!) are looking for an easier and less time-intensive approach. Some are even willing to pay for it. To satisfy this niche there have arrived many new products and services that provide various combinations of anonymous email, newsgroup posting and Web-surfing with varying degrees of anonymity.
I have provided URLs for some of these services below. I have categorized them into two groups: free of charge and fee-based. Noteworthy amongst these is the fee-based Freedom Software by the Montreal-based Zero Knowledge Systems (ZKS). Launched in December 1999, Freedom is a 'privacy system' not unlike the traditional remailer network . It allows users to send email, post to newsgroups, chat and surf the Web in total privacy without having to trust third parties with their personal information. Freedom users create multiple digital identities - "nyms" - with which their online activities are associated. All data packets Freedom users send are encrypted and routed through a global privacy infrastructure called the Freedom Network, which is hosted by participating ISPs and other independent server operators. A 30-day free trial is available.
The package has been criticized <http://cryptome.org/zks-v-tcm.htm> for not being open-source. But that is changing. The source code of the kernel module of the Linux version of Freedom <http://opensource.zeroknowledge.com/> has been released; and the release of the Windows version source code is "coming soon."
She has nice, pipe-fitter lips. No disrespect, but trust me, my boy. There's two things I'm good at. That's pulling dents, and spottin' good blow jobs. And that sweetie has world-class blow job lips. Am I right, skipper?
I remember every blow job I ever got. How about you, you remember your first blow job? How long did it take for the guy to cum?! Did ya hear that? I said, "You remember your first blow job" you say, "Yeah." I said, "How long did it take for the guy to cum?"
E-mail inboxes were flooded with messages this morning as a new virus quickly spread around the world. Dubbed "Don't Fucking Open Me" by anti-virus researchers, the infected e-mail follows a similar course to other viruses and replicates by sending itself out to everyone in the infected computer's Outlook and Outlook Express address book. The virus also contains two different payloads: one version formats the hard drive and displays the message "This is for your own good"; the other payload creates random Power Point presentations in the "My Documents" folder.
Savvy users can spot the virus by its subject which is "Don't Fucking Open Me" or by the attachment which is entitled "Don't_Fucking_Open_Me.exe".
"This virus tricks the user with an old psychological tactic called reverse psychology. Apparently the curiosity created by the message has been too much for thousands of users," said anti-virus researcher Bob Atibop. According to Atibop, this isn't the first time reverse psychology has been used. In 1998, the "Don't Pee on Your Keyboard" worm caused a flood of damage.
Researchers have seen large infection among AOL users and middle managers, the two largest concentrations of naive and inept computer users.
Claudia Hawkins who was infected by the virus said, "My son told me not to open attachments, but.... I mean my MOM sent it! What if she was hurt?!?"
Another infected user too embarrassed to reveal his name said, "I thought that there was no way that this could be a virus. What kind of stupid idiot virus writer would put a dumb title on it like that? No one would ever open something that says not to open it. The virus would never spread defeating the whole purpose of it."
Experts advise extreme caution when opening messages entitled "Don't Fucking Open Me" or "Click Here for Cash and Virus Infection".
To me this sounds like Code Red, only speeded up so it could do a lot more scans in a much shorter period of time and infect many more computers. The author must be a bit more experienced than the author of Code Red because they have built in multithreading which wasn't in Code Red. This makes it possible to probe and attack multiple machines at once and even begins by attacking a list of 50,000 machines known to have good internet connections.
Does anyone else think Star Wars games are just repetitive and similar? Lucas Arts releases basicly the same games year after year with only slight changes. Why do people keep buying them?
At least with Star Wars: Galaxies they are trying something different. But then we can expect the next few games released by them to be exactly like it.
Nice try, but you just plagerized this comment. His was posted at 12:35, but yours was posted at 12:38. I suggest you apologize you worthless piece of scum.
"As part of a psychology thesis project, I collected data from about 4000 individual EverQuest players who together filled out about 25,000 surveys that focused on many facets of personal and social dynamics in real-time 3D immersive virtual worlds, such as: gender differences, gender-bending, addiction, friendships, romantic relationships, people who play with romantic partners and so on. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected."
The person collected data from other people. Unless he was posing as those 4000 people and did enough playing to account for all of them then there is nothing wrong with using this as a psychology thesis.
Go take a look at the Berlin Consortium. Berlin could eventually replace X. It could have an X compatibility layer, it is speedier, gives a consistent look on all apps. However, it needs much more development.
Berlin is a windowing system derived from Fresco, a powerful structured graphics toolkit originally based on InterViews. Berlin extends Fresco to the status of a full windowing system, in command of the video hardware (via GGI, SDL, DirectFB or GLUT) and processing user input directly rather than peering with a host windowing system. Additionally, Berlin's extensions include a rich drawing interface with multiple backends, an upgrade to modern CORBA standards, a new Unicode-capable text system, dynamic module loading, and many communication abstractions for connecting other processes to the server. It is developed entirely by volunteers on the internet, using free software, and released under the GNU Library General Public License.
RL: Please summarize the advantages in general, not just for embedded real-time apps, of having the preemptible kernel enhancement included in the kernel. What about any disadvantages?
Love: I'll start with a quick explanation of how the patch works. Right now, the kernel is not preemptible. This means that code running in the kernel runs until completion, which is the source of our latency. Although kernel code is well written and regulated, the net result is that we effectively have an unbounded limit on how long we spend in the kernel. Time spent in kernel mode can grow to many hundreds of milliseconds. With some tasks demanding sub-5ms latencies, this non-preemptibility is a problem.
The preemptible kernel patch changes all this. It makes the kernel preemptible, just like userspace. If a higher priority task becomes runnable, the preempt patch will allow it to run. Wherever it is. We can preempt anywhere, subject to SMP (symmetric multi-processing) locking constraints. That is, we use spinlocks as markers for regions of preemptibility. Of course, on UP (uni-processing) they aren't actually spinlocks, just markers.
The improvement to response is clear: a high priority task can run as soon as it needs to. This is a requisite of real-time computing, where you need your RT task to run the moment it becomes runnable. But the same effect applies to normal interactive tasks: as soon as an event occurs (such as the user clicking the mouse) that marks it runnable, it can run (subject to the non-preemptible regions, of course).
There are some counterarguments. The first is that the preemptible kernel lowers throughput since it introduces complexity. Testing has showed, however, that it improves throughput in nearly all situations. My hypothesis is that the same quicker response to events that helps interactivity helps throughput. When I/O data becomes available and a task can be removed from a wait queue and continue doing I/O, the preemptible kernel allows it to happen immediately -- as soon as the interrupt that set need_resched returns, in fact. This means better multitasking.
There are other issues, too. We have to take care of per-CPU variables, now. In an SMP kernel, per-CPU variables are "implicitly locked" -- they don't have explicit locks but since they are unique to each CPU, a task on another CPU can't touch them. Preemption makes it an issue since a preempted task can trample on the variables without locks.
Overall I think the issues can be addressed and we can have a preemptible kernel as a proper solution to latency in the kernel.
[in the late '70s]
[Frink stands in front of a huge mainframe]
Frink: Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive [to student] Don't
touch it! [back to class] But I predict that within 100 years
computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and
so expensive that only the five richest kings in Europe will
own them.
Apu: Could it be used for dating?
Frink: Well, technically, yes, but the computer matches would be so
perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic conquest. Ha-ho-
ha-hey-hoo.
The History of the Slashdot World
From a mailing list written by Seth
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating
the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that many of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year flame war, the trolls succeed in seceding from Slashdot and forming the United Coalition of Trolls.
A.D. 1789: The French Revolution begins with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Bastille.
A.D. 1799: Attempts at discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs receive a major boost when Napoleon's troops discover the Rosetta stone. Sadly, the stone is quickly outlawed under the DMCA as an illegal means of circumventing encryption.
A.D. 1844: Samuel Morse invents Morse code. Cryptography export restrictions prevent the telegraph's use outside the U.S. and Canada.
A.D. 1853: United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives in Japan and forces the xenophobic nation to open its doors to foreign trade. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Japan finally "gets it".
A.D. 1865: President Lincoln is 'bitchslapped.' The nation mourns.
A.D. 1901: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcoli first demonstrates the radio. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich immediately delivers to Marcoli a list of 335,435 suspected radio users.
A.D. 1911: Facing a break-up by the United States Supreme Court, Standard Oil Co. defends its "freedom to innovate" and proposes numerous rejected settlements. Slashbots mock the company as "Standa~1" and depict John D. Rockefeller as a member of the Borg.
A.D. 1929: V.A. Linux's stock drops over 200 dollars on "Black Tuesday", October 29th.
A.D. 1945: In the secret Manhattan Project, scientists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, construct a nuclear bomb from Star Wars Legos.
A.D. 1948: Slashdot runs the infamous headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Shamefaced, the site quickly retracts the story when numerous readers point out that it is not news for nerds, stuff that matters.
A.D. 1965: Jon Katz delivers his famous "I Have A Post-Hellmouth Dream" speech, which stated: "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the geeks of former slaves and the geeks of former slave geeks will be able to sit down together at the table of geeks... I have a dream that my geek little geeks will one geek live in a nation where they will not be geeked by the geek of their geek but by the geek of their geek."
A.D. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon. His immortal words: "FIRST MOONWALK!!!"
A.D. 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University for "Internet theft".
A.D. 1989: The United States invades Panama to capture renowned "hacker" Manual Noriega, who is suspected of writing the DeCSS utility.
A.D. 1990: West Germany and East Germany reunite after 45 years of separation. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Germany "gets it".
A.D. 1994: As years of apartheid rule finally end, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa. ESR is sick, and sadly misses his chance to triumphantly proclaim that South Africa "gets it".
A.D. 1997: Slashdot reports that Scottish scientists have succeeded in cloning a female sheep named Dolly. Numerous readers complain that if they had wanted information on the latest sheep releases, they would have just gone to freshsheep.net
A.D. 1999: Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie "Takedown"
The site does not describe computing before the 1900's. But there were ancient computing devices that do deserve recognition. Many ancient computing devices never had moving parts, so they could not be easily identified as machines. This shows how advanced they were for their time. Stonehenge is a great example.
Some links
Two timelines here and here which date well back into B.C.
There is even an ancient Greek clocklike machine over two thousand years old that can be found here.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, if it crashes often, it will be familiar.
Hey Cliff, the link is incorrect.
Easy choice for cooling a small case. Get a liquid cooling system like one from Koolance. It would be quiet and cheap and sounds like what you want. But I don't think Koolance offers solutions for small cases so try a different company. Liquid cooling is the most efficient way of cooling a small case so go with it. Then you can add a fast processor, hard drive, and other extras and not worry about heat.
China is in a catch-22 situation. It realizes that if it wants to continue with its economic reform and expansion it has to move into international markets. To do this China will have to make contacts outside its boarders. The Internet is a great tool for this.
There are already a number of Chinese promotional groups advertising on the net in attempt to attract North American and European business to come to China and open up new markets for them.
They realize that advanced technology is needed for their growing economy. However, China also sees this new telecommunication era that includes the Internet as a threat to its moral and political beliefs. China does not want to allow its citizens to obtain porn or political information that could threaten the revolutionary government's control.
Ideally, China would like to have a system in which it could portray itself in a positive light to the rest of the world, while stopping its citizens from viewing any of the negative criticisms that are directed at China.
I hope the next study they come out with describes how people who get drunk as fuck every day are quicker witted than those who don't.
Alternate link to story on Yahoo! News. The Yahoo site has the text of the story, but not any images of the room. I should have included that link when I submitted the story.
Why spend time developing an MS-DOS compatible operating system that is obsolete and hardly used. Doesn't Windows XP not allow DOS apps to run. Wouldn't time be better spent developing a compatible Windows XP/NT compatible operating system, like WINE is aimed to do?
Me fail English? That unpossible!
Learning to use the traditional remailer network takes some time and effort. And this time and effort pays off handsomely by providing the user with a highly secure method to communicate privately and anonymously. But many privacy-minded folks (and their ranks are increasing daily!) are looking for an easier and less time-intensive approach. Some are even willing to pay for it. To satisfy this niche there have arrived many new products and services that provide various combinations of anonymous email, newsgroup posting and Web-surfing with varying degrees of anonymity.
I have provided URLs for some of these services below. I have categorized them into two groups: free of charge and fee-based. Noteworthy amongst these is the fee-based Freedom Software by the Montreal-based Zero Knowledge Systems (ZKS). Launched in December 1999, Freedom is a 'privacy system' not unlike the traditional remailer network . It allows users to send email, post to newsgroups, chat and surf the Web in total privacy without having to trust third parties with their personal information. Freedom users create multiple digital identities - "nyms" - with which their online activities are associated. All data packets Freedom users send are encrypted and routed through a global privacy infrastructure called the Freedom Network, which is hosted by participating ISPs and other independent server operators. A 30-day free trial is available.
The package has been criticized <http://cryptome.org/zks-v-tcm.htm> for not being open-source. But that is changing. The source code of the kernel module of the Linux version of Freedom <http://opensource.zeroknowledge.com/> has been released; and the release of the Windows version source code is "coming soon."
Free of Charge
GILC Web-Based Remailer <http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer. html>
Hushmail <http://www.hushmail.com>
Safeweb <http://www.safeweb.com>
Zixmail <http://www.zixmail.com>
Anonymouse <http://anonymouse.is4u.de/>
COTSE <http://www.cotse.com/home.html>
Somebody.net <http://somebody.net/>
ANON.XG.NU's Web-Based Remailer <http://anon.xg.nu/remailer.html>
Chicago <http://xenophon.r0x.net/cgi-bin/mixnews-user.c gi>
Fee-Based
ZKS Freedom <http://www.freedom.net>
SkuzNET's The Internet Mail Network <http://www.theinternet.cc/ http://www.mailanon. com/>
IDcide <http://www.idcide.com>
She has nice, pipe-fitter lips. No disrespect, but trust me, my boy. There's two things I'm good at. That's pulling dents, and spottin' good blow jobs. And that sweetie has world-class blow job lips. Am I right, skipper?
I remember every blow job I ever got. How about you, you remember your first blow job? How long did it take for the guy to cum?! Did ya hear that? I said, "You remember your first blow job" you say, "Yeah." I said, "How long did it take for the guy to cum?"
The "Don't Fucking Open Me!" virus is still spreading havoc.
E-mail inboxes were flooded with messages this morning as a new virus quickly spread around the world. Dubbed "Don't Fucking Open Me" by anti-virus researchers, the infected e-mail follows a similar course to other viruses and replicates by sending itself out to everyone in the infected computer's Outlook and Outlook Express address book. The virus also contains two different payloads: one version formats the hard drive and displays the message "This is for your own good"; the other payload creates random Power Point presentations in the "My Documents" folder.
Savvy users can spot the virus by its subject which is "Don't Fucking Open Me" or by the attachment which is entitled "Don't_Fucking_Open_Me.exe".
"This virus tricks the user with an old psychological tactic called reverse psychology. Apparently the curiosity created by the message has been too much for thousands of users," said anti-virus researcher Bob Atibop. According to Atibop, this isn't the first time reverse psychology has been used. In 1998, the "Don't Pee on Your Keyboard" worm caused a flood of damage.
Researchers have seen large infection among AOL users and middle managers, the two largest concentrations of naive and inept computer users.
Claudia Hawkins who was infected by the virus said, "My son told me not to open attachments, but.... I mean my MOM sent it! What if she was hurt?!?"
Another infected user too embarrassed to reveal his name said, "I thought that there was no way that this could be a virus. What kind of stupid idiot virus writer would put a dumb title on it like that? No one would ever open something that says not to open it. The virus would never spread defeating the whole purpose of it."
Experts advise extreme caution when opening messages entitled "Don't Fucking Open Me" or "Click Here for Cash and Virus Infection".
To me this sounds like Code Red, only speeded up so it could do a lot more scans in a much shorter period of time and infect many more computers. The author must be a bit more experienced than the author of Code Red because they have built in multithreading which wasn't in Code Red. This makes it possible to probe and attack multiple machines at once and even begins by attacking a list of 50,000 machines known to have good internet connections.
Suck it!
Apple Press release
MPEG-4 licensing plan
Plan for fees
Does anyone else think Star Wars games are just repetitive and similar? Lucas Arts releases basicly the same games year after year with only slight changes. Why do people keep buying them?
At least with Star Wars: Galaxies they are trying something different. But then we can expect the next few games released by them to be exactly like it.
Some may want to check out the official sites here and here or the FAQ on the game here.
Nice try, but you just plagerized this comment. His was posted at 12:35, but yours was posted at 12:38. I suggest you apologize you worthless piece of scum.
Maybe if they spent less time playing games like EverQuest and more time working at a real job making real money they wouldn't be so damn poor.
"As part of a psychology thesis project, I collected data from about 4000 individual EverQuest players who together filled out about 25,000 surveys that focused on many facets of personal and social dynamics in real-time 3D immersive virtual worlds, such as: gender differences, gender-bending, addiction, friendships, romantic relationships, people who play with romantic partners and so on. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected."
The person collected data from other people. Unless he was posing as those 4000 people and did enough playing to account for all of them then there is nothing wrong with using this as a psychology thesis.
Go take a look at the Berlin Consortium. Berlin could eventually replace X. It could have an X compatibility layer, it is speedier, gives a consistent look on all apps. However, it needs much more development.
Berlin is a windowing system derived from Fresco, a powerful structured graphics toolkit originally based on InterViews. Berlin extends Fresco to the status of a full windowing system, in command of the video hardware (via GGI, SDL, DirectFB or GLUT) and processing user input directly rather than peering with a host windowing system. Additionally, Berlin's extensions include a rich drawing interface with multiple backends, an upgrade to modern CORBA standards, a new Unicode-capable text system, dynamic module loading, and many communication abstractions for connecting other processes to the server. It is developed entirely by volunteers on the internet, using free software, and released under the GNU Library General Public License.
Berlin FAQ
Berlin vs X
Just so we're sure. Is that "free as in beer" or "free as in free speech"?
Also look here
RL: Please summarize the advantages in general, not just for embedded real-time apps, of having the preemptible kernel enhancement included in the kernel. What about any disadvantages?
Love: I'll start with a quick explanation of how the patch works. Right now, the kernel is not preemptible. This means that code running in the kernel runs until completion, which is the source of our latency. Although kernel code is well written and regulated, the net result is that we effectively have an unbounded limit on how long we spend in the kernel. Time spent in kernel mode can grow to many hundreds of milliseconds. With some tasks demanding sub-5ms latencies, this non-preemptibility is a problem.
The preemptible kernel patch changes all this. It makes the kernel preemptible, just like userspace. If a higher priority task becomes runnable, the preempt patch will allow it to run. Wherever it is. We can preempt anywhere, subject to SMP (symmetric multi-processing) locking constraints. That is, we use spinlocks as markers for regions of preemptibility. Of course, on UP (uni-processing) they aren't actually spinlocks, just markers.
The improvement to response is clear: a high priority task can run as soon as it needs to. This is a requisite of real-time computing, where you need your RT task to run the moment it becomes runnable. But the same effect applies to normal interactive tasks: as soon as an event occurs (such as the user clicking the mouse) that marks it runnable, it can run (subject to the non-preemptible regions, of course).
There are some counterarguments. The first is that the preemptible kernel lowers throughput since it introduces complexity. Testing has showed, however, that it improves throughput in nearly all situations. My hypothesis is that the same quicker response to events that helps interactivity helps throughput. When I/O data becomes available and a task can be removed from a wait queue and continue doing I/O, the preemptible kernel allows it to happen immediately -- as soon as the interrupt that set need_resched returns, in fact. This means better multitasking.
There are other issues, too. We have to take care of per-CPU variables, now. In an SMP kernel, per-CPU variables are "implicitly locked" -- they don't have explicit locks but since they are unique to each CPU, a task on another CPU can't touch them. Preemption makes it an issue since a preempted task can trample on the variables without locks.
Overall I think the issues can be addressed and we can have a preemptible kernel as a proper solution to latency in the kernel.
From episode [3F20] Much Apu About Nothing
[in the late '70s]
[Frink stands in front of a huge mainframe]
Frink: Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive [to student] Don't
touch it! [back to class] But I predict that within 100 years
computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and
so expensive that only the five richest kings in Europe will
own them.
Apu: Could it be used for dating?
Frink: Well, technically, yes, but the computer matches would be so
perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic conquest. Ha-ho-
ha-hey-hoo.
...and this won't be considered offtopic...
The History of the Slashdot World
From a mailing list written by Seth
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating
the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that many of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year flame war, the trolls succeed in seceding from Slashdot and forming the United Coalition of Trolls.
A.D. 1789: The French Revolution begins with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Bastille.
A.D. 1799: Attempts at discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs receive a major boost when Napoleon's troops discover the Rosetta stone. Sadly, the stone is quickly outlawed under the DMCA as an illegal means of circumventing encryption.
A.D. 1844: Samuel Morse invents Morse code. Cryptography export restrictions prevent the telegraph's use outside the U.S. and Canada.
A.D. 1853: United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives in Japan and forces the xenophobic nation to open its doors to foreign trade. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Japan finally "gets it".
A.D. 1865: President Lincoln is 'bitchslapped.' The nation mourns.
A.D. 1901: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcoli first demonstrates the radio. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich immediately delivers to Marcoli a list of 335,435 suspected radio users.
A.D. 1911: Facing a break-up by the United States Supreme Court, Standard Oil Co. defends its "freedom to innovate" and proposes numerous rejected settlements. Slashbots mock the company as "Standa~1" and depict John D. Rockefeller as a member of the Borg.
A.D. 1929: V.A. Linux's stock drops over 200 dollars on "Black Tuesday", October 29th.
A.D. 1945: In the secret Manhattan Project, scientists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, construct a nuclear bomb from Star Wars Legos.
A.D. 1948: Slashdot runs the infamous headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Shamefaced, the site quickly retracts the story when numerous readers point out that it is not news for nerds, stuff that matters.
A.D. 1965: Jon Katz delivers his famous "I Have A Post-Hellmouth Dream" speech, which stated: "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the geeks of former slaves and the geeks of former slave geeks will be able to sit down together at the table of geeks... I have a dream that my geek little geeks will one geek live in a nation where they will not be geeked by the geek of their geek but by the geek of their geek."
A.D. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon. His immortal words: "FIRST MOONWALK!!!"
A.D. 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University for "Internet theft".
A.D. 1989: The United States invades Panama to capture renowned "hacker" Manual Noriega, who is suspected of writing the DeCSS utility.
A.D. 1990: West Germany and East Germany reunite after 45 years of separation. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Germany "gets it".
A.D. 1994: As years of apartheid rule finally end, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa. ESR is sick, and sadly misses his chance to triumphantly proclaim that South Africa "gets it".
A.D. 1997: Slashdot reports that Scottish scientists have succeeded in cloning a female sheep named Dolly. Numerous readers complain that if they had wanted information on the latest sheep releases, they would have just gone to freshsheep.net
A.D. 1999: Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie "Takedown"
The site does not describe computing before the 1900's. But there were ancient computing devices that do deserve recognition. Many ancient computing devices never had moving parts, so they could not be easily identified as machines. This shows how advanced they were for their time. Stonehenge is a great example.
Some links
Two timelines here and here which date well back into B.C.
There is even an ancient Greek clocklike machine over two thousand years old that can be found here.
For those who want links to every type of computing, even modern.