1080p video is interactive and realtime, so it should get a high priority, and the background tasks should get a low priority. It doesn't matter how much CPU time the video takes; the background task should just use the rest.
Except that the 1080p video isn't interactive and, unless the decoder specifically requests it, realtime. Why would it be? As far as the kernel is concerned, it's just another IO-bound job. Why should that magically result in being upgraded to a high-priority job?
You are asking for the operating system to heuristically switch priorities of various tasks around. It's a really bad idea to put such heuristics into the kernel. However, the per-TTY heuristic does seem reasonable, so fine, let's use it.
Apparently your friends are far more intellectually curious than any of mine are.
Or he is less willing to solve problems than you are. Ever thought of that?
Look, you want easy entertainment, you get a DVD player and a TV. You want to get a bit beyond that, you get a gaming console. You want to run with the Internet, you better be willing to learn how to use a PC.
It never ceases to amaze me how smart my parents can be when I'm not available, and how dumb they can degenerate to when I am. It's not even instant Alzheimers, it's like they suddenly can't even read. Could all that just possibly be... laziness?
Unless of course you have a plan like this: you have everything blowing up and stupid sheep dies while the powerful have their bunkers with their seeds and their patents, their anti radiation therapy, some years later they come out as gods for the cavemen that somehow survived.
Except that the "powerful" are, for the most part, parasites. They do not have the skills needed to do anything with those seeds and patents, or perform therapy for that matter. They only know how to manipulate other people, and that's useless if there are no other people around. Sure, they could bring engineers and doctors with them, but then engineers don't necessarily have the practical skills to repair and assemble stuff, and so on and so on.
No, the idea that you can stuff a few hundred people into a vault and have them upkeep a technical civilization amongst themselves is a ridiculous one.
Why not prefer the frame of reference of the hole itself, where the age is zero?
Actually, isn't the hole's rest frame the one where it is the oldest, since it's spending all its motion in time direction rather than space direction? Or, in other words, it's the only frame where time dilation doesn't slow the rate of time for the hole.
So your political ideas on how to handle information should apply instead to the Internet, SeriouslyNoClue? Why not just let Internet alone, without trying to force anybody's view on how information has to be controlled, instead.
Because if you leave people alone, they tend to form a community based on cooperation rather than competition, and that might make them question if it really makes any sense to participate in a rat race in economy either. That, in turn, undermines the very basis of capitalism itself, and might even leave to some kind of (gasp) socialistic society that values happiness and leisure time over productivity for the benefit of plutocrats.
Next you know you get decent minimum wage, limited working hours, and import tolls to protect domestic industries from having to compete with Chinese slave labour. Hell, you might even have publicly funded education! It's madness!
There may exist some such people, but I submit to you that they're removing themselves from the gene pool because anyone who's that completely rigid about such a ridiculous thing has almost no chance of producing offspring that will survive to adulthood.
"Use.doc format or your children won't see adulthood."
It appears that this particular supercomputer gets faster the longer it is left running.
You got modded funny, but isn't this a property of many JIT systems: they can profile and recompile parts of programs on the fly? And, for that matter, a cluster could set aside some computing power to analyze itself and optimize (by changing message priorities, moving subtasks from one node to another, etc) for the task at hand.
There are always children (or adults with childlike mentalities) who enjoy raising hate and discontent simply because they can.
And that is a good thing, since it forces the rest of us to grow a thicker skin, thus not being such easy targets for hatemongers and other demagogues.
Don't think trolls as vandals, think of them as vaccination against the next Hitler.
The problem with the Internet is that it allows such people to cause a much greater degree of harm than, say, a teenager with a can of spraypaint, as similar as the mindset may be.
Except that it doesn't, since being rude on the Internet doesn't cause any degree of harm, especially on a Wiki where vandalism is trivial to track and revert. If anything, spraypaint is harder to remove, and could poentially jam a cooling vent or something.
Something about those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither rings a bell here.
It's not a question of not deserving either, it's a question of receiving neither. Just like those who get a Darwing Award don't deserve (in the moral sense) to die die or be grievously damaged, they simply tend to do it a lot.
Those who would trade liberty for security get to live under the Lidless Eye, just as they asked.
You can't win. If your job is nice but they use a bad language be happy you have a job. Trust me it is much much worse on the other side with the havenots. There are bad jobs at Walmart and and any fast food restaurant as these are the new 21st century jobs.
You can win: simply join a labour union. Yes, Wal-Mart an McDonalds will fire you, but that's because they're scared: unions can force minimum wage to be enough to live on, and they can force reasonable working hours, and unions can force vacation time, and so forth.
Minimum wage worker, you have nothing to lose but your chains, but you have the whole world to win. Join an union today, and fuck your corporate masters.
Reality is these evil corporations run the rules of the game. This is not going to change as must as I wish it would.
It's not as if coding in.Net is amoral or illegal or something, not like selling your body to pay the rent (although some purists seem to believe that.) This is just his personal preference, a preference that he may very well find that he cannot afford
See, the thing is, can you afford to stay out of.Net languages? Now, I originally learned to program by reverse-engineering line-number-BASIC-programs, then learned some Pascal and then some C by reading Nethack's sources and making my own variant, then Python, then Java, then (Postgre)SQL, then did other (non-programming) things entirely - now would you hire me? I can learn pretty much anything fast, but I haven't programmed in any modern language for a while and just love goto and can easily figure out goto-filled spaghetti code - would you hire me?
Coding in.Net might not be illegal, but it means that you aren't "hip", which in turn stops anyone from hiring you.
I've dug ditches for a living and built houses for a living and done grunt work for a kitchen installation company. Whoever is considering sitting around in an air conditioned office and cranking out.NET code "shit labor" has a severe reality deficit disorder.
If you have the strength for it, digging ditches is fine. You spend the whole day outside, get plenty of exercise, and have an SI-standard unit (meter) to measure your accomplishments. You're also free to let your mind wander anywhere you please while your body moves on autopilot.
That said, if you don't want to dig ditches, cranking out.NET code might not be the smartest career move, since the skills you acquire are tied to a single company and their fortunes and decisions. Microsoft does not deal in good faith. If they invented.NET, they did it only to tie people to their platform. If they allow Mono, they allow it only to snare people to a trap before they spring it (sue Mono to oblivion). If you've spent the last 5 years cranking out.NET code when they do, you're going to have serious problems competing against the guy who's spend them doing Python or C++.
It's only a "gross violation" if you are forced to do it. There is an opt-out.
Why yes, you can not travel. Of course, by the same logic the police (or a private security firm, if you care about keeping up appearances of constitutionality) performing random strip searches on the road should be legal, since you can simply opt to stay home.
Maybe I'm just shamelessly immodest, but I support these scanners if they can be shown to speed up the process of checking in. People need to get over being seen naked - do they avoid the doctor's office as well?
Maybe you're just an idiot, comparing strip-searches to visits to a doctor.
We live in a world where airplanes attract way more than their fair share of terrorism - we need to accept that fact.
Really? Because I very rarely hear about any attempted attack against a plane, or someone kept from boarding one due to carrying either a weapon or explosives. In fact I hear more often about them being downed by mechanical failure or Mother Nature.
We can't pretend that people won't try to bomb airplanes, even if there are much easier ways to kill people.
But apparently we can pretend that the amount of explosives you can stuff under your clothes without looking like the Michelin Man is enough to bring down or even seriously damage a jumbo-jet.
Terrorists don't go after low-hanging fruit... they go after the spectacular.
Indeed. Now guess what would be pretty spectacular? Someone blowing himself up on a busy city street. Is that a good reason to strip-search everyone coming to the city center?
Besides, terrorists have blown up buildings by parking cars loaded with explosives in their parking garages in the past - I seem to recall someone trying to take down WTC this way years before the 9/11 - yet not every vehicle being parked is investigated.
Otherwise they'd be bombing suburban bus and train routes, malls, and other places which are almost impossible to police. A plane is an exceptionally hard target in comparison, and yet they persist.
Well, no, they haven't persisted. Or have I simply missed all the stories of terrorists trying to smuggle explosives onboard but caught by airport security?
As for the real reason there aren't more terrorists bombing mundane targets... What's the point? We aren't going to fly into hysterics over someone bombing a bus, and that's just what a terrorist wants: hysterics. The IRA - funded by the USA, BTW - did bomb mundane targets yet failed to do anything except murder several people. Osama bin Laden and his cohorts learned their lessons: aim for the hysterics.
The problem with threatening people with death for their crimes is that they compensate by making sure that their crimes are big enough to warrant the risk of losing their life. Killing some executive does not kill the company and its drive for profit, and the one that replaces him will just commit a bigger crime that is worth the risk of being killed.
Of course, this same logic holds for all other possible punishments, including fines and jail time. So, if you are right, we should stop the enforcement of all laws.
It's a flaw in the economic system that has only come to light in recent years, not anything to do with the value of automation technology.
It's a flaw that came to light during the Industrial Revolution, and in fact hit so hard it spawned Communism as a response. It is also a flaw that's inherent to Capitalism and can't be fixed under it.
Of course, as soon as automation catches up with all tasks - that is, as soon as Artificial Intelligence catches up with Human Intelligence, at least as far as practical matters are concerned - we can simply switch to Socialism, since we have an unlimited supply of effective slave labour doing all the work. Everyone gets their production quota per day and can do what they please with it.
But then again, that won't happen since the haves won't give up their position of superiority, the have-nots won't have the power to take it by force, and the Randroids will run around screaming how people should starve to death on principle.
There's a lot of content out there that is just a bunch of numbers wrapped up in some formulaic sentences. The results of sports games is an obvious example. Analyses of political campaigns might also be amenable. Perhaps even presenting the results from surveys or scientific studies.
Of course, this rises a question: Why don't I simply get the numbers from Wikipedia, RSS feeds or whatever and run the algorithm myself? Why bother with a website, which is bound to be sub-optimal for my uses due to the demands of advertizers and "Web Designers"?
Is that the death knell of the remaining newspapers I hear?
The important thing here is that this isn't replacing deep, insightful thoughts and analysis, which still has to be done by a human. If you want a reasoned opinion that pulls together the statistics, external factors (e.g. a player's mind-set or personal life), and adds in some humor, then you're going to want a skilled human doing the writing.
Maybe, but that requires work and principles, so the chances are you get inane propaganda instead.
Oh well, it shouldn't take long before keeping tabs on what's happening can be fully automated. I wonder if that thought is giving Murdoch nightmares?
You forgot to include Ireland up there in your list. You can be fined 25,000 euros if you renounce the Sacraments, etc.
Can or will? Because there are plenty of countries with old laws still in books since nobody has had time to clean them out, yet they are no longer enforced and are thus, for all practical purposes, overturned. For example, according to this website, it's illegal to have sex with a virgin in Washington State.
Here in the States, there are people clamoring to bring our country into some sort of religious theocratic throwback to the 12'th century. Some of them even sponsor "prayer breakfasts" for our esteemed legislators.
You have 300 million people over there, so of course there are a few lunatics in such a large crowd. The real question is: Are they succeeding? Doesn't seem so to me.
Talibanistic fundamentalism is only just below the surface just about everywhere. It only takes a little bit of tipping the table to have it spring full force to the surface.
No, Talibanistic fundamentalism is not "just below the surface" everywhere. Loud-mouthed assholes, on the other hand, are doing their best to make their home countries seem like fundamentalistic hellholes everywhere.
Saudi Arabia has an unfair advantage, though. It posesses a natural resource which assures it of vast, easy wealth that requires next to no social advancement: Oil.
Oil is a disadvantage to Saudi-Arabia and the rest of the Middle-East. It lets the ruling class get plenty of wealth with little to no development, and causes outsiders to meddle in their affairs to keep them firmly in a medieval dictatorship stage - and even that might be too generous a term for it, for medieval dictatorships were, in fact, sustainable without outside assistance.
Once the oil runs out, shit will hit the fan; but after it has, Middle-East will finally be able to progress.
But it does highlight an underlying problem: When one person believes it is their religious/social/political duty to forcefully violate the freedom of another... then, unavoidably, *someone* will get their freedom removed. It just cannot be helped.
But it can be solved, in fact quite easily: Would you object to me doing something to you in the name of my ideology/religion? If yes, then you may not do it to others either. And if something were done to you by someone else, would you accept me simply watching and doing nothing about it? If no, then you must interfere too.
Or, in other words: we can all be equal, or I can be your master. Which will it be?
That's probably b/c many Jewish people think Judaism is fake too.
So many Muslims actually believe it all as absolute fundamental truth in their heart of hearts.
"Jew" is an ethnicity. "Judaism" is a religion. A Jew may or may not follow Judaism. "Muslim" is not an ethnicity, it's someone who follows the religion of Islam. Consequently, "Atheist Jew" (and "Buddhist Jew" and whatever) makes perfect sense, but "Atheist Muslim" or "Agnostic Muslim" doesn't, any more than "Atheist Christian" would.
According to the book's author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, "Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and should be killed in order to "curb their evil inclinations."
According to Wikipedia, this guy has been arrested several times (once over said book), and in general seems to be Israel's version of Fred Phelps.
If you want to judge Israel because of their policies, fine, but please don't judge them - or anyone else for that matter - because one of them happens to be a lunatic, especially when the rest keep on condemning his words and actions.
But the west chooces not to see because it makes the Israel-Palestine conflict one between a flawed democracy and a extremist religion totally at odds with any western value.
So basically you're saying that Israel and Palestine deserve each other?
We, ourselves, are not free from this. Look at the amount of "kill brown people" posts that topics like this brings up every time on slashdot. The true root of barbarism is an unreflected "We are different, therefore you are inferior". This mechanism exists entirely independent of religion, though I agree that religion mostly does not help.
We don't imprison or kill people because they mock whatever we hold sacred, brown people do, therefore we are superior to brown people, or at least our culture is superior to theirs. And yes, religious fanaticism is just a single symptom of an inferior culture.
Oh well. It's a pity about this guy, but maybe his existence is evidence that their culture can grow up. After all, ours did. And we should be careful not to provide an outside enemy for the powerful to point to as a distraction.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the 1080p video isn't interactive and, unless the decoder specifically requests it, realtime. Why would it be? As far as the kernel is concerned, it's just another IO-bound job. Why should that magically result in being upgraded to a high-priority job?
You are asking for the operating system to heuristically switch priorities of various tasks around. It's a really bad idea to put such heuristics into the kernel. However, the per-TTY heuristic does seem reasonable, so fine, let's use it.
Or he is less willing to solve problems than you are. Ever thought of that?
Look, you want easy entertainment, you get a DVD player and a TV. You want to get a bit beyond that, you get a gaming console. You want to run with the Internet, you better be willing to learn how to use a PC.
It never ceases to amaze me how smart my parents can be when I'm not available, and how dumb they can degenerate to when I am. It's not even instant Alzheimers, it's like they suddenly can't even read. Could all that just possibly be... laziness?
Except that the "powerful" are, for the most part, parasites. They do not have the skills needed to do anything with those seeds and patents, or perform therapy for that matter. They only know how to manipulate other people, and that's useless if there are no other people around. Sure, they could bring engineers and doctors with them, but then engineers don't necessarily have the practical skills to repair and assemble stuff, and so on and so on.
No, the idea that you can stuff a few hundred people into a vault and have them upkeep a technical civilization amongst themselves is a ridiculous one.
When all you have is impotence...
Actually, isn't the hole's rest frame the one where it is the oldest, since it's spending all its motion in time direction rather than space direction? Or, in other words, it's the only frame where time dilation doesn't slow the rate of time for the hole.
Because if you leave people alone, they tend to form a community based on cooperation rather than competition, and that might make them question if it really makes any sense to participate in a rat race in economy either. That, in turn, undermines the very basis of capitalism itself, and might even leave to some kind of (gasp) socialistic society that values happiness and leisure time over productivity for the benefit of plutocrats.
Next you know you get decent minimum wage, limited working hours, and import tolls to protect domestic industries from having to compete with Chinese slave labour. Hell, you might even have publicly funded education! It's madness!
Well, Kermit has more charisma and looks less creepy.
Why hold the poor robot to a higher standard than a human?
"Use .doc format or your children won't see adulthood."
Isn't that going a bit far, even for Microsoft?
You got modded funny, but isn't this a property of many JIT systems: they can profile and recompile parts of programs on the fly? And, for that matter, a cluster could set aside some computing power to analyze itself and optimize (by changing message priorities, moving subtasks from one node to another, etc) for the task at hand.
And that is a good thing, since it forces the rest of us to grow a thicker skin, thus not being such easy targets for hatemongers and other demagogues.
Don't think trolls as vandals, think of them as vaccination against the next Hitler.
Except that it doesn't, since being rude on the Internet doesn't cause any degree of harm, especially on a Wiki where vandalism is trivial to track and revert. If anything, spraypaint is harder to remove, and could poentially jam a cooling vent or something.
It's not a question of not deserving either, it's a question of receiving neither. Just like those who get a Darwing Award don't deserve (in the moral sense) to die die or be grievously damaged, they simply tend to do it a lot.
Those who would trade liberty for security get to live under the Lidless Eye, just as they asked.
You can win: simply join a labour union. Yes, Wal-Mart an McDonalds will fire you, but that's because they're scared: unions can force minimum wage to be enough to live on, and they can force reasonable working hours, and unions can force vacation time, and so forth.
Minimum wage worker, you have nothing to lose but your chains, but you have the whole world to win. Join an union today, and fuck your corporate masters.
That's what they want you to think. But greater evil has fallen in the past. Even Soviet Russia fell. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
Or, to put it another way: evil only wins when good men let it.
See, the thing is, can you afford to stay out of .Net languages? Now, I originally learned to program by reverse-engineering line-number-BASIC-programs, then learned some Pascal and then some C by reading Nethack's sources and making my own variant, then Python, then Java, then (Postgre)SQL, then did other (non-programming) things entirely - now would you hire me? I can learn pretty much anything fast, but I haven't programmed in any modern language for a while and just love goto and can easily figure out goto-filled spaghetti code - would you hire me?
Coding in .Net might not be illegal, but it means that you aren't "hip", which in turn stops anyone from hiring you.
If you have the strength for it, digging ditches is fine. You spend the whole day outside, get plenty of exercise, and have an SI-standard unit (meter) to measure your accomplishments. You're also free to let your mind wander anywhere you please while your body moves on autopilot.
That said, if you don't want to dig ditches, cranking out .NET code might not be the smartest career move, since the skills you acquire are tied to a single company and their fortunes and decisions. Microsoft does not deal in good faith. If they invented .NET, they did it only to tie people to their platform. If they allow Mono, they allow it only to snare people to a trap before they spring it (sue Mono to oblivion). If you've spent the last 5 years cranking out .NET code when they do, you're going to have serious problems competing against the guy who's spend them doing Python or C++.
Now excuse me, but my shovel needs polishing.
Why yes, you can not travel. Of course, by the same logic the police (or a private security firm, if you care about keeping up appearances of constitutionality) performing random strip searches on the road should be legal, since you can simply opt to stay home.
Maybe you're just an idiot, comparing strip-searches to visits to a doctor.
Really? Because I very rarely hear about any attempted attack against a plane, or someone kept from boarding one due to carrying either a weapon or explosives. In fact I hear more often about them being downed by mechanical failure or Mother Nature.
But apparently we can pretend that the amount of explosives you can stuff under your clothes without looking like the Michelin Man is enough to bring down or even seriously damage a jumbo-jet.
Indeed. Now guess what would be pretty spectacular? Someone blowing himself up on a busy city street. Is that a good reason to strip-search everyone coming to the city center?
Besides, terrorists have blown up buildings by parking cars loaded with explosives in their parking garages in the past - I seem to recall someone trying to take down WTC this way years before the 9/11 - yet not every vehicle being parked is investigated.
Well, no, they haven't persisted. Or have I simply missed all the stories of terrorists trying to smuggle explosives onboard but caught by airport security?
As for the real reason there aren't more terrorists bombing mundane targets... What's the point? We aren't going to fly into hysterics over someone bombing a bus, and that's just what a terrorist wants: hysterics. The IRA - funded by the USA, BTW - did bomb mundane targets yet failed to do anything except murder several people. Osama bin Laden and his cohorts learned their lessons: aim for the hysterics.
Of course, this same logic holds for all other possible punishments, including fines and jail time. So, if you are right, we should stop the enforcement of all laws.
It's a flaw that came to light during the Industrial Revolution, and in fact hit so hard it spawned Communism as a response. It is also a flaw that's inherent to Capitalism and can't be fixed under it.
Of course, as soon as automation catches up with all tasks - that is, as soon as Artificial Intelligence catches up with Human Intelligence, at least as far as practical matters are concerned - we can simply switch to Socialism, since we have an unlimited supply of effective slave labour doing all the work. Everyone gets their production quota per day and can do what they please with it.
But then again, that won't happen since the haves won't give up their position of superiority, the have-nots won't have the power to take it by force, and the Randroids will run around screaming how people should starve to death on principle.
Of course, this rises a question: Why don't I simply get the numbers from Wikipedia, RSS feeds or whatever and run the algorithm myself? Why bother with a website, which is bound to be sub-optimal for my uses due to the demands of advertizers and "Web Designers"?
Is that the death knell of the remaining newspapers I hear?
Maybe, but that requires work and principles, so the chances are you get inane propaganda instead.
Oh well, it shouldn't take long before keeping tabs on what's happening can be fully automated. I wonder if that thought is giving Murdoch nightmares?
Can or will? Because there are plenty of countries with old laws still in books since nobody has had time to clean them out, yet they are no longer enforced and are thus, for all practical purposes, overturned. For example, according to this website, it's illegal to have sex with a virgin in Washington State.
You have 300 million people over there, so of course there are a few lunatics in such a large crowd. The real question is: Are they succeeding? Doesn't seem so to me.
No, Talibanistic fundamentalism is not "just below the surface" everywhere. Loud-mouthed assholes, on the other hand, are doing their best to make their home countries seem like fundamentalistic hellholes everywhere.
Oil is a disadvantage to Saudi-Arabia and the rest of the Middle-East. It lets the ruling class get plenty of wealth with little to no development, and causes outsiders to meddle in their affairs to keep them firmly in a medieval dictatorship stage - and even that might be too generous a term for it, for medieval dictatorships were, in fact, sustainable without outside assistance.
Once the oil runs out, shit will hit the fan; but after it has, Middle-East will finally be able to progress.
But it can be solved, in fact quite easily: Would you object to me doing something to you in the name of my ideology/religion? If yes, then you may not do it to others either. And if something were done to you by someone else, would you accept me simply watching and doing nothing about it? If no, then you must interfere too.
Or, in other words: we can all be equal, or I can be your master. Which will it be?
"Jew" is an ethnicity. "Judaism" is a religion. A Jew may or may not follow Judaism. "Muslim" is not an ethnicity, it's someone who follows the religion of Islam. Consequently, "Atheist Jew" (and "Buddhist Jew" and whatever) makes perfect sense, but "Atheist Muslim" or "Agnostic Muslim" doesn't, any more than "Atheist Christian" would.
According to Wikipedia, this guy has been arrested several times (once over said book), and in general seems to be Israel's version of Fred Phelps.
If you want to judge Israel because of their policies, fine, but please don't judge them - or anyone else for that matter - because one of them happens to be a lunatic, especially when the rest keep on condemning his words and actions.
So basically you're saying that Israel and Palestine deserve each other?
That's cold, man, ice cold ;).
We don't imprison or kill people because they mock whatever we hold sacred, brown people do, therefore we are superior to brown people, or at least our culture is superior to theirs. And yes, religious fanaticism is just a single symptom of an inferior culture.
Oh well. It's a pity about this guy, but maybe his existence is evidence that their culture can grow up. After all, ours did. And we should be careful not to provide an outside enemy for the powerful to point to as a distraction.