The list goes on with the only thing missing being actual experience with PCs, printers, and Office suites, which is what the job description is all about.
The only time I would say a distribution should be involved in setting priorities would be if the actual process of launching software checked a listing. Even then it's highly suspect, in a lot of ways, nice is a sledgehammer for a problem that needs a scalpel.
From the looks of it, the hooks for group control are already in the kernel, if a launcher were written to take advantage of it, distros could easily set the launch commands for the response sensitive software to their own groups & leave less sensitive software to fall in the main window manager group.
If you launch things from a desktop icon, it'll get dumped into the same group as your window manager.
How to get it dumped into a different group is the variation on the 2 techniques. The patch requires you launch the program from a different TTY, the script requires it be launched from a different session.
Perhaps something like a nice command could be created that will dump things into the specified group:
kgroup -n firefox firefox
Software that needs to stay responsive or has the potential to bog down the system can be set to instance it's own group, while other software can be lumped into the generic session group.
In theory you could alter the 'launch' process for running software & check a database for 'nice' priorities so that they automatically launch with a preset 'nice' rating.
Currently, the kernel is very egalitarian - everything runs at 'nice 0' unless the user wants something different. If YOU think that extinguish_fire should have more of a priority than watch_tv, then YOU should handle the issue.
However, that isn't the issue addressed by either the patch or the userspace scripts. While adjusting niceness may help in a gross sense, it's not going to handle proper timeslicing of software that's spawning a huge number of threads and lagging other applications.
As an example, we need to run extinguish_fire and evacuate_building at the same time. extinguish_fire spawns a thread for each bucket in the brigade, while evacuate_building only spawns a thread for each escape route. Now, if there are 96 buckets & 4 escape routes, extinguish fire will consume 96% of the CPU & choke out the evacuate_building threads.
You could try to guess the appropriate level of 'nice' for each program when you launch it, but it's not going to be pretty. To get even timing, you would be pushing evacuate_building to nice -19 - an act that would make it next to impossible to establish any control over the bucket brigades.
By grouping all of the threads from a program, extinguish_fire and evacuate_building get equal footing regardless of the number of threads they spawn. Both of them remain responsive to commands without taking the huge hits you get from drastic nice levels. If both processes aren't running smoothly, you can renice the group rather than take the nice hit 'threadcount' times.
OK this is a vast oversimplification & if someone else has a better description feel free:
Either way you do this, Kernel level or Userspace, you're grouping tasks in the scheduler. The theory is, you take all your GUI programs & schedule them as independent tasks, and then lump all your non GUI software as a single task.
Since all your GUI software is marked as independent tasks, they each get a timeslice on every scheduler rotation. All of the non GUI tasks share a single timeslice. This prevents a task that's hogging the CPU (compiling in the test example) from locking out the other software & creating the lag that's common under a heavy workload.
There's a slight difference in the approaches to grouping tasks, but they are effectively the same technique.
Of course, the next step is trying to actively block VPNs, but that changes the game from passive eavesdropping to active censorship, and escalates the cat and mouse game.
More importantly, it affects the way companies make money. No VPN & places like IBM have to run hard lines between offices rather than a VPN.
A college was sued recently over hand constructing some testing equipment that had been patented. There are some loopholes in the patent law about use for research & the college was using the equipment to conduct research - just not on the patented item.
It'd be wonderful but you'd likely need some sort of extremely cheap energy for this paradigm to work well.
Not huge amounts. Your input is still raw matter pushed through the replicator. Just like the transporter - matter goes in one side & the same mass come out the other side. The only difference is that you use a static template to handle the energy->matter reconstruction instead of a live scan.
You probably won't notice it at all 5 minutes after you put it on.
Unless they cut it wrong & it gives you a wedgie. I can see the observation tapes now --- 6 months of an astronaut picking their body-stocking out of their ass.
Even if the Per GB price dropped by 80 or 90% SSD's would still be more expensive and have a lot shorter life expectancy than current HDD's, we are many many years before the possibility of SSD's fully replacing HDD's becomes even conceivable
It is happy to eat you for breakfast, then wipe its mouth on its sleeve and go play tennis.
I'm not certain about you, but I usually don't expect my hard drives to last for a millennium or more. NAND memory cells have dramatically increased in read/write cycle life since they first came out. Additionally, wear leveling routines have pushed the usable lifespan out to where their about as reliable as the rest of the solid state circuits in your laptop.
If you look at the picture, you can see 6 PCI cards in the box with cables coming off of them. So 6X4=24 + 6 on the MB would be 30. Not a huge leap to accept that there might actually be that many ports on a PC build specifically for this stunt.
Of course, if you're using asterisk and allow registrations from remote IPs and you have extensions.conf configured to allow calls to international destinations that you're unlikely to call then that's a bit foolhardy.
Fortunately, it's configured as a dial-in service only. It's a message service & conference room box only.
I was pulling 60+ login attempts a second for almost the entire month. I had at least 4 separate colleges around the world hammering at my system. I provided log snippets to their abuse depts & got no response, although I did receive an increase in attempts from the tech school in S. Korea.
Buildings (and pretty much everything else on Earth) are mostly designed to resist compressive loads I.E. the force of gravity. Thus, if you want to move a structure using this method your pretty much have two major options: First, to move an existing structure you can build a heavy cage around it so you can lift it from the top. Second, to move a new structure you can design in massive reinforcements so you can lift it from the top.
Or you can do what they currently do now which is shove a series of I-beams under it to take the weight from the foundation. Once all the weight is on the I-beams, there is no difference to the building if the I-beams are being lifted by a series of jacks to get it on a truck, a crane to lift it onto another foundation, or a dirigible to carry it cross country.
Although if I were Microsoft at this moment, I'd be paying the lawyers overtime to find out why EFF thinks overturning this patent ruling is a good thing.
Why pay the lawyers when you can just read the brief & they tell you? EFF thinks overturning the ruling because the ruling is based on "Clear and Convincing" evidence. In other words, a patent is given the same weight as a previous legal ruling - even though nobody is allowed to argue against the patent before it's issued.
First off you don't come in on an equal footing - patents are assumed to be valid. Next, the level of proof required to set aside a patent is higher than in any other form of IP case. The only other time I can find "Clear and Convincing" as the standard is when the court is stripping someone of their parental rights.
Between the 2 of them, it makes it almost impossible to invalidate a patent. When the standard was set, the Patent office was:
receiving 1/10th the number of patent application
Reviewing each patent by someone knowledgeable in the art.
reviewing patents involving physical products(items) & processes(chemical processes) not vague fragments of code & general abstraction (business processes)
At that time, the standard made sense. Under the current process, where an intern with a chemistry degree is approving software patents, it no longer does. Currently, a patent clerk has less than 4 hours to determine if a patent application should be approved or not. Examine some of these patents -- many are upwards of 200 pages of legalese. Nobody can accurately determine the validity of a patent that complex in a few hours - and yet they are given the presumption of validity going in.
I'm a little suspicious of the emission claims though. How much of that is from plugin? I can't imagine turbine->electric->battery->motors is an efficient drive train.
I doubt very little of it is from plugin. The 28g CO2/Km rating is based on 560 miles. The battery range is 68 miles. So even adjusting for a full charge from an outlet, you're looking at 31.9g CO2/Km rating.
Gasoline engines are abysmal at energy efficiency - in the neighborhood of 18-20%. Gas Turbine engines usually fall in the range of 35-60% depending on size & design.
The energy loss between the rotary->motor stages is probably close to the same as lost in an automatic transmission.
Given the ability of an electric car to use regenerative breaking, any loss due to the battery's internal resistance is more than compensated for. Depending on the driving conditions, regenerative breaking can extend range by as much as 30%.
So, baseline, I would expect that the car should show about 1/2 the emissions of a gasoline car. This would be improved by:
Turbines running at peak efficiency whenever they are on vs piston engines rarely running at peak power/g fuel.
Excess from regenerative breaking.
Minimal aerodynamic drag - this is designed as a "super-car" & appears to have a very minimal aerodynamic cross section.
Hurd's behavior was using his expense account to finance a few evenings with his mistress - who happened to be an HP consultant. Who cares - that's not corporate malfeasance.
Phiser on the other hand literally got away with deliberately flaunting FDA regulations and was deemed 'to big to fail'. Rather than baring their products from medicare - as the law says should have happened - they cut a deal to have a small shell company that wasn't involved barred instead. You can't jail a corporation for criminal acts. You only have 3 real tools - fines, mandatory oversight(receivership), and revocation of the charter. I haven't seen any cases - I did a quick search - in the last 10 years where a corporate charter was revoked because of criminal activity.
A lot of businesses today just see fines as a cost of doing business. If I can make 1/2 billion more profit by skirting the law, a 100mil fine is worth it.
Really? where I live (UK) you would contact the police. They investigate and the crown prosecution service would prosecute the thief for theft. You can't sue someone for a criminal offence.
In the US the cops tell you that they're really sorry but they can't do anything for you because it's only a little crime & it's not 'prioritized' for them to get involved. Sort of like having your credit card numbers stolen & used - if the thieves stay under 2K the govt won't get involved. No, literally, they won't even take a statement for credit card fraud under $2K .
Copyright owners can band together and set up collecting agencies for tracks they own. They just shouldn't get any special status from the state to collect for everyone.
Why not? Everyone else just got special status to use copyrighted works from the state.
Given a database of tracks, validating one's compliance (i.e. how many agencies does one need to pay) is trivial.
Really? Validation by the copyright owners is trivial when investigating every bar, radio station, and wedding reception? Wow, I had no idea there were so few. Oh, you mean a bar owner making certain his payments went to the right place - oh sure, can't be more than an additional 50 checks a month. Oh, and showing that validation list to the 50 separate agencies that decide to stop in during December isn't going to be an issue either - I mean it's only every song you've played over the last 6 months.
Those collection agencies are there for both sides of the mandatory licensing issue. What you want is all of the benefits of mandatory licensing without any of the restrictions. I said it initially, the proposed law is a step in the right direction because it codifies the right of an artist to opt out of the collection process if they want to. As far as I know, no other country with mandatory licensing had done that yet.
The second one is that if these apps need to be able to write to that section of the disk, they're going to ask for elevation.
OK, I can see AV software requiring raw disk access. I can't see why it would need to be able write to that section of the disk if there is no virus there.
Of the 3 programs listed, none are anti-virus. HP's software is for heavy duty keycard/usb dongle access to the computer - it might be trying to secure the bootstrap - however if that's what it's doing it should be replacing grub not just writing to the disk.
PC Angel is backup/recovery software... WTF does it need raw disk access? It's not like your computer is accidentally going to be writing files outside the partition.
Adobe's netflex is their DRM. It's obvious why they want to write their information outside the partition - to make it harder to discover & alter - but I'll tell you that if I found a program doing that - I'd yank it off of any network I was running. You want to run on my networks, you color within the lines. I'm not wasting my time hunting down why a chunk of software is writing where it's going to be hard for my AV software to check it, I'm yanking it & tossing it in the trash.
Yeah, just a great idea to toss your proprietary code chunks into random places on the hard drive that 'nobody uses anyway'. It's a file system for a reason.
Unfortunately, the only company that's going to get any flak over this is Adobe. People are going to get work stations with the HP software installed & installing the netflex software will break it. Once that happens, Adobe will get called by "big important companies" and bitched at. HP & PC angel will merrily go on their way with only a few 'fringe crackpots' having an issue with their software.
OK, then every radio, TV station, DJ, and bar has to negotiate it's own license with the copyright owner and conversely every copyright owner has to monitor, track, and collect from every DJ, bar, club, and wedding singer.
Mandatory licensing and the collection agencies go hand in hand. Let's stick with music. What percentage of music is released royalty free? That's both performance royalty and writer royalty. Next, what percentage of that is ever used as a public performance? From basic research, that number is well under 1%. ASCAP collects for the 99+% of copyright owners who want the royalties.
You don't want the royalties from mandatory licensing? You're a fringe case. Should there be an accommodation for that? Yes, but demanding everyone except the fringe cope with the problems created by the lack of Mandatory licensing & ASCAP shows a lack of realism.
And what incentive would an author of copyleft work have to make collection agencies' work easier? They stand to gain nothing from all the extra work.
None. However the agencies that do the collecting and the people writing the laws are faced with the choice of make everyone except a small number of people who don't want royalties collected do work, or make that small number of people do more. Note I said it was the easy solution. I never said it was the right solution.
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The list goes on with the only thing missing being actual experience with PCs, printers, and Office suites, which is what the job description is all about.
The only time I would say a distribution should be involved in setting priorities would be if the actual process of launching software checked a listing. Even then it's highly suspect, in a lot of ways, nice is a sledgehammer for a problem that needs a scalpel.
From the looks of it, the hooks for group control are already in the kernel, if a launcher were written to take advantage of it, distros could easily set the launch commands for the response sensitive software to their own groups & leave less sensitive software to fall in the main window manager group.
If you launch things from a desktop icon, it'll get dumped into the same group as your window manager.
How to get it dumped into a different group is the variation on the 2 techniques. The patch requires you launch the program from a different TTY, the script requires it be launched from a different session.
Perhaps something like a nice command could be created that will dump things into the specified group:
kgroup -n firefox firefox
Software that needs to stay responsive or has the potential to bog down the system can be set to instance it's own group, while other software can be lumped into the generic session group.
In theory you could alter the 'launch' process for running software & check a database for 'nice' priorities so that they automatically launch with a preset 'nice' rating.
Currently, the kernel is very egalitarian - everything runs at 'nice 0' unless the user wants something different. If YOU think that extinguish_fire should have more of a priority than watch_tv, then YOU should handle the issue.
However, that isn't the issue addressed by either the patch or the userspace scripts. While adjusting niceness may help in a gross sense, it's not going to handle proper timeslicing of software that's spawning a huge number of threads and lagging other applications.
As an example, we need to run extinguish_fire and evacuate_building at the same time. extinguish_fire spawns a thread for each bucket in the brigade, while evacuate_building only spawns a thread for each escape route. Now, if there are 96 buckets & 4 escape routes, extinguish fire will consume 96% of the CPU & choke out the evacuate_building threads.
You could try to guess the appropriate level of 'nice' for each program when you launch it, but it's not going to be pretty. To get even timing, you would be pushing evacuate_building to nice -19 - an act that would make it next to impossible to establish any control over the bucket brigades.
By grouping all of the threads from a program, extinguish_fire and evacuate_building get equal footing regardless of the number of threads they spawn. Both of them remain responsive to commands without taking the huge hits you get from drastic nice levels. If both processes aren't running smoothly, you can renice the group rather than take the nice hit 'threadcount' times.
OK this is a vast oversimplification & if someone else has a better description feel free:
Either way you do this, Kernel level or Userspace, you're grouping tasks in the scheduler. The theory is, you take all your GUI programs & schedule them as independent tasks, and then lump all your non GUI software as a single task.
Since all your GUI software is marked as independent tasks, they each get a timeslice on every scheduler rotation. All of the non GUI tasks share a single timeslice. This prevents a task that's hogging the CPU (compiling in the test example) from locking out the other software & creating the lag that's common under a heavy workload.
There's a slight difference in the approaches to grouping tasks, but they are effectively the same technique.
I have way more than 35K full body scans. Perhaps the government can pay me $1M to re-examine them. It is a matter of national security, trust me.
More importantly, it affects the way companies make money. No VPN & places like IBM have to run hard lines between offices rather than a VPN.
A college was sued recently over hand constructing some testing equipment that had been patented. There are some loopholes in the patent law about use for research & the college was using the equipment to conduct research - just not on the patented item.
Not huge amounts. Your input is still raw matter pushed through the replicator. Just like the transporter - matter goes in one side & the same mass come out the other side. The only difference is that you use a static template to handle the energy->matter reconstruction instead of a live scan.
OK that was more than geeky enough for 1 day.
Unless they cut it wrong & it gives you a wedgie. I can see the observation tapes now --- 6 months of an astronaut picking their body-stocking out of their ass.
I'm not certain about you, but I usually don't expect my hard drives to last for a millennium or more. NAND memory cells have dramatically increased in read/write cycle life since they first came out. Additionally, wear leveling routines have pushed the usable lifespan out to where their about as reliable as the rest of the solid state circuits in your laptop.
If you look at the picture, you can see 6 PCI cards in the box with cables coming off of them. So 6X4=24 + 6 on the MB would be 30. Not a huge leap to accept that there might actually be that many ports on a PC build specifically for this stunt.
No, he got out of breath reading the article --- happens when you have to move your lips while you read.
[sorry, low hanging fruit and all that]
Fortunately, it's configured as a dial-in service only. It's a message service & conference room box only.
I was pulling 60+ login attempts a second for almost the entire month. I had at least 4 separate colleges around the world hammering at my system. I provided log snippets to their abuse depts & got no response, although I did receive an increase in attempts from the tech school in S. Korea.
Or you can do what they currently do now which is shove a series of I-beams under it to take the weight from the foundation. Once all the weight is on the I-beams, there is no difference to the building if the I-beams are being lifted by a series of jacks to get it on a truck, a crane to lift it onto another foundation, or a dirigible to carry it cross country.
Why pay the lawyers when you can just read the brief & they tell you? EFF thinks overturning the ruling because the ruling is based on "Clear and Convincing" evidence. In other words, a patent is given the same weight as a previous legal ruling - even though nobody is allowed to argue against the patent before it's issued.
First off you don't come in on an equal footing - patents are assumed to be valid. Next, the level of proof required to set aside a patent is higher than in any other form of IP case. The only other time I can find "Clear and Convincing" as the standard is when the court is stripping someone of their parental rights.
Between the 2 of them, it makes it almost impossible to invalidate a patent. When the standard was set, the Patent office was:
At that time, the standard made sense. Under the current process, where an intern with a chemistry degree is approving software patents, it no longer does. Currently, a patent clerk has less than 4 hours to determine if a patent application should be approved or not. Examine some of these patents -- many are upwards of 200 pages of legalese. Nobody can accurately determine the validity of a patent that complex in a few hours - and yet they are given the presumption of validity going in.
I doubt very little of it is from plugin. The 28g CO2/Km rating is based on 560 miles. The battery range is 68 miles. So even adjusting for a full charge from an outlet, you're looking at 31.9g CO2/Km rating.
Gasoline engines are abysmal at energy efficiency - in the neighborhood of 18-20%. Gas Turbine engines usually fall in the range of 35-60% depending on size & design.
The energy loss between the rotary->motor stages is probably close to the same as lost in an automatic transmission.
Given the ability of an electric car to use regenerative breaking, any loss due to the battery's internal resistance is more than compensated for. Depending on the driving conditions, regenerative breaking can extend range by as much as 30%.
So, baseline, I would expect that the car should show about 1/2 the emissions of a gasoline car. This would be improved by:
Hurd's behavior was using his expense account to finance a few evenings with his mistress - who happened to be an HP consultant. Who cares - that's not corporate malfeasance.
Phiser on the other hand literally got away with deliberately flaunting FDA regulations and was deemed 'to big to fail'. Rather than baring their products from medicare - as the law says should have happened - they cut a deal to have a small shell company that wasn't involved barred instead. You can't jail a corporation for criminal acts. You only have 3 real tools - fines, mandatory oversight(receivership), and revocation of the charter. I haven't seen any cases - I did a quick search - in the last 10 years where a corporate charter was revoked because of criminal activity.
A lot of businesses today just see fines as a cost of doing business. If I can make 1/2 billion more profit by skirting the law, a 100mil fine is worth it.
In the US the cops tell you that they're really sorry but they can't do anything for you because it's only a little crime & it's not 'prioritized' for them to get involved. Sort of like having your credit card numbers stolen & used - if the thieves stay under 2K the govt won't get involved. No, literally, they won't even take a statement for credit card fraud under $2K .
Why not? Everyone else just got special status to use copyrighted works from the state.
Really? Validation by the copyright owners is trivial when investigating every bar, radio station, and wedding reception? Wow, I had no idea there were so few. Oh, you mean a bar owner making certain his payments went to the right place - oh sure, can't be more than an additional 50 checks a month. Oh, and showing that validation list to the 50 separate agencies that decide to stop in during December isn't going to be an issue either - I mean it's only every song you've played over the last 6 months.
Those collection agencies are there for both sides of the mandatory licensing issue. What you want is all of the benefits of mandatory licensing without any of the restrictions. I said it initially, the proposed law is a step in the right direction because it codifies the right of an artist to opt out of the collection process if they want to. As far as I know, no other country with mandatory licensing had done that yet.
OK, I can see AV software requiring raw disk access. I can't see why it would need to be able write to that section of the disk if there is no virus there.
Of the 3 programs listed, none are anti-virus. HP's software is for heavy duty keycard/usb dongle access to the computer - it might be trying to secure the bootstrap - however if that's what it's doing it should be replacing grub not just writing to the disk.
PC Angel is backup/recovery software ... WTF does it need raw disk access? It's not like your computer is accidentally going to be writing files outside the partition.
Adobe's netflex is their DRM. It's obvious why they want to write their information outside the partition - to make it harder to discover & alter - but I'll tell you that if I found a program doing that - I'd yank it off of any network I was running. You want to run on my networks, you color within the lines. I'm not wasting my time hunting down why a chunk of software is writing where it's going to be hard for my AV software to check it, I'm yanking it & tossing it in the trash.
Yeah, just a great idea to toss your proprietary code chunks into random places on the hard drive that 'nobody uses anyway'. It's a file system for a reason.
Unfortunately, the only company that's going to get any flak over this is Adobe. People are going to get work stations with the HP software installed & installing the netflex software will break it. Once that happens, Adobe will get called by "big important companies" and bitched at. HP & PC angel will merrily go on their way with only a few 'fringe crackpots' having an issue with their software.
OK, then every radio, TV station, DJ, and bar has to negotiate it's own license with the copyright owner and conversely every copyright owner has to monitor, track, and collect from every DJ, bar, club, and wedding singer.
Mandatory licensing and the collection agencies go hand in hand. Let's stick with music. What percentage of music is released royalty free? That's both performance royalty and writer royalty. Next, what percentage of that is ever used as a public performance? From basic research, that number is well under 1%. ASCAP collects for the 99+% of copyright owners who want the royalties.
You don't want the royalties from mandatory licensing? You're a fringe case. Should there be an accommodation for that? Yes, but demanding everyone except the fringe cope with the problems created by the lack of Mandatory licensing & ASCAP shows a lack of realism.
None. However the agencies that do the collecting and the people writing the laws are faced with the choice of make everyone except a small number of people who don't want royalties collected do work, or make that small number of people do more. Note I said it was the easy solution. I never said it was the right solution.