Monthly Archives: September 2012

  • Is there still a need for nice?

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

    Some time last week, the collective minds of Bristol Wireless were hunched over their pints down the pub when someone asked: “Is there still a point to nice?”

    For those unfamiliar with nice, it’s a means on a Unix/Linux system of giving a process more or less CPU time than other processes. A niceness of −20 is the highest priority and 19 or 20 is the lowest priority. The default niceness for processes is inherited from its parent process, usually 0.

    For an idea of how it works, here’s the nice man page:

    Name

    nice – run a program with modified scheduling priority

    Synopsis

    nice [OPTION] [COMMAND [ARG]…]

    Description

    Run COMMAND with an adjusted niceness, which affects process scheduling. With no COMMAND, print the current niceness. Nicenesses range from -20 (most favorable scheduling) to 19 (least favorable).

    -n, –adjustment=N
    add integer N to the niceness (default 10)

    –help
    display this help and exit

    –version
    output version information and exit

    NOTE: your shell may have its own version of nice, which usually supersedes the version described here. Please refer to your shell’s documentation for details about the options it supports.

    Author
    Written by David MacKenzie.

    Reporting Bugs

    Report nice bugs to bug-coreutils@gnu.org
    GNU coreutils home page: http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/
    General help using GNU software: http://www.gnu.org/gethelp/
    Report nice translation bugs to http://translationproject.org/team/

    Copyright
    Copyright © 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html.

    This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

    See Also
    nice(2)

    The full documentation for nice is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and nice programs are properly installed at your site, the command

    info coreutils aqnice invocationaq

    should give you access to the complete manual.

    Anyway, the main discussion centred around whether processes still needed to have their niceness adjusted (‘reniced’ in the correct terminology) in these days of processors and amounts of RAM that have capacities many multiples of the systems upon which Unix and Linux were originally designed to run, although no real conclusions were reached, apart from one instance mentioned: that of a process just starting up and slowing the whole system to a crawl. Perhaps readers would like to leave their opinions – if any – in the comments below.

    Putting on my language hat and looking at Wikipedia, it seems the etymology of nice is as follows. The name “nice” comes from the fact that the program’s purpose is to modify a process niceness value. The true priority, used to decide how much CPU time to concede to each process, is calculated by the kernel process scheduler from a combination of the niceness values of different processes and other data, such as the amount of I/O done by each process.

    The term “niceness” itself originates from the idea that a process with a higher niceness value is “nicer” to other processes in the system, as it allows the other processes more CPU time.

    Update: 27/09/12: Alex Butcher of Bristol & Bath LUG has suggested ionice is a more useful tool than nice.

  • Companies asked to fight European software patents and unitary patents

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    Companies within the European Union are being asked publicly to declare their opposition to software patents by signing a resolution (below) asking to the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs to amend the regulation on the unitary patent.

    This resolution, along with the list of signatories, will be sent to Members of the European Parliament on Tuesday, 13th September – a few days before the meeting of the Committee on Legal Affairs. More than 400 firms have already signed it.

    To sign the resolution, please send an email to: resolution-enterprises (at) unitary-patent.eu

    The text of the resolution is as follows:

    Our company is worried about the current plans to set up a unitary patent with a flanking unified patent court.

    The European Patent Office (EPO)’s practices to grant software patents, under the deceiving term of “computer-implemented inventions”, pose a threat to our professional activities.

    We are concerned that the regulation on the unitary patent, as agreed in December 2011 by the negotiators of the Council, the Commission, and the Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament, leaves any and every issue on the limits of patentability to the EPO’s case law, without any democratic control or review by an independent court.

    The regulation on the unitary patent is an opportunity for the EU legislators to harmonise substantive patent law in the EU institutional and jurisdictional framework, and to put an end to the EPO’s self-motivated practices extending the realm of patentability to software. Failing to do so, this unitary patent will do more harm than good to the EU ICT firms.

    For these reasons, we urge MEPs to adopt amendments which clearly state that the EPO’s decisions are subject to a review from the Court of Justice of the European Union, and which reaffirm the rejection of software patentability, as expressed by the votes of the European Parliament on September 24th, 2003 and July 6th, 2005.

    Signatories are also being encouraged to contact members of the Committee on Legal Affairs by email.

    As company secretary of Bristol Wireless, I’m pleased to say BW’s already signed the resolution.

  • How not to do an ‘online’ consultation

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Today I posted the article below on the Bristol Wireless blog. It is reproduced here in its entirety.

    Yesterday, the last day for responses, Bristol Wireless responded to the Department for Education‘s consultation on internet blocking in the cause of keeping children safe online. The consultation arose from a campaign called ‘Safety Net‘, run by Premier Christian Media and SaferMedia, and supported by the Daily Mail. The campaign, and now the consultation is about requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block adult and other content at network level whilst giving adults a choice to ‘opt-in’ to this content.

    However, taking part in the consultation wasn’t easy. Consultees had to do the following:

    • Download consultation questionnaire;
    • Fill in questionnaire;
    • Upload completed questionnaire to Dept. of Education website.

    Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It wasn’t.

    Here’s why. Ignoring the rhetoric on open standards coming out of their Whitehall neighbours the Cabinet Office, Education Department civil servants only made the consultation questionnaire available as a Microsoft Word file (Wot? No ODF? Ed.). The author of the questionnaire had also stuffed it full of Word macros; this made it very difficult, if not impossible, to open using alternative office suites, such as LibreOffice. Many highly experienced openistas encountered this: Alan Lord (aka the Open Sourcerer) mentioned on Twitter that he couldn’t open it, whilst Glyn Moody could, but found the questionnaire impossible to fill in! On the chief scribe’s, machine attempting to open the file either stalled to a complete halt or crashed the office suite! 🙁 Ultimately, the chief scribe was only able to complete the questionnaire as he had access to a copy of MS Office.

    We cannot understand why the civil servants at the Dept. for Education couldn’t have designed the consultation questionnaire as an online survey. Bristol City Council has years of experience of doing online consultations in this manner – and they work very well indeed. Perhaps Sir Humphrey at the Dept. for Education should have called the Counts Louse for advice. As it is, out of 10 we’re giving this Education Dept. consultation a mark of 2. They’d better pull their socks up or it’ll be detention for them… 🙂

    Update 08/09/12: It seems that the consultation did originally start out as an online consultation, but was rejigged owing to extremely embarrassing security cock-ups, as The Register reports.

    The Register was first to reveal – within hours of the Department for Education publishing its parental internet controls proposal – that the DfE’s website was ironically exposing the email addresses, unencrypted passwords and sensitive answers submitted people who filled in the consultation’s questionnaire.

    As a result of this additional information, we’ve now reduced the DfE’s mark to minus 2 out of 10. 🙂

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