Phil Henshaw wrote: > That's sort of a central control mechanism for dealing with independent > users that were not smart enough to share the limited resource on their own. > If the independent users were to learn enough about each other's needs they > might learn ways to cooperate and make better use of the limited shared > resource. It's not that they are not smart enough to figure out what the resource is and how to share it. It's that in this case the real failure would be ongoing haphazard negotiation by users, which is clumsy and poorly informed and its realization is usually not the primary problem they are interested in solving. Better to design an automated load balancing algorithm and leave that work to a fast and patient computer. The identification of general principles of what constitutes fair use (e.g. equal access to memory and cycles and known turnaround time), is the social/organizational question, and it's separate from the implementation.
So my question in response to yours, in the context of the subject line, was: "Is there really a resource under contention?" Or is it just a venue for someone to interleave themselves as a controller and make themselves more important than they ought to be. Lots of people have vested interests in existing inefficiencies, the management of conflict, and the facilitation of people who would rather not think. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
