Arbit Scratchpad

E-Revolution - The biggest environmental hazard of the future ? Millions of computers are getting disposed every day across the world and now in a big way in our country too thanks to the IT boom. There exists no stringent laws on the recycling and reuse of these toxic items such as cabinets, motherboards, chips and monitors. And as a result the local recyclers try to extract precious metals (read gold) and recycle these in all sorts of hazardous ways thus putting themselves in danger and propagating serious environmental pollution. The LCD in the monitors are toxic chemicals and the alloys and fumes out of burning other such chemicals and polymers and plastics could be deadly thus polluting neighbouring areas too. The illegal disposal and sale of these is even worse - the toxic materials are dumped into our country from the US apart from those that we ourselves generate - China has banned this but we have not because it provides a large number of people with their only means of l...

Entry for the day : Linux Kernel v2.6 performance tests ... Its a great performer, it seems - need to install it - got the sources with me from the LFY CDs... 'At the core of the enhancements in v2.6 is a new process scheduler. The process scheduler in the kernel divides CPU resources among system processes. The performance of the scheduler directly impacts system responsiveness and process latency. In the v2.6 kernel, the new 0(1) scheduler incorporates new algorithms that can substantially increase system performance, especially interactive tasks. The 0(1) scheduler can penalize CPU-hogging processes, improves process prioritization, and provides consistent performance across all processes. Also new in v2.6 are two new I/O schedulers. The scheduler used in the v2.6 kernel by default, the anticipatory scheduler, brings much improved handling of I/O scheduling, ensuring that processes get I/O time when necessary, without unnecessary queuing. Also present is the deadline...