Re: Good guy timers

On 3/30/14 at 8:17 AM, [email protected] (David Barbour) wrote:

>On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 2:01 AM, Jed Donnelley <capability-iCFHVraI1K1Wk0Htik3J/[email protected]>wrote:
>
>>
>>your mention of a human supervisor who isn't paying attention seems to me
>>a particularly good case for good guy timers.
>>
>
>... However, timers for
>human supervisors are more often for things like "okay, we're about to
>crash. please select one of these actions or perform another within 3
>seconds, or I'll need to guess which action is best." Timeouts are often
>relevant in domains where timing of actions and commitment to actions are
>relevant.

This example seems to be a question of a resource that is about 
to run out -- time for a decision.


>For something like live videos, timers are necessary not due to a human
>supervisor but due to buffering issues.  There is a limit to how much one
>can buffer live video while waiting for the remote client to fetch them.
>
>Now, there are ways around this for video (such as using a ring-buffer and
>accepting lossy video in case of timeout). But it can also be expensive to
>keep producing video, in terms of battery life and so on, e.g. if the video
>is coming from a remote robot platform. And it might not be so expensive to
>simply restart the video. So one needs to prioritize. Your 'good guy
>timers' would favor to keep the video running and buffering in case someone
>is debugging the code or similar, unless someone else needs the video
>stream.

There are still resources which are being optimized. Battery is 
a good example. So long as there is not competition for the 
resource, you don't have to disconnect it from the current user. 
With a battery, there are other users, now or in the future -- 
at least before it can be recharged.

Jed's examples are where the issues are easy to understand and 
resolve. Even with the more complex examples David has 
presented, the idea of competition for resources can help set 
good values for when, for example, you stop recording video to 
save the battery for other future uses.

Cheers - Bill

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