Consider the semantics: niceness (relinquishes resources) as the opposite of meanness (demands resource) in a multi user system > This is why the nice number i

Consider the semantics: niceness (relinquishes resources) as the opposite of meanness (demands resource) in a multi user system > This is why the nice number is usually called niceness: a job with a high niceness is very kind to the users of your system (i.e., it runs at low priority), while a job with little niceness hogs the CPU. The term "niceness" is awkward, like the priority system itself. Unfortunately, it's the only term that is both accurate (nice numbers are used to compute the priorities but are not the priorities themselves) and avoids horrible circumlocutions ("increasing the priority means lowering the priority..."). Jerry Peek et al. in Unix Power Tools (O'Reilly, 2007, p. 507) via https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14067128/why-are-niceness-values-inversely-related-to-process-priority https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14067128/why-are-nicenes...