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Those examples show both 
nice
 and 
renice
 using the 
-n
 option, and setting both 
positive and negative values. Since the 
-n
 option is used the same way between the 
two commands, it may be easier to focus on committing that to memory rather than 
focusing on the specifics. As previously discussed, I used 
sudo
 with commands that set 
a negative value for niceness, since only 
root
 can change a process to, or start a process 
with, a niceness below 
0
. You'll receive the following error if you try to do it anyway:
nice: cannot set niceness: Permission denied
This type of protection is somewhat important, because you may have some users 
who feel as though their processes are the most important, and try to prioritize 
them all the way to 
-19
. At the end of the day, it's better for a system administrator 
to make decisions on which processes are allowed to reach a niceness value in the 
negative.
As an administrator of Ubuntu servers, it's up to you to decide which processes 
should be running, and at what priority. You'll then determine the best way to 
achieve the exact system state that's appropriate, and tuning process priority may 
be a part of that. If nothing else, learning the 
nice
 and 
renice
 commands gives you 
another utility for your toolset.