As someone that often comments on overpaid CEOs, I feel like I need to reply to this. There are many aspect to it and many different cases.
First of all, his salary (what ever you call it it is a salary) is not $3 million. It is $1.2M+$4.2M+$8.2M. That's actually more than 13 million dollar a year. I won't even talk about stock, because arguably it is not salary. (But let's be honnest, at these positions abusing stock options is not really difficult. Also you have a pretty good picture of where to invest.) He shared 20% of his salary. He could share twice that and still not really see a difference.
Now, putting it in context. The GDP per capita in China is $6,000 a year. So when he gave them $300 which is claimed to be nothing by GP but he actually increased their salary by 5%. If I received 5% more salary, I'd be quite happy. (Remember he could share twice that.)
Now, the CEO is paid that. But he is likley not the only executive paid a ridiculous amount each year. (Because the guy lives 50% of its time in China, see what you do for a million dollars a year in china?) There are other executives which could lose 20% of their salary without wondering how to heal their son's broken arm at the end of the month. It is difficult to know how many there are, but you probably can scrap another $3 million.
Then there is the fact that when the guy leave or get fired or whatever, he will get a leaving bonus of again millions of dollars. Often it is a bonus for the guy that screws up. So even if the guy does crap and screw up and get fired after a single year, he will still get more money than you and me in 10 years. And more money than 10 of these chinese worker in a lifetime.
Then I am not convinced that whatever the CEO does (I don't know this one in particular) is actually worth the salary they are paid. I understand you need a guy with the ultimate decision on everything. But that's pretty much the only thing he does. Because all the strategic informations and negotiation of contract is not done by him alone, but by an army of analyst, lawyers and tacticians. On top of that, he is pretty much liable for nothing.
He can get the money, I understand he takes it. But don't tell me you feel like it is fair.
Count me in as well. I do not actually like driving. That's a lot of wasted time for me. I'd rather do so many more things during that driving time. I could read all my commute time. Or even play need for speed!:)
Most of it is true. Thought I must say that I never really understood all the legalese associated with paper publications. Most of the time, I am not sure whether it is ok to post a preprint or not. What I usually do is post a technical report on arxiv before I submit a journal paper.
I mostly aggree with you. But I have been using a galaxy note 10.1 for more than 6 months, and I am quite happy with its "stylus input". OP might want to try that.
I have been reading slashdot for years. And apparently I missed that particular news in th epast. Sometimes, repetition is a good thing. Also once a year does not seem like an unreasonnable rate for such a news.
He is a public figure. He does speak about these issues frequently and held various position in various organization about privacy and copyright issues. I'd say he is the closest thing we have to an expert on privacy from the societal perspective (instead of the technological one).
Personnaly, I like his writing style in novels. But I tend not to like his blog.
I understand the gameplay potential given by the wii u controller. But forking 350 dollars to get the wii U with a crapppy tablet when an iPad would have done the trick (close to) just as well is counter productive. There are only a handful of games that will use the tablet in meaningful way. That make the cost of a Wii U not really justified.
I was really interested in the wii U. But it is very expensive for me and not really worth it at that point. A Ouya seems like a better choice than the Wii U. That's not a good thing for nintendo.
There is indeed a ridiculous overcharge on all the medical profession. The number of times I went to the doctor and saw him/her for less than five minute, while still having me charged more than $100 is uncountable.
I really feel that doctors are running a nationwide blackmailing operations on the country.
I guess you have never written an actual simulation code. the IEEE754 standard tells you what happens and what kind of precision you get when applying basic operation on float. But that does not guarantee anything at the higher level. The order of operation is extremely important not to lose precision. For instance, how do you sum a set of float to achieve maximal precision? Hint you do not start from the first one and iterate to the last one. You basically need to keep them sorted by increasing absolute value. Whenever you sum two of them, you need to insert the result in the set and recurse until there is no more. So essentially if you want to sum a set of floats, you need to sort first, which induces a significant overhead.
Now when you think about a complex simulation code, you might not have all the numbers available at once. So you do not actually know in which order the numbers should be summed up. If you have a value that ou previously computed as a sum and later on you get a new value to add in there. To get the best precision you might need to redo the whole sum.
Obvisouly keeping the best tradeoff of precision of the computation vs size of the memory you need ot keep vs time of the calculation is challenging. That is why precision is often mostly ignored in these calculations. Also most simulation code pay a lot of attention to how much precision is lost during the computation.
That's a buggy claim. There is nothing in GPUs that ensures you will get performance. Many algorithms are very difficult to write in GPUs. You have (essentially) no cache which make none trivial memory access slow. You have thread divergence issues which can kill your performance even if it contains significant parallelism. There is no interwarp synchronisation which is quite painful for fine synchronisation.
Clearly the picture is more complicated than "parallel execution" => performance on GPU. If you have lots of taasks to do, but they all have different code. Then a GPU is useless despite massive parallelism.
I was one of the first phi user outside of intel (not in thefirst batch, but in the second one). And programming Phi can be quite painful as well. People always try to make you believe that perfoance is easy. But frankly, it is not. You need to understand how the architecture works and many people are not trained like that nowadays. Throwing a GPU or a Phi will only bring more problem.
From what the OP says, it is not even clear he used all the processing power available on his CPU. And since he ties to get performance out of a "visual" language, I assume he is far from what is possible.
Frankly, I don't know anything about C#. But I know quite a bit of High Performance Computing. What I can guarantee you, is that I never saw an high performance routine written efficiently in anything else than in C or in C++. Sure people claim to do great in java. But that's only a claim, I still have to see seriously complicated implementations in Java.
Regarding C#, honestly, nobody writes C# for HPC in the academia. I never met a single one. But I expect it to be similar. The main problem you get is that you are too far away from your architecture. Basically, if you can force memory placement (structure of array, array of structure), if you can not choose between pointer and array indirection, if you can not specify memory prefetching, or if you can not force which vectorial instruction to write, then your code will be suboptimal. If you can specify all of that in C#, then it is a good candidate. In my experience, that's why people turn to C or C++, because the architecture of the processor is entirely exposed at that level.
Often programmer in other languages end up turning to GPU for performance, where they could have gotten the same performance out of a CPU. But it is so much cooler to say that you use a GPU, instead of going low level on a CPU...
Like in all attemps at getting stuff faster, you should first wonder what kind of performance you are already getting out of CPU implementation. Provided you seem to believe it is actually possible to get performance out of a VB like langage, I assume that your base implementation heavily sucks.
Putting stuff on a GPU has for only goal to make things faster but it is mostly difficult to write and non portable. Having a good CPU implementation might just be what you need. It also might be easier for you to write.
If you really need a GPU, then you need to start learning how GPU works, because a simple copy paste is unlikely to give you any significant performance. A good start at: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-education-training
I never properly learned opencl, but it is essentially similar. Except you have access to less low level details on nvidia architecture. Of course, cuda is pretty much nvidia only.
I am currently working in a US university as a post doc and will join another one as assistant professor. And I can tell you that one thing we definitely lack are programmers. We need programmer and we hire them. My current department (biomedical informatics at OSU) already employ at least 2 full time programmers. And they are useful. I am currently "in charge" of a piece of middleware that is quite useful for parallel programming, but it is not production ready. And provided the time I have to spare to work on it (probably negative time), it is not going to be ready anytime soon.
And frankly, close to noting of the software I write is production ready, we still release it as open source because it is useful for some other researcher, but it could definitely use some ironing.
So yes, there is definitely work. Now the question is "Are there funds for you?" The answer to that question varies a lot in time. But frequently when writting research grant, we include programmer time in the budget. So there is money for programmers.
Where does this belief comes from? Why would there be any format requirement on these things? The requirement would need to be in the law or in a court judgment. Is the law going to be that precise over electronic communications? (Not trying to bitch, just really wondering)
What if he does? Besides, he is talking like this to his peers. Not to his mother or the neighbors.
Maybe it is acceptable in his culture. In france people swaer much more than in the US. That always made me saw americans as hypocrite. They do not say what is on their mind but what is politically correct to say. Politeness is mostly useless PR that nobody buys. I prefer hearing "That makes no fucking sense" than "This could use some more explanation."
Well, that is stupid. You NEVER run identical codes on different architectures. Especially when they are not even binary compatible. You almost always optimize the code for a given architecture in fractions of code that are particularly important. Querying cache sizes, checking the number of hardware contexts are common things.
For instance libcairo has some NEON specialized code path. ffmpeg contains codepath for pretty much every single architecture out there.
Are you talking about the compiler that was checking the processor ID instead of the capabilities of the processor? That's an old story that has been fixed a long time ago.
In all fairness, compiler optimizations are close to black magic. The only reasonnable way to know what is best is to test multiple compilers and see what comes. Depending on codes some compiler will be better than some other one. Even on intel platforms, depending on benchmarks sometimes gcc performs much better, sometimes icc performs better, sometimes pgi performs better. If you care about performance of an application that much, you got to bench it on the target hardware with different compilers and optimization levels.
I haven't lived in france for a few years. But that is pretty much true. There are some emigration problems in France. But most of it is caused by improper and discriminatory government policies or police actions. The population coming from emigration suffers wide discrimination even generations after they becoming citizens. That's the problem we have in France. After being told that they are worthless, thug, crack dealers and beligerant, well some start acting on it.
Well, it is politically interesting in France. There is a large movement there to have more openness (called "transparency") in what the government and congress do and how they reach these conclusions. It was a proposition of the runner up to the presidential elections 6 years ago to put video tapes of the council of minister as public records. It was a proposal by Segolene Royal, supported by the socialist party, in order to cleanse public politics. Now we have Francois Hollande as president who was supported by the socialist party; and he was strongly advocating against prism a week ago.
There are in France many law that restrict what you can or can not store about people in databases (would they be public or private). This is supposed to be taken care of by the CNIL (National Comitee for Internet and Liberty). CNIL is supposed to be the one that prevents electronic wiretaping and electronic spying... But in the recent years the role of CNIL has weaken a lot.
While I agree on the spirit of your comment, it might not apply to everybody. I used to live in france and I was taking the bus to work in winter or I was biking (the leg-powered kind) there. When it snowed (about 1/3 of the year), biking was not really an option. If the whether is just bad, biking is not really an option as well. If I had a motored bike, I would probably not have ride it in bad weather anyway.
Also two wheels are particularly inconvenient to transport large amount of groceries. Depending how far you are from the grocery store, you might need a car for grocery shopping. Currently, I frequently need to taxi my son and his friends, a 2-wheel will not cut it. I'd recommend public transportation, but in the US, public transportation is mostly a joke (expect in a few very large city).
Depending on usage, modes of transportation varies. While living in france (Paris and Grenoble), I did not even have a driving license becasue it was so inneficient to drive anyway (compared to other means of transportation). I live in the US now, and I do not really have a choice.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone that often comments on overpaid CEOs, I feel like I need to reply to this. There are many aspect to it and many different cases.
First of all, his salary (what ever you call it it is a salary) is not $3 million. It is $1.2M+$4.2M+$8.2M. That's actually more than 13 million dollar a year. I won't even talk about stock, because arguably it is not salary. (But let's be honnest, at these positions abusing stock options is not really difficult. Also you have a pretty good picture of where to invest.) He shared 20% of his salary. He could share twice that and still not really see a difference.
Now, putting it in context. The GDP per capita in China is $6,000 a year. So when he gave them $300 which is claimed to be nothing by GP but he actually increased their salary by 5%. If I received 5% more salary, I'd be quite happy. (Remember he could share twice that.)
Now, the CEO is paid that. But he is likley not the only executive paid a ridiculous amount each year. (Because the guy lives 50% of its time in China, see what you do for a million dollars a year in china?) There are other executives which could lose 20% of their salary without wondering how to heal their son's broken arm at the end of the month. It is difficult to know how many there are, but you probably can scrap another $3 million.
Then there is the fact that when the guy leave or get fired or whatever, he will get a leaving bonus of again millions of dollars. Often it is a bonus for the guy that screws up. So even if the guy does crap and screw up and get fired after a single year, he will still get more money than you and me in 10 years. And more money than 10 of these chinese worker in a lifetime.
Then I am not convinced that whatever the CEO does (I don't know this one in particular) is actually worth the salary they are paid. I understand you need a guy with the ultimate decision on everything. But that's pretty much the only thing he does. Because all the strategic informations and negotiation of contract is not done by him alone, but by an army of analyst, lawyers and tacticians. On top of that, he is pretty much liable for nothing.
He can get the money, I understand he takes it. But don't tell me you feel like it is fair.
Really? What do you use then? I tried so many alternatives (tango, kakao talk, various SIP providers) and they are all so much worse than skype.
Nintendo essentially already does that in the 3DS. I guess they just want more resolution using more cameras.
Actually True Lies is a remake of La Totale! [1] by Claude Zidi. But I don't think Francois Voisin invented it either.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103103/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Count me in as well. I do not actually like driving. That's a lot of wasted time for me. I'd rather do so many more things during that driving time. I could read all my commute time. Or even play need for speed! :)
Most of it is true. Thought I must say that I never really understood all the legalese associated with paper publications. Most of the time, I am not sure whether it is ok to post a preprint or not. What I usually do is post a technical report on arxiv before I submit a journal paper.
I had not laugh thatmuch in a while. Thank you! :)
I mostly aggree with you. But I have been using a galaxy note 10.1 for more than 6 months, and I am quite happy with its "stylus input". OP might want to try that.
I have been reading slashdot for years. And apparently I missed that particular news in th epast. Sometimes, repetition is a good thing. Also once a year does not seem like an unreasonnable rate for such a news.
He is a public figure. He does speak about these issues frequently and held various position in various organization about privacy and copyright issues. I'd say he is the closest thing we have to an expert on privacy from the societal perspective (instead of the technological one).
Personnaly, I like his writing style in novels. But I tend not to like his blog.
I understand the gameplay potential given by the wii u controller. But forking 350 dollars to get the wii U with a crapppy tablet when an iPad would have done the trick (close to) just as well is counter productive. There are only a handful of games that will use the tablet in meaningful way. That make the cost of a Wii U not really justified.
I was really interested in the wii U. But it is very expensive for me and not really worth it at that point. A Ouya seems like a better choice than the Wii U. That's not a good thing for nintendo.
There is indeed a ridiculous overcharge on all the medical profession. The number of times I went to the doctor and saw him/her for less than five minute, while still having me charged more than $100 is uncountable.
I really feel that doctors are running a nationwide blackmailing operations on the country.
I guess you have never written an actual simulation code. the IEEE754 standard tells you what happens and what kind of precision you get when applying basic operation on float. But that does not guarantee anything at the higher level.
The order of operation is extremely important not to lose precision. For instance, how do you sum a set of float to achieve maximal precision? Hint you do not start from the first one and iterate to the last one. You basically need to keep them sorted by increasing absolute value. Whenever you sum two of them, you need to insert the result in the set and recurse until there is no more. So essentially if you want to sum a set of floats, you need to sort first, which induces a significant overhead.
Now when you think about a complex simulation code, you might not have all the numbers available at once. So you do not actually know in which order the numbers should be summed up. If you have a value that ou previously computed as a sum and later on you get a new value to add in there. To get the best precision you might need to redo the whole sum.
Obvisouly keeping the best tradeoff of precision of the computation vs size of the memory you need ot keep vs time of the calculation is challenging. That is why precision is often mostly ignored in these calculations. Also most simulation code pay a lot of attention to how much precision is lost during the computation.
These problem are non trivial.
That's a buggy claim. There is nothing in GPUs that ensures you will get performance. Many algorithms are very difficult to write in GPUs. You have (essentially) no cache which make none trivial memory access slow. You have thread divergence issues which can kill your performance even if it contains significant parallelism. There is no interwarp synchronisation which is quite painful for fine synchronisation.
Clearly the picture is more complicated than "parallel execution" => performance on GPU. If you have lots of taasks to do, but they all have different code. Then a GPU is useless despite massive parallelism.
I was one of the first phi user outside of intel (not in thefirst batch, but in the second one). And programming Phi can be quite painful as well. People always try to make you believe that perfoance is easy. But frankly, it is not. You need to understand how the architecture works and many people are not trained like that nowadays. Throwing a GPU or a Phi will only bring more problem.
From what the OP says, it is not even clear he used all the processing power available on his CPU. And since he ties to get performance out of a "visual" language, I assume he is far from what is possible.
Frankly, I don't know anything about C#. But I know quite a bit of High Performance Computing. What I can guarantee you, is that I never saw an high performance routine written efficiently in anything else than in C or in C++. Sure people claim to do great in java. But that's only a claim, I still have to see seriously complicated implementations in Java.
Regarding C#, honestly, nobody writes C# for HPC in the academia. I never met a single one. But I expect it to be similar. The main problem you get is that you are too far away from your architecture. Basically, if you can force memory placement (structure of array, array of structure), if you can not choose between pointer and array indirection, if you can not specify memory prefetching, or if you can not force which vectorial instruction to write, then your code will be suboptimal. If you can specify all of that in C#, then it is a good candidate. In my experience, that's why people turn to C or C++, because the architecture of the processor is entirely exposed at that level.
Often programmer in other languages end up turning to GPU for performance, where they could have gotten the same performance out of a CPU. But it is so much cooler to say that you use a GPU, instead of going low level on a CPU...
Like in all attemps at getting stuff faster, you should first wonder what kind of performance you are already getting out of CPU implementation. Provided you seem to believe it is actually possible to get performance out of a VB like langage, I assume that your base implementation heavily sucks.
Putting stuff on a GPU has for only goal to make things faster but it is mostly difficult to write and non portable. Having a good CPU implementation might just be what you need. It also might be easier for you to write.
If you really need a GPU, then you need to start learning how GPU works, because a simple copy paste is unlikely to give you any significant performance. A good start at: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-education-training
I never properly learned opencl, but it is essentially similar. Except you have access to less low level details on nvidia architecture. Of course, cuda is pretty much nvidia only.
I am currently working in a US university as a post doc and will join another one as assistant professor. And I can tell you that one thing we definitely lack are programmers. We need programmer and we hire them. My current department (biomedical informatics at OSU) already employ at least 2 full time programmers. And they are useful. I am currently "in charge" of a piece of middleware that is quite useful for parallel programming, but it is not production ready. And provided the time I have to spare to work on it (probably negative time), it is not going to be ready anytime soon.
And frankly, close to noting of the software I write is production ready, we still release it as open source because it is useful for some other researcher, but it could definitely use some ironing.
So yes, there is definitely work. Now the question is "Are there funds for you?" The answer to that question varies a lot in time. But frequently when writting research grant, we include programmer time in the budget. So there is money for programmers.
Where does this belief comes from? Why would there be any format requirement on these things? The requirement would need to be in the law or in a court judgment. Is the law going to be that precise over electronic communications? (Not trying to bitch, just really wondering)
What if he does? Besides, he is talking like this to his peers. Not to his mother or the neighbors.
Maybe it is acceptable in his culture. In france people swaer much more than in the US. That always made me saw americans as hypocrite. They do not say what is on their mind but what is politically correct to say.
Politeness is mostly useless PR that nobody buys. I prefer hearing "That makes no fucking sense" than "This could use some more explanation."
Well, that is stupid. You NEVER run identical codes on different architectures. Especially when they are not even binary compatible. You almost always optimize the code for a given architecture in fractions of code that are particularly important. Querying cache sizes, checking the number of hardware contexts are common things.
For instance libcairo has some NEON specialized code path. ffmpeg contains codepath for pretty much every single architecture out there.
Are you talking about the compiler that was checking the processor ID instead of the capabilities of the processor? That's an old story that has been fixed a long time ago.
In all fairness, compiler optimizations are close to black magic. The only reasonnable way to know what is best is to test multiple compilers and see what comes. Depending on codes some compiler will be better than some other one. Even on intel platforms, depending on benchmarks sometimes gcc performs much better, sometimes icc performs better, sometimes pgi performs better. If you care about performance of an application that much, you got to bench it on the target hardware with different compilers and optimization levels.
I haven't lived in france for a few years. But that is pretty much true. There are some emigration problems in France. But most of it is caused by improper and discriminatory government policies or police actions. The population coming from emigration suffers wide discrimination even generations after they becoming citizens. That's the problem we have in France. After being told that they are worthless, thug, crack dealers and beligerant, well some start acting on it.
Well, it is politically interesting in France. There is a large movement there to have more openness (called "transparency") in what the government and congress do and how they reach these conclusions. It was a proposition of the runner up to the presidential elections 6 years ago to put video tapes of the council of minister as public records. It was a proposal by Segolene Royal, supported by the socialist party, in order to cleanse public politics. Now we have Francois Hollande as president who was supported by the socialist party; and he was strongly advocating against prism a week ago.
There are in France many law that restrict what you can or can not store about people in databases (would they be public or private). This is supposed to be taken care of by the CNIL (National Comitee for Internet and Liberty). CNIL is supposed to be the one that prevents electronic wiretaping and electronic spying... But in the recent years the role of CNIL has weaken a lot.
While I agree on the spirit of your comment, it might not apply to everybody. I used to live in france and I was taking the bus to work in winter or I was biking (the leg-powered kind) there. When it snowed (about 1/3 of the year), biking was not really an option. If the whether is just bad, biking is not really an option as well. If I had a motored bike, I would probably not have ride it in bad weather anyway.
Also two wheels are particularly inconvenient to transport large amount of groceries. Depending how far you are from the grocery store, you might need a car for grocery shopping.
Currently, I frequently need to taxi my son and his friends, a 2-wheel will not cut it. I'd recommend public transportation, but in the US, public transportation is mostly a joke (expect in a few very large city).
Depending on usage, modes of transportation varies. While living in france (Paris and Grenoble), I did not even have a driving license becasue it was so inneficient to drive anyway (compared to other means of transportation). I live in the US now, and I do not really have a choice.