Actually really smart people are generally troubled.
No, you are wrong right there. You might claim that some smart people are troubled and nobody would argue with you. But if you argue that all smart people, or even most smart people are troubled then you are just wrong. And to make it worse you are replying to a poster trying to correct a stereotype.
As some perspective I work at one of the best CS departments in my country (not the US), and I know many people from top US departments. Amongst the smart people that I know very few of them are generally unhappy. Most of them are actually content, having the raw talent to pursue a career in a subject that fulfils them.
Not sure why you thought that. As one British person to another I thought that the signs were quite obvious. Which part made you think otherwise : ZIRP? or QE? The BoE is engaged in both. As far as stats, going by the Nationwide or Rightmove indices house prices are apparently back up to peak levels (give or take 5%). Anecdotally I had heard that the only stuff shifting was going at a significant discount to those figures.
Either way house prices have been rising for the past 10 months. Whether or not people have been achieving these increases in asking price is open to debate, but there isn't much question about whether or not property is still over-priced in the UK.
I stand corrected. Thanks for the link, there is a wealth of interesting material out there on the "missile gap" in the early 60s that I had not come across.
Just about everywhere. The Soviets had plenty of ICBMs by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The advantage of stationing missiles in Cuba was the reduction in flight-time and the corrosponding reduction in reaction-time that would prove an advantage in a first-strike.
Because avoiding bias is not a courtesy to be extended to an opponent in a debate. It's a basic requisite for scientific enquiry. Your question naturally assumes that there are only two possible descriptions of the current debate: that "they" are wrong, or that "you" are wrong.
If neither side can actually do good science then I would suggest that there is a third option that you have not considered: that you are both wrong.
Actually I hate to say it but postscript is not prior art: there is no communication channel between the browser and the postscript program that allows two-way interactive use.
The use of asynchronous communication with the server is one of the sub-claims. The actual "invention" that they filed is a browser that can download programs, and run them in such a way that the program can communicate with the browser for I/O. That is AJAX, but also Javascript in general. It's also any Java applet, Flash applet or in fact, any applet of any kind.
They claim that they have invented the idea of executable applets, in any language or implementation. And after the Microsoft victory their legal position looks quite strong. I would assume that the only way the targets in this round can beat this is by tying the suits together and trying to get the patents dismissed on the grounds that they are overly broad.
There was no specific invention in the patent - but they stumbled onto a very general idea that is the basis for the entire internet 15 years later. The argument needs to be along the lines that no one company should be allowed to own a patent on technology that it actually took the entire industry 15 years to develop.
Re:Cameras usually stink for this....
on
The DIY Book Scanner
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You haven't actually tried this have you? I've had various flatbed A4 scanners over the years, all at much higher resolution than a camera, and hence all got down-sampled afterwards for my display that is only 1.5MP anyway. Then I switched to using a phone camera with only a 2MP CCD, but a really good lens and decent macro mode (Sony-Ericcson Cybershot for those that are interested). As long as the focus was good it produced perfectly readable shots, and so it became my portable scanner. These days I mostly shot stuff at home so I have a 12MP DSLR to hand. It's huge overkill, and I massively down-sample stuff afterwards, but entirely readable. So your basic claim that this can't be done with a camera based on the resolution compared to a scanner is a complete load of bollocks. The focus of the lens tends to be the important issue.
What you think is the opposite of the corporation's fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders.
Yes. I guess that makes me a bad capitalist but a good human being:)
And at least you agree with me that Microsoft Research is really just a place to hide talented engineers so that they don't go off and do good things for other companies.
Yes, I'd also be a bit contrary and suggest it is also a good place to hide talented academics so that if they do come up with anything good Microsoft can patent it. But I'd have the decency to make the suggestion very quietly as it does contradict my original point.
Yes. Well done, and that's why I said This is simplistic and wrong... While it is true that having more cores requires more threads/processes to achieve high utilisation it is not necessarily true that having fewer cores with more functional units per core allows high utilisation across workloads with few thread.
In particular your claim that but segregated into more cores is going to be suitable for different workloads is wrong.
I didn't claim that they had brought anything to market. They are a blue sky research lab. A better question would be how have they advanced the scientific community, and to answer that just look at the list of publications from Microsoft Research.
The issue of whether or not each project within them should produce results comparable to the resources spend on the whole organisation is separate to the issue of whether or not we should put a dollar sign on what they have achieved. You were plain wrong on the first point, and the second point is highly subjective. But if a large company wants to sink resources into something that improves science rather than their bottom line then I think they're doing a good thing.
I bought Hennessy and Patterson as an undergrad textbook for an Architecture course many moons ago. Brilliant book. Your predictions seem very reasonable - "medium" numbers of simple cores will probably provide more throughput than small numbers of complex cores at a given power budget.
So why would the output of a part of Microsoft other than Microsoft Research, need to justify the entire budget of Microsoft Research? If I spend $1B to fund 100 projects, does each of them need to justify $1B of resources? I think there is a job on Wall Street in securitisation waiting for you.
The worst thing about his assumption is that it is wrong. But that is sufficient to make it bad.
Contemporary processors have many functional units, but they are only segregated into a small number of cores to minimize issues with inter-core communication, communication with memory, et cetera
This is simplistic and wrong. It is true that fewer cores implies less inter-core communication, but this is not a design criteria for putting fewer cores in a system. While it is true that having more cores requires more threads/processes to achieve high utilisation it is not necessarily true that having fewer cores with more functional units per core allows high utilisation across workloads with few threads.
Increasing the number of functional units per core runs into diminishing returns quickly as keeping all of them fully fed requires lots of implicit parallelism in the program. To be able to execute sequential workloads well on a system with few cores and many functional units, there must be lots of independent chains of operations within the program. Not many sequential programs exhibit this property, and those that do can often be rewritten into a threaded form. Hence a system with more cores is more efficient on server-style workloads (lots of fully independent requests) and on workloads with lots of fine-grained parallelism if the programmer can rewrite the code using threads.
The last if is a big one, and it is the only reason that we are seeing mainstream designs with "few" cores. If we knew how to parallelise the code better then designs with many cores, and fewer functional units per core are a lot more efficient. One of the main reasons is that the size of the register file needed on a core is proportional to the amount of data needed to be kept in-flight to keep the functional units full. But as the number of registers increases, and the number of read ports into functional units increases the complexity of the register file does not grow linearly (if memory serves I think it is quadratic).
So designs with few cores, but large register files, are less efficient than more cores (even with more associated issue/despatch) with more registers per core. Of course this is not an exact science as finding representative benchmarks is hard, and then creating a design to hit the right set of parameters is also hard. But that is the reason that Intel have tried this design - research. It's also the reason that designers don't just throw their transistor budget at maximising the number of units within a single core.
Weird. Don't you get the "Disable Ads" checkbox on the side of your page? It showed up on mine sometime this year, and it's made slashdot much faster and more enjoyable.
What complete idiocy! By the same rational if we could half costs in the space program in exchange for a 1:12 chance of disaster it would stupid not to do so?
There is a trade-off between risk and price. You are indicating a particular point on that continuum and claiming it is stupid to look anywhere else, but without any justification whatsoever.
Thanks for a well reasoned and interesting argument. You make a very good point about the timescales involved. Your line of reasoning proves insightful as you are translating the domestic/foreign labour argument into a classic labour/capital argument within the domestic market.
Why do you use the current figure for China's GDP (when most people are poor) to try and back up your failed attempt to make everybody over there getting rich sound like a bad thing?
Here's a clue: if everybody in China did get rich, they would be earning more than $6000, and the average for USA+China would be higher.
Offshoring labour is a consequence of the different standards of living in China and the US. If the current trade situation does result in the enrichment of China then that barrier will disappear and suddenly American employees will become more attractive in the global manufacturing market.
The main issue with the trade imbalance at the moment is that the Chinese are holding down their currency by recycling their profits in the dollar market. Once that imbalance is corrected (probably by a massive devaluation of the dollar scaring the Chinese into withdrawing their assets) there will suddenly be an extra billion consumers in the world with disposable income.
Rather than answering my point you seem to have missed its most important consequence; China's main competitive advantage over the US is poverty. That is what has decimated US manufacturing, and that advantage is removed if China becomes rich. Lifting your rivals out of poverty is the best way to end your own destructive spiral.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you are wrong right there. You might claim that some smart people are troubled and nobody would argue with you. But if you argue that all smart people, or even most smart people are troubled then you are just wrong. And to make it worse you are replying to a poster trying to correct a stereotype.
As some perspective I work at one of the best CS departments in my country (not the US), and I know many people from top US departments. Amongst the smart people that I know very few of them are generally unhappy. Most of them are actually content, having the raw talent to pursue a career in a subject that fulfils them.
Not sure why you thought that. As one British person to another I thought that the signs were quite obvious. Which part made you think otherwise : ZIRP? or QE? The BoE is engaged in both. As far as stats, going by the Nationwide or Rightmove indices house prices are apparently back up to peak levels (give or take 5%). Anecdotally I had heard that the only stuff shifting was going at a significant discount to those figures.
Either way house prices have been rising for the past 10 months. Whether or not people have been achieving these increases in asking price is open to debate, but there isn't much question about whether or not property is still over-priced in the UK.
Much rarer [citation provided].
I stand corrected. Thanks for the link, there is a wealth of interesting material out there on the "missile gap" in the early 60s that I had not come across.
Yikes, you waited until ZIRP and QE pushed prices back up to the peak before you bought? I hope you got a good discount when you made your offer...
[citation needed]
Just about everywhere. The Soviets had plenty of ICBMs by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The advantage of stationing missiles in Cuba was the reduction in flight-time and the corrosponding reduction in reaction-time that would prove an advantage in a first-strike.
Because avoiding bias is not a courtesy to be extended to an opponent in a debate. It's a basic requisite for scientific enquiry. Your question naturally assumes that there are only two possible descriptions of the current debate: that "they" are wrong, or that "you" are wrong.
If neither side can actually do good science then I would suggest that there is a third option that you have not considered: that you are both wrong.
But it does ADD to the CRANK factor of the POSTER and add to the general SLASHDOT milieu. Intermix with TLA for added effect, YMMV.
I find it amusing that while railing against the bias and closed minds of the establishment you refer to them as "warmers". Irony knows no bounds.
Hang on. He only proved that he can't read, we need proof that he can't write either before Slashdot hires him..
Actually I hate to say it but postscript is not prior art: there is no communication channel between the browser and the postscript program that allows two-way interactive use.
The use of asynchronous communication with the server is one of the sub-claims. The actual "invention" that they filed is a browser that can download programs, and run them in such a way that the program can communicate with the browser for I/O. That is AJAX, but also Javascript in general. It's also any Java applet, Flash applet or in fact, any applet of any kind.
They claim that they have invented the idea of executable applets, in any language or implementation. And after the Microsoft victory their legal position looks quite strong. I would assume that the only way the targets in this round can beat this is by tying the suits together and trying to get the patents dismissed on the grounds that they are overly broad.
There was no specific invention in the patent - but they stumbled onto a very general idea that is the basis for the entire internet 15 years later. The argument needs to be along the lines that no one company should be allowed to own a patent on technology that it actually took the entire industry 15 years to develop.
You haven't actually tried this have you? I've had various flatbed A4 scanners over the years, all at much higher resolution than a camera, and hence all got down-sampled afterwards for my display that is only 1.5MP anyway. Then I switched to using a phone camera with only a 2MP CCD, but a really good lens and decent macro mode (Sony-Ericcson Cybershot for those that are interested). As long as the focus was good it produced perfectly readable shots, and so it became my portable scanner. These days I mostly shot stuff at home so I have a 12MP DSLR to hand. It's huge overkill, and I massively down-sample stuff afterwards, but entirely readable. So your basic claim that this can't be done with a camera based on the resolution compared to a scanner is a complete load of bollocks. The focus of the lens tends to be the important issue.
Yeah, happens to me a few times a day. May I should add more feeds...
ipchains used to do the same thing and is old enough to act as prior art.
Yes. I guess that makes me a bad capitalist but a good human being :)
Yes, I'd also be a bit contrary and suggest it is also a good place to hide talented academics so that if they do come up with anything good Microsoft can patent it. But I'd have the decency to make the suggestion very quietly as it does contradict my original point.
Yes. Well done, and that's why I said This is simplistic and wrong... While it is true that having more cores requires more threads/processes to achieve high utilisation it is not necessarily true that having fewer cores with more functional units per core allows high utilisation across workloads with few thread.
In particular your claim that but segregated into more cores is going to be suitable for different workloads is wrong.
Ironic, eh?
I didn't claim that they had brought anything to market. They are a blue sky research lab. A better question would be how have they advanced the scientific community, and to answer that just look at the list of publications from Microsoft Research.
The issue of whether or not each project within them should produce results comparable to the resources spend on the whole organisation is separate to the issue of whether or not we should put a dollar sign on what they have achieved. You were plain wrong on the first point, and the second point is highly subjective. But if a large company wants to sink resources into something that improves science rather than their bottom line then I think they're doing a good thing.
I bought Hennessy and Patterson as an undergrad textbook for an Architecture course many moons ago. Brilliant book. Your predictions seem very reasonable - "medium" numbers of simple cores will probably provide more throughput than small numbers of complex cores at a given power budget.
Failing troll is full of fail?
So why would the output of a part of Microsoft other than Microsoft Research, need to justify the entire budget of Microsoft Research? If I spend $1B to fund 100 projects, does each of them need to justify $1B of resources? I think there is a job on Wall Street in securitisation waiting for you.
The worst thing about his assumption is that it is wrong. But that is sufficient to make it bad.
This is simplistic and wrong. It is true that fewer cores implies less inter-core communication, but this is not a design criteria for putting fewer cores in a system. While it is true that having more cores requires more threads/processes to achieve high utilisation it is not necessarily true that having fewer cores with more functional units per core allows high utilisation across workloads with few threads.
Increasing the number of functional units per core runs into diminishing returns quickly as keeping all of them fully fed requires lots of implicit parallelism in the program. To be able to execute sequential workloads well on a system with few cores and many functional units, there must be lots of independent chains of operations within the program. Not many sequential programs exhibit this property, and those that do can often be rewritten into a threaded form. Hence a system with more cores is more efficient on server-style workloads (lots of fully independent requests) and on workloads with lots of fine-grained parallelism if the programmer can rewrite the code using threads.
The last if is a big one, and it is the only reason that we are seeing mainstream designs with "few" cores. If we knew how to parallelise the code better then designs with many cores, and fewer functional units per core are a lot more efficient. One of the main reasons is that the size of the register file needed on a core is proportional to the amount of data needed to be kept in-flight to keep the functional units full. But as the number of registers increases, and the number of read ports into functional units increases the complexity of the register file does not grow linearly (if memory serves I think it is quadratic).
So designs with few cores, but large register files, are less efficient than more cores (even with more associated issue/despatch) with more registers per core. Of course this is not an exact science as finding representative benchmarks is hard, and then creating a design to hit the right set of parameters is also hard. But that is the reason that Intel have tried this design - research. It's also the reason that designers don't just throw their transistor budget at maximising the number of units within a single core.
Weird. Don't you get the "Disable Ads" checkbox on the side of your page? It showed up on mine sometime this year, and it's made slashdot much faster and more enjoyable.
What complete idiocy! By the same rational if we could half costs in the space program in exchange for a 1:12 chance of disaster it would stupid not to do so?
There is a trade-off between risk and price. You are indicating a particular point on that continuum and claiming it is stupid to look anywhere else, but without any justification whatsoever.
Thanks for a well reasoned and interesting argument. You make a very good point about the timescales involved. Your line of reasoning proves insightful as you are translating the domestic/foreign labour argument into a classic labour/capital argument within the domestic market.
Why do you use the current figure for China's GDP (when most people are poor) to try and back up your failed attempt to make everybody over there getting rich sound like a bad thing?
Here's a clue: if everybody in China did get rich, they would be earning more than $6000, and the average for USA+China would be higher.
Offshoring labour is a consequence of the different standards of living in China and the US. If the current trade situation does result in the enrichment of China then that barrier will disappear and suddenly American employees will become more attractive in the global manufacturing market.
The main issue with the trade imbalance at the moment is that the Chinese are holding down their currency by recycling their profits in the dollar market. Once that imbalance is corrected (probably by a massive devaluation of the dollar scaring the Chinese into withdrawing their assets) there will suddenly be an extra billion consumers in the world with disposable income.
Rather than answering my point you seem to have missed its most important consequence; China's main competitive advantage over the US is poverty. That is what has decimated US manufacturing, and that advantage is removed if China becomes rich. Lifting your rivals out of poverty is the best way to end your own destructive spiral.