The major cause of war/unrest in the world isn't skin color, it's religion.
In the past, cultural groups were mostly defined by their religion so unrest was typically between groups with different religion. In the last century or two there has been a significant growth in non-religious states and organisations, but without a corresponding drop in the level of war or unrest. This would imply that the real problem is the underlying tribalism rather than the religious affiliation of those tribes.
"so anyone with good manners will acquire the skills required to drive safely."
I have a very polite friend who is blind. I doubt he'd ever be a safe driver, no matter how nice his manners.
Did I really need to add "and if they cannot do this then they will not drive at all"?
And yet sometimes racing drivers do not drive in a polite way.
You are being deliberately obtuse.
No, I am pointing out a massive flaw in your claim that people with good technical skills are necessarily polite drivers.
Yet you continue to insist that the "technical skills" for street driving are not more than "car control".
Actually, I said that you can use any definition you like for "technical skills"
Cutting people off is a poor-risk choice, and impolite. Leaving proper space is the safe choice, and polite. It always works out that way. Come on, show me wrong. Give examples of where the safe choice is impolite.
I already have: "running red lights, driving too fast, passing dangerously close to pedestrians or cyclists, overtaking badly, cutting in too close to the car behind, forcing other drivers off the road or many other instances of what I call bad driving."
All of these can be done without risk to the driver, though they are sometimes not safe for the other road users. If your definition of "technical skills" includes driving in a way that is safe for other road users then it begins to sound a lot like politeness...
Ever seen a professional race? Their skills are well beyond just being able to make the car go where they want, but also to know where they should be wanting it to go.
And yet sometimes racing drivers do not drive in a polite way.
In which case, "technical driving skill" leads to politeness is correct
This has been asserted a few times, but the causal connection in this claim has not been proved. What is the mechanism by which acquiring "technical driving skills" (however you want to define this) leads to politeness, and what is the evidence that this mechanism actually operates?
This is the only point of disagreement. We agree that having technical driving skills is important. We agree that driving in a polite way is important. We simply don't agree on whether the one necessarily leads to the other.
What you see are people with good car control skills, but poor technical driving skills. I assert there is a difference, you obviously believe otherwise.
I don't see a difference because I am using the term "technical skill" to mean "car control skills" (it is pretty clear from the context above). But if you believe that good driving is more than just car control skills and includes appropriate behaviour on the road then we are in complete agreement.
This is a slightly circular argument because the issue is what constitutes "good driving". I am simply saying that good driving is not primarily about technical skill but about behaviour.
It isn't a circular argument. It says that good technical diving skills naturally leads to polite driving, not the other way around.
I often see good technical driving used in a very dangerous and impolite way, you are lucky to live in a place where this does not happen.
In my experience, having good technical driving skills does not stop you running red lights, driving too fast, passing dangerously close to pedestrians or cyclists, overtaking badly, cutting in too close to the car behind, forcing other drivers off the road or many other instances of what I call bad driving.
In fact some of the best technical control that I see is when drivers use it to get an advantage for themselves at the cost of other drivers.
This is a slightly circular argument because the issue is what constitutes "good driving". I am simply saying that good driving is not primarily about technical skill but about behaviour.
I think you have a different definition of "Good Manners"...
When everyone had good manners, nobody needs to know how to drive. Everyone goes 10 mph, leaves massive amounts of room and just doesn't get anywhere.
Some of the worst driving I see is people driving too far below the speed limit, or leaving large gaps when the road is close to capacity. How can it be good manners to drive in a way that prevents other people getting where they want to go?
When everyone is a great driver, manners aren't needed. When you only change lanes when safe to do so, you don't need to worry about others cutting in, or letting them in, as they'll find their spot.
Your must have very strange driving conditions where you live. Where I live people cut in all the time and refuse to let other people in because it is better for them and they don't care about other people. The only safety they care about is their own safety, which means those driving large tough vehicles don't care about smaller cars.
Bad driving happens when two drivers who both think them above average, meet each other on the road.
It doesn't take top-notch driving skillls to drive at a safe speed, or obey red lights, or let other people out of side roads in busy traffic, or move of promptly when lights go green, or let people coming the other way turn in front of you when your road is blocked. This is the sort of bad driving that I see and it is nothing to do with being able to control your car at high speed if the electronics fail (which, just to be clear, is the context of this discussion)
Treating other road users with courtesy and respect is more important than any level of technical skill.
Not really, manners are good, but it wont make up for the fact someone cant drive.
Driving badly is not good manners, so anyone with good manners will acquire the skills required to drive safely. But that is very different from the skills required to "control your vehicle in the worst of conditions, especially when the fancy electronics fail" which is the context of my original remark.
So what I am saying is that having good manners is more important than have top-notch driving skills.
You really need the technical skills there in order to do the job, I cant hire a sysadmin with no skills just because he's polite. Now one who's got skills and is polite, holy grail right there. Same with driving.
Interesting comparison. The best sysadmin I ever had was technically weak but she had a passion to do the very best for all the users. So I guess that I am saying that as long as the basic skills are there I will usually choose character over top-notch skills.
My grandmother used to say that "Good Driving is Good Manners".
Treating other road users with courtesy and respect is more important than any level of technical skill. Not only will it make you consider their actions and act appropriately, it will keep you calm and avoid the sort of aggressive and impatient driving that causes the majority of accidents.
And, yes, it is good manners to behave well to people even if they do not behave well to you...
ARM has shipped over 30 billion processors with a current annual rate of 5 billon per year. Only 3.5 billion PCs have ever been sold and the current rate is less than 0.5 billon per year. So, yes, I believe it is arguable that the ARM ISA has sold more than x86.
[Intel designed] probably the best-selling ISA in history
Arguably this honour goes to ARM, since it outsells Intel by a significant margin. But you could equally argue that ARM is actually multple ISAs and no single ARM ISA beats x86.
as long as it works different from the Samsung implementation, there is no reason why it shouldn't be patented.
Actually there could be a number of reasons why it shouldn't be patented, simply being different is not enough.
You don't (or shouldn't) get patents for an idea, you should get patents for a working implementation.
You get a patent on a method of doing something, based on a specific example of how it might be done. Using the same method to produce a different working implementation is still an infringement of that patent. Conversely, you can't get a patent on something that is a simple derivation of an existing method (either another patent or a well-known published method).
What really matters are the claims in patent, which are usually quite different from the description or what it says in the text.
The advantage of Xeon Phi cards is that parallelization on those cards works similar like classical parallelization on supercomputers.
Not really, no. Classic supercomputers were vector machines whereas Xeon Phi is wide SIMD.
You just use MPI
MPI is equally applicable to GPU or Xeon Phi, it operates at a level above the raw computation. In both cases you have controlling CPUs with accelerators attached (GPU in once case, Xeon Phi in the other). MPI is used to manage the data flow between these units but has little to do with the architecture of those units themselves.
For GPUs, on the other hand, you have to adapt a lot of code.
You have to adapt code either way:
For GPU you express the problem as a scalar kernel that is executed in parallel. You have to make sure that the work doesn't overlap but you only have to consider one element at a time.
For SIMD you break your problem in to SIMD-width chunks that are computed in parallel. It is easier to synchronise operations but you have to fit the problem into chunks of the right size.
Xeon Phi has an advantage where you have existing SIMD code (e.g. SSE), but if you are starting from scratch then there is no clear winner. And HPC code is increasingly being written in languages like OpenCL and CUDA which are designed for GPU rather than SIMD.
But for pure benefit to mankind I'd say folding@home is a pretty worthy project. It's been running for years and has helped make actual discoveries and raised understanding of protein folding's effects.
According to Wikipedia it was running at 14 Petaflops when last updated. Would taking that up to an exaflop be a huge benefit? You bet!
While not wishing to critisise folding@home specifically, we should be careful not to assume that there is an automatic progression from data to knowledge to understanding and hence to benefit. And with rising costs (both financial and environmental) we should not blindly assume that building huge supercomputers or running millions of inefficient home computers 24/7 is an inherently good idea.
This supports the argument that porting SSE/AVX code to Xeon Phi is easier than porting SSE/AVX code to GPU. It does little to support the original claim that "x64 Phi cards are a lot easier to program then GPU" which is more general and seems to be about original programming rather than porting.
ispc, OpenCL, and LLVM on the way. Failing that, you could of course use C++ and AVX intrinsics (which would be a good choice if you already have a load of SSE4/AVX optimised code lying about).
Having to use specialist languages like ispc to get performances does not support the claim that Xeon Phi is "a lot easier to program then GPUs". OpenCL is no easier to write on x64 than GPU and is arguably harder. And you certainly can't rely on LLVM (or any compiler) to turn your scalar code into high-performance optimised vector without a significant amount of work.
So the original claim that "x64 Phi cards are a lot easier to program then GPUs" needs a lot more evidence before it will stand up.
Is that 1%/10% based on population distribution or wealth distribution?
Population. If you sort the whole of the UK in reverse order of income then the top 1% of that list pay 24% of all Income Tax.
I don't know for certain, but I'm pretty sure that those top 1% own significantly more than 24% of the wealth of the UK and they certainly pay a significantly lower percentage of their total income in Tax.
The brunt of the tax burden is borne by the middle class.
The "middle class" tend to pay the highest proportion of their income in taxes, but the wealthiest in society pay the largest chunk of the total personal tax bill.
In the UK, for example, the top 1% pay 24% of all Income Tax and the top 10% pay over 50%. The next 40%, which could reasonably be classified as the "middle class", pay 35% which leaves less than 12% being paid by the other half of society.
So in both absolute terms and per-capita terms, the richest 10% pay the most tax.
The top earners are also the most mobile and "international" members of society, so the unfortunate conclusion is that countries have to retain those top earners, and one way they do that is to give them a fabvourable tax position. While they pay lip-service to stopping evasion, most countries would prefer to have the richest paying some tax rather than losing them and getting no tax at all.
You said, "The Queen's speech will have been written for her by Parliament, so in instances like this, her opinions are not really her own."
Notice that you are suggesting that dishonesty is acceptable.
There is no dishonesty. The speech is written by the leadership of the governing party (not Parliament) and is phrased to make it clear that they are the ones actually speaking. So she will say "My government will..." rather than "I will..."
The only falsehood, if there is any, is the pretence that she has any significant control over "her" government.
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The major cause of war/unrest in the world isn't skin color, it's religion.
In the past, cultural groups were mostly defined by their religion so unrest was typically between groups with different religion. In the last century or two there has been a significant growth in non-religious states and organisations, but without a corresponding drop in the level of war or unrest. This would imply that the real problem is the underlying tribalism rather than the religious affiliation of those tribes.
You said:
"so anyone with good manners will acquire the skills required to drive safely."
I have a very polite friend who is blind. I doubt he'd ever be a safe driver, no matter how nice his manners.
Did I really need to add "and if they cannot do this then they will not drive at all"?
And yet sometimes racing drivers do not drive in a polite way.
You are being deliberately obtuse.
No, I am pointing out a massive flaw in your claim that people with good technical skills are necessarily polite drivers.
Yet you continue to insist that the "technical skills" for street driving are not more than "car control".
Actually, I said that you can use any definition you like for "technical skills"
Cutting people off is a poor-risk choice, and impolite. Leaving proper space is the safe choice, and polite. It always works out that way. Come on, show me wrong. Give examples of where the safe choice is impolite.
I already have: "running red lights, driving too fast, passing dangerously close to pedestrians or cyclists, overtaking badly, cutting in too close to the car behind, forcing other drivers off the road or many other instances of what I call bad driving."
All of these can be done without risk to the driver, though they are sometimes not safe for the other road users. If your definition of "technical skills" includes driving in a way that is safe for other road users then it begins to sound a lot like politeness...
Ever seen a professional race? Their skills are well beyond just being able to make the car go where they want, but also to know where they should be wanting it to go.
And yet sometimes racing drivers do not drive in a polite way.
In which case, "technical driving skill" leads to politeness is correct
This has been asserted a few times, but the causal connection in this claim has not been proved. What is the mechanism by which acquiring "technical driving skills" (however you want to define this) leads to politeness, and what is the evidence that this mechanism actually operates?
This is the only point of disagreement. We agree that having technical driving skills is important. We agree that driving in a polite way is important. We simply don't agree on whether the one necessarily leads to the other.
What you see are people with good car control skills, but poor technical driving skills. I assert there is a difference, you obviously believe otherwise.
I don't see a difference because I am using the term "technical skill" to mean "car control skills" (it is pretty clear from the context above). But if you believe that good driving is more than just car control skills and includes appropriate behaviour on the road then we are in complete agreement.
This is a slightly circular argument because the issue is what constitutes "good driving". I am simply saying that good driving is not primarily about technical skill but about behaviour.
It isn't a circular argument. It says that good technical diving skills naturally leads to polite driving, not the other way around.
I often see good technical driving used in a very dangerous and impolite way, you are lucky to live in a place where this does not happen.
In my experience, having good technical driving skills does not stop you running red lights, driving too fast, passing dangerously close to pedestrians or cyclists, overtaking badly, cutting in too close to the car behind, forcing other drivers off the road or many other instances of what I call bad driving.
In fact some of the best technical control that I see is when drivers use it to get an advantage for themselves at the cost of other drivers.
Good driving naturally leads to good manners.
This is a slightly circular argument because the issue is what constitutes "good driving". I am simply saying that good driving is not primarily about technical skill but about behaviour.
I think you have a different definition of "Good Manners"...
When everyone had good manners, nobody needs to know how to drive. Everyone goes 10 mph, leaves massive amounts of room and just doesn't get anywhere.
Some of the worst driving I see is people driving too far below the speed limit, or leaving large gaps when the road is close to capacity. How can it be good manners to drive in a way that prevents other people getting where they want to go?
When everyone is a great driver, manners aren't needed. When you only change lanes when safe to do so, you don't need to worry about others cutting in, or letting them in, as they'll find their spot.
Your must have very strange driving conditions where you live. Where I live people cut in all the time and refuse to let other people in because it is better for them and they don't care about other people. The only safety they care about is their own safety, which means those driving large tough vehicles don't care about smaller cars.
Bad driving happens when two drivers who both think them above average, meet each other on the road.
It doesn't take top-notch driving skillls to drive at a safe speed, or obey red lights, or let other people out of side roads in busy traffic, or move of promptly when lights go green, or let people coming the other way turn in front of you when your road is blocked. This is the sort of bad driving that I see and it is nothing to do with being able to control your car at high speed if the electronics fail (which, just to be clear, is the context of this discussion)
Not really, manners are good, but it wont make up for the fact someone cant drive.
Driving badly is not good manners, so anyone with good manners will acquire the skills required to drive safely. But that is very different from the skills required to "control your vehicle in the worst of conditions, especially when the fancy electronics fail" which is the context of my original remark.
So what I am saying is that having good manners is more important than have top-notch driving skills.
You really need the technical skills there in order to do the job, I cant hire a sysadmin with no skills just because he's polite. Now one who's got skills and is polite, holy grail right there. Same with driving.
Interesting comparison. The best sysadmin I ever had was technically weak but she had a passion to do the very best for all the users. So I guess that I am saying that as long as the basic skills are there I will usually choose character over top-notch skills.
Being a good driver is two things. [...]
My grandmother used to say that "Good Driving is Good Manners".
Treating other road users with courtesy and respect is more important than any level of technical skill. Not only will it make you consider their actions and act appropriately, it will keep you calm and avoid the sort of aggressive and impatient driving that causes the majority of accidents.
And, yes, it is good manners to behave well to people even if they do not behave well to you...
For God, a thousand years are like a day.
And a thousand years is like a day, so perhaps there is something more to this than a strict conversion factor?
ARM has shipped over 30 billion processors with a current annual rate of 5 billon per year.
Fine. Now compare it to the historical sales of 8051 and compatible chips.
I was thinking 32-bit processors but, yes, 8051 beats all of them!
Arguably this honour goes to ARM
Uhm, try again...
OK, I'll try again...
ARM has shipped over 30 billion processors with a current annual rate of 5 billon per year. Only 3.5 billion PCs have ever been sold and the current rate is less than 0.5 billon per year. So, yes, I believe it is arguable that the ARM ISA has sold more than x86.
[Intel designed] probably the best-selling ISA in history
Arguably this honour goes to ARM, since it outsells Intel by a significant margin. But you could equally argue that ARM is actually multple ISAs and no single ARM ISA beats x86.
as long as it works different from the Samsung implementation, there is no reason why it shouldn't be patented.
Actually there could be a number of reasons why it shouldn't be patented, simply being different is not enough.
You don't (or shouldn't) get patents for an idea, you should get patents for a working implementation.
You get a patent on a method of doing something, based on a specific example of how it might be done. Using the same method to produce a different working implementation is still an infringement of that patent. Conversely, you can't get a patent on something that is a simple derivation of an existing method (either another patent or a well-known published method).
What really matters are the claims in patent, which are usually quite different from the description or what it says in the text.
The advantage of Xeon Phi cards is that parallelization on those cards works similar like classical parallelization on supercomputers.
Not really, no. Classic supercomputers were vector machines whereas Xeon Phi is wide SIMD.
You just use MPI
MPI is equally applicable to GPU or Xeon Phi, it operates at a level above the raw computation. In both cases you have controlling CPUs with accelerators attached (GPU in once case, Xeon Phi in the other). MPI is used to manage the data flow between these units but has little to do with the architecture of those units themselves.
For GPUs, on the other hand, you have to adapt a lot of code.
You have to adapt code either way:
For GPU you express the problem as a scalar kernel that is executed in parallel. You have to make sure that the work doesn't overlap but you only have to consider one element at a time.
For SIMD you break your problem in to SIMD-width chunks that are computed in parallel. It is easier to synchronise operations but you have to fit the problem into chunks of the right size.
Xeon Phi has an advantage where you have existing SIMD code (e.g. SSE), but if you are starting from scratch then there is no clear winner. And HPC code is increasingly being written in languages like OpenCL and CUDA which are designed for GPU rather than SIMD.
Xeon phi is easier to deal with than Nvidia's solution for GPU, essentially because it is currently much easier to program.
Citation needed.
But for pure benefit to mankind I'd say folding@home is a pretty worthy project. It's been running for years and has helped make actual discoveries and raised understanding of protein folding's effects.
According to Wikipedia it was running at 14 Petaflops when last updated. Would taking that up to an exaflop be a huge benefit? You bet!
While not wishing to critisise folding@home specifically, we should be careful not to assume that there is an automatic progression from data to knowledge to understanding and hence to benefit. And with rising costs (both financial and environmental) we should not blindly assume that building huge supercomputers or running millions of inefficient home computers 24/7 is an inherently good idea.
you may be too young to remember, but the NT family - which includes Win7 and Win8 - has always come on multiple architectures
By "multiple" you mean x86-32, x86-64 and IA64, right? Or do you mean further back when NT4 ran on MIPS, Solaris, and Power?
Don't forget DEC Alpha, I had one of those beasts on my desk a couple of decades ago.
And I think you mean Sparc not Solaris, but NT didn't support that either way.
Try using a version of Windows that isn't 15 years old. 640x480 isn't even a supported resolution
640x480 is still supported but it is hidden in the UI when larger modes are available.
This supports the argument that porting SSE/AVX code to Xeon Phi is easier than porting SSE/AVX code to GPU. It does little to support the original claim that "x64 Phi cards are a lot easier to program then GPU" which is more general and seems to be about original programming rather than porting.
ispc, OpenCL, and LLVM on the way. Failing that, you could of course use C++ and AVX intrinsics (which would be a good choice if you already have a load of SSE4/AVX optimised code lying about).
Having to use specialist languages like ispc to get performances does not support the claim that Xeon Phi is "a lot easier to program then GPUs". OpenCL is no easier to write on x64 than GPU and is arguably harder. And you certainly can't rely on LLVM (or any compiler) to turn your scalar code into high-performance optimised vector without a significant amount of work.
So the original claim that "x64 Phi cards are a lot easier to program then GPUs" needs a lot more evidence before it will stand up.
You won't get full performance from a Xeon Phi without using the SIMD instructions, so it is not as easy to program as you might hope.
Is that 1%/10% based on population distribution or wealth distribution?
Population. If you sort the whole of the UK in reverse order of income then the top 1% of that list pay 24% of all Income Tax.
I don't know for certain, but I'm pretty sure that those top 1% own significantly more than 24% of the wealth of the UK and they certainly pay a significantly lower percentage of their total income in Tax.
The brunt of the tax burden is borne by the middle class.
The "middle class" tend to pay the highest proportion of their income in taxes, but the wealthiest in society pay the largest chunk of the total personal tax bill.
In the UK, for example, the top 1% pay 24% of all Income Tax and the top 10% pay over 50%. The next 40%, which could reasonably be classified as the "middle class", pay 35% which leaves less than 12% being paid by the other half of society.
So in both absolute terms and per-capita terms, the richest 10% pay the most tax.
The top earners are also the most mobile and "international" members of society, so the unfortunate conclusion is that countries have to retain those top earners, and one way they do that is to give them a fabvourable tax position. While they pay lip-service to stopping evasion, most countries would prefer to have the richest paying some tax rather than losing them and getting no tax at all.
You said, "The Queen's speech will have been written for her by Parliament, so in instances like this, her opinions are not really her own."
Notice that you are suggesting that dishonesty is acceptable.
There is no dishonesty. The speech is written by the leadership of the governing party (not Parliament) and is phrased to make it clear that they are the ones actually speaking. So she will say "My government will..." rather than "I will..."
The only falsehood, if there is any, is the pretence that she has any significant control over "her" government.