In fairness, the Japanese balloon navigation was limited to maintaining a certain altitude range in order to stay within the recently discovered jet stream. Ingenious, but not really comparable to a balloon that's actually navigating using the different wind currents at different altitudes.
True.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem like there's any real need for machine learning either, except as a long-term cost-cutting strategy. Balloon navigation isn't exactly a high-stress, fast-reaction endeavor - I bet one person sitting at a computer with a detailed wind-map could control at least several dozen.
Machine learning is kinda cool. And I guess you can handwave it by saying the intent is to deploy hundreds or thousands of balloons, at which point being able to automate would be more cost effective than tens or hundreds of pilots.
Another thing that's I like about it is that you could mount windspeed sensors and GPS on the balloons themselves. So they'd each sample wind speed and direction as they moved up and down. And you'd use those measurements to correct the model.
I.e. a swarm of balloons could both use the model and at the same time correct it.
Successful religions are probably successful because they tell their followers to expand and kill or convert the unbelievers. I.e. they've got 'survival characteristics' in a Darwinian sense. E.g. most religions tend to encourage their followers to have large numbers of children and discourage birth control, abortion. homosexuality and childlessness. Some allow believers to treat unbelievers badly, and punish apostasy with death.
I.e. they tend to become a majority and then 'encourage' the unbelievers to convert, by which point they're universally believed and not vulnerable to criticism from unbelievers. And believers who dissent get labelled apostates and killed.
It's only a matter of time before the actress who played Stephanie goes public with sordid tales of sexual blackmail, exploitation and casting couches.
I bet Queer Kids Stuff will be OK, given that Kevin Spacey recently demonstrated being LGBT is an affirmative defence against charges of paedophilia in the eyes of bien pensants types.
Blaire White's channel got demonetized though, because being transgender is not an affirmative defence to charges of being conservative.
Loon balloons navigate by changing their altitude to reach winds that are going in the right direction. They know what the wind directions are by modeling the atmosphere in the 18 to 25km range. It's rather ingenious.
The balloons are maneuvered by adjusting their altitude in the stratosphere to float to a wind layer after identifying the wind layer with the desired speed and direction using wind data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Users of the service connect to the balloon network using a special Internet antenna attached to their building. The signal travels through the balloon network from balloon to balloon, then to a ground-based station connected to an Internet service provider (ISP), then onto the global Internet.
Project Loon is Google's pursuit to deploy a high-altitude balloon network operating in the stratosphere, at altitudes between 18 km and 25 km. Google asserts that this particular layer of the stratosphere is advantageous because of its relatively low wind speeds (e.g., wind speeds between 5 and 20 mph / 10 to 30 km/h) and minimal turbulence. Moreover, Google claims that it can model, with reasonable accuracy, the seasonal, longitudinal, and latitudinal variations in wind speeds within the 18-25 km stratospheric layer.
Given a reasonably accurate model of wind speeds within the 18-25 km band, Google claims that it can control the latitudinal and longitudinal position of high-altitude balloons by adjusting only the balloon's altitude. By adjusting the volume and density of the gas (e.g., helium, hydrogen, or another lighter-than-air compound) in the balloon, the balloon's variable buoyancy system is able to control the balloon's altitude
Then again the Japanese were able to direct fire balloons through the stratosphere all the way to the US with no computational power at all in WWII
The balloons didn't do any real damage to the US, but the Americans were worried about biological or chemical weapons being used in the future. So they covered up the fact that the balloons were successfully reaching the US mainland.
The bombs caused little damage, but their potential for destruction and fires was large. The bombs also had a potential psychological effect on the American people. The U.S. strategy was to keep the Japanese from knowing of the balloon bombs' effectiveness.
In 1945 Newsweek ran an article titled "Balloon Mystery" in their January 1 issue, and a similar story appeared in a newspaper the next day.
The Office of Censorship then sent a message to newspapers and radio stations to ask them to make no mention of balloons and balloon-bomb incidents. They did not want the enemy to get the idea that the balloons might be effective weapons or to have the American people start panicking. Cooperating with the desires of the government, the press did not publish any balloon bomb incidents. Perhaps as a result, the Japanese only learned of one bomb's reaching Wyoming, landing and failing to explode, so they stopped the launches after less than six months.
The press blackout in the U.S. was lifted after the first deaths to ensure that the public was warned, though public knowledge of the threat could have possibly prevented it.
I hope they do sell well. I always thought Larabee was an interesting idea. The basic idea was that you can get a lot more P54C cores than Cores ones in the same area. P54C was in order and Core was out of order. Core had a much better IPC. Larrabee had the interesting idea of using hyperthreading to keep those simple P54C cores busy by switching threads on a cache miss. Noice.
Problem is desktop and server applications are currently too dependent on high IPC cores and single thread performance for this approach to work well there.
Otherwise Intel would discontinue the brainiac cores in Kabylake chips and move everyone over from a small number of Kabylake cores to a large number of Airmont ones.
HPC is obviously a special case because people are happy to code to architectures which are a bit out of the ordinary.
IIRC Google have written a paper saying that, for their applications, fewer cores but more IPC is better than more cores with lower IPC.
You seem to be arguing that an omnipotent God would be bound by natural laws that somehow supersede him. I'd say that contradicts his being omnipotent.
If you assume God is the guy running the simulation he's not bound by the laws of the simulation. He may be bound by natural laws in the Universe outside the simulation. However he chooses not to override the laws inside the simulation because he doesn't want to stop it producing interesting results.
It's like if you're running Conway's Life you could go in and tweak the cells by hand but that would defeat the purpose of running it. You choose not to. You can't however override natural law in the Universe you're in. You're only omnipotent in your created universe.
(because those laws must necessarily influence the simulation on some level)
Not necessarily. Natural law in Conway's Life has nothing to do with natural law in our universe. If our universe were a simulation run by a Deist God, there's no reason for our natural laws to have anything to do with the laws in His universe.
In Frank Tipler's quasi religious and frankly rather odd Omega Point Hypothesis the real universe is very different from the simulated one. The real universe is collapsing to a point and the simulated one (our universe) may or may not be. Even if it is it's a lot less far along the process because that's where the interesting stuff happens - the ultra powerful entities near the big crunch have finite time but almost limitless computational ability.
The challenge has been performance per watt and performance per dollar is crap. Single threaded performance is complete and utter crap, and even though it's a 48 core socket, even 48 of them suck next to a comparable Intel Xeon.
If you want a whole bunch of cores and you don't care about terrible per core performance Intel can sell you a Xeon Phi. It's got a whole load of Atom cores
Knights Landing will be built using up to 72 Airmont (Atom) cores with four threads per core,[66][67] using LGA 3647 socket[68] supporting for up to 384 GB of "far" DDR4 2133 RAM and 8â"16 GB of stacked "near" 3D MCDRAM, a version of the Hybrid Memory Cube. Each core will have two 512-bit vector units and will support AVX-512 SIMD instructions, specifically the Intel AVX-512 Foundational Instructions (AVX-512F) with Intel AVX-512 Conflict Detection Instructions (AVX-512CD), Intel AVX-512 Exponential and Reciprocal Instructions (AVX-512ER), and Intel AVX-512 Prefetch Instructions (AVX-512PF).[69]
Is it selling well? Probably not. I.e. there's some evidence that people don't want to move from 4-8 Core i7 style large cores to 64-72 Atom cores. I.e. people buying server CPUs care about single thread performance.
Which makes me think ARM based servers are not going to kill x64 ones.
There has been a lot of talk about Qualcomm ARM chips taking over from Intel. The problem is when you look at the benchmarks they're rather underwhelming. Eg.
The Snapdragon 835 is a great device if you're running Android. If you're running something like Photoshop I predict performance is going to be disappointing. Microsoft's 'Windows on a Snapdragon' video shows Photoshop running. It doesn't mention performance
Intel invests enormous resources to advance its dynamic x86 ISA, and therefore Intel must protect these investments with a strong patent portfolio and other intellectual property rights. The following graph shows that relentless instruction set innovation translates into a deep and dynamic patent portfolio with over 1,600 patents worldwide relating to instruction set implementations.
Intel carefully protects its x86 innovations, and we do not widely license others to use them. Over the past 30 years, Intel has vigilantly enforced its intellectual property rights against infringement by third-party microprocessors. One of the earliest examples, was Intelâ(TM)s enforcement of its seminal âoeCrawford â(TM)338 Patent.â In the early days of our microprocessor business, Intel needed to enforce its patent rights against various companies including United Microelectronics Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, Cyrix Corporation, Chips and Technologies, Via Technologies, and, most recently, Transmeta Corporation. Enforcement actions have been unnecessary in recent years because other companies have respected Intelâ(TM)s intellectual property rights.
However, there have been reports that some companies may try to emulate Intelâ(TM)s proprietary x86 ISA without Intelâ(TM)s authorization. Emulation is not a new technology, and Transmeta was notably the last company to claim to have produced a compatible x86 processor using emulation (âoecode morphingâ) techniques. Intel enforced patents relating to SIMD instruction set enhancements against Transmetaâ(TM)s x86 implementation even though it used emulation. In any event, Transmeta was not commercially successful, and it exited the microprocessor business 10 years ago.
Only time will tell if new attempts to emulate Intelâ(TM)s x86 ISA will meet a different fate. Intel welcomes lawful competition, and we are confident that Intelâ(TM)s microprocessors, which have been specifically optimized to implement Intelâ(TM)s x86 ISA for almost four decades, will deliver amazing experiences, consistency across applications, and a full breadth of consumer offerings, full manageability and IT integration for the enterprise. However, we do not welcome unlawful infringement of our patents, and we fully expect other companies to continue to respect Intelâ(TM)s intellectual property rights. Strong intellectual property protections make it possible for Intel to continue to invest the enormous resources required to advance Intelâ(TM)s dynamic x86 ISA, and Intel will maintain its vigilance to protect its innovations and investments.
If Microsoft can't transform SSE instructions into an ARM SIMD instruction set due to patents on SSE, Photoshop will suck if it's run through Microsoft's x86 to ARM64 JIT engine. And the odds are something like Photoshop is using bits of SSE which are still patented and will be for some time.
Does anyone else find it strange that the United States is basically controlled by Washington DC, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago? And that the UK is controlled by London? And that France is controlled by Paris? And Germany by Berlin?
It's true for the UK, France and Germany. However it's not true of the US. The electoral college is designed so that it is impossible to be elected President without a majority of electoral college votes. Which means you can lose NY, CA and DC and still be POTUS so long as you pick up enough votes elsewhere.
The current incumbent lost NY, CA, DC and IL. Arguably the purpose of electoral college is to prevent one party monopolizing the presidency but gaining a majority of the votes in highly populated coastal states like NY and CA and then ignoring everywhere else.
To become POTUS you need to try to appeal all across the country.
I don't believe in God. But it is possible to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with an omnipotent God. My favourite argument is that God allows free will and thus evil because a Universe with no free will would be sterile.
You can make a similar case for a God that allows natural law to run without modification after the Big Bang. In fact a lot of the US founding fathers were Deists who believed in just such a God.
A Deist God is actually analogous to a human who sets up a simulation and then lets the simulation evolve according to its own set of simulated physical laws rather than intervening. Obviously our simulations aren't beefy enough to have life or suffering develop inside them. Still it's easy to imagine intellectually that such simulations would be possible to an advanced civilisation and that that civilisation would choose to let them develop rather than intervening and stunting them, even if the cost of doing so is that suffering would exist inside the simulation.
I.e. in a sense a simulation with simulated physical laws rich enough to have life capable of reasons would necessarily have suffering. You can create a universe with no life and no suffering, or one with life and suffering but you cannot create one with life and suffering.
I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue but I no longer think it is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future. That last year was the warmest yet, in some data sets, but only by a smidgen more than 2005, is precisely in line with such lukewarm thinking.
As he points out here the lukewarmer case - global warming is real but not catastrophic is compatible with the range of predictions the IPCC made. And in fact looking at satellite and surface data we find that warming has been slower than the best case predictions from models.
The climate models have so far failed to get global warming right. As the IPCC confirmed in its latest report for the period since 1998 - I quote - "111 of the 114 available climate models show a surface warming trend larger than the observations". In other words the models have overestimated warming. And here's a chart that illustrates that point.
That is to say there is actually a consensus - if you like that word - that models are exaggerating the rate of global warming. The warming has so far resulting in no significant changes in the frequency or intensity of storms, tornadoes, floods, droughts or winter snow cover as I said. As two climate scientists, Richard McNider and John Christy put it "We might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the beginning of climate modeling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate. Back in 1990 the first IPCC assessment included this statement forecasting - no predicting - a temperature increase of 0.3 degrees C per decade with an uncertainty of 0.2 to 0.5 degrees C per decade. In fact, in the two and half decades since, even though emissions have risen faster than in the 'business as usual' scenario of that year the temperature has rise at an average rate of 0.15 degrees per decade based on surface measurements or 0.12 degrees based on satellite data. That is less than half as fast as expected and below the bottom of the uncertainty range.
That was a talk at the Royal Society, and as you can see he's quoting from the IPCC itself when he claims 111 of 114 - 97% - of models have had a best case warming prediction which exceeds what has been seen experimentally.
So you could say there's a 97% consensus that models have over estimated how bad warming will be in the past. Which would make me very sceptical that unless we pump billions into renewable energy the planet will turn into Venus.
Not to mention Germany did pump billions into renewables and didn't cut its CO2 emissions as he points out at 36:43.
OBEX started off on serial and IRDA and moved to Bluetooth. You could presumably run it over WiFi - e.g. encapsulate the packets into TCP/IP or UDP. I'm guessing done right - with the right windows size basically - you should be able to get close to the native speed of the WiFi connection.
The problem would be how you'd balance convenience and security. With Bluetooth you need to pair. With Wifi you need to know the password for the network.
So what happens with OBEX over TCP/IP? Both devices would need to be on the same subnet, unless you had some sort of evil NAT avoiding technique to punch through to an external server. But is that what you really want? I.e. allowing anyone to read and write files on the device? OBEX doesn't have any security built in because it was designed for IRDA or Bluetooth where the security comes from proximity or pairing and usually a "This device is trying to connect? Allow once, allow always, deny" dialog. Run it over TCP/IP and you've got an unsecured way to read and write files and that seems dangerous. Even the dialog would be easy to fake unless you do SSL certificate verification which is fine for webservers but sucks for devices on the the same subnet.
Honestly I think I'll stick to SMB shares. The speed of those is limited by the storage device, not the network. You can saturate a Wifi connection with a cheap NAS. You get Wifi security, such as it is these days and you can password protect the shares. Obviously it's not ideal, but it's better than OBEX where you get no security with a naive OBEX over TCP/IP connection.
SFTP isn't too bad either. I like it because Macs listen by default and you have a certain amount of trust in the device identity because of SSH fingerprints. Also AndFTP has a nice Sync feature so you can sync a directory on an Android device with a Mac.
Basically he's alleging that Google's system of quotas discriminates against whites and men and in favour of non whites and women. And they fired him.
Now imagine if a black woman had made the same argument - i.e. that the company had discriminated against black women. Not only would she not be fired - she'd mostly likely be promoted. If she did get fired she'd sue and win millions. All the people who accused Damore of writing an 'anti diversity screed' would support her.
And Damore isn't anti diversity. His memo explicitly says
The harm of Google's biases
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
* Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race5 * A high priority queue and special treatment for "diversity" candidates * Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for âoediversityâ candidates by decreasing the false negative rate * Reconsidering any set of people if it's not "diverse" enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias) * Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination
It's typical of the media that they've accused him of saying something he explicitly was not saying to smear him and defend his employer. And it's typical that, if he'd have been a different race or gender that same media would have rushed to defend him and attack his employer.
The phrase 'this sort of thing is why Trump won' is overused, but this sort of thing is why Trump won. Trump is gaffe prone but most of those gaffes are him trying to confront the PC establishment. And it's clear there's a lot of resentment at that establishment, enough to make people overlook Trump's other character flaws.
Then again his opponent was hardly free of character flaws either. If you have two awful people standing, one you mostly agree with and one you mostly disagree with, it's not ignoring the awfulness to pick the one you mostly agree with.
Kyle Reese: [in a stolen car, while being chased by the police and the terminator] All right, listen. The Terminator's an infiltration unit: part man, part machine. Underneath, it's a hyperalloy combat chassis, microprocessor-controlled. Fully armored; very tough. But outside, it's living human tissue: flesh, skin, hair, blood - grown for the cyborgs. Sarah Connor: Look, Reese, I don't know what you want from... Kyle Reese: Pay attention! I gotta ditch this car.
(And btw, where was that fucking "God" asshole? Mysterious deliberately-letting-kids-suffer ways again?)
I see you have read extensively on the problem of theodicy. Hint : Free Will.
Interestingly even if you're not religious the notion that free will and good outcomes for all are incompatible is an important one. It's the basis of this -
he British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, & what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. yet where does this anarchy exist? where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? and can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it's motives. they were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. god forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. the people cannot be all, & always, well informed. the past which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive; if they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. we have had 13. states independant 11. years. there has been one rebellion. that comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. what country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it's natural manure.
I.e. Jefferson clearly believes that 'a few lives lost in a century or two' in armed rebellion against the state is the price you pay for liberty.
Bluetooth file transfer is also pretty mature at this point. I've used it between Windows, Mac, and FreeBSD machines and with old Nokia and new Android phones (it probably works with iOS, though it didn't in the original iPhone). Pairing is a bit annoying, but once that's done it's basically drag and drop.
...
I'm quite annoyed that Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all developing independent protocols for this though. I want an open protocol that works with all of my devices, not a mess of protocols where I can use one between my laptop and Android phone, one between my laptop and iPad, none between my iPad and Android phone, a different one between Windows devices, and so on.
Not sure why we need a new protocol when we've got OBEX.
Like you say it's supported by literally everything.
My Galaxy S5, Windows machine and Mac all support it. Even old feature phones did - in fact that's where it was invented.
As far as pairing goes it's not too bad now. With NFC you can tap to pair, though I've never owned two devices that support it. Even without it you can fiddle around in the GUI once to pair and then click OK on both devices - the PINs are synched automatically. It's about the minimum security that is viable to stop drive by downloads.
I.e this is a solved problem and there's no need for a new protocol. If it is more convenient it will necessarily be less secure. And a vendor specific protocol is obviously not going to be much use with a heterogeneous bunch of devices.
Also if you want more speed Android, Mac, Windows and Linux/BSD all support SMB networking over Wifi. So for a large file you can just copy to a mutually visible network share.
Slashdot Mirror
In fairness, the Japanese balloon navigation was limited to maintaining a certain altitude range in order to stay within the recently discovered jet stream. Ingenious, but not really comparable to a balloon that's actually navigating using the different wind currents at different altitudes.
True.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem like there's any real need for machine learning either, except as a long-term cost-cutting strategy. Balloon navigation isn't exactly a high-stress, fast-reaction endeavor - I bet one person sitting at a computer with a detailed wind-map could control at least several dozen.
Machine learning is kinda cool. And I guess you can handwave it by saying the intent is to deploy hundreds or thousands of balloons, at which point being able to automate would be more cost effective than tens or hundreds of pilots.
Another thing that's I like about it is that you could mount windspeed sensors and GPS on the balloons themselves. So they'd each sample wind speed and direction as they moved up and down. And you'd use those measurements to correct the model.
I.e. a swarm of balloons could both use the model and at the same time correct it.
Successful religions are probably successful because they tell their followers to expand and kill or convert the unbelievers. I.e. they've got 'survival characteristics' in a Darwinian sense. E.g. most religions tend to encourage their followers to have large numbers of children and discourage birth control, abortion. homosexuality and childlessness. Some allow believers to treat unbelievers badly, and punish apostasy with death.
I.e. they tend to become a majority and then 'encourage' the unbelievers to convert, by which point they're universally believed and not vulnerable to criticism from unbelievers. And believers who dissent get labelled apostates and killed.
It's only a matter of time before the actress who played Stephanie goes public with sordid tales of sexual blackmail, exploitation and casting couches.
I bet Queer Kids Stuff will be OK, given that Kevin Spacey recently demonstrated being LGBT is an affirmative defence against charges of paedophilia in the eyes of bien pensants types.
Blaire White's channel got demonetized though, because being transgender is not an affirmative defence to charges of being conservative.
Confirmed. Your ignorance level has decreased by 5.75%
Loon balloons navigate by changing their altitude to reach winds that are going in the right direction. They know what the wind directions are by modeling the atmosphere in the 18 to 25km range. It's rather ingenious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The balloons are maneuvered by adjusting their altitude in the stratosphere to float to a wind layer after identifying the wind layer with the desired speed and direction using wind data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Users of the service connect to the balloon network using a special Internet antenna attached to their building. The signal travels through the balloon network from balloon to balloon, then to a ground-based station connected to an Internet service provider (ISP), then onto the global Internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Project Loon is Google's pursuit to deploy a high-altitude balloon network operating in the stratosphere, at altitudes between 18 km and 25 km. Google asserts that this particular layer of the stratosphere is advantageous because of its relatively low wind speeds (e.g., wind speeds between 5 and 20 mph / 10 to 30 km/h) and minimal turbulence. Moreover, Google claims that it can model, with reasonable accuracy, the seasonal, longitudinal, and latitudinal variations in wind speeds within the 18-25 km stratospheric layer.
Given a reasonably accurate model of wind speeds within the 18-25 km band, Google claims that it can control the latitudinal and longitudinal position of high-altitude balloons by adjusting only the balloon's altitude. By adjusting the volume and density of the gas (e.g., helium, hydrogen, or another lighter-than-air compound) in the balloon, the balloon's variable buoyancy system is able to control the balloon's altitude
Then again the Japanese were able to direct fire balloons through the stratosphere all the way to the US with no computational power at all in WWII
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The balloons didn't do any real damage to the US, but the Americans were worried about biological or chemical weapons being used in the future. So they covered up the fact that the balloons were successfully reaching the US mainland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The bombs caused little damage, but their potential for destruction and fires was large. The bombs also had a potential psychological effect on the American people. The U.S. strategy was to keep the Japanese from knowing of the balloon bombs' effectiveness.
In 1945 Newsweek ran an article titled "Balloon Mystery" in their January 1 issue, and a similar story appeared in a newspaper the next day.
The Office of Censorship then sent a message to newspapers and radio stations to ask them to make no mention of balloons and balloon-bomb incidents. They did not want the enemy to get the idea that the balloons might be effective weapons or to have the American people start panicking. Cooperating with the desires of the government, the press did not publish any balloon bomb incidents. Perhaps as a result, the Japanese only learned of one bomb's reaching Wyoming, landing and failing to explode, so they stopped the launches after less than six months.
The press blackout in the U.S. was lifted after the first deaths to ensure that the public was warned, though public knowledge of the threat could have possibly prevented it.
Prior restraint has its uses, even in the USA.
Or "You'll never take me alive, Copper!" when evading pursuing police.
I'm an old school Luddite. Neo-Luddites are HERETICS!
I hope they do sell well. I always thought Larabee was an interesting idea. The basic idea was that you can get a lot more P54C cores than Cores ones in the same area. P54C was in order and Core was out of order. Core had a much better IPC. Larrabee had the interesting idea of using hyperthreading to keep those simple P54C cores busy by switching threads on a cache miss. Noice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Problem is desktop and server applications are currently too dependent on high IPC cores and single thread performance for this approach to work well there.
Otherwise Intel would discontinue the brainiac cores in Kabylake chips and move everyone over from a small number of Kabylake cores to a large number of Airmont ones.
HPC is obviously a special case because people are happy to code to architectures which are a bit out of the ordinary.
IIRC Google have written a paper saying that, for their applications, fewer cores but more IPC is better than more cores with lower IPC.
You seem to be arguing that an omnipotent God would be bound by natural laws that somehow supersede him. I'd say that contradicts his being omnipotent.
If you assume God is the guy running the simulation he's not bound by the laws of the simulation. He may be bound by natural laws in the Universe outside the simulation. However he chooses not to override the laws inside the simulation because he doesn't want to stop it producing interesting results.
It's like if you're running Conway's Life you could go in and tweak the cells by hand but that would defeat the purpose of running it. You choose not to. You can't however override natural law in the Universe you're in. You're only omnipotent in your created universe.
(because those laws must necessarily influence the simulation on some level)
Not necessarily. Natural law in Conway's Life has nothing to do with natural law in our universe. If our universe were a simulation run by a Deist God, there's no reason for our natural laws to have anything to do with the laws in His universe.
In Frank Tipler's quasi religious and frankly rather odd Omega Point Hypothesis the real universe is very different from the simulated one. The real universe is collapsing to a point and the simulated one (our universe) may or may not be. Even if it is it's a lot less far along the process because that's where the interesting stuff happens - the ultra powerful entities near the big crunch have finite time but almost limitless computational ability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Anyway, thanks for the interesting discussion! :-)
No problems!
The challenge has been performance per watt and performance per dollar is crap. Single threaded performance is complete and utter crap, and even though it's a 48 core socket, even 48 of them suck next to a comparable Intel Xeon.
If you want a whole bunch of cores and you don't care about terrible per core performance Intel can sell you a Xeon Phi. It's got a whole load of Atom cores
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Knights Landing will be built using up to 72 Airmont (Atom) cores with four threads per core,[66][67] using LGA 3647 socket[68] supporting for up to 384 GB of "far" DDR4 2133 RAM and 8â"16 GB of stacked "near" 3D MCDRAM, a version of the Hybrid Memory Cube. Each core will have two 512-bit vector units and will support AVX-512 SIMD instructions, specifically the Intel AVX-512 Foundational Instructions (AVX-512F) with Intel AVX-512 Conflict Detection Instructions (AVX-512CD), Intel AVX-512 Exponential and Reciprocal Instructions (AVX-512ER), and Intel AVX-512 Prefetch Instructions (AVX-512PF).[69]
Is it selling well? Probably not. I.e. there's some evidence that people don't want to move from 4-8 Core i7 style large cores to 64-72 Atom cores. I.e. people buying server CPUs care about single thread performance.
Which makes me think ARM based servers are not going to kill x64 ones.
There has been a lot of talk about Qualcomm ARM chips taking over from Intel. The problem is when you look at the benchmarks they're rather underwhelming. Eg.
http://weborus.com/snapdragon-...
The Snapdragon 835 is a great device if you're running Android. If you're running something like Photoshop I predict performance is going to be disappointing. Microsoft's 'Windows on a Snapdragon' video shows Photoshop running. It doesn't mention performance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's the same with server stuff. And of course Intel have threatened people with a patent lawsuit on SIMD
https://newsroom.intel.com/edi...
Protecting x86 ISA Innovation
Intel invests enormous resources to advance its dynamic x86 ISA, and therefore Intel must protect these investments with a strong patent portfolio and other intellectual property rights. The following graph shows that relentless instruction set innovation translates into a deep and dynamic patent portfolio with over 1,600 patents worldwide relating to instruction set implementations.
https://imgur.com/a/x0K2V
New x86 Instructions and Related Patents
Intel carefully protects its x86 innovations, and we do not widely license others to use them. Over the past 30 years, Intel has vigilantly enforced its intellectual property rights against infringement by third-party microprocessors. One of the earliest examples, was Intelâ(TM)s enforcement of its seminal âoeCrawford â(TM)338 Patent.â In the early days of our microprocessor business, Intel needed to enforce its patent rights against various companies including United Microelectronics Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, Cyrix Corporation, Chips and Technologies, Via Technologies, and, most recently, Transmeta Corporation. Enforcement actions have been unnecessary in recent years because other companies have respected Intelâ(TM)s intellectual property rights.
However, there have been reports that some companies may try to emulate Intelâ(TM)s proprietary x86 ISA without Intelâ(TM)s authorization. Emulation is not a new technology, and Transmeta was notably the last company to claim to have produced a compatible x86 processor using emulation (âoecode morphingâ) techniques. Intel enforced patents relating to SIMD instruction set enhancements against Transmetaâ(TM)s x86 implementation even though it used emulation. In any event, Transmeta was not commercially successful, and it exited the microprocessor business 10 years ago.
Only time will tell if new attempts to emulate Intelâ(TM)s x86 ISA will meet a different fate. Intel welcomes lawful competition, and we are confident that Intelâ(TM)s microprocessors, which have been specifically optimized to implement Intelâ(TM)s x86 ISA for almost four decades, will deliver amazing experiences, consistency across applications, and a full breadth of consumer offerings, full manageability and IT integration for the enterprise. However, we do not welcome unlawful infringement of our patents, and we fully expect other companies to continue to respect Intelâ(TM)s intellectual property rights. Strong intellectual property protections make it possible for Intel to continue to invest the enormous resources required to advance Intelâ(TM)s dynamic x86 ISA, and Intel will maintain its vigilance to protect its innovations and investments.
If Microsoft can't transform SSE instructions into an ARM SIMD instruction set due to patents on SSE, Photoshop will suck if it's run through Microsoft's x86 to ARM64 JIT engine. And the odds are something like Photoshop is using bits of SSE which are still patented and will be for some time.
Even if you don't emulate and run code nati
Does anyone else find it strange that the United States is basically controlled by Washington DC, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago? And that the UK is controlled by London? And that France is controlled by Paris? And Germany by Berlin?
It's true for the UK, France and Germany. However it's not true of the US. The electoral college is designed so that it is impossible to be elected President without a majority of electoral college votes. Which means you can lose NY, CA and DC and still be POTUS so long as you pick up enough votes elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The current incumbent lost NY, CA, DC and IL. Arguably the purpose of electoral college is to prevent one party monopolizing the presidency but gaining a majority of the votes in highly populated coastal states like NY and CA and then ignoring everywhere else.
To become POTUS you need to try to appeal all across the country.
I don't believe in God. But it is possible to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with an omnipotent God. My favourite argument is that God allows free will and thus evil because a Universe with no free will would be sterile.
You can make a similar case for a God that allows natural law to run without modification after the Big Bang. In fact a lot of the US founding fathers were Deists who believed in just such a God.
A Deist God is actually analogous to a human who sets up a simulation and then lets the simulation evolve according to its own set of simulated physical laws rather than intervening. Obviously our simulations aren't beefy enough to have life or suffering develop inside them. Still it's easy to imagine intellectually that such simulations would be possible to an advanced civilisation and that that civilisation would choose to let them develop rather than intervening and stunting them, even if the cost of doing so is that suffering would exist inside the simulation.
I.e. in a sense a simulation with simulated physical laws rich enough to have life capable of reasons would necessarily have suffering. You can create a universe with no life and no suffering, or one with life and suffering but you cannot create one with life and suffering.
Can you prove that is the Scientific Consensus?
Right now it's just as possible that the lukewarmers are right. E.g. as Matt Ridley put it
http://www.rationaloptimist.co...
I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue but I no longer think it is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future. That last year was the warmest yet, in some data sets, but only by a smidgen more than 2005, is precisely in line with such lukewarm thinking.
As he points out here the lukewarmer case - global warming is real but not catastrophic is compatible with the range of predictions the IPCC made. And in fact looking at satellite and surface data we find that warming has been slower than the best case predictions from models.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The climate models have so far failed to get global warming right. As the IPCC confirmed in its latest report for the period since 1998 - I quote - "111 of the 114 available climate models show a surface warming trend larger than the observations". In other words the models have overestimated warming. And here's a chart that illustrates that point.
https://imgur.com/a/ZNDbY
That is to say there is actually a consensus - if you like that word - that models are exaggerating the rate of global warming. The warming has so far resulting in no significant changes in the frequency or intensity of storms, tornadoes, floods, droughts or winter snow cover as I said. As two climate scientists, Richard McNider and John Christy put it "We might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the beginning of climate modeling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate. Back in 1990 the first IPCC assessment included this statement forecasting - no predicting - a temperature increase of 0.3 degrees C per decade with an uncertainty of 0.2 to 0.5 degrees C per decade. In fact, in the two and half decades since, even though emissions have risen faster than in the 'business as usual' scenario of that year the temperature has rise at an average rate of 0.15 degrees per decade based on surface measurements or 0.12 degrees based on satellite data. That is less than half as fast as expected and below the bottom of the uncertainty range.
That was a talk at the Royal Society, and as you can see he's quoting from the IPCC itself when he claims 111 of 114 - 97% - of models have had a best case warming prediction which exceeds what has been seen experimentally.
So you could say there's a 97% consensus that models have over estimated how bad warming will be in the past. Which would make me very sceptical that unless we pump billions into renewable energy the planet will turn into Venus.
Not to mention Germany did pump billions into renewables and didn't cut its CO2 emissions as he points out at 36:43.
OBEX started off on serial and IRDA and moved to Bluetooth. You could presumably run it over WiFi - e.g. encapsulate the packets into TCP/IP or UDP. I'm guessing done right - with the right windows size basically - you should be able to get close to the native speed of the WiFi connection.
There's a standard for OBEX over TCP/IP
https://books.google.com/books...
https://i.imgur.com/WhzUaDB.pn...
The problem would be how you'd balance convenience and security. With Bluetooth you need to pair. With Wifi you need to know the password for the network.
So what happens with OBEX over TCP/IP? Both devices would need to be on the same subnet, unless you had some sort of evil NAT avoiding technique to punch through to an external server. But is that what you really want? I.e. allowing anyone to read and write files on the device? OBEX doesn't have any security built in because it was designed for IRDA or Bluetooth where the security comes from proximity or pairing and usually a "This device is trying to connect? Allow once, allow always, deny" dialog. Run it over TCP/IP and you've got an unsecured way to read and write files and that seems dangerous. Even the dialog would be easy to fake unless you do SSL certificate verification which is fine for webservers but sucks for devices on the the same subnet.
Honestly I think I'll stick to SMB shares. The speed of those is limited by the storage device, not the network. You can saturate a Wifi connection with a cheap NAS. You get Wifi security, such as it is these days and you can password protect the shares. Obviously it's not ideal, but it's better than OBEX where you get no security with a naive OBEX over TCP/IP connection.
SFTP isn't too bad either. I like it because Macs listen by default and you have a certain amount of trust in the device identity because of SSH fingerprints. Also AndFTP has a nice Sync feature so you can sync a directory on an Android device with a Mac.
I've read his memo.
https://medium.com/@Cernovich/...
or
https://www.documentcloud.org/...
And he seems very sensible here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Basically he's alleging that Google's system of quotas discriminates against whites and men and in favour of non whites and women. And they fired him.
Now imagine if a black woman had made the same argument - i.e. that the company had discriminated against black women. Not only would she not be fired - she'd mostly likely be promoted. If she did get fired she'd sue and win millions. All the people who accused Damore of writing an 'anti diversity screed' would support her.
And Damore isn't anti diversity. His memo explicitly says
The harm of Google's biases
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However,
to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several
discriminatory practices:
* Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race5
* A high priority queue and special treatment for "diversity" candidates
* Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for âoediversityâ candidates by
decreasing the false negative rate
* Reconsidering any set of people if it's not "diverse" enough, but not showing that same
scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
* Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal
discrimination
It's typical of the media that they've accused him of saying something he explicitly was not saying to smear him and defend his employer. And it's typical that, if he'd have been a different race or gender that same media would have rushed to defend him and attack his employer.
The phrase 'this sort of thing is why Trump won' is overused, but this sort of thing is why Trump won. Trump is gaffe prone but most of those gaffes are him trying to confront the PC establishment. And it's clear there's a lot of resentment at that establishment, enough to make people overlook Trump's other character flaws.
Then again his opponent was hardly free of character flaws either. If you have two awful people standing, one you mostly agree with and one you mostly disagree with, it's not ignoring the awfulness to pick the one you mostly agree with.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
Kyle Reese: [in a stolen car, while being chased by the police and the terminator] All right, listen. The Terminator's an infiltration unit: part man, part machine. Underneath, it's a hyperalloy combat chassis, microprocessor-controlled. Fully armored; very tough. But outside, it's living human tissue: flesh, skin, hair, blood - grown for the cyborgs.
Sarah Connor: Look, Reese, I don't know what you want from...
Kyle Reese: Pay attention! I gotta ditch this car.
(And btw, where was that fucking "God" asshole? Mysterious deliberately-letting-kids-suffer ways again?)
I see you have read extensively on the problem of theodicy. Hint : Free Will.
Interestingly even if you're not religious the notion that free will and good outcomes for all are incompatible is an important one. It's the basis of this -
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/j...
he British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, & what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. yet where does this anarchy exist? where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? and can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it's motives. they were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. god forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. the people cannot be all, & always, well informed. the past which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive; if they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. we have had 13. states independant 11. years. there has been one rebellion. that comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. what country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it's natural manure.
I.e. Jefferson clearly believes that 'a few lives lost in a century or two' in armed rebellion against the state is the price you pay for liberty.
I don't like Apple's push for proprietary interfacrs either but to be fair to them they support OBEX over Bluetooth already, at least for OS-X.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Bluetooth file transfer is also pretty mature at this point. I've used it between Windows, Mac, and FreeBSD machines and with old Nokia and new Android phones (it probably works with iOS, though it didn't in the original iPhone). Pairing is a bit annoying, but once that's done it's basically drag and drop.
...
I'm quite annoyed that Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all developing independent protocols for this though. I want an open protocol that works with all of my devices, not a mess of protocols where I can use one between my laptop and Android phone, one between my laptop and iPad, none between my iPad and Android phone, a different one between Windows devices, and so on.
Not sure why we need a new protocol when we've got OBEX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Like you say it's supported by literally everything.
My Galaxy S5, Windows machine and Mac all support it. Even old feature phones did - in fact that's where it was invented.
As far as pairing goes it's not too bad now. With NFC you can tap to pair, though I've never owned two devices that support it. Even without it you can fiddle around in the GUI once to pair and then click OK on both devices - the PINs are synched automatically. It's about the minimum security that is viable to stop drive by downloads.
I.e this is a solved problem and there's no need for a new protocol. If it is more convenient it will necessarily be less secure. And a vendor specific protocol is obviously not going to be much use with a heterogeneous bunch of devices.
Also if you want more speed Android, Mac, Windows and Linux/BSD all support SMB networking over Wifi. So for a large file you can just copy to a mutually visible network share.
Also the printer wouldn't work in Linux ;-)
You can use html character entities - Ü gives Ü
Seems like the two announcements came back to back.
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