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James Reinders: Parallelism Has Crossed a Threshold

Is the parallel everything era here? What happens when you can assume parallel cores? In the second half of our in-depth interview, Intel’s James Reinders discusses the fading out of single-core machines and the ramifications of the democratization of parallel computing, remarking “we don’t need to worry about single-core processors anymore and that’s pretty significant in the world of programming for this next decade.” Other topics covered include the intentions behind OpenHPC and trends to watch in 2016.

First half: A Conversation with James Reinders

I took a shower this morning. I really needed one - I was getting pretty ripe.

Rather more significant is that I was waiting for the light rail, which was to come in eight minutes. I used that time to practice my guitar, also for a few minutes while waiting to transfer to a bus.

When I got to the homeless day center in Vancouver, a friend said that I was looking really good. I don't think it was just the shower but my entire demeanor. I go there to practice on their upright piano, but the last few times I went there, practicing just seemed like too much trouble. Not today - I practiced and I enjoyed it.

My next step is to wash my clothes and O do my clothes need washing. I'm not so bad now that I've showered but with the right wind conditions I can smell my own clothes. I have the choice to wash in the mornings in return for thirty minutes of "barter points" - typically sweeping the Portland day center floor - or in the afternoon for $1.50. It's my plan to sing on the street tomorrow, to raise the $1.50 for the laundry, also a couple bucks for coffee.

Today I feel - at long last - that my antidepressant is working to full effect.

So, looks like the 16.02 site upgrade is mostly going to be a features upgrade rather than a bugfix upgrade, though there's some of that as well. There's one thing going in that there's an outside chance may annoy some people though: the new mobile layout. To be very clear on this, the mobile layout will be served to anyone with a horizontal screen (not browser window) resolution of 800 pixels or less. The only way you'll see it on your desktop is if you're still running 800x600 or lower resolution, in which case you really should get with the whole 21st century technology thing.

We're going to be doing the site upgrade the first weekend of February but if you want to give it a look early head over to https://dev.soylentnews.org/ and have a look around. Bear in mind we ain't foisting beta code on you lot with this, we're foisting pre-alpha code that took all of maybe half an hour to do up on you. This is not what the finished product will look like, it's just something to make life easier on mobile users while we write up something that doesn't suck. If it sucks too hard and you all bitch that you want the old layout back though, it's a matter of minutes to fix and revert until we have something worth calling a proper mobile interface.

Let me know what you think here.

Sensors, not CPUs, are the tech that swings the smartphone market

Flash back a quarter of a century: I’m sourcing components for a consumer virtual reality system. An accelerometer is an absolute necessity in a head-mounted display, because it senses the motion of the head. Accelerometers exist in silicon, but priced at US$25 apiece, their only customer is the automotive industry - sensors used to trigger deployment of the airbags in a crash.

In the end, I invented my own sensor, because silicon accelerometers cost too much.

A few hundred million smartphones later, accelerometers and gyroscopes have become cheap as chips. Literally. From twenty-five dollars to less than twenty-five cents, the conjunction of Moore’s Law and Steve Jobs made these sensors cheap and abundant.

With many smartphones using high-quality accelerometer/gyroscope sensors, the groundwork had been laid for Google’s Cardboard - really no more than a cheap set of plastic lenses set at the right distance from a smartphone screen. Everything else about the Cardboard experience happened inside the smartphone - because the smartphone suddenly had the right suite of sensors to generate a head-tracking display.

Theoretically, Google’s Cardboard should give you the same smooth virtual reality experience as Samsung’s Gear VR. But it’s like chalk and cheese: Cardboard does the job, but it always feels as though you’re fighting the hardware, where Gear VR feels as comfortable as an old shoe.

The reason for that lies with the sensors built into Gear VR. Oculus CTO John Carmack worked with Samsung to specify an accelerometer/gyroscope sensor suite that could feed Samsung's flagship Galaxy S6 smartmobe with a thousand updates a second. The average sensors, on a typical smartphone - even the very powerful Galaxy S6 - won’t come anywhere near that.

Head tracking can only be as good as the sensors used to track the head. The proof of this is the difference between Galaxy S6 in Cardboard, and Galaxy S6 in Gear VR - try both and see for yourself.

This is one bleeding edge in the smartphone sensor arms race. Within the next eighteen months, every high-end smartphone will specify incredibly sensitive and fast accelerometers and gyroscopes. Smartphones work well both in the palm of your hand and when mounted over your eyes. Every major manufacturer will have their own Gear VR-like plastic case for wearing their latest top-of-the-line handset. Except at the very high end - the province of serious gamers and information designers - smartphones and VR will become entirely interchangeable.

[...] Back during the Cold War, the Soviets were caught out shining laser beams onto the windows at the White House, reading voices out of the reflections. The White House responded by pointing speakers at their windows, playing music just loud enough to drown out any other signal. We may need a new app for our smartphones, one that keeps just enough music piping out its speaker to confound anyone using our newly sensitive accelerometers against us.

My case manager and one other mental health clinic staff member came to Portland to conduct a Housing Assessment for me. Mostly I signed forms to authorize that my psychiatric history be disclosed to the people that actually provide the housing.

It's not HUD Section 8, rather it is a branch of the same agency as funds my clinic.

I'm on the "PACT Team". I don't recall the acronym's proper title but I'm given to understand that everyone on the PACT Team is Extra Special. Most of the others I've met were pretty loopy. I've declined the housing in the past because I wanted that limited resource to go to them, as I felt the others needed it more than I.

I have the Boy Scout Wilderness Survival Merit Badge, see. My troop in Moscow, Idaho went camping once per month without any regard whatsoever for the weather. That was a little hard to take when I first moved there from California, but eventually I grew to enjoy camping in the snow.

Even so, I've been homeless for almost three years. I haven't been on the streets this whole time but when I was in a place, I was definitely a houseguest, not a resident. I figure I've given enough people my spot that I deserve a place myself.

Ironically I may be flushed for cash soon. It's not a sure thing in that it's consulting, it's not employment. If my code does not meet their written specification, then I don't get paid - I don't work through agencies.

It's not going to be easy work, but then if the job were easy, the client wouldn't need a consultant.

I was for a while stricken with terror over the difficulty of the work required. But many times I've told myself that I've done far, far more difficult work in the past.

When I was at Apple in '96 we had a "phase of the moon bug" that QA could not reproduce. The fourth time it was encountered, the bug was assigned directly to me rather than to QA. That is, I had no regression.

One week later, through Apple Developer Tech Support I advised Microsoft of the exact byte offset in Word 6's binary where their bug lay.

The old Mac OS - not really "Classic" but most people call it that, it was System 7.5.2 - didn't really have a proper concept of processes. When you called ExitToShell you could not count on certain resources being freed. Word 6 had a timer that reset itself each time it was fired. Under certain conditions, the timer was still firing after Word 6's binary was overwritten by some other data.

If I could isolate that problem then my present work should be a cakewalk.

We're not expecting my actual work to start until next week as their windows people had some problem they needed to work around. They expect I'll need to apply the same fix on OS X.

But back to housing...

They told me that six slots were opening soon, and that I was at the head of the line. I still have to wait, I don't think it will be long but those slots aren't actually open yet, also my application has to go through their process.

But both case managers were completely convinced I'm qualified.

I don't know what I do to deserve the TLC they give me, but I've had to insist that I pick up my prescriptions myself, at a regular pharmacy, rather than having them hand-delivered. I've also insisted on getting to the clinic on public transit, rather than being chauffered, despite that a long walk is required.

We've settled for them giving me a monthly bus pass. If I don't have to spend my busker tips on bus fare, then I can blow it at Starbucks while I look for work.

Finally, my depression is quite definitely getting better. Yesterday I shaved with a fresh blade. You might not think that's such a big deal but a very common symptom of my kind of mental illness is that one develops a "disheveled appearance".

I've spent a lot of time pondering my bearded, long-haired colleagues, realizing that I would look just like them soon, maybe I wouldn't be so welcome in some of the businesses I frequent. Maybe I wouldn't be able to pick up chicks. It's much harder to shave off a full beard than it is to shave off stubble.

I have a real trendy goatee though - have a look at my CNN interview on YouTube, the difference is that my hair is grey now. The goatee is a little longer than I prefer, and my hair is growing unkempt. It doesn't help to comb it, so tomorrow - if I can get myself there - I'm going to get them trimmed at the "Homeless Connect" event in Vancouver.

It's not that I'm not Aqualung, I just don't look like him.

Rouhani in Europe: Italy covers nudes for Iran president

Italian hospitality for the visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has stretched to covering up nude statues.

Mr Rouhani and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi spoke at Rome's Capitoline Museum after Italian firms signed business deals with Iran.

But several nudes there were hidden to avoid offending the Iranian president.

Italy also chose not to serve wine at official meals, a gesture France, where Mr Rouhani travels next, has refused to copy.

An Islamic republic, Iran has strict laws governing the consumption of alcohol.

Mr Rouhani is in Europe on a five-day tour seeking to boost economic ties after the implementation of a deal on rolling back Iran's nuclear activity saw sanctions lifted.

"Iran is the safest and most stable country of the entire region," the Iranian president told Italian business leaders.

He also stressed growth would be key to combating extremism, saying "unemployment creates soldiers for terrorists".

Monday saw contracts worth around €17bn ($18.4bn; £12bn) signed between Iran and Italian companies.

On Tuesday, Mr Rouhani also met Pope Francis, who urged Iran to work with other Middle Eastern countries against terrorism and arms trafficking, the Vatican said.

But the standard to which I hold myself is much the same as when I enrolled at Caltech to study Astronomy. While my life's course is much different than I originally intended, I still aim to leave something of value behind when I'm gone.

For the last fifteen years, that thing of value has been my writing - essays like Living with Schizoaffective Disorder.

While I expect I could make money from my writing, I do not yet attempt to do so, so at least for now I'm a coder. In some ways it appeals to me but in other ways I want nothing to do with it. I feel very strongly that the software industry is a Den of Iniquity. Coders - especially young coders - are often quite naive; those with the money take advantage of us.

By contrast I am recently able to realize there are many people in software who are genuinely good people. The clients I will start working for next week are that way. Their product is something that is genuinely useful to their customers. They treat me really well.

Among the reasons I have grown to dislike software is today's prevalence of Javascript. It's not exactly a bad language, however it is often used in reckless ways, with the result that many websites work poorly. That is, javascript isn't bad, javascript coders are.

I prefer C++, Python and Assembly Code.

When you consider my mental illness, compare it to that of my friend "Annellie". That's not her real name. She was twenty-nine years old when we met at Washington's Western State Hospital. She is a lovely young woman, always cheerful and full of happy things to say.

All the time she either wears a rain hat or holds a newspaper above her head because she has the delusion that a chemical rain is falling from the sky. She was especially terrified when we were out in the exercise yard.

"Look up in the sky. Can you see that it's sunny? Do you feel the sun's warmth on your face?"

"Oh yes, it's very nice!"

But when she turns away she can sense the chemical rain again.

Mighty No. 9 Suffers Another Delay, Inafune "Sincerely Sorry" for Disappointing Fans

Mighty No. 9, Keiji Inafune's spiritual successor to Mega Man, has been delayed again. The announcement was made in an update to Kickstarter backers, where Inafune--who created Mega Man along with a number of iconic properties for Capcom, before leaving in 2010--explained developer Comcept encountered "critical" issues in the game's online matchmaking.

Keiji Inafune’s Mighty No. 9 delayed … again

Mighty No. 9 is a lesson for future Kickstarters

"We started to record meteorology at the coldest point in the last 10,000 years."

https://vimeo.com/14366077

I've been taking the antidepressant imipramine for a month now. It has worked well in the past, and in many ways I feel it's working now. However I am finding that the things that once interested me, no longer do. I can't motivate myself to do anything productive. Instead I just hit the Reload button in my web browser.

When I reload a page only to discover no new content has appeared, I feel totally useless.

I've experienced this before; the experience passed after some time, even without medication. So at times I tell myself just be patient this will go away.

My depression is not the "Goodbye Cruel World" sort. I've experienced that before as well, and have attempted several times. These days I feel silly about that - I demolished a perfectly good car because I lost all hope, but then a few months later that hope had returned, but with the exception that I was riding public transport.

In reality there are many things I could do to enjoy my time.

Yesterday I contemplated this problem then walked about five miles round trip to fetch my prescriptions, also to hang out in a day center for the mentally ill. It was a good experience. I felt really weary when I finally got back to my camp and lay down in my sleeping bag, but it was a good sort of weariness.

I often write Walls Of Text then publish them online. Lately I cannot even do that I have nothing to write about, and when I attempt to write a new Wall Of Text it falls flat.

I know this will pass too, I am heavily into writing.