I am pretty much the only Linux user in my company. Pidgin works ok with Lync (need to install pidgin-sipe on Ubuntu). Video and audio calls do not work, but text chats, sending/receiving files and screen sharing works fine. (I have not tried to share my screen though but I see their screens fine).
Fully agree. What about Gollum Wiki[1] ? I have been using it happily for years. It used to be Github wikis, but they diverged apparently. It uses git as backend. You're in full control of your data. Love it.
UK and tax havens have a long history. It is pretty sad and tells a lot about the quality of information in UK that most British people do not know about ATAD: Anti Tax Avoidance Directive, a EU attempt to crack down on tax havens, which will come in effect on 1st of Jan 2020.
Thanks to Brexit, UK will secure its tax havens, to the benefit of very few and to the detriment of many...
Whenever the voters vote the wrong way the EU subverts it with the result in effect being overturned in one way or another, so the UK will probably end up staying in and this ATAD will be implemented.
For those downvoting, there is truth in this e.g.:
* Ireland voting (twice) on the Nice Treaty - 2001 then 2002
* Denmark voting (twice) Maastricht Treaty - first 1992 then 1993
* Ireland (again) this time on the Lisbon Treaty - 2008 then 2009
There was also a case where the Labour government (in the UK) promised a referendum on a couple of EU treaty changes, before changing their mind after other countries' referendums voted them down, and just ratified it in parliament instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Consti...
The treaties changed between the votes though. So a more sympathetic reading would be, the treaties were voted down so had to be changed - then the new treaties were acceptable and voted for.
(I don't even necessarily think a second vote on an unchanged treaty would be unacceptable, if there was reason to believe people had changed their minds).
Had Cameron taken this approach, things could have worked out OK for the UK. Every one of those involved renegotiation and change of treaties before a re-vote.
The timeline could have been:
Cameron attempts to renegotiate with EU, achieves little.
Calls a referendum, leave achieves a very narrow margin.
Cameron doesn't resign, but attempts to renegotiate with the EU, achieves some small but significant improvements.
No, we're stuck with a "government" that's lost every vote they called, and a no-deal crash out looks the only option. Realistically that was always the only option without moving some of those infamous "red lines", or accepting Theresa May's deal. I don't see room for anything else.
So the no-deal that was explicitly ruled out during the referendum campaign. The Swiss invalidate referendums when the electorate haven't been given correct information.
I have found the best source of information about Brexit, although it certainly has its own bias, to be eureferendum.com . They have long advocated for Efta/EEA membership as the first move for the UK before gradually disentangling from EU directives.
IMV (I'm not British) the only sane option was some form of soft Brexit. Which was the only way to avoid most of the economic damage and also prevent hordes of Leavers with pitchforks. But the damage was done at Lancaster House which made immigration a red line. Theresa May concluded that Leavers wouldn't consider anything without immigration control to be a real Brexit, thus implicitly agreeing with the idea that the referendum passed because of immigration.
And now you have a neverending shitshow as a result. So I mostly agree, but there was a window of opportunity for TM to sell a soft Brexit. She opted not to.
See this is where it gets truly silly. You may not be wrong about some form of soft-Brexit, or EEA status, but whichever level of closeness you consider that is not "hard Brexit" would have required dropping one of the UK's "red line" issues. Anything else that was not Theresa May's deal needed the EU offering cake and cookies for free. It wasn't so much she couldn't sell it as the hardliners of the Tory party wouldn't take it. For 3 years the UK's negotiating position has been "la, la, la, not listening", whilst asking for the impossible (or cake).
Michel Barnier, the EU's chief negotiator summarised it all beautifully in a single slide he put out in about 2016 or 17. Each level of softer Brexit available is ruled out by a UK red line.
Yes, I've seen that slide. In fact, it was exactly what I had in mind when I said to pytester below that "Barnier has been crystal clear about what is required of the UK and what the options are". Certainly you are right about what has been the Tory negotiating strategy.
I meant, however, that she could have attempted to sell it to the hardliners in her party or, more likely, cross-party as described below. None of the red lines were inevitable, because no one knows why Leave won. Some say immigration, some say sovereignty, ECJ, payments that could "fund our NHS", and myriad other things. Some in Labour are even said to have supported it to get around state aid rules.
So there was a fundamental lack of clarity what the referendum had actually meant shortly after it passed. That was TM's window of opportunity to show some leadership and choose an interpretation of the referendum that could command majority support.
If she had presented a soft Brexit agreement to the house, yes, she would have thrown the DUP and ERG under the bus, but she also would have put Labour, LD, etc into an extremely difficult position. At the time, they all said "we should respect the referendum". If they had rejected a soft WA the blame would be all on them instead of, as it is now, on the Tories. She would have faced accusations of being a closet Remainer, but she got that anyway.
I am convinced everyone hates the DUP and very few like the ERG. Instead of tossing them, the Tories toss Ken Clarke and Nick Soames? Sounds like a bad plan.
You're right. You're entirely right with every word. But politics.
Cameron originally offered and called the referendum expecting a win for remain, to put the Tory lunatic fringe back in the box for a generation. They campaigned terribly, remain lost. So much for putting the hardliners back in line, they were brought front and centre, fed and given a spotlight. Michael Heseltine wrote a good piece about this a year or three back, I forget where. Guardian or FT probably.
The DUP are seriously unpleasant, so it's only necessity that brought them in to prop up a majority-free Tory government. Even then it was a surprise.
Selling a soft-exit deal to those hardliners probably needed not losing the campaign. TM being charisma free and terrible at presentation didn't help. The Tories haven't been good with leaders lately. Yet I don't think anyone could have sold the soft-Brexit deal to the ERG. It would interfere with shorting UK plc with their overseas funds. :)
Labour? Bizarre. They have been unable to take a stand, or we wouldn't be in this mess. Most of the party are remain. They could have voted through any deal at any time. Yet their official stance is "it depends, maybe". They were told to vote against TM's deal. So throwing the ERG under the bus still wouldn't have got enough votes to win.
At heart Corbyn wants Brexit, but some sort of undefined and unexplained lBrexit - leftwing-Brexit - that recreates his view of former 1960s politics. Or something. He avoids explaining. Schrodinger's lBrexit: It's unknowable. :)
Bizarre because on the rest of their policies they damn near got elected, and found much sympathy with voters. A remain Labour could have been running the country by now.
As for losing Churchill's grandson, Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine (now publicly a LibDem voter), and the rest: The acceptable face of the Tory party is gone. For doing what Johnson and the ERG did under May dozens of times. They have kept and become the hardline fringe. Perhaps not yet, but I think they will come to bitterly regret that.
> Cameron originally offered and called the referendum expecting a win for remain, to put the Tory lunatic fringe back in the box for a generation. They campaigned terribly, remain lost...
All true, but even then there was the opportunity for spin, especially because Cameron resigned. TM could have said, "I respect the need to leave the EU, but we can't just ignore the needs of Scotland and NI (not to mention business, in the days before fuck business). So we'll do a compromise soft Brexit reflecting the 52/48 vote. It was made clear that Leave didn't mean leaving the SM. Also, David Cameron is an idiot." She didn't.
> Labour? Bizarre. They have been unable to take a stand, or we wouldn't be in this mess. Most of the party are remain. They could have voted through any deal at any time. Yet their official stance is "it depends, maybe".
Tell that to pytester below. I have no idea how anyone could be watching Labour and think that they have ever taken a clear stand this entire time, but apparently, some people do buy into this "kinda-sorta SM and CU but not the actual thing" and "second referendum? uh, no, maybe, yes but we'll be neutral" stuff of Corbyn's.
Labour may well have some good policies, and my wife and her far left American friends think Corbyn walks on water, but they have been punished severely in the polls for this lack of clarity. How could anyone think Corbyn is a good leader when his party is doing so horribly in the polls despite ongoing Tory fuckups is also beyond me.
If the thought process in the UK is anything like the US, presumably staunch Labour supporters simply chalk it up to the 40+% of Tory voters being ignorant, bigoted rednecks. Just as an honest person has to ask some hard questions of Hillary Clinton for losing to Donald Trump, anyone who can lose to BORIS JOHNSON needs to find another job.
I don't think TM could have pulled that off. At all. I suspect that Rees-Mogg, the ERG and other fools gallery (BoJo etc) felt their prey had been weakened after referendum, so could push right for hard exit. I'm not nearly stratospherically wealthy enough to understand why that is quite so appealing for the vastly moneyed. It seems like it would come with downside for them too, or maybe they'll all be asset stripping the bankruptcy sale from Cannes.
So where do the votes come from to make up the gap? Labour is dogmatically voting against, SNP are firmly remain, LibDems have no one left, so without Labour or ERG support it's not happening.
Labour have taken a remarkable manifesto that even I could mostly support, a decent election resurgence, an electorate firmly in favour of many of the ideas, and turned it into a huge trail in the polls to the worst government and PM's since Lord North (That minor difficulty in 1776). That's quite an achievement!
Among the Labour supporters I know, the opinion of Corbyn varies wildly. He achieved a remarkable election campaign, and achieved worse than nothing in opposition. He seems terrible in the Commons. Some think his electioneering will swing it come election, as many think he should be replaced before we get 5 years of BoJo (heaven help us).
A cold restart of the system seems to be in order. Bring it back with proportional representation. :)
I love how many people in the UK talk about fundamental changes of the voting system like PR. In the US such a thing would require a constitutional amendment and would therefore be utterly impossible, particularly since the Republicans and Democrats would stand to lose from it. But you don't have a written constitution, so...
But still, even if you got PR, then you'd have a substantial percentage of Brexit Party people in Parliament, making the UK even more of a laughingstock. Doing the same sorts of shit they do in the EU Parliament. And Greens and so forth. Sure that's what you want? I can see pros and cons to it, it is just interesting there is such desire for reform.
I don't think a renegotiation after the referendum could possibly have achieved anything. Discourse about the EU in the UK is not based on facts. The EU would never have given compromises on freedom of movement, or the single market, and there wasn't anything else specific that people were asking for.
It may not have achieved much at all, certainly nothing on freedom of movement, but like previous treaties he could have come back with something.
With a negotiating stance of "they just voted out, what can we give to avoid this?", I am sure some package that didn't compromise the aims of the EU too far, or cost billions, could have been worked out.
Now, whether a second referendum would have swung back to remain, now I'm clueless. :)
> Ireland (again) this time on the Lisbon Treaty - 2008 then 2009
It wasn't just a straight re-vote through. Selected reasons for voting no, according to The Times (bearing in mind it was only 53:47 to no):
> Protect neutrality - 10%
> Keep commissioner - 10%
> Protect tax system - 8%
And according to Gallop (for the European Commission):
> To safeguard Irish neutrality in security and defence matters - 6%
> We will lose our right to have an Irish Commissioner in every Commission - 6%
> To protect our tax system - 6%
> It would allow the introduction of European legislation in Ireland, such as gay marriage, abortion, euthanasia - 2%
Consequently, The European Council agreed that:
> the necessary legal guarantees would be given that nothing in the Treaty of Lisbon made any change of any kind to the Union's competences on taxation for any member state;
> the necessary legal guarantees would be given that the Treaty of Lisbon did not prejudice the security and defence policy of any member state, including Ireland's traditional policy of neutrality;
> the necessary legal guarantees would be given that neither the Treaty of Lisbon (including the Justice and Home Affairs provisions), nor the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, affected the provisions of the Irish Constitution in relation to the right to life, education and the family in any way;
> in accordance with the necessary legal procedures, a Decision would be taken to retain Ireland's Commissioner, provided that the Treaty of Lisbon was ratified;
> the high importance attached to issues including workers' rights would be confirmed.
The noise is very important. Any kind of white noise is soothing for a baby... noise from water, car or even vacuum cleaner.. I used to generate a noise with:
You're using pink noise, right? I wish it would be less common to kind any kind of noise "white noise", as people might instinctively search for / generate actual white noise, dislike it, and abandon the concept. Pink noise is a particular kind of noise that's much nicer to listen to than white noise. I used it from time to time to block my cow-orkers off.
OpenCL is not a disaster at all. It is just that NVidia were (and still are) too scared to have people move away from their proprietary solutions, so they tried to hide OpenCL has much as they could and only pushed Cuda.
Even today OpenCL is a viable solution for GPU. It works fine on both AMD and NVidia GPUs. It is also pushed a lot by Intel for FPGA, which probably scare even more NVidia.
OpenCL kernels are compiled at runtime, which is brilliant since you can change the kernels code at run time, use constants in the code at the last moment, unroll, etc.. which can gives better performances. (Nvidia only introduced the possibility of having runtime compilation as a preview in Cuda 7!)
The "single source" argument is completely overrated. Furthermore, you can have single source in OpenCL putting the code in strings.
> It is also pushed a lot by Intel for FPGA, which probably scare even more NVidia.
These tools aren't available for the wide majority of developers, and are still exceptionally difficult to use and maintain without hardware engineers. I'm going to assume you haven't used FPGAs at all? The ones that can compete at the same tasks for GPUs are not as easily available in terms of price, volume, or even over-the-counter availability (be prepared to ask for a lot of quotes), and the tools have only become more accessible very recently -- such as Intel slashing the FPGA OpenCL licensing costs, and Dell EMC shipping them in pre-configured rack units.
> Nvidia only introduced the possibility of having runtime compilation as a preview in Cuda 7
In the mean time, Nvidia also completely dominated the market by actually producing many working middleware libraries and integrations, a solid and working programming model, and continuously refining and delivering on core technology and GPU upgrades. Maybe those things matter more than runtime compilation and speculative claims about peak performance...
> The "single source" argument is completely overrated.
Even new Khronos standards like SYCL (built on OpenCL, and which does look promising, and I'm hoping AMD delivers a toolchain after they get MIOpen more fleshed out) are moving to the single-source model. It's not even that much better, really, but development friction and cost of entry matters more than anything, and Nvidia understood this from day one. They understood it with GameWorks, as well. They plant specialist engineers "in the field" to accelerate the development and adoption of their tech, and they're very good at it.
This is because their core focus is hardware and selling hardware; it's thus in their interest to release "free" tools that require low-effort to buy into, do as much dirty integration work as possible, and basically give people free engineering power -- because it drives their hardware sales. They basically subsidize their software stack in order to drive GPUs.
> Furthermore, you can have single source in OpenCL putting the code in strings.
I'll probably need to be more specific. OpenCL 1.0 through 1.2 is fine, but fell hopelessly behind NVidia's CUDA efforts. NVidia CUDA has more features that lead to proven performance enhancements.
OpenCL 2.0 was the "counterpunch" to bring OpenCL up to CUDA-level features. However, OpenCL 2.0 is virtually stillborn. Only Intel and AMD platforms support OpenCL2.0. Intel Xeon Phi are relatively niche (and their primary advantage seems to be x86 code compatibility anyway. So I doubt you'd be running OpenCL on them).
AMD OpenCL 2.0 support exists, but is rather poor. The OpenCL 2.0 debugger simply is non-functional and you're forced to use lol printfs.
That leaves OpenCL 1.2. Its okay, but it is years behind what modern hardware can do. Its atomic + barrier model is strange compared to proper C++11 Atomics, its missing important features like device-side queuing, shared virtual memory, unified address space (no more copy/paste code just to go from "local" to "private" memory), among other very useful features.
> Even today OpenCL is a viable solution for GPU
OpenCL 1.2 is a viable solution. An old, crusty, and quirky solution, but viable nonetheless. OpenCL 2.0+ is basically dead. And I think only Intel Xeon Phi supports the latest OpenCL 2.2.
I bet you there are more Vulkan compute shaders out there than there are OpenCL 2.0. Indeed, there are rumors that the Khronos project is going to be focusing on Vulkan compute shaders in the future.
> The "single source" argument is completely overrated. Furthermore, you can have single source in OpenCL putting the code in strings.
I like my compile-time errors to be during compile-time. Not during run-time on my client's system. Compiler-bugs in AMD drivers are fixed through device driver updates (!!!) which makes practical deployment of plain-text OpenCL source code far more of a hassle in practice.
Consider this horror story: a compiler bug in some AMD Device Driver versions which cause a segfault on some hardware versions. This is not theoretical: https://community.amd.com/thread/160362.
In practice, deploying OpenCL 1.2 code requires you to test all of the device drivers your client base is reasonably expected to run.
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But that's not the only issue.
"Single Source" means that you can define a singular structure in a singular .h file and actually have it guaranteed to work between CPU-code and GPU-code. Data-sharing code is grossly simplified and is perfectly matched.
The C++ AMP model (which has been adopted into AMD's ROCm platform) is grossly superior. You specify a few templates and bam, your source code automatically turns into CPU code OR GPU-code. Extremely useful when sharing routines between the CPU and GPU (like data-packing or unpacking from the buffers)
With that said, AMD clearly cares about OpenCL and the ROCm platform looks like it strongly supports OpenCL through then near term, especially OpenCL 1.2 which seems to have a big codebase.
However, if I were to do any project these days, I'd do it in ROCm's HCC / single-source C++ system or CUDA. OpenCL 1.2 is useful for high-compatibility but has major issues as an environment.
Interesting. I'll take your anecdote for what its worth.
My personal use case with OpenCL didn't seem to be going very well. I was testing on my personal Rx 290x. While I didn't have the crashing / infinite loop bugs (See LuxRender's "Dave" for details: http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=11009) that other people had, my #1 issue was with the quality of AMD's OpenCL compiler.
In particular, the -O2 flag would literally break my code. I was doing some bit-level operations, and those bit-level operations were just wrong under -O2. While the -O0 flag was so unoptimized that my code was regularly swapping registers into / out of global memory. At which point the CPU was faster at executing and there was no point in using OpenCL / GPU compute.
It seems like AMD's OpenCL implementation assumes that the kernels would be very small and compact. And it seems to be better designed for floating-point ops. Other programmers online have also complained about AMD's bit-level operations returning erronious results under -O2. My opinion of its compiler was... rather poor... based on my limited exposure. And further research seems to indicate that I wasn't the only one having these issues.
Only did and do floating point for image processing. In fact, looking into my logs, I registered 5 bugs with NVidia in the last 2 years, none with AMD.
In 2013 we started GPU programming at the company I work for. We carefully evaluated CUDA and OpenCL and decided to go for OpenCL because it was a standard and we could chose between 2 vendors of GPU. I can tell you that in 2017 we do not regret our choice. It is great to be able to run our code on both AMD and NVidia GPUs, and to offer our customers to choose whichever GPU vendor they prefer.
Many people criticise OpenCL because when you come from C++ it seems a lot of work. It is true that OpenCL has an API influenced by OpenGL and is verbose. However it is not difficult to write a small framework specific to your needs and domain to factorise much of this verbosity.
NVidia does everything it can to hide the fact that their devices support OpenCL. People thinks that only ancients versions of OpenCL run on NVidia devices. That is not true: 1.2 is not ancient is still as of today the main version of OpenCL used. OpenCL 1.2 is fully supported and NVidia quietly say to its large customers who refuse to use CUDA, that they will starting to support soon some OpenCL 2.0 features.
To answer your question, I am not sure either will win, but they will both exist for a long time.
> Thus OpenCL seems ultimately more proprietary than CUDA,
Could not be further from the truth there!
OpenCL is an open standard, can be used to program GPU, CPU and even FPGA. It is definitively NOT proprietary in any sense! To target both AMD and NVidia GPU, you do not need any vendor specific flag at all.
Yes, OpenCL, is like OpenGL pretty verbose and explicit. It can be a bit tedious but once you've factored this verbosity in a framework of some kind, it becomes pretty easy to use.
HIP seems interesting, but I am unwilling to invest on it yet. What will happen if for whatever reason AMD abandon it in 6 months? No such worries with OpenCL.
OpenCL just like its graphics cousin, is full of extensions leading to multiple code paths, if one wants to take advantage of GPU features.
Also AFAIK there isn't any vendor supporting OpenCL 2.1, which means we are forced to use C or languages with compilers that are able to target C. Including the whole dance of loading, compiling and linking at runtime.
If AMD decides to go HIP only, and given that no mobile OS cares about OpenCL support, then those worries apply to it as well.
For Exchange-based email you can use DavMail (http://davmail.sourceforge.net/) At work I have the only Linux workstation and DavMail + Thunderbird + Lightning works a treat. I have pretty much all the functionality that my Outlook fellows have. (email, calendars, LDAP corporate address book, etc...)
