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EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. (AP) - Adrian Peterson is coming back to the Minnesota Vikings less than a week after he was charged with child abuse for using a wooden switch to spank his 4-year-old son.
INDIANOLA, Iowa (AP) - Hillary Rodham Clinton's third-place finish in the 2008 Iowa caucuses seemed but a fading memory when the former secretary of state took the stage in front of roughly 10,000 loyal Democrats at outgoing Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin's annual fall fundraiser south of Des Moines.
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama will travel next week to Atlanta to address the Ebola crisis during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the White House said Friday.
TORONTO (AP) - Toronto Mayor Rob Ford withdrew his re-election bid Friday as he seeks treatment for a tumor in his abdomen, ending a campaign he had pursued despite a stint in rehab and persistent calls for him to quit amid drug and alcohol scandals. But he said his brother would run in his place, saying "we cannot go backwards."
WASHINGTON (AP) - As a U.S. senator from Illinois running for the White House in 2007, Barack Obama sponsored a resolution to prohibit President George W. Bush's administration from taking military action against Iran unless it was explicitly authorized by Congress. His idea died in committee.
PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) - A South African judge on Friday found Oscar Pistorius guilty of culpable homicide in the shooting death of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp and declared him not guilty of murder. Prosecutors said they were disappointed by the ruling but would decide on whether to appeal only after sentencing.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - The South Carolina man accused of killing his five children was an ex-convict whose homes were visited by social workers a dozen times in the last three years.
WASHINGTON (AP) - More than 120 members of Congress urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to recognize that pregnant workers are entitled to reasonable accommodations such as light duty, saying it's needed to ensure that expecting mothers are not forced out of their jobs.
AUBURN, Ala. (AP) - He still is in college, but Nick DiChiara already has been granted early access to a product that promises to change the way folks use computer technology.
NEW YORK (AP) - With the solemn toll of a bell and a moment of silence, the nation paused Thursday to mark the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attack.
OLD FORGE, N.Y. (AP) - Elise Stefanik is fighting to make history in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains, an expanse of rural America in upstate New York that - like the Republican Party - is struggling to grow.
Students at a public high school outside Atlanta are rallying behind a teacher who says he's standing up for his Christian beliefs and what he views as his right to talk about Jesus in the classroom.
CUPERTINO, Calif. (AP) - For the first time in years, Apple's iPhones aren't the star of the show. Apple unveiled a smartwatch called the Apple Watch on Tuesday, a wearable device that marks the company's first major entry in a new product category since the iPad's debut in 2010.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - In some ways, Rebecca Wright doesn't understand all the fuss over her 96-year-old mother's recent marriage. After all, she says, "Anybody who wants to get married must have a little dementia."
WATERVILLE, Maine (AP) - It was supposed to be a lesson in growing your own food, healthy eating and helping the less fortunate. Instead, a group of Maine fifth-graders got a lesson in the harsh realities of life.
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Dealing with employee absence
1.8 million people are reported to suffer from an illness which they believe was caused by or made worse by their current or past work. 26.4 million working days are lost every year, 22.1 million due to work-related ill health and 4.4 million due to workplace injury.
Employee absences are both costly and disruptive. In any year, workplace absence typically averages 8.1 days per employee at a cost of £850 to the employer. Multiply this figure by the number of staff in your company, and take into account the disruption and lost work caused by other employees having to cover for absent colleagues, and you can see that absenteeism is a significant factor in damaging your profits.
Here are some practical steps to take.
Track the problem
Can you identify any particular problem areas? Are there patterns of absence? Does a particular department or employee have a below average record?
Focus on morale
Unhappy staff are more likely to take time off. A financial incentive for low absence is one solution but creating a friendly environment, where staff feel valued as part of a team and where flexible, family friendly policies are in place is likely to prove more effective at keeping absenteeism to a minimum.
Support sick employees
Long-term sickness must be handled sensitively. An employee's permission must be sought and given before applying for a medical report. Establish whether you should keep in touch so that the employee doesn't feel isolated. Consider referring them to an occupational health specialist. This can identify ways of helping them return to work and give you an indication of how long the absence is likely to last.
Have a clear policy - and enforce it
Make sure staff are well informed regarding sickness policy and procedures and that these are seen to be followed, and keep accurate records.
It is sensible to ensure that employers are aware of the right to request an independent medical assessment in the event of an employee taking substantial numbers of days off work. When recruiting you could check a potential employee's attendance record with their previous employer, and you may consider requiring all prospective staff to undergo a medical examination.
Make it company policy always to carry out a return to work interview. This may just let the employee know that their contribution was missed, or it could help identify underlying problems that will affect your management strategy. It may also deter staff from feigning illness.
Remember that disciplinary action for unacceptable absence must be distinguished from capability procedures related to illness. Employers need to be aware of the full range of conditions which come under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. In this case, reasonable adjustments must be made to help the employee return to work.
Employee absence is a serious issue for most small businesses, but there are steps you can take to minimise its impact. However, we recommend that you take professional advice before altering contracts or terms and conditions of employment.
Do please contact us for further advice on this matter.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Chris Lau, Kapitall: So Twitter announced its IPO last week. Speculate all you want, we're interested in stocks you can trade now. Rumors around a Twitter IPO had been circulating for a while, including in this space, and last week the company confirmed everyone's suspicions with a tweet. [Read more from Kapitall: Can a Twitter IPO Trump Facebooks?] Twitter wrote on September 12 that "We've confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale." Two questions ought to be asked by investors. First, is this yet another bubble and second, what is Twitter really worth? Key Twitter numbers Twitter has 500-555 million users and nearly 170 billion tweets. Revenue is projected around $600 million this year, although that pace is expected to slow this year. While the company provides little hard data about its user base, the top three Twitter users with the most followers are musical artists. According to Dashburst, the average individual user has just 208 followers. Analysis: be skeptical When Twitter becomes a public company, it might be worth 25 times sales and 39 times trailing sales. As a public company, users may have about 200 followers on average, but should expect to see more promotional tweets filling their stream. This could hurt activity, but will help Twitter reach its sales targets on its first year as a public company. Investing ideas Despite all the hype, investors can only speculate about Twitter as a stock for now. So we looked at publicly traded companies similar to Twitter that investors can consider now – are all up sharply, except Zynga (ZNGA): Do you see investment opportunities in these social media stocks, or are you waiting for Twitter? Use the list below as a starting point for your own analysis. 1. Yelp, Inc. ( YELP): Operates as an online urban city guide that helps people find places to eat, shop, drink, relax, and play based on opinions of locals in the know. Market cap at $4.05B, most recent closing price at $62.76. Yelp has risen lately, helped by second quarter earnings that beat estimates. Bearishness was very high, with a squeeze on short-selling contributing to the rise (at least partly). The short float was 15.3% recently.


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Harpsichord 5 (EMUS3605)
In this unit students will continue to refine their instrumental foundation, build musical and artistic skills and the attributes essential to a flexible and broad engagement with musical performance. They will attend individual lessons, performance workshop. On completion of this unit students should be able to demonstrate progress in technical achievement, awareness of stylistic diversity, and a sense of their individual creativity.
Our courses that offer this unit of study
Further unit of study information
9 one hour lessons and 3 master classes/semester and performance workshop/week
Teacher grade (100%)
Faculty/department permission required?
Unit of study rules
Study this unit outside a degree
Non-award/non-degree study
If you wish to undertake one or more units of study (subjects) for your own interest but not towards a degree, you may enrol in single units as a non-award student.
Cross-institutional study
If you are from another Australian tertiary institution you may be permitted to underake cross-institutional study in one or more units of study at the University of Sydney.


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The Crap We Missed – Monday 10.22.12
Welcome to another super-sized Monday installment of The Crap We Missed that we almost couldn't fit everything into until we lubed it up with Sean Penn's hair grease. We've also got the awkward moment when Neil Diamond realizes that George Clooney is changing the lyrics to publicly kick Stacy Keibler to the curb, Robert Pattinson broods harder than he's ever brooded before, Helena Bonham Carter busts out the sweetest rack you'll ever see on a walking corpse*, Costas Mandylor??, and finally, one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen. Seriously, why not just dangle that kid above the snapping jaws of an alligator, give her a fighting chance.
*Subject to change upon the death/zombie resurrection of Christina Hendricks, Kat Dennings, Katy Perry…
- Photo Boy
Click Here To Start The Gallery
Photo: Bauer-Griffin, Fame/Flynet, Getty, INFdaily, Pacific Coast News, Splash News, WENN


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BP Comment Quick Links
November 7, 2013
The Lineup Card
12 Items That Tell the Story of the 2013 Season
1. The Beard
Beards were well-represented in the playoffs. Clayton Kershaw sported a fuller beard in 2013 than in previous seasons, guiding him to the best season of his illustrious career. Teammate Brian Wilson continued to take his Blackbeard costume deeper into the abyss of absurdity, to the extent that he tied his facial hair in Gimli knots, fueling his comeback from Tommy John surgery. The Cardinals' Edward Mujica rode the magic of the beard to a ridiculous K:BB ratio of 43-to-3 for the first five months of the season, but he was unable to handle the beard's strength for the duration and grew tired down the stretch. Oakland's Josh Reddick was overzealous in his pursuit of the beard, sporting Sasquatch locks at the beginning of the season, and his offensive collapse was surely connected to his lack of restraint. The beard must be respected before it can be feared.
Young Bryce Harper grew the beard of a veteran, but it didn't provide enough shock absorption to spare his collision with the outfield wall at Dodger Stadium. Sergio Romo trimmed his trademark beard into a goatee, and the Giants suffered the consequences in the standings. As a bearded individual myself, I can appreciate the power that is concentrated within, but enthusiasm must be tempered in order to realize the full potential of the beard. For evidence, look no further than the most interesting man in the world. —Doug Thorburn
2. This Image
The moment was intense, and then there was the picture itself. The similarity between Hunter's legs, straight up in the air as he falls over the wall after failing to make the catch, and the arms of a Boston police officer raised in victory is striking. It's hard to conceive of an image that better encapsulates the 2013 baseball season. —Matthew Kory
3. A Jolly Roger
4. Jose Lobaton's Home Run Off of Koji Uehara
5. The Chase Field Pool
6. Dodger Dollars
The change in ownership brought a financial sea change for the franchise, and the numbers are dizzying: $127 million for deals for Andre Ethier and Yasiel Puig in June of 2012, $37.5 million to acquire Hanley Ramirez and Brandon League a month later, and $264 million in the mega-trade for Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, and Nick Punto in August. Add an extension for League ($22.5 million), free-agent deals for Zack Greinke ($147 million) and Hyun-jin Ryu ($36 million), and about $6 million for in-season acquisitions Ricky Nolasco, Brian Wilson, Carlos Marmol, and Michael Young, and the Dodgers have committed roughly $640 million in guaranteed contracts in the last 18 months.
Armed with a local TV deal worth $6-7 billion, there's no indication the Dodgers will stop now. After signing Cuban infielder Alexander Guerrero for $28 million last month, LA already has committed $166 million to 11 players for 2014. Ramirez and Clayton Kershaw are both a year away from free agency, putting them in line for a nine-figure extensions, and Japanese star Masahiro Tanaka is on the radar. Though the season ended in disappointment on the field, 2013 was the year the Dodgers established themselves as a dominant financial power in the game. —Jeff Euston
7. Ryan Dempster's Fine
"But," you might say if you wanted to humor me, "Dempster's fine and accompanying five-game suspension are standard fare for pitchers throwing at hitters."
And then I would laugh at you, because Yankee skipper Joe Girardi—who was ejected from that game, while Dempster was allowed to stay in—was fined twice as much as Dempster was. Girardi's offense was arguing, forcefully, to home plate umpire Brian O'Nora that Dempster should have been tossed immediately. Plus, Dempster didn't even have to miss a start during his suspension; the Red Sox had off days the following week that didn't require them to reshuffle their rotation. (And it's not like there's no precedent for taking off days into account in suspensions. Carlos Carrasco—even after shaving a game off through an appeal—got seven for hitting Kevin Youkilis back in April.)
MLB's half-hearted response to the this episode illustrated just how much A-Rod had become persona non grata in league offices, and how much headache he caused them with Biogenesis. Selig was content to take 1/5,300th of Dempster's 2013 salary and call it a day. —Dan Rozenson
8. The Messy Scorecard
But some time ago we stopped trying to colonize Mars and instead focused on a computer network that lets the Internet hive quickly inform each other of #weirdbaseball, #shrimpalert, and position players pitching — some who weren't even Casper Wells. While the gross tonnage of extra frames is a record, the ratio didn't come close to the all-time mark. But these fanciful baseball marathons became more prominent to us social media nightcrawlers with MLB.tv who dread sleep for fear of dying in the middle of the night — or worse, work in the morning. —Matt Sussman
9. Jose Fernandez and Yasiel Puig
10. Shane Victorino's Walkup Music
The first of these things is easy. The 2012 Red Sox managed to alienate even the most stalwart of Boston baseball fans. The sell-out streak was in jeopardy (and finally ended). The Globe declared the 2013 Red Sox to be talentless and unexciting. For a team that had built the expectations of being a title contender under Francona, the collapse into a protracted rebuild seemed inevitable. There was real fear that the short, sweet glory days of the Red Sox were gone: that the front office and ownership had lost its way, that the division had become too competitive, and that it would be a long time before we saw October baseball in Boston.
Public perception of Victorino's signing is also somewhat simple to explain. Victorino, it was said, was a platoon hitter, had no obvious position with the Sox, and was a clear overpay. The signing was widely ridiculed as another move by a misguided front office with a sudden cash surplus.
And now we get to the challenging parts. I can't possibly hope to convey the sadness or strangeness of the Marathon bombings in a single paragraph. Even if I could somehow put to words my emotions from that time, I'm not sure that it would be anything other than a recollection of my own personal experience rather than a complete or fair account of those events and the city's reaction to them. But let me try: in a culture consumed with fandom and capitalism and tailgating and betting and regionalism and competitiveness, the Marathon is an entirely paradoxical event. People from all walks of life line the streets—for free—and cheer randomly for a group of people they have never seen before and will never see again and for whom there is really no extrinsic reason to cheer. The truth is that in some sense this doesn't really even matter—if a marketplace or a café or a bar or a night club had been bombed, we'd all think it was just as terrible. But the fact that it was the Marathon, this kind of innocent, culturally antithetical, community event made the tragedy more personally resonant. And I think there was real concern as to whether some part of the event had been fundamentally changed by the attack: the Marathon takes place on miles of streets with totally open access. There's no hope of a bag check or a security detail or a gate. Many Bostonians openly wondered if, for fear of security concerns, it would be impossible to gather hundreds of thousands or millions of people in the streets in the future.
Last, Fenway. Fenway is unique. I don't intend to convey any sense of superiority here; every ballpark has a unique atmosphere and environment and buzz. One thing that sets Fenway apart from most other parks is the organic nature of the crowd's involvement in the game. There are no reminders from the scoreboard that men are on base and so you should cheer. There are no sounds like "DAY OH" and "Everybody Clap Your Hands". There is an organ, and in recent years, they have started to play upbeat dance music when the Red Sox score, but the noise during the game is almost entirely driven by the fans. One exception to this rule has been player walkup/entrance music. Sox batters get a short clip played before each time they come to the plate. Most of the choices here have been songs where you're not going to see much fan involvement: rap, instrumental riffs, or dance music.
Victorino's walkup music became adopted as a sort of Fenway anthem this year. It starts with two full measures—10 seconds—of instrumentals, as if to get everyone on the same page. And then the whole crowd sings along to the music: "Don't worry… about a thing." Suddenly, the music stops. But the crowd takes over: "CAUSE EVERY LITTLE THING, IS GONNA BE ALRIGHT."
For a world series winner that fans feared was lost following a dismal 2012. For a player that key cog in a championship team despite the common perception that his best days were behind him. And for a city that lined miles of streets with millions of people after a tragic event that could have ended such simple freedoms. It's hard to describe a more simple, potent, and poignant message.
Don't worry… about a thing. 'Cause every little thing, is gonna be alright. —Dan Brooks
11. The Rangers' International Spending Spree
Any overage up to 10 percent of a team's allocation pool results in a tax on said overage; an overage beyond 10 percent of a team's allocation pool results in a tax penalty and the loss of right to sign any international amateur during the next signing period to a bonus exceeding $500,000; and an overage beyond 15 percent of a team's allocation pool results in a tax penalty and the loss of right to sign any international amateur during the next signing period to a bonus exceeding $250,000.
The thought behind this soft cap approach is that while big spending teams may be willing to swallow a tax on their spending, they would be unlikely to forfeit the opportunity to acquire top shelf talent in following years by having hard caps place on their future bonuses. For the 2012-2013 international signing period, that proved to be the case, with teams absorbing tax penalties, but staying below the higher-level penalties that might limit actions in following years.
The Rangers shook up the paradigm this July, blowing through their approximate $1.9 million allocation, as well as the 15% overage threshold, on the first day of the signing period. As of today, just one-third of the way through the signing period, the Rangers have exceeded their allocation pool by over 150 percent, loading up on some of the best available talent with no regard for the financial consequences, or subsequent limitations that will levied upon their actions during the 2014 signing period.
It is a bold approach, and one that has allowed the Rangers a remarkable first move advantage in the competition for top international talent. Front offices are now on notice that there is at least one organization willing to take on the high-level penalties associated with binge spending on the international front, and the Rangers can drill down on "bargains" in 2014 while the rest of baseball figures out if unabashed international spending is going to be a fixture in the market. To the extent one or more teams follow suit next year, the Rangers will have fewer competitors for the top talents in 2015, when the spending cuffs come off.
What's more, any team hoping to follow suit will do so on more expensive terms than Texas' 2013-2014 signing period spending spree. With the start of next year's international signing period, the tiered penalty system increases in severity. Any overage between 5-10 percent of a team's allocation pool results in a tax penalty and the loss of right to sign any international talent during the next period to a bonus exceeding $500,000; an overage between 10 and 15 percent of a team's allocation pool results in a tax penalty and the loss of right to sign any international talent during the next period to a bonus exceeding $300,000; and an overage beyond 15% of a team's allocation pool results in a tax penalty and the loss of right to sign any international amateur during the next two signing periods to a bonus exceeding $300,000.
That's right. While the Rangers are forfeiting the right to spend big next year, any team hoping to follow suit in gobbling up a bunch of top talent in a single signing period will have to forfeit big spending for a two year period. By acting first in this manner, the Rangers have effectively claimed an advantage on the international amateur scene that no team can match. Strategically, it's a home run; scouting and development will ultimately determine whether that impressive first move results in an on-field advantage for the big club.
In many ways, Rangers fans might consider 2013 a disappointment. To me, it was another example of a an impressive organization operating at the forefront of the talent acquisition game. It's moves like this that should keep Rangers fans confident their org is going to do what it takes to keep the talent pipeline stocked for the foreseeable future. —Nick J. Faleris
12. Matt Harvey's Surgically Removed UCL
Anything. Almost literally anything would be better than that, because UCLs, and elbows, and just generally anything that originated inside of a body, can be super, super gross. But that's okay! Because sometimes history hurts, and often it isn't easy to look at. And it's precisely at those times that we should force ourselves to stare. The only way to overcome our fear of phenoms getting hurt is to confront the fact that mere sound mechanics and responsible pitch counts are powerless to prevent catastrophe. Look upon Matt Harvey's broken body part, ye Mighty, and despair. —Ben Lindbergh
4 comments have been left for this article.
BP Comment Quick Links
Hate the Red Sox, but caught a game at Fenway this year and I have to agree, the Victorino walk-up was an amazing thing to be part of. Great crowds at Fenway.
Nov 07, 2013 05:20 AM
He was going with Buffalo Soldier earlier in the year. Wonder why he changed? The Sox would never have won without it.
Nov 07, 2013 07:16 AM
Kevin Ebert
Dan - you need to write more. Your piece here was excellent.
Nov 07, 2013 10:52 AM
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ANOTHER weekend of inaction for Swindon Supermarine has left Dave Webb wondering whether artificial turf is the way forward for clubs at Southern League level.
The Marine boss saw his side's visit to Shortwood postponed due to a waterlogged pitch on Saturday, which means that yet another fixture will have to be squeezed into the end-of-season pile-up.
No team in Division One South & West has played more fixtures than league leaders Merthyr, with the Welsh side's recently-installed 4G pitch playing a significant role in that statistic.
And Webb revealed his thinking that there were positives and negatives in waving goodbye to grass.
"Merthyr will be the team that are looking at it and thinking that it's great for them because they have got the points on the board," he said.
"They are able to play on their 4G pitch and the rest of us are all playing catch-up.
"That's going to work in their favour and I just wonder whether that will be the norm one day for every team.
"They are a huge investment but you get the revenue of renting the pitch out and the maintenance costs are low.
"It just doesn't seem right to me not playing on grass."
Currently, Marine have seven games scheduled in both February and March, and five more in April, with Saturday's fixture against Shortwood yet to be rescheduled.
Webb stopped short of calling for an extension to the campaign - due to finish on April 26, not including the play-offs - but admitted he was concerned that more bad weather was to come.
"At the moment I don't think they (the Southern League) will extend the season," he said.
"If you look at what's remaining, we'll probably get them all in if we play three times a week at some stage.
"But if we don't play this Wednesday or Saturday (against Guildford and Evesham respectively) then that's another two we've got to fit in and you're then on the verge of, is there going to be an extra week added?
"I'm sure we're going to get cold weather at some point as well which will affect us.
"I'm not saying it's going to snow, but if we get a cold snap then it's going to be a nightmare."
Elsewhere in the division, Cirencester's trip to Paulton was called off, while in the Premier Division, Chippenham's visit to Arlesey suffered the same fate.


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The winner here will be in good position for a wild card halfway through the schedule. Both teams are on the upswing, with the Vikings taking three in a row and the Rams three of four.
The Rams have visited Minnesota just twice in 23 seasons. Their coach, Jeff Fisher, is 1-6 against the Vikings. For St. Louis to prosper, it will need to keep firing up that league-leading pass rush, but also slow down Todd Gurley.
Gurley is the first rookie in NFL history with four straight games of 125-plus yards rushing. He leads the league with 115 yards per game rushing, and Minnesota star Adrian Peterson is next at 90.4.
St. Louis' defense is ranked sixth in the NFL, utilizing a deep rotation to keep the pressure on opponents and keeping production high without two top starters.
The Rams dominated the last two games, allowing just four field goals.
"We're just raising the bar every week," said tackle Michael Brockers, who had a sack and combined with middle linebacker James Laurinaitis for a safety last week in a 27-6 victory over San Francisco. "We're not being complacent with stats or what everybody is saying about you."


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PAPER HOUSE Sea Shell Stickers
I have an idea. I'm going to cover the top of a small, round side table with sea shell stickers, then seal it and lacquer the top surface. Voila!
Cool photographic shark stickers!Added 9 Years Ago from Paperhouseproductions
Remind your landlocked friends how nice it is living by the water by adding these stickers to your letters and post cards.Added 9 Years Ago from Paperhouseproductions


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About the Book
Offering a glimpse of the state's capitol from a unique and rarely seen perspective, photographer Chris M. Wachtelhausen presents the city of Hartford in a very different light. Using long exposures to give a feeling of drama in the city skies or shooting in the early morning hours or late at night, Wachtelhausen presents images of the architecture and cityscapes of New England's Rising Star. Hartford In a Different Light is a long-term project, spanning from 2006 to 2011, and includes prints previously seen in Bushnell Park's Pumphouse Gallery and City Hall as well as photographs adorning executive suites in the city's largest companies.
Features & Details
- Category Arts & Photography
Standard Landscape, 10×8 in, 25×20 cm
66 Pages
- Publish Date Jul 31, 2011
- Tags New England, City Hall, long exposure, executive, Bushnell, night, city, Connecticut, Conn., CT, Hartford
About the Creator
Award-winning and internationally recognized photographer, Chris Wachtelhausen has traveled extensively, capturing unique and awe-inspiring photographs. He primarily shoots landscapes, architecture and cityscapes, and has expanded his focus to include a variety of different subjects under low-light and night time conditions. Urban decay being one of those subjects. As can be seen throughout his galleries, a constant theme to Chris' work includes landscapes with dramatic cloud formations as well as capturing motion by either freezing or blurring the action. Often he will blend the cloud and motion themes together to give viewers the impression of actually being there. Chris was a finalist in the Outdoor Photographer Nature's Colors Contest and won a Bronze Award in the 2009 International Aperture Awards. Earlier in the year, he was a finalist in the 2009 Photographers Forum's Spring Contest and was published in the book Best of Photography 2009.
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The top executive at the Orange County fairgrounds is up for a pay raise at a time when fair projected reserves have fallen $5.2 million and full-time employees are being forced to take furloughs.
The Fair Board will meet Thursday to consider raising Chief Executive Officer Steve Beazley's yearly pay — which includes an extra 20 percent for retention purpuses — from $136,483 to as much as $143,539, on the same day that they will receive reports on the fairgrounds' financial problems.
Beazley, who took over the office in August 2008, is up for a pay raise of 5 percent, plus the 20 percent bonus he already receives for working in Orange County.
Beazley did not return several requests for comment. Board president Julie Vandermost declined to comment on whether it was the right time to consider pay raises.
Vandermost, however, said the fair is still trying to get a handle on the severity of its financial crunch. She said finances are dependent on fair attendance and revenue and Orange County Market Place performance.
"We really won't know how to close this gap, or what the gap really is, until later this year," she said.
Meanwhile, the fairground's projected surplus has fallen by $5.2 million in six months, largely because of a $3 million drop in lease revenue from the Market Place swap meet as well as the loss of the $500,000 Cirque du Soleil contract to Irvine's Great Park, according to a fair financial report. The document adds that projections for event revenue were "overly optimistic," by at least $1 million.
The Pacific Amphitheatre is expected to break even this year, the report said. The amphitheatre finished the last season with a loss of $396,000, putting the venue $1.3 million in debt since it reopened in 2003.
Moreover, the report notes that the $2.5 million Al's Brain project, a 3-D movie featuring Weird Al Yankovic, could be up to 4 percent over budget during the next two years. A theater is being built for the project, but it will not be ready in time for the July fair, so "Al's Brain" will be housed in a temporary tent.
Other building projects have been stalled by a problem with the steel supply and will not be ready for the fair.
Because of the losses, the fairgrounds is attempting to cut its service contracts, such as the security agreement with the sheriff's department, by 25 percent.
Besides cutting contracts, the fairgrounds' 90 full-time employees — including Beazley — are on furlough for two days a month beginning in mid-February and ending in June 2010, which amounts to about 32 days. With workers losing money to furloughs, one employee said it was no time to consider giving the top executive a pay raise.
The employees have "struggled so hard with mortgages in an economy that's absolutely horrendous…how in good conscience could (Beazley) take a pay raise?" said fairgrounds worker Robert Mosley.
Contact the writer: firstname.lastname@example.com or 714-796-6930


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Quote: Butterfly, remember in all of this that I am an omnivore, and I believe that humans are not 'superior' animals with any extra 'rights' or privelidges than other creatures.What our dominance and self awareness does give us however, is greater responsibility.In a world where creatures are farmed, bred in captivity, and slaughtered in controlled and humane fashion, there is no place, as far as I am concerned, for taking the life of a wild animal.
Quote: Also, I don't believe we have any more rights than other animals. We are both lifted up and cursed by our brains to be smarter than the creatures around us, not better. And sometimes we lack the wisdom to apply our mental powers as well as we should. But we are also omnivores and predators, as you mentioned, and having owned a dog and found he had killed rodents in the past, I'll not disabuse him that side of his being
Quote:<<is not as tragic>>so degrees of cruelty and tolerance towards it?.....either the *use* of animals for vermin humans is acceptable or not. you really cant compartmentalise this imo.
Quote:lots of shades of grey. do you eat canned tuna?. a wild fish that has run the gauntlet of disease, other predators etc i.e. not reared and slaughtered in a controled 'humane' envioroment. if yes then your arguements are just words not actions.
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Self Defense
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text:
I have the following code however it does not work on my site but I have seen it on other sites.
It is supposed to be a submit button. Can anyone advise if the DOCTYPE is correct?

<input name="followbutton" type="image" src="07221802_d18fc66228740e19b32cd5c95c8b4502.png" />
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
I notice that you have some classes (i.e. aboutuscontent and followbuttonbox). Do you have a css style sheet linked to your HTML document that contains those classes? Also, are you sure that the image for your button is on your server? I would check those things first. If you can provide a link to the page where the code is installed I might be able to help you further.
Many thanks,
I am trying to use an image as a submit button, the top line works but the bottom line doesn't.
Can anyone advise how to use an image as a submit button?
<input name="followbutton" type="submit" />
<input name="followbutton" type="image" src="/images/follow.png" />
You are using the correct way to define an image as the submit button.
Just exactly what is happening that indicates that it is not working.
Is the image displaying? If not then the path to the image is wrong.
If you click on the image then the form will be submitted - if it isn't then one of the validation tests that you are doing must be wrong.
It is usually best to not name submit buttons/images at all as the information passed is not useful - particularly when using images where both followbutton.x and followbutton.y will be zero if the form is submitted from the keyboard and will only contain values indicating a position within the image if the form is submitted by clicking on the image.
The image displays but when I click it nothing happens.
Is there a way of using images as a submit button?
A better way to do this would be as follows:
This goes in your HTML

<input type="submit" id="image-button">Text</input>

This Goes in a CSS File
background: #fff url(' /images/follow.png')no-repeat;
I tried this but I couldn't get it to work. It displays the word "sumit" and the image on top of one another.
Yes - exactly as you are doing - at least for the part of the code that you are showing us.
If it isn't working then the problem is in a part of the code you haven't shown us.
This is all the code. I just cant see why it works with standard submit button but not an image. Its driving me nuts.
<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
$profileid = (int)$_GET['ID'];
$followerid = intval($_SESSION['userID']);
$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM follow WHERE user_id = '". $profileid ."' AND follow_user_id= '". $followerid ."'");
$duplicatefollow = null;
if (mysql_num_rows($query) > 0)
$error['duplicatefollow'] = 'You Already Follow This Profile..';
if(isset($_POST['followbutton'])) {
$query = "INSERT INTO `follow` (`user_id`, `follow_user_id`) VALUES ('{$profileid}', '{$followerid}')";
$result = mysql_query($query);
if (!$result){
$errors[] = "Query: {$query}
Error: " . mysql_error();
if(($profileid) == ($followerid)) {
$errors['sameprofile'] = "You cannot follow your own profile.";
$loginprofile = intval($_SESSION['userID']);
$query_rsSearch = "SELECT * FROM follow WHERE `follow_user_id` = '$loginprofile'";
$rsSearch = mysql_query($query_rsSearch) or die(mysql_error());
$row_rsSearch = mysql_fetch_assoc($rsSearch);
$totalRows_rsSearch = mysql_num_rows($rsSearch);

<input name="followbutton" type="submit" />
<input name="followbutton" type="image" src="/images/follow.png" />


text:
Hey Z, I have a question for you.
I am currently using the small grate on the ash pan to put my charcoal on. I read that you put charcoal on your top grate?
I have a few questions regarding this.
1. I want to use this as a small grill if I'm just cooking for myself and the wife. Would it be safe to put food on this grate after I use it for putting charcoal on it for most of the time I use the smoker?
2. When you put charcoal on the top grate, do the ash fall to the bottom, therefore allowing you to remove the ash without disrupting the heat? Putting the charcoal on the bottom grate makes it difficult to remove the ash unless I am done cooking.
Thanks for all your help Z! You've been a great resource for us new to smoking and to the Chargriller.


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de Hannah & Noe Sheveland
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A cute colorful learning to count and learning your colors book. All the images are handdrawn and are drawn from items found on Maui, Hawaii. Poems are found at the end of this book.
A perfect bedtime read for children. A happy, bright, colorful book guaranteed to make them smile.
Two children wrote and drew this book to help their friend Olivia Bianco. Olivia has cancer and all profits from the sale of this book are going to Olivia and her family to help with medical and relocation expenses.
Mahalo for your prayers and support.
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AMD's Graphics Core Next Preview: AMD's New GPU, Architected For Computeby Ryan Smith on 12/21/2011 9:38 PM EST
83 Comments
Back to Article
StormyParis - Friday, June 17, 2011 - linkThank you for a very enlightening write up. Comments and questions:
1- please add a comma in there somewhere. I had to read the sentence 4 times to understand it (page 1=: "VLIW designs will never achieve perfect efficiency in this regard, but the farther off real world utilization is the weaker the benefits of VLIW."
2- When, if ever, will we vile users see any benefits ? I get the feeling that most apps are still not optimized well, if at all, for multicore/threading. Come to think of it, most don't even use most of the x86 extensions more recent than SSE2. Now we're talking of yet another x86 extension, that is not only AMD-specific, but very task-specific. Apart from a handful of labs doing GPU computing, and the usual Photoshop filters... i'm doubtful ? Reply
MonkeyPaw - Friday, June 17, 2011 - linkI'm not an expert in this sort of design, but is AMD setting up this architecture to replace the x86 ALU? Bulldozer is already running 2 ALUs for every 1 FPU, which is promoting ALU-heavy software design. It may take a few revisions to meld them (or phase one out), but it certainly seems like that's a heterogeneous CPU in the end. Reply
marc1000 - Friday, June 17, 2011 - linkthere is a slide (on Llano article, I believe) where AMD points this. yes, they want to completely merge them, and the ALU would be one of this mergind points. Reply
A5 - Friday, June 17, 2011 - linkI think it'll be quite awhile before the monolithic cores dissolve into the heterogeneous architectures, mostly depending on how fine-grained the power gating can get. When it gets to the point where the CPU can selectively turn off components inside a given SIMD unit, I think we'll see someone go "Wait a minute, then why do we even have this big core anymore?" and it'll go away. 2018ish, maybe? Reply
jamescox - Monday, June 20, 2011 - link
ALU is generally used to refer to a very simple unit that performs arithmetic, logic, and possibly bit shift operations on integers, not floating point values. The units labeled ALU in the GPU diagrams in the article may support some integer operations, but they mainly process 32-bit floating point values, and (IMO) should not be labeled as "ALUs". FPU would probably be more accurate, but I do not know what operations these units support and whether they include a native integer ALU or just convert to integers to FP.
I don't know what you would mean by ALU-heavy software design. Bulldozer has two integer execution cores per module. Each core is composed of 2 ALUs and 2 AGUs, not shared. It also has 2 128-bit floating point (FMA) units per module shared between the two threads. This isn't really much different than an intel hyper-threaded core. Intel has, I believe, 3 ALUs, 3 AGUs, and 2 FPUs per core which is shared between 2 threads. AMDs version of multi-threading just doesn't share as much hardware between threads, which may be better than Intel's HT (2-2-1 AMD vs 1.5-1.5-1 Intel ALU-AGU-FPU). Intel's version would allow a single thread to us all of the execution resources at once, if there is no competing thread. Sharing the FPU makes a lot of sense, since most code that runs on CPUs only uses the FPU intermittently. If the code uses FP more than intermittently, then it would be a candidate for vectorization, and execution on the GPU instead.
While AMDs next generation graphics hardware may be able to execute more general code compiled from a wider range of languages, it is not an x86 processor, and it can not replace the CPU. If you look at the diagram, it has a single scalar unit to handle non-vector code in each compute unit. It also has 64 units in the 4 vector arrays of each CU. If you actually tried to compile and run the kind of branch heavy, integer code that CPUs have to deal with on a CU, then it would probably run entirely and very, very slowly on that single scalar unit. Reply
MrSpadge - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 - linkI think you've got the right idea with this being melted into a Bulldozer-like design. however, it wouldn't replace the x86 ALUs, which are highly-optimized for high clock speed and low latency execution, as well as excellent handling of branches etc.
No, it would rather replace or supplement a fat FPU shared between many "cores" (which, by then would basically mean ALUs + scheduling). Most tasks which requires massive fp number crunching can be executed well in parallel and therefore are suitable for execution on a GPU core. The question is just how to bond them together so that the software guys can actually use them..
MrS Reply
Deleted - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - linkBasically, what we have here is a math coprocessor. Back in the day, Intel's x86 processors were very good (relatively speaking) at integer math, but choked on floating point math. So Intel created the 8087 to handle the floating point calculations while the CPU handled the integer calculations (obviously this wasn't exclusive to Intel, but I'm generalizing). Eventually, the floating point unit was merged onto the CPU, and programs began using them interchangeably.
What we have today is very similar. CPUs, even with their advanced FPUs, are nowhere near as powerful as the massively parallel monstrosities we use for graphics. Eventually, they will be merged onto the CPU, and used as readily for general floating point processing tasks as FPUs are currently.
And this is the point of Fusion: to fully replace the aging floating point unit with an IGP. Reply
A5 - Friday, June 17, 2011 - linkThe benefits to home or enthusiast users of heterogeneous CPUs are still several years off. We need market penetration of hardware along with fundamental changes in software development models and smarter compilers. Reply
nedwards - Tuesday, January 28, 2014 - linkSmarter programmers would help! Let me rephrase that. Programmers thinking in a parallel mindset would help! Reply
Beenthere - Friday, June 17, 2011 - linkIf AMD delivers in a timely manner they will have a bright future. This looks like a huge technological transition and I understand the need to get developers onboard now but it also tips AMD's hand to Intel who will steal any ideas that they can.
Unfortunately we are still waiting for most applications to be written for 64-bit use so I'm not holding out much hope for an expeditious migration on a complex technological transition though it does appear that maybe AMD has been working on this for some time and may be able to do a better job of executing with Trinity and future products. Time will tell but I hope AMD delivers on time and they will definitely get my dime - all of them. Reply
Targon - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkWith Windows 7 having a 80 percent(or higher at this point) install base being 64 bit, it will take until late 2013 before we see the majority of the old 32 bit install base being phased out in the home computer market(as people replace their computers at the four-five year mark). Until then, application developers have to expect that they MUST support both 32 and 64 bit platforms. Lowest common denominator for your user base is what developers generally have to compile for. Reply
DanNeely - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkI assume you're using the steam hardware survey since they're showing 4:1. Unfortunately steam's not a good source for broad market stats since it excludes the low end boxes bought by non-gamers and corporate boxes. Surveys that capture these numbers only show a 2:1ish ratio for win7 64:32.
Beyond that, it's the people with the low end 32bit boxes that will keep their old clunkers the longest. You're also underestimating how long support for legacy OSes will continue despite their very small market shares. Firefox 4 still runs on win2k, despite it's market share having been negligible for several years and being officially out of support for almost a year.
Excepting apps that actually can benefit from going 64bit I expect most to stay 32bit for at least the next 5 years. Reply
swaaye - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkIndeed. In the non-gamer realm, I know of people happy with 2003 Pentium 4s and Athlon XPs yet. I have no doubt that there are many people with even older hardware. This stuff tends to stick around until the PCs die and the owner is told it's not worth the money to upgrade. Fear of change and the simple lack of a true need to upgrade is the reason. Reply
swaaye - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkOops. I meant that the owner is told it's not worth the money to fix the dead old hardware. But they do also tend to ask about upgrading their ancient box too. Reply
Randomblame - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkI was at office max the other day and a guy was screaming at a sales rep because they didn't carry any serial mice that supported his rig. I don't mean ps2 either. He was carrying around a busted up brown serial mouse. He said his rig came with windows 95 but last year he upgraded it to windows 98. Seriously. This is the world we live in. Reply
EJ257 - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkI still have my Compaq (that came with Win95 which I upgraded to win98) running on a Pentium 133 with 32MB of EDO RAM and a 2.1GB HDD. Its sitting ilde in my basement collecting dust at the moment. :D Reply
Operandi - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - linkBut Steam is good representation of those who could benefit from and will ultimately will be using these future technologies, professionals and enthusiasts. Such is always the way of high-end computing. Reply
softdrinkviking - Monday, June 20, 2011 - linkexactly. people still running XP are probably not the target market for developers because if they are so slow on the uptake of new technology, it would follow that they are also relatively uninterested in other new programs. Reply
Targon - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - linkNope, I am going on what my customers have and are upgrading to. If you BUY a machine with Windows 7 on it, 9 out of 10 have Windows 7 64 bit on them. Those that have 32 bit are either the very low-end machines with only 1GB of RAM(yes, they still sell those), or they are the result of doing an upgrade from Windows Vista 32 bit.
That is the thing about 64 bit, people don't "go to 64 bit" at this point, they get a new computer that comes with 64 bit Windows on it. The number of people who do an upgrade on an older machine has dropped, since those who would have done the upgrade did that back in 2009 and early 2010 when Windows 7 first came out.
Now, the real benefit to 64 bit isn't as much about the software as it is about how much RAM the machine comes with. If you get a machine with 4GB of RAM, you want 64 bit, just so you don't lose memory due to the 4GB limit on 32 bit Windows, and hardware mapping below the 4GB mark.
A part of this is also about the area you live in, and how much money there is going around. I live in an area where it is the norm to pay over $8 per person for lunch at a deli, and as a result, the value of the dollar isn't as high. Spending $20/day just on lunch and minor expenses is the norm, so with that in mind, replacing a computer every 4-5 years, even for the non-technical is NORMAL. The last time I encountered Windows 95 or 98 was around 6 years ago. Reply
UrQuan3 - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - linkThere is a little more benefit. A few of us were doing an internal benchmark of our software using VStudio 2010 and all the random hardware we have around. 32bit, 32bit + SSE2, and 64bit + SSE2. We found across the board, 64bit is about 5-10% than 32bit + SSE2 and 5-20% faster than basic x86.
However, a 64bit OS gave no benefit (or penalty) for a 32bit program. The same 32bit software ran the same speed on XP32, XP64, Vista32, Vista64, and 7-64. Reply
hammer256 - Friday, June 17, 2011 - linkIt's good to see AMD more committed to the GPGPU. I use GPGPU for neural network simulations, and currently the default choice has been Nvidia with CUDA. It would be nice to see some competition in this space.
From the article it sounds like AMD knows to put a lot of emphasis on the software side of things for the developers. Hopefully they'll have a capable programming system that's as good as CUDA, maybe even better.
Finally, Given AMD's strategies in the past with medium sized GPU chips and multi-GPU for high-end, hopefully they'll put sufficient emphasis into support for easier multi-GPU programming.
Exciting times indeed. Reply
krumme - Friday, June 17, 2011 - linkWhat a pleasure to read articles like this. I would gladly pay for it, more directly, so to speak.
Some animations or video, especially for us less tech savvy, would be highly appriciated too.
Competition for x86 is comming ! :) Reply
mczak - Friday, June 17, 2011 - linkI wouldn't really call it radical, Cayman already had the same theoretic 1/2 performance for FP64 adds compared to FP32. Muls/FMAs though are now 1/2 too it seems (though it might not extend to all products) whereas it was 1/4 on Cayman. Still, a factor two is not what I'd call a "radical" improvement. Reply
ahmedz_1991 - Friday, June 17, 2011 - linkI really appreciated the letters A M D. Since Athlon, one could feel that AMD is lagging behind Intel more and more, but now with them beingh the first successful CPU\GPU combination (Llano out there now ) now AMD can make their own way and API's even into OS's just like what Intel and NVidia always do. This way I'm more than sure that we'll see titles (apps and games ) with the unified AMD brand instead of those ( meant to be played ) or ( smart solution ) with some stupid stars for Core i3,5 or 7 Reply
frozentundra123456 - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 - linkWell, technically Sandy Bridge is also a CPU/GPU combination, and I think I would call it successful. Granted, the graphics are not up to AMD levels, but their CPU performance is much better. And considering the debacle of Bulldozer and the architecture that was not optimized for current software, AMD will have to do a much better job of integrating their hardware with software than they have done so far. Reply
haukionkannel - Friday, June 17, 2011 - linkSo maybe not big upgrades in graphic power, but improvement in computing power. Its really good for CPGPU usage. It allso makes it easier to run physic calculations in AMD GPUs.
Hmm... It allso means that more silicon space is neede for same graphic power...
Interesting to see how it all sums up. Reply
Targon - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkRight now, there has been a shortage of software that really pushes the graphics limits, mostly because you have the substandard Intel graphics out there that still has a significant market share. How many games out there really make you feel that a Radeon 6970 just isn't enough? The polygon count for objects(characters) in games have not been going up as much as more world detail has been going in.
Now, when developers want to try aiming for 5 million polygon figures in games, THAT is where there will be a bigger demand for more graphics power, and with that level of detail, the CPU power needed to properly animate the objects needs to be higher. This is where all of this work with GPU compute comes in, to handle all the complexities of properly animating these super-high detailed objects.
I will note that The Witcher 2 is one of the first games I have seen in a long time where CPU power needs to be higher than a Phenom 2 945, and I am waiting for the AMD Bulldozer core CPUs(not APUs) to come out to see how big of an improvement it will make. Reply
IlllI - Friday, June 17, 2011 - linkcan someone explain all this to me? lol this is all beyond my understanding Reply
tipoo - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkThey are making GPU compute much more capable and possible, in a nutshell. This will greatly increase the processing speed of many tasks on computers. Reply
khimera2000 - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - linkAMD has CPU and GPU, but there seperate. They want this to change.
There combining the CPU and GPU so that they are more able to talk to each other, and do the tasks there best at. this is done by remaking the way they build video cards.
C++... great for CPU not so great for gpu... they want to change this.
Out of order operations suck on the GPU. they want to change this, so it can hammer through more work faster.
There also throwing in a bunch of tools to help tell developers where there messing up in this regard.
fusion APUs will have a nice trick... they will be able to talk to each other without needing to send information back to memory. Imagion passing letters but having to use fedex, this would be like a move to passing letters in class (no fedex) its quicker :) and your mail isint delayed.
APU will talk over PCI-E... Im wondering how that will work to 0.o Reply
Targon - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - linkAMD wants to put an end to the GPU in the chipset, but no one expects dedicated CPU and GPU to go away. Now, the code that would take advantage of the APU would probably work with a full AMD CPU/AMD GPU combination, so the software side of things would not need a lot of change to support both configurations. Reply
khimera2000 - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - linkAgree, dedicated cards will not go away, however intergrated cards like the past will.
I think we see Eye to Eye on this. AMD wants to take full advantage of all its hardware, It looks like the way there trying to do it is by combining the CPU and Intergrated GPU into one package, after which they want to set it up so infromation that goes into that package dosent have to leave to be processed, like sending it out to ram from the CPU only to be read by the GPU.
Still want to see how this will work across PCI-E. I can already see future reviews and comparisons on how effetive GPU acceleration is on there intergrated aproach VS discreet cards. AND Buying those discreet cards :D
By the time these parts comes out my desktop will be right in the middle of its upgrade cycle :D Reply
Targon - Monday, June 20, 2011 - linkAMD needs to push for the HTX slot again for discrete video, where there is a direct HyperTransport link between the CPU and whatever is plugged into that slot. PCI-Express is decent, but HTX would and should blow the doors off PCI-Express. Reply
rnssr71 - Friday, June 17, 2011 - linki wish this coming next year especially in Trinity but at lest they are heading in the right direction:) also, to those wondering about improvements in gaming ability, look what amd did with cayman vs cypress- the improved efficiency and noticeably improved performance on the same manufacturing. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/294?vs=331
GCN this is going to improve efficiency even farther and they are cutting the transistor size roughly in half. Reply
nlr_2000 - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link"Unfortunately, those of you expecting any additional graphics information will have to sight tight for the time being." sight = sit Reply
EnerJi - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkI wonder if this architecture would be a particularly good fit for a next-generation Xbox (due around 2013)? Any thoughts on this? Reply
GaMEChld - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link2013? I heard 2015, unless they recently changed dates to counter Nintendo. Anyways, I'm not so sure what benefits a console will realize from this, since full blown PC's barely get to utilize much of the technology we currently have access to. Multi-threading, 64-bit support, advanced cpu instructions are all available yet barely utilized features.
Also, consoles are designed to be cost effective and relatively cheap, so usually modified older generation architecture is used. For example, the new Wii uses Radeon 4700 class graphics, which sounds old but is roughly twice as powerful as the X360 (Radeon X1900) or PS3 (GF7000) graphics. Reply
DanNeely - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkThat's true of the Wii because Nintendo doesn't subsidize the console, but MS and Sony have gone after higher end GPUs for their last launches. The XBox 360 launched using a GPU similar to that of the ATI 1900, a bare month and a half after the card hit the market.The PS3 used a GF7800 derivative and launched roughly 1 year after the GF7800 did. The GF7900 was nVidias top of the line card at the time, but it was only a marginal improvement over the 7800. Reply
swaaye - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkPS3 actually launched about when G80 came out, which obviously made RSX look awfully retro when you saw 7900GTX SLI being beaten in reviews by a single board. ;) But G80 surely was never an option for a console due to size and power.
Xenos has less than half of the pixel fillrate of X1900. X1900 also has 48 pixel shader units + 8 vertex shaders so it might have an advantage over Xenos 48 unified units, especially when clock speed and the access to a large RAM pool over a 256-bit bus are taken into account. Reply
GaMEChld - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - linkBut we must also bear in mind that X360 and PS3 may have chosen high on the scale because of the concurrent shift to 720p/1080p resolution instead of the old 480p standard. At this point in time, the 1080p resolution is standardized, so greatly escalating GPU horsepower will show diminishing gains, since people aren't really going to be gaming on higher resolutions than the new standard tv resolution.
What I mean is, if a Radeon 5000 Series could maximize all graphics quality at 1080p, why would a console manufacturer bother with more power?
For example, you wouldn't buy a GTX590 or Radeon 6990 just to game on a 1080p monitor, would you?
The only exception I can think of for this TV resolution argument is 3DTV gaming, in which case I am not well versed in the added GPU overhead required to render a 3D game. Reply
EJ257 - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkI can't believe it's been 6 years since the X360 and PS3 release. It seems like this latest generation of consoles stuck around a lot longer than previous versions did. Any speculations on what kind of hardware MS and Sony will throw into the next gen? Reply
DanNeely - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - linkThey have. The big console makers, at the gave devs requests, were trying to make the current generation last a decade to allow more time to recover the work expended figuring out how to best program them. The motion capture cameras were supposed to be the thing that kept the platforms from getting too stale. I suspect however, that by planning to launch its new console early Nintendo may have blown those plans out of the water. Reply
jabber - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - linkI'm pretty sure the hardware specs for both the next Xbox and Playstation have been set in stone already.
I'm still betting on a 2013 release too.
So right now GPU wise I reckon we're looking at GPUs currently sitting in the $100 range for both boxes. By 2013, the cost of these chips (suitably modified) will be down to $15 -$10 a box.
I wouldnt have thought anything higher than a 5770 or 450 would be suitable/required. Reply
Targon - Monday, June 20, 2011 - linkIt all depends on what you expect. Things feel a bit stagnant on the PC game front because consoles are not evolving, and too many companies want almost exactly the same experience on the PC version as what you have on the console. Reply
Stargrazer - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link
Whereas VLIW is all about extracting instruction level parallelism (ILP), a non-VLIW SIMD is primarily about thread level parallelism (TLP).
Something doesn't feel right here. In itself, SIMD is about *Data* Level Parallelism, not Thread Level Parallelism. Sure, you could use SIMD units as part of some larger scheme that exploits TLP, but that's not what *SIMD* is about. Reply
Loki726 - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkIf you use a strict definition of a SIMD programming model, then yes, you are probably right: SIMD is a single sequence of operations executed over multiple data elements.
However, over time SIMD has been used to refer to both the aforementioned programming model and the hardware used to implement it. The hardware typically consists of a single control unit that broadcasts instructions to multiple functional units. When people say "a SIMD", they typically mean that hardware implementation rather than the computing model.
If that wasn't confusing enough, in the 1980s GPUs started using that SIMD hardware to execute multiple threads as long as the threads were all executing the same instruction at the same time.
So the statement about using "a SIMD" to exploit TLP is accurate, if you take "a SIMD" to mean a processor pipeline with a single control unit that broadcasts to multiple functional units, and have some scheme for scheduling threads onto functional units. Reply
RedemptionAD - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkIt seems like a good thing potentially. I hope that their good intentions are followed with good execution, at least better than Fermi. Reply
Targon - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - linkIt should be interesting going forward. Now that AMD is finally into the 32nm process node, standalone GPUs also stand to gain quite a bit. As long as graphics don't become an afterthought to GPGPU, AMD should be in good shape. Radeon 7970(if that is the next generation GPU) may really be a game changer. Reply
Navier - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkWill the GCN architecture be able to be virtualized? Can a VMWare/XEN/KVM/HyperV hypervisor create vGPUs accessible by VMs in much the same way as vCPUs are today? With GPUs being integrated within the CPU package it would be a waste of resources if it could not be virtualized.
This will become a critical feature for enterprise computing beyond HPC applications. One example would be gaming in a cloud computing environment, where a company provides a service that runs a game on their compute and graphics hardware for a game and streams the output to your mobile device for you to enjoy. Reply
hechacker1 - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkYeah I'm also curious about this. Perhaps with the IOMMU and other CPU like features that the GPU now has, it would be much easier to timeshare the GPU. Reply
haplo602 - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - linkI hope that AMD delivers. This is exactly what I expected them to do once Llano was anounced. GPU as a coprocessor. Actualy I hoped that AMD would implement a HTX capable GPU, so I can just plug it into a C32 socket (for example) along with an Opteron.
The future past Trinity looks interesting. Reply
jamescox - Monday, June 20, 2011 - linkIt would be interesting if they produced a form factor with CPU+GPU on a separate card with memory. Ever since AMD moved the memory controller on die, I wondered if we would see CPU + memory on a separate card. It seems to make a lot of sense. A 4 socket motherboard is huge, especially where each socket has 4 to 6 memory slots associated with it. If the CPU and memory were on a separate card, then you could pack them a lot denser, like you can run 4 GPUs off an ATX board now. It might be cheaper than a massive 4 socket board also. I don't know how many HT links you can run through a slot, but you could always use extra cables/connectors like they use for multiple graphics cards.
With the GPU using the same memory space as the CPU, then why leave the CPU attached to the slow system memory? Just put one of these hybrid chips attached to some high-speed graphics card like memory on a separate board. Move the slow system memory out to the chipset again. The current memory hierarchy is not exactly optimal in my opinion. I am using a slightly older macbook pro, which only supports 3 GB of memory. With all of the stuff I run, it is paging a lot to a super slow laptop hard drive. I have been tempted to get an SSD to speed it up rather than a new laptop.
Anyway, with the way the memory hierarchy works now, system memory is kind of like a cache for the swap space on disk. System memory has gotten a lot faster, but disk have not, so people are using SSDs to fill the gap. If you directly connect the "graphics memory" to a CPU/GPU combo, then you don't need as much total memory in the system because you would not need multiple copies of the data. You would just pass pointers to data back and forth between the CPU and GPU components.
Also, it would be nice to switch to something non-volatile for the memory connected to the chipset; just use disk as mass storage only. "System" memory wouldn't need to be that fast, since you would probably have a GB or two of high-speed memory on each processor board. The "system" memory would be used more like the SSD boot/swap drive in a current system. I don't think flash is quite there yet, and the other types of non-volatile memory (magnetic RAM , phase-shift RAM, etc) that promise much better performance and durability seem to still be all talk with no real products.
With keeping the current form factor, it would be nice if they could put a large amount of memory in with the CPU/GPU package to act as high-speed memory for the GPU and L4 cache for the CPU. This form factor doesn't support scaling up to multiple chips easily (too large of main-board), but it would be very power efficient for laptops and other small form factor systems. It would require very little off-module communication which saves a lot of power. Maybe they could use a low-power, wide-interface dram chip originally meant for mobile devices.
Hopefully Trinity is more than just a meaningless code name... Reply
Quantumboredom - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - linkOn page 4 ("Many SIMDs Make One Compute Unit") there are two figures showing wavefront scheduling on VLIW4 versus GCN. As I read it the figures seem to indicate that in VLIW4, one 4-wide VLIW handles operations from four wavefronts in parallel, but that's not how I've understood AMD's VLIW4. Only a single work-item is executing on a VLIW4-core at any point in time, the occupancy problems of VLIW4 come from ILP within a work-item, not across wavefronts.
At any one point in time, a Cayman/VLIW4 compute unit is only executing instructions from a single wavefront (though they need at least two wavefronts to switch between on VLIW4). Again at any one point in time only 16 work-items are actually being executed, and it's within those 16 work-items that ILP must be extraced to fill the VLIW4 units. Since each work-item is executing on a VLIW4-processor, a total of 16*4=64 operations can be done in parallel, but that requires ILP within the work-items.
On GCN this is quite different, where the four 16-wide vector units are actually executing 64 work-items at a time (four times as many as in Cayman). However the point is that each of these work-items are basically executing on a scalar processor, there's no need for ILP anymore. So again we are executing 64 operations in parallel, but now without any need for ILP.
At least this is how I understood the presentation (I was at AFDS). Basically I agree with how the GCN scheduling is illustrated in this article, but the Cayman part looks wrong to me. A Cayman CU can only execute one wavefront at a time, and it only needs two wavefronts to switch between to be able to fully utilize the hardware, not four like the figures here seem to suggest.
Now I'm just a programmer, not an architecture guy, so if anyone could clear this up for me it would be greatly appreciated :) Reply
Ryan Smith - Monday, June 20, 2011 - linkHi Quantum;
After further consideration you're basically right. I should have made a distinction in the figures between instructions and wholly distinct wavefronts. While there are some ILP considerations to be had, basically the elements Cayman accepts should all be instructions from the same wavefront rather than different wavefronts. Cayman can't really work on multiple wavefronts at once.
I don't have the original files on me, but we'll get this fixed in the morning to show that Cayman is consuming multiple instructions from the same wavefront.
Ryan Smith Reply
jamescox - Monday, June 20, 2011 - link
Would a CPU/GPU integrated chip only be a replacement for integrated graphics, or does it have the possibility to move a little farther up? With multi-threading, 4 to 8 thread CPUs will be common in the mainstream, but that will not be a very big die on smaller processes. Most PC software doesn't make use of more than 4 compute intensive threads, so how much room does that leave for GPU hardware? If they solve the memory speed problem by integrating some high-speed memory into the socket (multi-chip module), or something, then it seems like they could possibly get more mainstream performance out of an integrated chip.
If the integrated GPU isn't being used for graphics, then I really don't see that much software that would use it for compute in the PC space. One of the main things mentioned was usually video encode/decode, but it seems that the best solution is to include specific media encode/decode hardware like sandy bridge does. It seems to be just as fast and much more power efficient. If AMD doesn't include a media processing engine, then that could still be a reason to go with Intel. What other PC software could use the compute power?
There is plenty of software that could use it in professional/HPC markets, so it makes sense to make a GPU that can be used for both if it doesn't sacrifice the graphics performance. The newest generations of GPUs have some things in common with Larrabee and Sony's Cell processors, except both of those tried to move too much of the graphics processing abilities into software. AMD didn't make that mistake, but talk of compute abilities for GPUs in the PC/consumer space seems a bit premature without any real applications to take advantage of it. Reply
GaMEChld - Monday, June 20, 2011 - linkLlano already has low level discrete GPU performance, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. You are correct that on smaller processes they will be able to allocate more space to the GPU while maintaining CPU performance. I believe the successor to Trinity (which is the Bulldozer based successor to Llano) is supposed to be on 28nm. If everything goes exactly right, you could potentially have some kind of monster that has i5-2500K CPU performance with Radeon 6800 GPU performance in some maintstream laptop chip a year or two down the road. (Those numbers are all pure speculation)
I encourage everyone to take a moment and remember the first computer you ever used, just to pay homage to what we are capable of as a species in just a few short years.
I remember an IBM computer flipped on by a big red toggle that took 2 minutes to boot to a dos prompt... Reply
Targon - Monday, June 20, 2011 - linkI remember the Timex Sinclaire, with 2KB of memory standard hooked up to a black and white TV and cassette tapes to save/load programs. Z80 running at 1MHz...the old 5.25 inch floppies were MUCH better, at least you could get a list of what was on the storage medium without having to load it. Reply
jabber - Monday, June 20, 2011 - linkIf only our attitudes to each other and other issues had advanced as much as well. Reply
GaMEChld - Monday, June 20, 2011 - link"Because in the end, aren't all religions the same? They tell us what to eat, when to pray, that this lump of clay called Man can somehow shape himself to resemble the divine. But we can never attain that perfect grace if we have hatred in our hearts. So let us celebrate our commonalites. Some of us don't eat pork. Some of us don't eat shellfish. But we all eat chicken. So spread the word: peace and chicken!"
:-D Reply
Cyber.Angel - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - linkoff-topic?
7th day Adventist don't eat meat, yes, not even chicken
in Christian religion it's God who sacrifices, not human
there is a requirement of TOTAL change according to Jesus
That is, the "ME" is buried, forgotten and God lives inside of you
meaning a total change in life
God bless America - but...where is the change? Reply
DoctorPizza - Monday, June 20, 2011 - linkI can't understand that at all.
The next architecture will have 16-wide SIMD. How does that fit computational problems better than a 16-wide MIMD VLIW architecture? VLIW can act as if it were SIMD if necessary (simply make each instruction within the word the same, varying only the operands), so how on earth can SIMD be better? SIMD is strictly less general and less flexible than VLIW. This makes it applicable to a narrower set of problems--if you have problems that aren't 16-wide, then you're wasting those additional ALUs, and there's nothing you can do with them, ever. MIMD can't always use them, but there the restriction is unbreakable dependencies, not an inability to encode instructions.
And while VLIW heritage is indeed statically scheduled, nothing about VLIW mandates static scheduling. The next generation Itanium will use dynamic scheduling, for example.
This whole article reads like AMD has offered a rationale for its architectural change, and the author has accepted that rationale without ever stopping to consider if it makes sense. Reply
DoctorPizza - Monday, June 20, 2011 - link(FYI: the *real* reason to go for SIMD instead of VLIW is simply that VLIW takes up more die area. AMD has decided that the problems people are working on have enough data- and thread-level parallelism that it's not worth having extra decode logic to enable extraction of more instruction-level parallelism.
The result is a design that's actually *worse* for general-purpose computation--for non-vector computations, it'll only ever use one of those sixteen ALUs, whereas the previous design could in principle use them all--but better for embarrassingly parallel workloads.
Why the article couldn't say this is anybody's guess.) Reply
Quantumboredom - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - linkI don't understand your argument. They have moved from 16-wide SIMD where each instruction is a 4-operation VLIW (where there are quite a few restrictions on what that VLIW instruction can actually be) to _four_ 16-wide SIMDs where each instruction is scalar. The new architecture is in every way more general and more suited to a wide range of computational problems while retaining the same power. It does presumably cost more (in terms of area/transistors), but hopefully it will be worth it. Reply
DoctorPizza - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - linkWhere does it say that Cayman SPs are ganged into groups of 16? It says they're grouped somehow, but never makes the claim that their groups are as wide as the new SIMD short vectors. Reply
Quantumboredom - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - linkIt is well-known that Cypress and Cayman both have arrays of 16 processing elements operating in SIMD mode, and they have to execute work-items from the same work-group over four cycles, leading to a wavefront size of 64. See for example the AMD APP OpenCL Programming Guide 1.3c section 1.2 where this is described. Specifically it says "All stream cores within a compute unit execute the same instruction sequence in lock-step". Reply
DoctorPizza - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - link"well-known"? I assure you, the vast majority of people have not read AMD's OpenCL Programming Guide.
Nonetheless, the article still makes little sense.
A vector of 16 instruction-parallel processors is more versatile than a vector of 16 strictly SISD ones. In the worst case, with unbreakable data dependencies, the former degrades to the latter. In the best case, the former can do 4 (VLIW4) or 5 (VLIW5) times the work of the latter. The average case cited in the article was about 3.5 times.
If you only had one thread of work, the old architecture would tend to be better. For every 64 ALUs (one old VLIW vector or four new SIMD vectors), a single-threaded task would average usage of 56 out of 64 ALUs (3.5 per VLIW) on the old arch, but only 16 out of 64 on the new.
However, AMD is plainly counting on there being many, many potential threads. If you have abundant threads then you can guarantee that you can fill up the remaining 48 ALUs with different threads, whereas the 8 unused ALUs in the VLIW arch are off-limits.
This is a less general architecture, but as long as all your problems are massively parallel, creating all those extra threads shouldn't be a problem. AMD is sacrificing generality in favour of the embarrassingly parallel. Reply
Quantumboredom - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - linkI actually asked a similar question at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit.
The minimum number of wavefronts (i.e., batches of 64 work-items) needed to keep a Cypress/Cayman CU fed is two, while GCN requires four wavefronts (so twice as many). However it is the case that quite often (for all of my programs actually) you really do need four wavefronts per CU on Cypress/Cayman to effectively hide the global memory latency. The guy I was talking to at AMD seemed to thnik that in practice the number of work-items needed would stay about the same between Cayman and GCN for most applications.
I've asked this question on the AMD developer forums as well, but I don't know how many answers will be given about GCN there. Reply
DoctorPizza - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - linkI certainly wouldn't be surprised to hear that typical GPGPU workloads could inundate the GPU with threads and so provide more than enough wavefronts. The GPGPU workloads are pretty much all of the embarrassingly parallel kind, so creating more threads should tend to be pretty trivial.
So your experience certainly makes sense with what I'd expect.
It's not that I think this is necessarily a bad change for the applications that people use GPGPU processing for.
It's more that I'm disputing the implication that this somehow makes the GPU more general and easier to take advantage of; to my mind it's doing the exact opposite of that.
Or to put it another way: virtually every single program has a reasonable amount of instruction level parallelism. Data-/thread-level parallelism is much rarer. We're losing the former to improve the latter.
For problems amenable to massive thread-/data-level parallelism the result should be substantially more ALUs available to process on. But for problems with only limited data-/thread-level parallelism, it's a step backwards. Reply
name99 - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link"The next architecture will have 16-wide SIMD. How does that fit computational problems better than a 16-wide MIMD VLIW architecture? VLIW can act as if it were SIMD if necessary (simply make each instruction within the word the same, varying only the operands), so how on earth can SIMD be better? SIMD is strictly less general and less flexible than VLIW."
A VLIW system has to have instruction decoders and routers for every instruction, and thus for every data item that is processed.
A SIMD system only has to have one instruction decoder and router for every 16 data items that are processed. If your computations consist primarily of doing the same thing to multiple data items this is a win. (More processing for less power and less silicon.) If your computations do NOT consist primarily of doing the same thing to multiple data items, it's a loss.
Or, to put it differently, is it worth investing silicon in moving instructions around with great facility, or is it better to invest silicon in moving data around with great facility? Seymour Crane thought (for the problems he cared about) the answer was data. I'd like to think AMD know enough about what they are doing that they have the numbers in hand, and have calculated that, once again for them the answer is data. Reply
MySchizoBuddy - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - linkwhere is the information about the toolkit to take advantage of this hardware? Reply
ClagMaster - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - linkWhat is being describe is tantamont Vector Processing that was featured on CRAY supercomputers available in the 70's through 90's. In the machines I once programmed (using CFT77 compiler), a vector was 64 64-bit words that was processed through a pipe. Reply
789427 - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - linkIs it just me, or will we be seeing AMD refresh cycles quadruple for their processors because of on-die graphics?
I sense a prefix/suffix CPU/GPU diversification happening soon - and a bit of confusion with maybe some sideport memory enabled chips coming our way.
2/4/8 cores with
6550, 6750, 6850 level graphics and
512Mb/1Gb sideport
all for $100-$200 and crossfire capable?
Drool now?
cb Reply
Kakkoii - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - linkThis pleases me, because this will likely mean that AMD no longer has such a performance per dollar and watt difference from Nvidia. Thus further degrading most arguments AMD fanboys have against Nvidia. I see this being a benefit for Nvidia in the long term. After AMD claiming what Nvidia was doing wasn't right, they basically give up and are doing it themselves now too. Reply
Cyber.Angel - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - linkexactly what I was thinking
AMD/ATI is catching up - in the HPC sector
otherwise they are still a better buy in the consumer market
and in 2012 also in HPC
Nvidia uses too much power
too bad if even Trinity is not using this new GPU design... Reply
Wreckage - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 - linkI'm guessing we won't see product until sometime next year. Reply
tzhu07 - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 - linkLooking forward to buying a 7970 (or possibly a 7950) to go along with my Sandy Bridge build. I'm currently running on Intel HD3000 and it's killing me. But just a few more days now. Hopefully I can hit the refresh button on my browser fast enough to catch one before they sell out. Reply
OwnedKThxBye - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - linkTypo on the last page. At no point has AMD specified when a GPU will appear using GCN will appear, so it's very much a guessing game. Reply
R3MF - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link"We expect AMD to take a page from NVIDIA here and configure lower-end consumer parts to use the slower rates since FP64 is not currently important for consumer uses."
Will AMD be likewise crippling the FP64 support native to the chip, in products that have the resident features, if they are sold in a consumer SKU rather than a more expensive professional SKU?
I refer to nvidia's practice of crippling access to FP64 functionality in Geforce 580 cards that is otherwise available in Tesla 580 products. Reply
zarck - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - linkFor the GPGPU GRID, a test with Radeon 7970 and Folding@Home it's possible ?
https://fah-web.stanford.edu/projects/FAHClient/wi... Reply
morricone - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - linkI'm a developer myself and you have to look really hard to find an article as good as this. Keep this stuff up! Reply
mariush - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - linkLast paragraph, last page....
It's clear that 2011 is shaping up to be a big year for GPUs, and we're not even half-way through. So stay tuned, there's much more to come.
Say what? Reply
ajp_anton - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - linkIt's an old article (I'm guessing June 17th based on first comment), but bumped to the top because of the "launch". Don't know why the article's date is new... Reply
bguide - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link超激安ノートPCバッテリー >> 新品互換ノートPCバッテリー、安心1年保障。PCバッテリー、デジタルカメラ バッテリー、 過放電及び過充電防止回路付、 送料無料。laptopbattery..jp Reply


text:
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/4/2013 (1587 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
I am not a member of the Liberal party. I have voted everything from Green to NDP to Liberal, depending on the candidate in my area.
But I'm watching new Liberal leader Justin Trudeau these days as he goes up against Team Harper, and I have to admit that I wish him well.
I wish him well because the bullying has already begun, and I fear he will not be smart enough or confident enough to counter it properly.
And if he can't, the bullies will win again.
We've already seen what the Tory attack ads did to Stéphane Dion (he was painted as a ditherer, a 'weak' man), and Michael Ignatieff (an ambitious academic, far too snooty to lead). Dion in particular chose to ignore those ads at his peril. He was not well-known enough outside of Quebec, and a lot of the Tory dirt stuck.
This week, hours after Trudeau took over the Liberal leadership, the Tories unleashed their first attack ad, portraying Trudeau as a vain and shallow person -- look, he's doing a mock striptease at a public event, he's sporting long hair and a moustache -- how unbecoming of a leader!
"Does he have the judgment to be prime minister" asks a voice dripping in contempt, as carousel music plays in the background. "He's in way over his head."
So far, the real Trudeau appears to be earnest and forthright enough, an open book compared to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
He's not an intellectual like his father, Pierre. He is possibly more like his mother Margaret -- more emotional and empathic, traits that tend to make him look younger and less of a 'leader' in some people's eyes.
(In fact, columnist John Ibbitson called him a "callow youth" last weekend. Seriously? Trudeau is 41.)
But why do we persist in defining leadership according to some kind of cowboy-macho stereotype? Surely we have learned in the last few decades that there is real value at the top for empathic virtues such as collaboration, consultation and compromise.
In my opinion, the true test of Trudeau's leadership lies before him right now.
It is how he will react, how he will allow his party to react, to the attack ads.
The Tories may think they have taken the right tone; one of mild contempt, right down to the fairy dust and Disney-like swirl at the end.
But videos such as these are not funny at all. Not to a nation still raw from the suicides of two young women. We've seen what happens when the power of social media is used to bully and belittle.
So I admit, I have no political aspirations for Justin Trudeau. I don't even know if he has a platform, let alone a vision for Canada. But I want him -- I need him -- to stand up to the bullies.
He needs to fight back with grace, with courage, and with humour. He needs to say this country deserves better. He needs to refuse to play along.
He has already deflected the ads in exactly that fashion.
The day they first aired, Trudeau said he was happy to have offered his shirt to the Canadian Liver Foundation. "I hope that all the attention drawn to that today and my willingness to have a little fun with it will actually lead them to receive more donations," he said.
The mock-strip footage stems from the CLF's charity lunch in 2011 in which he raised about $1,900.
But can he control his own party? Liberal party officials have already vowed to respond with ads of their own.
And so we the voters hold our breath, hoping beyond hope that they choose to take some high road.
Yes, Trudeau has to respond, but he must not be defensive, or even worse, angry.
We need him to laugh off these personal attacks with the derision they deserve, to show the bullies that these tactics do not belong in Canadian politics today, even as U.S. campaigns wallow in the muck.
Canadian politics needs to take a new tack. And Trudeau has the power and the momentum right now to show us the way.
He told the Globe and Mail that Canadians are tired "of negativity, of bullying, of cynicism."
We are. We truly are. Lead on.
Margo Goodhand is a former editor of the Winnipeg Free Press. She is working on a book about women's shelters.


text:
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/9/2012 (1789 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Five storylines to consider as the Blue Bombers prepare to host the Argonauts tonight at Canad Inns Stadium:
IF there was any doubt in this community remaining about what a completely different team the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are when Buck Pierce is the starting quarterback, it was settled last Friday in a 34-12 win over the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
Pierce has a transformative effect on this team -- and not just on offence or even just on the field. "He's just a winner," Toronto Argonauts head coach Scott Milanovich said of Pierce on Friday. "I put him in the category of (Hamilton running back) Avon Cobourne. These guys just know how to win. They're competitive, they just kind of have that 'it' factor.
CHAD OWENS is the straw that stirs the Argos drink and finding a way to contain him as a receiver and a kick returner will be as essential to the outcome tonight as it was in their neutralizing of the Ticats' Chris Williams last week.
Both men are sneaky fast and capable of game-breaking plays on both offence and special teams. But Winnipeg found a way to make Williams a non-factor last week and the defence believes a similar scheme can be just as effective against Owens tonight.
"We've got to go in there with the same focus," said linebacker Jovon Johnson. "We've got to go in there with the mindset not to let him make big plays against us that hurt us."
JARIOUS JACKSON hasn't started a game in the CFL since 2010, but he will start for the Argos tonight in place of the injured Ricky Ray.
And that poses a different set of challenges for the Bombers defence than Ray does. While Jackson is nowhere near the artisan that Ray is, he does provide the Argos with a mobility element that Ray doesn't have. Plus, he totally digs the long ball.
Still, a quarterback is a quarterback.
"It makes no difference to me either way," said Johnson. "Nine times out of 10, I'm covering a guy and I've got my back to the quarterback. So I can't see what's going on anyway."
OVER 26,000 tickets to tonight's game had been sold as of Friday morning and a beautiful weather forecast could result in a sizeable walk-up crowd tonight.
The statistics make it clear the home crowds have made a demonstrable difference for the Bombers.
How else to explain how a team that is 0-6 on the road this season is 3-3 at home. And how else to explain why the Bombers have outscored opponents at home this season 156-140, but have been outscored 237-81 on the road.
WHEN Winnipeg has an effective rushing game, Winnipeg wins.
In the three games the Bombers have won this season, they have averaged 131 total rushing yards. In the nine games they have lost, they have averaged 80 rushing yards.
Step forward, Chad Simpson. The Bombers tailback had 134 rushing yards last week. He's unlikely to get that kind of production against the Argos tonight, but anything over 100 yards and the odds of a Winnipeg victory rise exponentially.


text:
Sherman Oaks, CA, US
I am an interior designer with experience in residential interior design, home staging and light commercial interior design. My design and decoration theory is based on three pillars: Creativity, Function and Personalization. I am passionate in what I do and I strive to always learn, get inspired and create!
Eklectic Interiors, Sherman Oaks, CA, US, Interior Designer
Prepared conceptual designs, interior plans, schedules, FF&E specifications and documentation. Oversaw daily operations, including purchasing, outsourcing, and client relations.
Coordinated and supervised all project installations
Created and implemented strategic marketing, advertising plans offered a high level of customer service that translated to a significant amount of referrals
Efficiently developed and managed operating budgets, proposals, invoices and furniture inventory reports
Pierre Deux Inc, West Hollywood, Interior Designer/ Sales Consultant
Coordinate and handle in-home consultations for custom and large projects
Prepare quotes and documentation such as CFA's, COM's, invoices, deliveries and payments
Assist manager with inner-store transfers, inventory reports, replenishment, and receiving
Create seasonal vignettes and displays that reinforce the visual theme and reflect market trends
Provide excellent customer service through product knowledge, problem solving and design assistance
Prepare presentations such as room inspirations, boards, drawings, fabric and furniture selections
City Leather, Valencia, CA , Store Manager/ Interior Designer
Consistently met company's sales goals through product sales, customer satisfaction and training
Created and implemented designer programs and in home-consultations to increase sales
Coordinated staff business meetings, presentations, agenda, and events
Developed strong relations with vendors, personnel and clients
Worked as a buyer assistant to the owner as well as maintain and managed annual store(s) inventory
Maintained sales, delivery , and company financial reports
Attended conventions and trade shows to improve sales skills and networking
American InterContinental University (AIU), Los Angeles, CA, US, Bachelors, Intererior Design


text:
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