Posts by alain williams 2835 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
Do we have any numbers on how the Meltdown fix affects CPU power use for the same workload ?
If it is having to do more work at every context switch then that will mean less time idle/...
The argument above is that unless you use the CPU at 100% then you will not notice the patch overhead -- but then you might notice a bigger electricity bill???
Yesterday I completed a guide on how to implement let's encrypt, including simple openssl.cnf files and using something other than certbot. Apache on *nix systems. Hopefully useful to some of you.
Given how seriously Shenoy suggests Intel takes this issue I have to assume that they set to work to try and produce a microcode patch as soon as they learned of the problem 8 months ago (or was that 2 years ago?).
In all that time they have not succeeded; so maybe they could do with some help. How about releasing the microcode and then we could all try to help.
Are either of us really in a position to determine whether 'many' judgments are, or are not, capricious?
I have, for some 20 years, helped people (men & women) who are caught up in the nightmare that is family law [as thanks to those who helped me]. Sometimes the courts, etc, get it right, but often they do not. I have seen hundreds of cases:
* they can drag on for years - only benefits the solicitors who earn fees. Some solicitors seem to act to slow things down
* CAFCASS reports that do not describe what is really happening, but reflect the prejudices of the officer. Once case where an officer & her boss made up evidence just before a hearing (being unaware that they were being observed)
* courts officials who: loose paper-work, ignore orders made by their own court; refuse to obey practice directions
* judges that make orders and then will not enforce them (generally if a woman breaks it, but woe betide a man who does)
* judges who kick cases into the long grass rather than deal with it
* innumerable false allegations of violence or sexual misconduct against dads [in about half the cases that I see]. The courts take at face value, chuck dad out of the house, kids no contact with him (even in a contact centre), mother thus gets legal aid. By the time that it is shown false some 9 months later: mother has the house, the kids don't want to see dad, ... This happens time and again - how come the judges do not see through it ?
I could go on ...
State-sponsored actors absolutely have the resources to produce malware to exploit Spectre.
I would be surprised if some did not already have the tools/malware. But as we well know they cannot keep their toys in their playpen, so we have to expect that other ne'er do wells will acquire them.
When I worked for a big insurance company, it took 3 years to get a server approved along with the necessary resources to set it up, and configure it into service.
Find a desktop PC that is being replaced, wipe it & install Linux, hide it under your desk. It will work nicely as a Git machine or similar. By the time that management discover it - it will be too vital for them to remove.
I've done this several times. The only time that I had a problem was when a janitor type was the one who 'safely disposed' of old machines, he did not like it when I took one as it mean less money for him as he 'securely disposed' them at car boot sales.
It was known about for over half a year; el Reg blew the gaff a week early; only then did Intel & others release microcode to mitigate the problems. But that microcode was buggy, it crashed systems.
So are we to assume that in that last week they were going to test, debug & distribute fixed microcode ?
I would like to know what they spent that half year doing - other than sticking their heads in the sand.
Their move away from Linux is widely regarded as not for technical reasons but you all know the story ...
I wonder if the EU will have the balls to impose a fine here.
If it is "about" then why give a number to 4 places of decimal ? "ten times 2×10^27kg" would have been accurate enough - especially considering how the whole tone of the article was about the difficulties of being precise. Did Ms Quach understand what she was writing about ?
as it ages, so we need to get away from it to remain at the same temperature.
There are other effects that contribute to Orbital Decay, but they are also very small in the case of the Earth.
Even if you don't have a static one, it is not going to change for the duration of your search for a holiday, hotel, car-insurance, ... purchase. If you do this at work: you will be lumped in with everyone else at your company, if you do it at home ... well how many of you are surfing at the same time ?
She's not thinking "Wayhey, cheap food", its about optimising a bunch of shitty outcomes.
But you started out saying:
She will go in to the pizza place first, get a great deal on the pie we want and once they bring it the free garlic bread for while we wait, she messages me to come on in :)
Why do you wait outside until she has got free garlic bread if both of you were not thinking "Wayhey, cheap food" ?
However, some women are good at ignoring and/or dealing with it. When I'm drinking with a friend of mine, a well proportioned young lady who gives as good as she gets, we have a routine. She will go in to the pizza place first, get a great deal on the pie we want and once they bring it the free garlic bread for while we wait, she messages me to come on in :)
So: it is OK for her to use her sex/large-breasts/... to get an advantage over the pizza boys, but regards any comeback as harassment (even if she can deal with it) ? Is that not trying to have your cake & eat it ? Maybe I have got this wrong, please explain.
The woman said:
“This is no longer about my personal experience, this is about every single female who has been victimised in this way by someone from a company we put our trust in.”
'every single female' ??? It is about a lack of trust in a company; nothing special about the unfortunate person happening to be a woman in this instance. Men & women suffer from abuses of information.
In no way do I excuse the driver who should not have used the 'phone number as he did.
should not money be going as compensation to those who were disturbed? See a nice illustration of the cost of an interruption to a techie.
but they don't seem to worry if they make things hard for us, like their Making Tax Difficult initiative where everyone has to use an accounts package to submit tax information. Most individuals and some small businesses (eg window cleaners) have no need for something complicated like accounts programs but may be forced to buy one. The biggest cost will be the time taken to enter details at the level that the tax man wants - which looks likely to be much more detailed than is actually useful for the individual or small business.
But HMRC does not pay for the time that we work on their behalf - so why not require something which comes at no cost (to them).
Intel's downplaying of meaningful consequences from Meltdown and Spectre appears to have become unsustainable
In the nature of things like this most people will read the story while it is big in the headlines for a few days and then lose interest. Thus they will believe that this affects all CPU vendors, not just Intel. So the Intel misinformation campaign will have worked. Intel will not get castigated for misleading statements.
Main-stream media will prob continue to mis-report it as they don't have the interest to follow tech sites.
Upfront, open & honest is not what large corporations do, unfortunately.
Thought experiment: What would Intel be if IBM had picked a different processor for its PC back in 1981 (Motorola 68000?)?
Oooh - that would have been nice. An unsegmented 32 bit memory space, unlike the intel 16 bit, then memory segments, ... Although the Intel CPUs came with a defined MMU (Memory Management Unit) which the M68k chips did not; I seem to remember 3 different sorts of M68k MMUs floating around.
If IBM had gone M68k, would Bill Gates have been able to get in on the act ? We might be living in a very different world in which Amiga was the big boy.
Phil James presumably did it in the hope of some personal gain - make himself much richer. Yet the 2 fines were reduced so that it did not hurt him too much.
It is only if others see that they will be completely cleaned out that they will think twice at doing something similar. However: what has happened here tells them that if they get caught then consequences won't be that bad ... so probably worth a gamble.
What we are not told about are those who paid for this, people like share holders. Why should they suffer (and in similar cases to come) because the powers that be do not want Mr James to suffer too much?
If he had been caught stealing food from a supermarket - how would he have been dealt with ?
up against high street stores who do have to pay their staff the minimum wage as well as pay tax on profits. So Amazon gets away with it at both ends.
Hopefully our politicians will wake up before the only way of buying something is over the Internet.
IIRC the Snoopers’ Charter does not apply to MPs - they are specifically excluded. Any such exclusion should be outlawed: what is good enough for me should also be good enough for MPs. If they don't like it then they should rein it in for everyone - not just themselves.
Much more should be made of it - how MPs are hypocrites.
It is almost impossible to protect a cable several thousand miles long. To destroy it you only need a short vulnerable section - preferably easy to reach; and it won't take long.
Mitigation by means of several cables is probably better, also helps capacity and protect from natural or innocent disasters (eg earthquakes and deep sea trawlers).
Err, you do realise the Ireland isn't leaving the EU. If you think it's part of the UK I'm sure any Irish commentards can explain why it isn't.
I'm well aware of that. Brexit could result in many businesses moving to Eire, it could also result in a downturn in trade with the UK due to tariffs at the border. Who knows!
advertise a low tax rate for the mega corps, have them all flock there and create lots of jobs.
Then ''the nasty EU says we have to charge you the tax that we told you were going to avoid".
So: they have lots of jobs and €13 billion.
Although I do wonder what will happen in the next couple of years -- but they can always blame the mega corps going elsewhere on Brexit.
Page 12 of the report shows that only 12% of nurses are men. Should we not be agitating to increase the number of men who choose that as a career ?
When we have got that fixed:
* we also want more men to be primary carer of kids following divorce;
* the courts to give men more lenient sentences as they do women (like for like crimes);
* women to be prosecuted for domestic abuse in the same way as are men
I could go on ...
was demonstrating incompetence of the system admins at the various USA establishments that he cracked. Real damage in terms of stolen data, etc, does not figure. This is exactly why the USA wanted Gary McKinnon. It is an attempt at revenge rather than justice; the people that they should be looking at (I do not say prosecute) are the sysadmins & their bosses.
The real risk is that he faces is a long sentence in a prison there, the USA seems to lock more people up & for longer than most other countries. They do not regard prison as one way of rehabilitation.
There is little public interest in prosecuting him in the USA rather than the UK.
Another issue is the asymmetrical USA/UK extradition arrangements: the USA can grab people from the UK much, much more easily than the UK get people from the USA.
Then they slowly started leaning on me and said I needed to give them a 9 or 10 otherwise they were in trouble. Having read the article, I can understand why.
Whether the sales droid gets a bonus is not the real issue: once you start giving them a 9 or 10 then the marketing department will start shouting from its web site that ''90% of customers consider us excellent'', which will pull in more people who will then also be pressured to give artificially high scores.
So: what is really going on here is that companies are using the social pressure (''that nice man who sold me a car wants to give his daughter a nice birthday present, what possible harm is there is me lying on this questionnaire ?'') to artificially raise the company approval score; this acts to the detriment of (potential) customers. The value of the commission paid to the salesman is trivial compared to the extra sales that are generated.
Just another way of generating fake news.
A consequence that the article authors did not understand.
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