Posts by Jim 68

Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs

Re: Maybe we dodged a bullet?

I think NSA told me to avoid side-channels back in the 1980s.

Itanic was sunk before launch - by Alpha compiler

Itanic was sunk before launch - by Alpha compiler

I had an early DEC 3000 Alpha 400/400S AXP workstation. It had a C compiler that did extremely deep/wide source parallelism analysis across an entire application, what EPIC later promised. I experimented and found that the degree of "hidden" parallelism discovered in no way compensated for the inconvenience and time required to recompile the entire application from source just to edit one module. Yes, I conducted detailed, controlled studies at (then) DCRT at the NIH. Around late 1992 or early 1993. Oh, yes, you could do EPIC on an Alpha in 1992! Just pick the right compiler options and compile the whole source at once.

This whole disaster could have easily been avoided had someone at HP or Intel simply repeated what I did a decade earlier with that Alpha.

Yet IBM decided I didn't deserve to have a job selling HP Itanics to Mickey Mouse (he evidently likes HP-UX better than IBM POWER with the COBOL like AIX OS) so I was RA'd.

Go figure...

Republicans' net neutrality attack written by… you guessed it, the cable lobby

It's Comcastic!

And the winner is...

Fire fighters get grinding on London man’s trapped genitalia

Sounds like another job for...

Angle Grinder Man!

Best be Nimble, best be quick. You're out of a job at HPE – and that's sh*t

Re: I am not a resource!

Hewlett and Packard wanted to make the best quality engineering kit possible. It was costly but generally worth it if you could afford it.

When I visited a large HP facility around 1999 or so I asked about their quality assurance testing. Once the laughter subsided I was told: "If it powers on, it ships!"

I think I also vaguely recall a time when employers saw critical minded, skilled employees as a valuable resource. By the 1990s they were a disposable asset. Now they're just a cost to be cut.

Industrial plant robots frequently connected to the 'net without authentication

I suspect...

...there are a lot of people who simply can't envision anything that's not connected to the Internet.

Come celebrate World Hypocrisy Day

Startup Entrepreneurship

Silicon Valley essentially invented IP theft. The whole idea of startup "entrepreneurship" was essentially joining a firm, learning their kit and then going into competition with them.

It's happening! It's happening! W3C erects DRM as web standard

Fair Use, We Don't Need No Steenkin' Fair Use!

Why can't people ever get over this "copy protection" nonsense? All DRM does is to hobble reasonable use by legal licensees.

Fix crap Internet of Things security, booms Internet daddy Cerf

Re: I hope "the answer" isn't EVEN MORE gummint...

A significant issue is the prevailing social problem of complete lack of ethics that has overtaken nearly everything. When the people in control of doing things have no interest in quality or potential risks, it really doesn't matter. Private sector or public, big or small, if there's no intent to do good to begin with, neither regulations nor market selection pressure will matter.

Microsoft cloud TITSUP: Skype, Outlook, Xbox, OneDrive, Hotmail down

I Just Assumed...

The Internet being what it is these days, I assumed the periodic hiccups in MS cloud svcs were due to a DDoS attack on their authentication servers. Fortunately in my case reloading the page a few times got through and everything I did Tuesday seems to be there today.

Will AI lead to the rise of the love machines?

Big Bang Theory

There was that episode with Wolowitz' robotic hand...

Scott McNealy: Your data is safer with marketers than governments

"...Wait until we see puck."

Most Sun engineers in the '80s and '90s regarded Scooter primarily as a source of entertainment.

Hyper-V guest escape, drive-by PDF pwnage, Office holes, SMB flaws – and more now patched

'...Secure programming is hard, kids'

From reading the descriptions of most Windows related vulnerabilities, the developers would only have needed to type, size, bounds and sanity check inbound data. All incoming data, every time. This is hardly news, and is certainly less difficult than the time some suits at a former unnamed employer decided it would be a nifty idea to mix big and little endian app servers in a n-tier SAP environment. "Well, the marketing rep SAID it would work..."

IBM: Voluntary redundo offer? Ticked. Min stat terms? Ticked

Re: But don't we need to import IT skills...

This was always the old selling point when Cisco produced that white paper nearly two decades ago about "at will" employees being able to pick and choose the best compensation. Unfortunately when everyone is going down the H-1B route there aren't many "opportunities" to choose.