Re: The man is 53, for god's sake!
Ageism? 53 is no age!
3261 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jan 2015
"I'd assume most of the hosts of these servers are not going to be idling, so the CPU shouldn't ever do 'idle-time' speculation"
It's not that sort of idle time (on a very macro scale). It's running some instructions while waiting for data for some other instructions: Out-of-order execution. Making your system more busy on a process level scale won't make any difference.
"Almost as if they are all copying each other......."
CPU design has been openly discussed in fora since day one.
Most performance enhancement methods are very well known, and subject of research at universities etc.
Developers get poached between companies.
All currently used mainstream CPUs follow the same basic design pattern.
Performance improvements are in the details of implementation, more than overall architecture.
Pressure to make the fastest processors would lead to designers doing similar things, perhaps ignoring some obscure and unlikely to be exploited side effects (if they even considered them in the first place).
Computing is still in its infancy.
We have only (relatively) recently started accepting that malicious stuff will run on our computers (invited in by making the web able to run stuff locally). We used to think it was the exception that malicious code ran, whereas now it's the norm.
Most security still stems from only running stuff from trusted sources. The main security holes are "run everything" platforms such as browsers and Flash.
"Also, to exploit these flaws, malware has to be running on a device"
Unfortunately, just visiting a website starts all sorts of cra*p running. Draining the battery, flashing useless ads, and other oh-sooo important stuff going on.
But, yes, these information leak bugs aren't exactly low hanging fruit. Much easier to just fool a gullible user to do something stupid.
BTW, was it just me who found the explanatory RedHat video explanation not very useful? (I can't quite map waiters running around with how a CPU works..)
"But this came from a time when editors were simple affairs, and printer drivers essentially just copied the file to a printer port. Heck, the "file" could well be a length of punched paper tape that would be physically fed into the printer."
I'm sure you have a point. However, I have used line printers with perforated blue-white paper, and formatting applied to your text documents by filtering software. I know for sure I didn't put in page numbering, headers, footers, etc, but it all came out with that. Both on Unix systems, and CMS/VM.
"You assume that CR always denotes a new line. I once used line printers and telex machines a great deal"
You are muddying the waters by getting mixed up the printer control needed to get a certain result with the storage format for a document. I bet you don't want to edit a document by inserting printer instruction to go back, then space forward, then print some underline, then go back and linefeed..
I install Emacs ASAP on any Windows system I have to edit anything on.
That Wordpad, or whatever it's called, doesn't it open things with a variable width font per default?
Anyway, it's pretty typical of MS to fix nothing, no matter how trivial, unless there's money in it.
Still don't know why Explorer hangs doing feck all for ages (looking for God knows what on the network) every now and then. Not something MS will fix within the next few decades, it seems. It's been like that for a couple of decades, at least.
"Which – gulp! - isn’t a very far-fetched scenario, unless you run a tight ship of no untrusted code."
I would assume that any non-trusted code running on a machine will one way or another be able to gain access to everything.
I don't think we are at a stage where you could install a program from an untrusted source and think that because you didn't give it admin privileges it would somehow be a safe thing to do.
It's not even true for supposedly much tighter platforms, such as Android and iOS.
"analog mastering is highly overrated. It has to do with the way tape DISTORTS the audio."
Actually, may early digital workstations sounded like total crap. It's fully possible, and easy, to make digital audio mixing consoles ruin the sound.
Those nasty effects went far and beyond any good analogue system's minor issues, rendering the resulting mix horrible.
However, because there wasn't any audible hissing noise in the background, many were very impressed by the early digital sound.
"Most other people will upgrade due to recommendation / incentives / or simply the car that looks nice secondhand happens to be electric and the other half love s the seats and its got low mileage..."
Sounds like you are surrounded by not very clever people. Are you in the USA?
"Audiophiles have really taken to the warm digital tone of streaming music"
Lossy compression often does indeed sound "warm" compared to pure 16/44 (CD), due to a loss of high frequency content, and dulling of transients.
It's a myth, however, that LP and other older formats have to sound "warm". Indeed, realistic transients and high frequency contents is typically what you get with a very good vinyl playback system. Nothing warm or dull about it. Quite the opposite.
I don't know how you do your calculations, but 10Gb/s is roughly 1GB/s, so 1000 users' data per second if a user has 1MB of data. That's 3.6 million users per hour. 360m in 100 hours, so 500 hours would give you 1.8b users' data. Assuming the data is only 200kB, it would only take 100 hours, or about 4 days. Perhaps the interesting data is only 20kB? Then it would take just 10 hours.
In the CA example they got some 87m users' data out of what must have been a rather slow process. That was worth millions of dollars to CA (Robert Mercer, really), for some reason.
"As they had no process they had nothing to patent and by the time they worked out the process they'd given the Japanese enough time to work out and patent the process before they could."
That's because the Japanese make stuff.
The sad other side to this story is the fact that we don't.