forgotpw2018

I know almost nothing about law but I would assume a large company would be insured against contingencies like this.

I remember reading something about how rich people can get 'everything else's insurance that's basically applicable to anything bad that could happen to them. Maybe its the same with companies?

I deleted that because I thought it was too flamey after reading it again, but yeah refunding everyone is unrealistic.

Maybe just average out the performance impact across large cloud providers and offer that as a percentage? It probably wouldn't be hard for a company like Google to crunch metrics before/after the update and give a number for how much their performance has been affected

Exactly why. Even if the performance impact is 3%, that means the world has lost maybe 2% of its CPU power overnight. That's an utterly massive amount of hardware, many billions of dollars, maybe a trillian.

It's not just the cost of the processors, but everything that contains them. Truly 'fixing' all the affected products would bankrupt a county but we should get a refund for the CPU's at the least

Intel's PR dept is in overdrive, but the truth about this vulnerability is that it's essentially worst-case.

It really only affects workloads where high performance is important. The average user might not see an impact but if you need fast IO God help you. The solution is to 'make less syscalls' but the problem is that syscalls have always been slow and the people making a lot of them are only doing so because they absolutely have to

This is why embargoes are stupid. Unless you're 'blessed' you get screwed. They only exist to give intangible benefits to large corporations at the expense of everyone else.

It's the technological version of insider trading

Didn't know that. The chipmaking business is insular and pretty incestuous, I wonder if the same engineers built both speculative execution units.

I've got a friend in CPU design and he's only got about 50 companies he can work for in the world where he could do the same job he does now

All other chipmakers are 'immune' to Meltdown precisely because the attack is obvious. Cache timing is hard, but speculating execution before checking permissions is plain dumb.

If it was such a mythical attack why doesn't it work on anyone else's chips? Intel screwed up hard on this and I have no sympathy. Hopefully the incoming lawsuits will make up for the massive amount of money wasted for the performance losses

Huge real world performance impact, they didn't say how much but it looks like close to 100%.

I smell a class action lawsuit coming.

You could use it, but you would probably have to reachitect the server to use green threads to avoid the overhead. Frequent syscall sends are done with games to keep the latency as low as possible. Any batching would increase delay

Hahaha. Look it up, having a blood relative or longtime friend of a member in your house pledge another house is a pretty common tactic. You can find out if they haze, how much money and members they have, their secret rituals. You can even snipe other pledges from their incoming class sometimes.

The activity fee thing is true too. Many universities have a student government of sorts, and some of them allow the student government to decide what happens with a significant amount of the school's budget. At my school it was 5% ish. At the school with 20k students that's a ton of money for 40 elected students to slosh around.

The Greek system would commonly ally as voting blocks to make sure their candidates were elected, so student government is frequently run by Greeks.

Watching other houses parties was really important too. You need to see how far other houses go in breaking the inevitably unenforcable rules for parties. If you stray from the pack the school will shut you down. Finding out how many people went to social events at other houses was probably the most accurate gauge of a house popularity and reputation.

I came from a school with a very competitive Greek system, so I'm sure a lot of this doesn't apply everywhere

Fraternity hazing and military bootcamp are basically the same.

There's a lot of parallels that shouldn't be legal since hazing isn't, but nobody talks about it

I don't see anything wrong with it. What don't you like?

The basic concept is to throw 40 twenty year old college guys (hopefully well chosen) into a 10000 sq ft house worth a mil, and they sink or swim.

You learn a ton. Keeping it afloat is a huge challenge, and the competition with other houses demands constant attention and good decision making.

I was president about two years after joining as a random guy in undergrad, and suddenly in charge of 300,000 a year budget. Our alumni pledges plus assets were almost a million and that's normal. Keep in mind I was just a guy elected by 23 of my 40 peers voting for me.

It was one of the best learning experiences in my life. If you know of something equivalent that's accessible for a random guy in college and not in the Greek system it would surprise me.

Compared to what the average college student was doing? No. It was a great use of time. We had a team, a goal, and a purpose. No stupider than being on mock trial or chess team.

It's all pointless if you think about it too much, but that competition drove a ton of benefits to the school. IFC (Interfraternity counsil) ran most of the school events. Our attendance at official school functions like football games or president speeches was about 30% of attendees, even though 'greek life' was only 4% of the student population.

Over 50% of alumni endowment/donation money was from sorority/fraternity members even though they made up a single digits percentage of graduates since the 60s.

I don't understand why Greek life is attacked so judiciously on HN when it's clearly a net positive to schools and the students that join. Of course it's not for everyone but that's not a reason to vilify it.

Eh, I joined one when I was 25 so I have to disagree. One of my fraternity friends followed me across the country and let me live on his couch for about two years. Another was my best man. Best friends I've ever had, easily.

Yeah the competition doesn't mean as much when you get older but you still get fired up years later on homecoming when you hear your old rival got more members or a bigger house or whatever.

I'm in my early thirties now and I still think it was worth it, competition and everything.