nuand

I just ran these past OpenAssistant and I'm seeing a much higher error detection rate. I've tried 6 so far, and it's caught bugs in about 4. OpenAssistant actually had a very good technical explanation of the bug it found in the BubbleSort example.

The "fix" Intel pushed out this week is a microcode update that in my experience doesn't fix or address Meltdown at all. The update does however make Spectre slightly less reliable, so I'm going to assume that the microcode update has something to do with fixing, updating, or adding new controls to the branch predictor buffer.

So absent a microcode update that outright fixes Meltdown, there will always be some level of slow-down for vulnerable devices. System calls now jump from user mode code to a stub kernel in "supervisor memory". The stub kernel then does a full context switch (touching %cr3 paging register and wiping a good portion of the TLB), and once the real kernel finishes, it does a full context switch back to the stub kernel. It's all terribly inefficient, and realistically it's unlikely that there will only be negligible performance impacts. It should also be noted that this "work-around" doesn't fix processor, it just makes it so that that there's nothing juicy in the supervisor memory.

You may have to learn to live with this for a while. Even if it takes Intel a month to design and validate a fix for Meltdown, prototype and mass production turn around times mean that no customer will have a processor that isn't vulnerable to Meltdown until April-June 2019.

Nope, it's all in the MAC and additional usermode services that help phones identify to the network using, in most cases, its SIM.

Eventually yes, we can expect to see optical in desktops. Fiber connections are "better" but also much more expensive. The price should eventually come down as volumes increase. The main delaying factor is that copper is still good enough.

Multimedia is the driving force behind increased data usage, and I think we'll continue to need more throughput until we no longer get any benefits from higher resolutions (aka when we have substantially more pixels than rods and cones in our eyes). At the moment a phone with a 4K display saturates your eyes at any distance greater than 2 feet from your face. I think a 16x PCIe 4.0 link will likely provide more than enough bandwidth to generate fully immersive VR experiences, so the question then becomes... why and when will we need optical PCIe 5.0 to quadruple the datarate of PCIe 4.0...

$6.9 billion? sounds like this fire is razing quite well

The Google ads ban does not affect players like LendingClub/SoFi/Avant since they are long term loans with interest rates similar to credit cards.

Yea, I am too

Yes, you are correct. Some parts of LTE and WCDMA use a pre shared secret and rolling keys to allow UEs to identify themselves to the mobile network. There are however many non-data carrying parts of LTE that are not encrypted or authenticated, sort of how 802.11 has AES but management frames are still fully unecrypted.