patrick8

Joined 10 years ago

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Sep 2

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WebAssembly doesn't make native integration any easier than JS. Neither defines the exact way so called non-web embeddings actually are defined and both can support it. I honestly have no idea the relevance of WebAssembly in this discussion. Could you provide an illustrative example?

Edit: I should clarify that for certain types of apps WebAssembly might be relevant but the discussion seemed to be out UI layer and I don't understand how WebAssembly fills a gap that a native API in JS could also provide along with the same challenges.

Comment · 10 years ago

The P in PCA is principal. It's a strong and dubious assumption that MBTI carries any orthogonality.

Comment · 10 years ago

Yeah, get bent dude. It sort of is your job to prove who you're quoting or get called out on it. The nearest I can tell is the guy you're talking about is George Haymaker, and if that is who it is, he was CEO of Kaiser, not Alcoa.

But when you do things like this: "FFS; I am relaying a quote I heard from the head of fucking ALCOA! y'all motherfuckers know what ALCOA is? and how far their reach is...."

That detail mattered because you made it matter. No one attacked you for that.

Comment · 10 years ago

I find it funny that no one yet has called you on your bullshit: Who the fuck is John Haymaker? There was no Haymaker CEO of Alcoa. You quote this person, and you don't even know their first name? Sounds legit.

Comment · 10 years ago

You're incorrect, especially for the typical reader here. A good chunk (maybe not over 50%, but its gotta be close) of the regular readers on this site use Macs. Most Mac keyboards, including the ones on the Macbook Pro, spell it out. Same for most non IBM/IBM-PC compatible keyboards.

Comment · 10 years ago

I think that is the reason for the misunderstanding.. FDIV was not really insidious in the way you describe. It was 100% predictable, certain bit patterns always gave the wrong answer in the quotient on the affected hardware and it had a very straightforward software fix (with a performance effect sure). You could demonstrate it immediately, but it really wasn't severe. (Q9 and Q10 http://www.trnicely.net/pentbug/pentbug.html)

Rowhammer is a much more complex errata and I don't feel qualified to comment on, especially the safety of the published mitigations, but it is in a class of bugs where the outcomes are not generally predictable due to more variables involved.

My reason for replying initially though, is that I don't think that the line for what types of hardware defects are open to software workarounds is so cut and dry, and I don't think many people outside of kernel/OS dev realize how many errata are on the chips they use everyday with workarounds they don't notice.

Comment · 10 years ago

FDIV was really not technically a serious errata in the grand scheme of erratas. The Phenom TLB bug was worse. Intel basically denied/sat on the issue for half a year, stopped just short of slandering Dr. Nicely, etc, they made it into a complete PR disaster. If they came out the week after it was reported and just said, here's a workaround, here's an opt-in replacement program (which they finally did, but then it was too late), you would probably never have heard about the FDIV bug -- like the countless other errata we have software workarounds for.