TomV1971

I’ve been on the receiving end where hobbyists were trying (and eventually succeeded) to hack our DRM scheme.

It was really fun to read the forums and see how, day by day, they managed to get closer. Since it wasn’t really crucial IP to begin with, we were rooting for the little guys to see how close they would get, secure in the knowledge that our algorithm was solid. :-)

The final exploit that granted them access was due to a supplier who replaced an earlier validated random generator with something not quite as random, which enabled replay attacks.

Reminds me of comfort noise in the telephone system.

Even though the system encodes silences noise free (so improve compression), it deliberately inserts noise because otherwise people think the line is dead.

Here is one of them: https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...

Intel graciously paid for trees to brighten up the street and has a nice street sign saying so. (It doesn’t say why they did.)

This one is not directly related to silicon production, but the QA that came after.

If that were true, why didn’t they do this kind of authentication right from the start?

There is little upside in screwing over millions of existing customers.

Other phone manufacturers aren’t as prolific in updating the low level firmware of their devices once it’s on the market?

I’ve worked with many LCD panels: while they all support one of a few signaling standards, there is no standard for the cables and connectors. (Or if there is, nobody follows them.) For each LCD panel, you need to make a custom cable.

So that part is not something that’s specific to Apple.

Yes, but even for your WiFi example, fixes to work with a non-compliant third party are often reactive. In many cases, that’s the only practical way.

They already IPO’d. :-)

I assume that there might be technical reasons to do it that way.

For example: a soft delete may be just a stronger version of public vs private settings. The whole software infrastructure still assumes a link exists and doesn’t need to cover cases where it really isn’t there. I could see how that makes maintaining indexes etc easier.

Flipping a flag and then filtering out results down the line based on the delete setting is probably much easier than actively removing them from an index.

And if deleting is rare (it probably is), then the performance and resource impact should be minimal.

Last time I checked, HIP didn’t support reading from textures.

That’s something that’s not only useful for pure graphics.

So it is (or was?) not a straight substitute for CUDA.

Yes, but it means AMD will have to do the original work. They can’t use a CUDA to HIP converter.

I retried. Still doesn’t work.

Looks like I’ll be forced into human to human interaction.

“We’re sorry but we can’t cancel your account automatically. Please contact support.”

Yeah...

Last month I stayed a weekend at the Salisbury hotel right across Carnegie Hall for $180 per night.

Nothing fancy, but a surprisingly big room at a prime location.

The author mentions that they fired his management before they fired him.

Thanks for posting this link!

I don’t care at all if a photograph from a photographer whom I’ve never heard of is a composite, but today I learned about the location of the moon North Pole, moon libration, and moon roll, and that’s really cool.

Tangentially related: the singing Commodore 64 floppy drive.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5gnMgmlKi_o

That was a very long time ago.

Microcode can be loaded by the BIOS.

There are only so many ways to accelerate a CPU by speculating.

I’ve written RTL that speculatively fetches data from memory in order to avoid bubbles in a pipeline. Not a CPU, but the concept is exactly the same.

If somebody had assigned me to a CPU project without guidance from a security architect and ask me to speculate reads, I’d probably have done the same as Intel.

The chance that the same guy did both CPUs is small. It’s just that it’s not an unreasonable way of doing thing if you’re not familiar with these kind of attack.

I have no stake in this particular race, but I try to see things from both points of views.

And I know from experience that what looks ridiculous and petty for an outsider is suddenly much less so when it impacts you personally.

Exactly. :-)

And it’s great progress if people at least realize that they are, or would be in the same situation as that Berkeley neighborhood.

In the context of a belittleing “Oh, the horror”, it’s perfectly acceptable to argue that he has he right to not be happy about it.

Yes, I think about it this way as well. In general.

Until it happens to impact me personally.

I’m not proud of it, but I haven’t seen anyone who doesn’t react the same way. Nobody like to give up good things that they already have (especially if they paid $1M+ for it.)

That’s exactly what we did in our neighborhood: change the zoning to disallow structures with more than one story.

And then you spend $1M+ on a nice house in a nice quiet neighborhood, and suddenly you start to care.

It happened to me, and just like it happens to virtually everybody in the same situation.

As an outsider, it’s easy to dismiss this.

But now think if you happen to live on just that one plot of land in the street, right next to the development, that will now be in the shadow of the new building.

Would you be happy about it?

I wouldn’t, and neither would you.

AMD positions the $1000 Vega FE against the $1200 Titan Xp.

The $700 1080 Ti has almost the same performance as the Titan Xp, so why not compare those?

It changes conclusions considerably...

You start by talking about Nvidia’s behavior but nowhere in the article is there any mention of that, so you’re leaving us to guess what you’re talking about.

Very common.

Two times, I accepted the counteroffer and stayed (for a while.) It didn’t have any adverse impact. I’m still at the company of the second counteroffer.

My experience is that big companies are typically quite rational about the whole thing. No hard feelings or anything, just business.

No, they are not.

OoO is much more expensive to implement than simply scheduling a different warp to hide latency.