Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 05-Jan-2018 15:31:54 EST
Bob MottramI quite like the spectre logo, holding a branch presumably representing the speculative pipeline, or maybe it's just a stick to thrash the computer with in the style of Fawlty Towers, but in general I think we need better and scarier logos for security bugs. There are many great cartoonists out there. I think they should get to work on this.
@xj9 Many people already get paid to do nothing. It's known as capital income. Capitalism already contains something resembling basic income, but only for the rich.
@lienrag There are various dubious aspects about military submarines. I've read reports in the past about how bad radiation protection is for submarine mechanics, and how some tried to sue the government. Then there's the mass surveillance aspect of tapping undersea internet cables. Then there's the nuclear war aspect and the renewal of Trident missiles. And then there just the general propping up of institutions which I don't support.
Because of the surveillance aspect I bet that modern military submarines also do a lot of information warfare type stuff, or are integrated into that.
I suspect people trying to find alternate CPU architectures that don't suffer from #Spectre - like bugs have misunderstood how fundamental the problem is.
Your CPU will not go fast without caches. Your CPU will not go fast without speculative execution. Solving the problem will require more silicon, not less.
I don't think the market will accept the performance hit implied by simpler architectures. OS, compiler and VM (including the browser) workarounds are the way this will get mitigated.