Well the FCC cannot create a tax, sorry but that actually takes Congress.

That doesn't mean that AT&T won't hit all their customers with some bogus "net neutrality compliance fee" or other such nonsense.

I suspect that we could persuade those caches to flush to RAM, simply by exhausting the number of possible lines for that address - if the cache is set-associative. Of course modern processors have multiple levels of cache, so that makes it harder.

You can abuse the C pre-processor as well. The early versions of the Bourne Shell are, essentially, written in Bourne Shell through the use of a mess of C macros. When I was working at a Unix vendor I was assigned to track down a bug in the shell and that was just...wrong. Some time around Sys V somebody un-macro'ized the code.

Hi AC,

This is sort of self-contradictory, so I don't really need to respond to it directly. I just want to point one thing out. I can't afford to work for any company as less than a C-level employee. It would be a salary cut from my current business.

Not to mention that I'd not like it.

An AC talking about balls. Pathetic.

Right. I didn't even bother responding to the taunts.

Coward really means coward. I am sorry for the folks who are afraid that their employer will take a dislike of what they post, but for them we have handles.

I can't say I'm happy about what's happened to Debian. Having Ubuntu as a commercial derivative really has been the kiss of death for it, not that there were not other problems. It strikes me that the kernel team has done better for its lack of a constitution and elections, and Linus' ability to tell someone to screw off. I even got to tell him to screw off when he was dumping on 'Tridge over Bitkeeper. Somehow, that stuff works.

IMO, don't create a happy inclusive project team full of respect for each other. Hand-pick the geniuses and let them fight. You get better code in the end.

This actually has something to do with why so many people hate Systemd. It turns out that Systemd is professional-quality work done by competent salaried engineers. Our problem with it is that we're used to beautiful code made by geniuses. Going all of the way back to DMR.

It really does look like Jomo did post this article, and it refers to another article of his.

What isn't to like about Ubuntu is that it's a commercial project with a significant unpaid staff. Once in a while I make a point of telling the unpaid staff that there really are better ways that they could be helping Free Software.

It's just that I object folks who would be good community contributors being lured into being unpaid employees instead.

Say how do feel about idiots working for corporations contractually enmeshed with the US military-industrial-surveillance complex. Why no spittle-laced hate for them?

The GNU Radio project was funded in part by a United States intelligence agency. They paid good money and the result is under GPL. What's not to like?

Keep all of the idiots that want to work for a millionare for nothing. Fire the others.

Anyone with sense has by now joined a non-profit project.

Compare-and-exchange and mfence would be doing cache flush all of the way to RAM and global cache line invalidation, wouldn't they? So, they can potentially be used to hammer too.

Multi-threaded programs really do need those cache flushes to implement their interprocessor communications, don't they? It seems to me that they would be the ones most likely to hit this problem.

I worked for one - never again. I don't particularly appreciate attempts to guilt me into working extra hours "because the company really needs to hit this ship date" when they're weeks behind on payroll. "Hey asshole, I need to eat more than you need to be able to charge a receivable to the current quarter."

It has yet to be established whether hammer techniques can result in a correct data+ECC pattern. If so, it should be possible to permute the memory in a way that defeats this, either on the memory module or the memory controller.

That would make a good research paper for someone.

Yes, you beat me to it. A correctly-configured ECC motherboard with real ECC memory would defeat this. Watch out for fake ECC memory that just simulates the correction bits.

Once memory starts being vulnerable to row interference, having a machine without ECC becomes much more dangerous, regardless of this exploit.

More like train HR to not make unrealistic barriers to getting people interviewed who can do the job

At the last place I worked, we had the most awesome HR manager I've ever seen. She was smart as hell, listened to what the managers were saying, and got the hell out of the way when it came to technical evaluations - she hired people she personally didn't like on the basis of the team's recommendations, and they turned out to be good for the company. She knew enough about what we did to know when a resume was mostly BS, and when she wasn't sure she came to us to ask. She also was truly interested in the employees' needs, and often would go out of her way to do stuff for the employees to make them feel appreciated. *Everyone* loved her, and she had a real gift for interacting with people.

Until...

...the company was bought out and hired a "VP of HR" to be her boss that thought she (the new VP) knew everything there was to know because of all of her certifications, and was more interested in making the C-level execs happy than what was actually best for the company. She dressed up as an ice queen for her first Halloween party at the company, and the universal opinion was, "wow, totally appropriate costume".

The awesome HR manager left about 18 months later (after having been with the company for 8 years), and from what I hear, morale and productivity hasn't ever been lower. The new VP made it quite clear that the employees are looked upon as replaceable cogs, and that they should be happy that management deigns to let them keep their jobs. My former co-workers have lamented the quality of interviews of late, simply because Ms. VP thinks she has all of the answers in regards to hiring, and doesn't pay much attention to what the team thinks now.