I get writing a compiler, but why a text editor?

Personally, though coding certainly helped, I think my high school economics classes really helped dispel a lot of my personal "magical thinking" about social issues. That framework is much more useful than if/then/else for thinking about human endeavors. I think CS is cool, of course, but economics and statistics (correlation versus causation) are the logical/mathematical fields we should be pushing for everyone to know.

For all practical purposes, you are incorrect. Desktops and laptops do not typically support PCI Express hot swapping; this is a feature implemented only on high-end server chipsets.

Additionally, grow up.

I assume you mean PCI Express, since PCI-X is an obsolete standard not used on modern systems, but the answer is the same for PCI, PCI-X, and PCI Express, so no matter.

The TRESOR-HUNT attack works by having the attacker plug a malicious peripheral into the running computer, then having that peripheral use DMA to write malicious code into the computer's RAM which copies the encryption key out of the CPU.

Plugging a PCI card into a computer while it is running is likely to fry the motherboard, or at the very least cause an immediate system crash, so this is not a risk.

I am the author of Loop-Amnesia, a system similar to TRESOR, but more sophisticated in that it supports multiple encrypted volumes. After looking over the article, it does not appear that this is at all similar. It also does not appear to protect against the cold boot attack as claimed.

The authors claim a 2% performance reduction. Such a reduction implies that the instructions are not being decrypted literally on-the-fly; the reduction would be much more severe then. They're using a tactic called a "TLB split", which corrupts the cached page table so that reading memory gets you different results from executing it. A page of executable code is likely decrypted with a key stored in the CPU, put in a different physical page, and then the TLB split is performed so that executes go to the other page while reads still go to the encrypted page.

The cold boot attack dumps physical memory. This tactic corrupts virtual memory to frustrate analysis. The executable code is still stored in RAM somewhere, just not somewhere where you can get to it by reading from a virtual memory address. The cold boot attack would still work fine.

Finally, TRESOR and Loop-Amnesia are not broken. TRESOR-HUNT only works if you enable DMA on your FireWire bus. You shouldn't be doing that anyway.

It's experimental now, but it won't always be. Are you saying that you won't use it because it's experimental now, or you won't ever use it because you think there is something fundamentally wrong with the approach?

Well, LTE roaming could still be useful to you even if there are no roaming agreements. Just get a local SIM.

I get that, but you can do process migration without virtualization: http://criu.org/Main_Page

Is it just because that's experimental still?

Why would you use virtualization in such an environment? Not trying to be argumentative, but it doesn't seem like virtualizing a bunch of database servers would be that big a win. So many people post here about virtualization that I'd like to know what they find so useful about it.

I personally just don't like the concept of adding a layer between the OS and the hardware. The OS is supposed to handle running different programs and providing the environment they need to run. If it's not, fix the OS, don't just add another layer and take the associated performance hit.

That's not a very good argument.

Where do you work where you have an entire board dedicated to code review?! How do you get anything done!?

The only places where that much red tape is justified is with pacemakers, airplanes, manned space flight, and anything with the word "nuclear" in it. And maybe a few other cases, but you get the idea.

Yes, they can. Do some research before posting rather than talking out of your ass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Like I said: one machine out of six, and I'm using a beta distro.

Like you, I typically only reboot when the power goes out.

Umm ... R-Pi 2 is still ARM, right? So, wouldn't the answer be, "not at all, because MS is bailing out of ARM"? They discontinued the ARM-based Surface recently.

Weird. Have you checked what glxinfo says? I think it's possible for OpenGL to be software rendering even if the driver isn't VESA in certain broken setups. Another good step would be to try Knoppix on it, to see if it's a distro-specific issue or not. I used Knoppix recently on some random computers with Intel drivers and desktop effects worked fine.

No, they haven't had a major release recently, but XFCE is definitely still maintained. It's possible to get Compiz to work with XFCE, but, like sibling poster suggests, I would just not use desktop effects if they're not working. I'm sure I could get them working if I really tried, but I'm not using desktop effects on any of my machines. They're a novelty item that wears off quickly.

One machine out of six, man :) And I was using a beta distro, and I think it might be fixed now. I actually think it's one screensaver that causes or caused it, but I don't know which one because xscreensaver uses a random one each time it starts. It could also be a hardware issue with the machine, though I doubt it.

Uh ... my guess would be ElementaryOS somehow didn't auto-detect your graphics card right and you were using X with VESA. That would do that. I just set up a Linux laptop with an Intel graphics card. Worked great; VA-API allows hardware-accelerated 1080i H264 video, with deinterlacing, with no tearing. I'm sure it could handle the 10 or so polygons used for desktop effects without problem.

Dude, Linux runs on the Raspberry Pi. In the last few years I set up Linux on a system with a 700MHz Celeron and 256MB RAM. I've purchased a Linux VM with 128MB of "virtual" RAM. It'll run.

Use XFCE on old hardware. And new hardware; it's the current king of traditional desktop interfaces in the window manager world.

GNOME, KDE, and the others have lost their minds. That doesn't mean you have to drink the kool-aid, too.

Re bugs, my experience has been Linux is pretty bug-free. The only thing I'm running into trouble with is X deciding to segfault every week or so on my work machine. Annoying as fuck, but at least I can restart it without restarting the whole computer. It seems to be fixed in the last update, too, though it hasn't been long enough. And, I'm running Slackware-current, which is technically a beta distro though it's usually pretty stable.