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Should We Panic About the KPTI/KAISER Intel CPU Design Flaw?

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As a followup to yesterday’s post, I’ve been asked: should we panic about the KPTI/KAISER/F*CKWIT Intel CPU design flaw? My answer was: it depends on a lot of unknowns. There are NDAs around a lot of the fixes so it’s hard to know the scope and effect. We also don’t know how much this will affect particular workloads. The folks over at Sophos have a nice writeup today about the actual problem (link below) but in short, the fix will reduce the effectiveness of the CPU’s speculative execution and on-die caches, forcing it to go out to main memory more. Main memory (what we call RAM) is 20x slower than the CPU’s L2 cache (look below for a good link showing …

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What Content Creators and Consumers Should Do Now That Google Reader Is Dead

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So the tech world is freaking out about the announcement that Google Reader will go offline on July 1, 2013. There’s been talk about this for a while now, along with talk that RSS is dead. This feels like the biggest blow to 141+ character social media in history. And why did it happen? I think Dave Winer and Bruce Schneier sum it up: Dave Winer: “Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on.” Bruce Schneier: “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not – you’re the product,” Schneier said [at the RSA Conference]. “Its customers are the advertisers.” Google Reader’s biggest problem was its API. A good API leads to a …

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OpenStack, Lock-In, Support Costs, and Open Source Free Lunches

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Since I posted my missive about OpenStack not being our savior from lock-in or support costs I’ve had a number of comments and discussions about it. The discussions generally start from the point of view that I’m wrong. Let’s take a look at a few of these. Also, it might seem like I’m picking on Randy Bias and Greg Ferro a little here but Randy seems like a good guy, and Greg is a friend, so there’s no animosity. Just point/counterpoint. TL;DR version: OpenStack is cool but isn’t some magic tech that prints money, open source doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay someone to support a service built on it, customized open source and custom solutions using open source don’t …

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Dear Google: I'm Not Changing My SSID

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Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel, Google: I’ve considered your offer to not add my wireless network to your location database in exchange for appending “_nomap” to the SSID. I am rejecting it out of hand and laughing at the idea that this is “greater choice for wireless access point owners.” To start with, I’m not going to reconfigure all the wireless clients I support. I’m sorry that Google is facing increased scrutiny, legislation, and legal action for raping the world’s privacy in order to sell things, but changing an SSID is a big deal for everybody. Doesn’t matter if it’s grandma’s little wireless network or a giant intercontinental wireless hotspot setup, it’s a big pain in the ass to “protect” …

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