static_noise

This basically kills cloud computing for anything sensitive using shared hardware. In the short term this will actually be good for cloud providers because the demand for dedicated instances will shoot up as there is no short-term alternative.

How much in advance do the intel managers have to register a stock sell?

So, as I gather, one of the main culprits is that unwinding of speculatively executed commands is done incompletely. That is something that the people doing the unwinding must have noticed and known. Somewhere the decision must have been made to unwind incompletely for some reasons (performance/power/cost/time).

As for the difference between AMD and intel. (From other posts here, not this one.) The speculative execution can access arbitrary memory locations on intel processors while this is not possible on AMD. This means that on intel processors you can probe any memory location with only limited privileges.

As for the affected AMD and ARM processors I'm none the wiser. How are they affected? Which models are affected? Does it allow some kind of privilege escalation? The next days will surely stay interesting.

Testing is not for finding bugs, testing is for preventing bugs. But otherwise you are right, it's hard to calibrate and further develop the testing procedure if you rarely find bugs. While you might wide awake on one eye you might be blind on seven others. It's usually the things you don't expect that kill you. So, some need to be paranoid, be very paranoid.

It's also about using multithreading to achieve a responsive user interface. Something that is not quite as easy in python with the global interpreter lock which tends to lock up quite some time on seemingly innocent operations.

Why don't we just dump the radioactive material into the ocean to dilute it sufficiently? Apparently that's what solved most of the Fukushima problem.

There was also that incident in Fukushima that turned the political tides against nuclear power.

What is the problem with nuclear energy? It is very safe and very clean and provides near limitless power. Our technology has been much advanced in the last decades. Now we would only need to build next generation (Thorium) reactors. At least that's what the hivemind here told me.

There is always the new hotness. The researchers and research money needs to go somewhere. Until it reaches silicon levels of efficiency and durability it won't become a serious contender. Silicon has reached the point where it is 'good enough' to go further and further. Usually 'good enough' wins versus 'perfect but not quite ready'. We may see with great interest where the perovskites start to level out in efficiency. If they really come close to silicon and stability is solved the market might shift very quickly.

Keep a close eye to the NREL chart.

EDIT: 22.7% for Perovskits vs. 26.6% for Silicon. It's getting hotter as CIGS and CdTe are beaten: https://www.nrel.gov/pv/assets/images/efficiency-chart.png

> many people are getting quite rich

Only if they cash out. You need new investors to be able to cash out. The wise ones smell the crash and are the first ones out. Some make it out just before the crash when the party is still going but the fires are rising. The rest burns. There is no real value in bitcoin (unlike the stock exchange or fiat money where valuable people are trapped in contracts).

I haven't seen many market studies but those that I saw were... not very predictive beyond rolling dice and generic drawing exponential curves.

I think we might have reached the point where push comes to shove and solar is making its breaktrough. You can't really predict when that will happen. The best we can do is "when problem X is solved" or "price point Y is reached" then it will go off and "once it does it will reach XX% market share in a short time." Afterwards it is easy to pinpoint the exact time where it went off. But beforehand. Hard. Probably impossible. Many technologies die without gaining wide adoption.

The question I'm asking is not how fast solar will reach some percentage but where will it level off? 20%, 50%, 80% of total electricity generation? Will it replace fossil fuel or will it add to that? The total primary energy market is huge compared to just electricity. Will solar replace much of the primary energy consumption, too?

This foot of the goverment did their work to stomp freedom. Let the other foot stomp again.

You are right. It sounds like that. I actually wanted to say more:

"Look, fellow Germans. We are called inudstry leader and powerhouse of Europe. We export lots of goods for money they owe us. So much that we can bankrupt other nations. Our politicians say that yes, we are a souvereign nation. At the same time we cannot protect our own borders. We give control to the EU and other nations. We let other countries fly attacks on countries we are not at war with from our own soil. We host weapons that could instantly pulverize our whole country. We are spied to up to the highest levels of government. Even down to the lowest levels we fail. We use software that we don't have the source to. Here is this little project of providing some sanity and some freedom. They use software that is actually open to look at and we are free to develop it to our needs. We can take these matters into our own hands and share our work with the world to create a part of a free and open society. Yet, we have kill this project. Not because it doesn't work. It works, just not as well as the foreign made closed software. It doesn't look as good. It is killed by some politicians who want to, yet again, give away some of our freedom to foreign corporations. They want to run the government like a company and they succeed as such. Being a company, not a government. Let's not be that stupid. Many countries have the same needs for office software. Let's work together on solutions that mutually benefit us. Let's try again. Maybe not in Munich but in the next city. Maybe not replacing everything at once but step by step creating open formats being able to run more and more open software. One day we will look back at this time as the dark ages where the latin bible (proprietary formats) could only be read by the clergy (closed software)."

> it makes German government dependent

The home country of Microsoft still has big and active military bases in Germany and spies even on Germany's highest politicians. If they wanted they could pulverize Germany withhin minutes. You can't honestly say that the German government is really independent under these circumstances.

Key users hated Linux and their know-it-all IT administration prescribing them software that nobody else uses. During the time the IT department failed to provide a solution that was better than the MS offering. The user interface is different and the compatibility lacked badly.

Let's be honest. How do you beat MS Office using Linux solutions? Will your Excel documents with macros still work flawlessly? How would you replace Exchange? Maybe Thunderbird with what calendar solution? There are tons of material and training for everyday MS Office use and most people are already familiar with the details they need. For OpenOffice... not as much... OpenOffice isn't even really developed anymore as people switch to LibreOffice.

People learn about and optimize for those heuristics. Those resumes will on average get better and better over time until half of them are almost perfect. Those people all spent considerable time and energy on optimizing their resume. You get people who look good on paper. They will continue to excel in your company (on paper). If your job is to look good on paper. Yes, go on.

There is supposed to be... evidence?

What aspects of politics?

How do they interact with engineering?

Now that you say it, I believe that there are several (military) aircraft projects that have huge delays exactly due to changing specifications. The people making the contracts did not have a clear vision about what they actually want and there are several parties involved who want different things crammed into one vehicle. As the process moves on, the requirements get adjusted to meet the new political power balance.

The commerical planes, I believe, were designed with a clear goal and are in many ways an incremental improvement on the previous (proven to work well) models.

So in essence you need: A clear vision of something that is acutally achievable. Plus you need to communicate that vision.

The hiring process hires exactly the people that it was designed to. You do not want a team that excels in every aspect. How would you manage such a team? They would go off in directions you cannot control anymore and you have no way of stopping them taking your position.

One essential part is managing complexity.

With a mechanical part it often is obvious to see and easy to understand what this part does. A lot of engineering goes into finding the right materials, the best shape and processing tools. But the finished part is easy to understand.

With software engineering we have abstractions like "sort algorithm" that are easy to understand but many things have so many cross-connections to other parts that in order to understand what is actually going on you have to get really deep into this stuff. Changing a detail in one implementation may lead to unforseen consequences on other, seemingly unrelated, parts. You may rely on undocumented features without even knowing that.

How many cables do you see when you cut a boeing in half? How many of them are essential to operating the plane? How many dangling pointers do you get if you cut your main memory in half? How many of them are of system components?

Whatever technique we have to cut down complexity, hide implementation details behind clear interfaces, separating stuff into easily-to-combine modules makes managing projects easier. I think that the main success factor of python lies in this area.

Then imagine a project that does not have all those modules readily available. That does not have engineers who know it all (and really do, not just pretend) in charge. They rough out a plan and start working on many ends that - when they meet - do not fit together. Add in organizational, personal, psychological problems and the structure wraps in on itself, turns on itself in infighting about how-to-do-stuff, career postions, blame, praise, just surviving or just passively standing by fulfilling orders on paper waiting until everything collapses.

Can you tell us more about what was holding you back and what worked for you?

If they rely on you (you being apple here). It's their fault for relying on undocumented interfaces. Consequently, they should stop using your system but they don't.

When it's documented it cannot be changed as easily, so it's often better to not document everything in detail.

The problem with those cures might be that they modify one measurable imbalance but there may be many more and that imbalance might only be a symptom of something else. Also, people differ in the ways and rates they process chemicals. Using those poorly understood pills is akin to hitting it with a hammer and hoping it starts working again.

What chemical corresponds to the mental picture of a cat?

Sure, they are heavily interrelated. They are vastly different models of the same thing. While we can understand some processes simply by chemistry, we don't get too far with that when trying to understand social behavior. On the other hand psychology can model processes and behaviors on another level. Sometimes they overlap well but far too seldom.

They will probably not converge well in our lifetime because we are really slow in understanding of complex interrelated systems and cannot make all the experiments we need to quickly advance scientifically.

The root cause of depression is chemical not psychological. It's a natural process and everybody gets depressed sometimes. If you get depressed, you can fix it by behaving like a normal person following normal person schedules and doing normal person things like sports and eating good food. Well... unless you can't because you're really sick and not just depressed. Those with CFS have tried following the recipy of getting cured and failed. Time and time again. Sometimes they succeed for no good reason but mostly after some time of being normal it all falls apart again.

I fear that it's becoming a catchall-diagnosis for illnesses the doctors don't understand and can't cure. The current catchall is "it's psychosomatic" or "get over it already you lazy *". Most doctors can only handle diseases that can be cured by pills or cutting up the patient. With CFS we have something that seems to cleverly evade all attempts to cure it or even define what it actually is and how to properly diagnose it. I surely do hope that this changes soon!

While you can misuse a feature, you don't have to. My example is extreme and you probably don't run into something like that often depending on what you do. There could be other solutions. There surely are other solutions that are neither more clear nor better in any way. Sometimes you just got to do what you got to do. What surprised me about Rust is that it has all those cool features but lacks a very basic one that most programming languages have.

It seems like you can... but then this could be done implicitly at no loss and lead to less clutter. It's not hard to understand what default parameters or named parameters do.