He should hug off and mind his own business
In an age when the F word is generally permitted on radio, what is the problem with it being in Linux source comments? Are we protecting all the kiddy coders or are the coders usually adults?
Linus Torvalds has stuck to his “no swearing” resolution with his regular Sunday night Linux kernel release candidate announcement. Probably the most important aspect of the weekend's release candidate is that it, in a way, improves the performance of STIBP, which is a mitigation that stops malware exploiting a Spectre security …
How's this for an idea: All those of us who are sick of snowflakes needing a safe space from being micro-aggressed by sporadic use of bad language should adopt an otherwise good, acceptable word to colloquially mean the same thing, until it sticks. When they start censoring that, we'll go and ruin another word the same way.
I suggest we start with a word for a concept the snowflakes are particularly fond of. Any suggestions?
" All those of us who are sick of snowflakes needing a safe space from being micro-aggressed by sporadic use of bad language should adopt an otherwise good, acceptable word to colloquially mean the same thing, until it sticks"
I nominate the OTHER 'F' word: FEEL
(I have been regularly playing THAT one for laughs, for YEARS)
Perhaps he meant "fug". I'd go for Flip, it worked well in the censored version of the original Repo Man. Or Frak.
Or, perhaps, not be a dick, and leave things as they are.
We're getting worse than the Victorians lobbing the genitals off statues. I always wondered where they stored them afterwards. In a big hanger like the one from Raiders Of The Lost Ark, but crammed full of cocks and balls cut off statues...
It's called creating a precedent.
Allow some shit move like this to pass 'oh, but it's so innocuous, such a minor change' and you'll find it harder to stop the next 'innocuous' change, once they've got a couple of them under their belt, the 'not quite innocuous' changes start piling up and you'll find it hard to block them.
(Not that I've seen this sort of scenario being played out by a clique within an organisation before, you understand [Greenock - early 70's, Dundee - early 80's, London - mid-90's])
I've said this before here and in other places, I'm getting increasingly twitchy about the way Linux is heading, systemd and the attendant nonsense surrounding it I can avoid, ignore and work around, but finding out that a Kernel developer seriously submitted this as a patch is another indicator to me that there's something foul afoot there, considering this follows the recent drama surrounding Linus, you'd almost swear that it was a deliberately provocative weasel move..
There are times that the use of the word "fuck" is the only appropriate word. Times like ...
"Go the FUCK away!"
Where it is the only way to get across your exact meaning.
Like in the work place where saying ...
"Go away, or I'm going to beat you stupid ass!"
Just might get you fired.
"Go the FUCK away!"
So wordy.
A cold, hard stare and a single "Leave" in a dark tone can express lots. If that doesn't work, a just-loud-enough-to-be-heard "fuck off" expresses things plenty enough I find. Anyone who does not get that (regardless of their grasp of the English language) is probably already brain dead.
So if I understand this correctly, Intel is knowingly leaving an exploit available to advanced malware just to hide the fact that their broken processors would have terrible performance operating with the same security level as competitors. One could say noncompetitive performance, even.
So, does Intel have legal liability for malware using this hole now? Or do they have liability for the inflated benchmarks they are putting out on vulnerable systems?
Seriously, what gives?
Intel is not hiding it, note all the publicity earlier on in the year. Unfortunately the bug is in code that is so fundamental to how modern day multi threaded processors work that to fully fix it will require a fundamental redesign of the chips. Current chips[1] IIRC can't be patched without causing a slowdown.
The amount of slowdown depends on what each program is actually doing and can't be guessed.
AMD and other chip manufacturers have the same problem.
As to legal liability I doubt it, we wos warned.
[1] Please correct this if I'm wrong
Don't forget that a big part of the slowdown with the patch is down to hyperthreading being a terrible idea in general. Disable hyperthreading (which doesn't help much performance much if any for most workloads) and lose most of the performance hit associated with the mitigation patch.
which doesn't help much performance much if any for most workloads
This is very application dependent. If you're getting L3 cache misses then the HyperThreading helps, it's just doing a context switch in HW. If your application is clever enough not to spend most of its time waiting to get data from memory then HW multithreading won't work. I seem to remember that for the TPC-C benchmark it made about a 50% difference when you enabled the HyperThreading, but then TPC-C is a bloody stupid app. Mind the biggest problem with had with TPC-C and the multithreading was that for the CPU involved a certain DB vendor doubled the license fee, so you got a 50% speed up for a 100% cost up.
It's not just Intel AFAIK.
This whole sorry saga was kinda inevitable as soon as CPUs started having microcode; someone was sooner or later going to end up with a micro architecture that didn't really implement the advertised machine architecture.
OK, it was a way of getting better performance from existing software on new CPU designs, but we're paying a price for that now. Perhaps if microcode wasn't so opaque, perhaps if we didn't use it at all, problems like this would be more readily apparent before they got burnt into decades worth of CPUs.
as soon as CPUs started having microcode
Microcode (or microprogramming as he called it) was invented by Maurice Wilkes in 1951 and pretty much every family of computers that implements the same instruction set on a range of different hardware has used it since in some form or another.
{...] why aren't we blaming the parents?
An interesting new series on the BBC about experiments to judge babies' development approaching the age of two. "Babies: their wonderful world".
The first episode looked at things like playmate selection bias, self-control, and whether the early use of touch screens was detrimental or beneficial.
The "see again" iplayer will have geographic limitations.
" ... why aren't we blaming the parents? ... "I do. But have found that the parents are "f'ing p'ssies" too.
Well of course. I mean that's pretty obvious! If the father wasn't "f'ing p'ssies" then how would the child have been conceived?
Whatever do they teach kids in the UK schools these days....
</jk>
I distinctly remember an earlier attempt to make the kernel comments business-appropriate, some 18-20 years ago maybe, but I can't be... eh... hugged... to look up a reference.
What the hug, I just grepped the kernel code. That earlier attempt was probably just a proposal.
After some debate, Sakkinen acknowledged that, as a Finn
Most of that swearing including that particular comment in the Sun source is by DaveM and it has a twist added to it. No matter how much you scrub the data, the METADATA in the kernel mailing list headers, git history, etc remains. If you can read/speak any of the major slavic languages (*) the email addresses, hosts, etc from which the code originated make for a very interesting reading. But he probably can't grok that. Bless him.
It is an interesting question: "Why DaveM and several other major Linux developers have the habit of naming some of their machines using words which are not used in polite company in Eastern Europe?" No idea what's the answer. Something which El Reg can ask one day perhaps.
All Slavic except Bulgarian and Macedonian use the same C word and that word is present quite prominently on the metadata side of the Linux kernel history.
Of cleansing the comments of filthy verbiage. I would posit that the replacement ought be the same number of symbols though.
As for "We're getting worse than the Victorians lobbing the genitals off statues"-- where did they lob them to? Maybe they are hidden in one of the cabinets in the fascinating Naples' Gabenetto Segreto.
As for oddities, there is the monumental metal statue with (human) parts detachable (horse parts seemingly aren't an issue), for when the Pope floated by on his boat. You know, unscrew the parts, and later screwing them back in, well used in the meantime.