Re: Master changed, really?
The term "trunk" comes from a tree analogy - you have a central trunk with branches diverging off it. Of course, the analogy breaks down when you try and explain merging branches back into the trunk...
282 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2011
It has always puzzled me why US and UK elections are held on work days. Here in Oz, elections are always on a Saturday. ( Yes, voting is mandatory here, but you could still have the election on a weekend with voluntary voting).
Of course, this system delivered us Scotty From Marketing, so is far from perfect, but still.
Had something similar. Small company, "server room" was a couple of racks in a small room with no emergency light. Power cut happened, cue frantic beeping from our Potato Clock, and a mad scramble (using phones as torches) to try and plug a monitor in to perform orderly shutdowns on the servers before UPS drained completely.
Note: most of the recent security issues recently (Spectre, et al) are down to _speculative execution_, which is different to out-of-order execution. In OoO, the processor is free to re-order instructions which do not share a data dependency. If it needs to compute x = a + b and y = c + d, then it can do either one first. So if c and d are in registers, say, while b needs to wait for the result of a previous computation, the cpu can compute y first and x later, even if the code provided by the compiler has x first, then y.
For speculative execution, the cpu will execute instructions which may or may not actually be required. If the code it's running contains something like 'q = p * r; if ( q < 17 ){ w = *k + 2}' then speculative execution allows the cpu to guess that q will be less than 17 and push on with computing w. It might do this if the calculation of 'q' is taking a long time - perhaps 'r' is the result of a previous computation, or 'p' needs to be loaded from RAM (rather than cache). If, when 'q' is known, it turns out to be 19, then the computation results for w are thrown away. Part of the whole meltdown problem was that the memory access *k by the speculative execution logic was done without appropriate permissions checks, and even though the result of the access was not visible to the program, side-channels (like timing or cache population) _were_ visible and able to be exploited.
At least, that's how I remember it, but it's been years since I've studied computer architecture stuff.
Sounds like a simple fix - we just need to improve the people using it, and the phone will work perfectly!
Either that, or this a cunning way for Samsung to create a market for an add-on device which does the folding (perfectly) for you.
(Perhaps I should patent that idea before Apple gets around to it - the iFolder).