Researcher, Software Developer, Writer

The time-worn phrase “There must be a bug in the compiler” is usually a red flag.  When I hear this I hear “There’s something wrong with my code, and I’m either too lazy or too inexperienced to figure out what it is.”

 

An ex-colleague of mine a few years ago approached every problem by reinstalling his software. His compiler, his IDE, maybe even Windows 7. Needless to say, it hardly ever fixed his bug, but that didn’t seem to curb his enthusiasm.

 

Once he got lucky and a SQL Server reinstall solved all his configuration issues. That was a happy day for him.

 

What reminded me of him today was this article on recent Intel CPU bugs. He’ll love that, I must send it on to him. I can hear him now: “There’s a bug in my CPU. I need a new laptop.”

 

But he’s not the only one affected. The increasingly serious implications of CPU bugs are summed up by this line ‘…“unpredictable system behavior” has moved from being an annoying class of bugs that forces you to restart your computation to an attack vector that lets anyone with an AWS account attack your cloud-hosted services…’

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Picture of Ita Ryan

Ita Ryan

Shopping Cart

Your shopping cart is empty
Visit the shop