> My wife once saw some AT&T contractors digging too close to the wrong fiber line at her facility when she was working for the Navy at a contractor site and unmarked black SUVs were there to take those guys away to God knows where within two minutes.
I used to do design/permitting for fiber networks and going around DOD areas/Fiber was always fun. You wind up having to submit your routes, and get vague feedback as to what you need to move, but never how far away/etc. Usually your best bet is to just go to the other side of the road if possible.
Same for C#. Any narrowing truncation needs to be an explicit cast. Widening is typically allowed implicitly, although in the case of the 'decimal' (128 bit struct representing a 'higher precision' floating point) type you still need an explicit cast from a 'double', since there are cases where that conversion can still change the value or fail (i.e. Infinity/NaN)
How many FTEs should they have dedicated to triaging security complaints from (relatively speaking) randos on the Internet about their customers?
Also, would you take that job?
Some poor support person probably got this and punted because they couldn't pattern match to something in their handbook.
For every thoughtful, detailed security report there are about 500 others that involve voices from appliances, self-xss, csrf on logout and 5G coronavirus. It is extremely difficult for L1 support to make sense of these. Having a support contract or attracting attention on the forums are decent ways to pop out from the background noise.
Not to worry, they'll replace their overworked human staff with sentiment analysis bots which will do an equally uneven job of sorting the wheat from the chaff, with even less hope of appeal.
Malice is the wrong term for it even if we accept the premise. (I do not but that is another can of worms.) Malice implies a desire to hurt people. It would be utilitarian callousness if anything, negligence if there were legal obligations shirked. There is no law against just poor customer service like being a jerk isn't illegal.
> 14nm was the first that everyone was on their own, because IBM failed their research. In the end, Samsung managed to get it done, and GloFo either failed or... didn't try really hard ? This is where I'm gonna speculate a tiny bit and be less charitable, I don't think that GloFo was sufficiently funded in terms of process development, despite their parent owner being able to.
For whatever it's worth, it feels like GloFo has had various process issues for a -long- time. While there were issues with the Bulldozer design itself from a deep pipeline perspective etc, the other factor in it's lukewarm lifetime (especially the first couple gens) was issues with GloFo's processes even back then. I know some of that was that they were trying to gear more towards bulk silicon vs CPUs but I think there were other issues too.
> While there were issues with the Bulldozer design itself from a deep pipeline perspective etc, the other factor in it's lukewarm lifetime (especially the first couple gens) was issues with GloFo's processes even back then.
I think no process could have saved Bulldozer for AMD, it truly was a deeply flawed design IMO, but yep GloFo certainly didn't help. I think my "uncharitable" take was a bit too kind considering.
Specifically in the case of AMD, GloFo relied early on on guaranteed income from AMD through the Wafer Supply Agreement which was stupidly tight (my understanding is that it was part of the deal of selling to Mudabala, though exact details are not public), included a massive volume of must buy from AMD, and didn't include any penalties for GloFo missing deadlines or having their processes underperforming. They definitely coasted on this and I should probably have mentioned this above, since it led to many of their issues going forward till 14nm.
It took them years to manage to loosen the WSA up, the last step was (if I recall correctly ?) loosening the CPU core exclusive that I believe was part of it (they had a carve out for GPUs which were built at TSMC at the time of the sale, though that was supposed to be phased out if my memory is correct, before it was renegociated and AMD moved the low end GPUs there instead, except maybe one gen?).
To their credit, AMD pretty much never bad mouthed GloFo in public. Managing to do the original Ryzen at GloFo and getting as much out of the 14 process that they did is, I think, one of the most underrated engineering tour de force from those who worked on that. While supposedly "copied exact" from Samsung, it wasn't exactly fully there at the time.
I did read that the last renegotiated WSA between AMD and GloFo is supposed to be going on till 2024 (?) currently, so if this goes through, I hope there's a "in case of sale" carve out, if just so anyone can save face a bit ;)
(and that would be a pretty large unburden from AMD in any case, which makes the whole thing even more ironic)
Fun fact: Actual Gambling machines are also audited on the reg.
A college friend works for my state's gaming commission. During a 'drinking talk' about digital signatures, she told me an interesting part of her job; not just going through the slot machines and validating the payout settings, but also checking the EEProms MD5 Hash* to make sure that it was in a list of 'approved' code hashes.
* - This was 15 years ago, I -really- hope they use something better nowadays.
Yeah, I've hear as much before. That's one of the things that makes this worse, these cabinets are (were?) a loophole that allows fleecing people without oversight. It's not like gambling is in your favor when you do it at a casino, but you can usually trust that the state has kept it from being egregiously unfair.
> checking the EEProms MD5 Hash* to make sure that it was in a list of 'approved' code hashes.
> This was 15 years ago, I -really- hope they use something better nowadays.
I dunno. If the hash is generated and displayed by the hardware on a separate LCD display (or a serial you attach) and maybe a bit of non-flashable code, that seems pretty good to me, especially that it's regularly spot checked in person. Something like that is far harder to fake and fool real people with successfully for an extended period, IMO.
"something better" was referring to the MD5 algorithm in particular. It'd be really easy today to make a fair firmware and a rigged firmware with identical MD5 hashes.
Ah, that's true. I was thinking less of the specific hashing used, but MD5 is problematic so that's likely what they meant. I thought they were referring to the process in general.
The DC is a lot more watchable. The biggest benefit is the CG Sequences, which are used to replace some of the 'staring at the viewscreen' type reaction shots.
As for why it wasn't remastered at 4k, let alone 1080p back then, my guess is that the cost of rendering CG above DVD resolutions was a major factor.
Make of that what you will.