Month: January 2018

“Rounding Corrections”, by Sandra Haynes, and “The Floor”, by Melissa Hall

Passing these along from the folks at io9 on planet Gizmodo:

What might life be like in a future where every citizen was guaranteed a universal basic income? Two very good short stories imagine the sociological and cultural changes that might happen, in poignant and chilling ways. One of them was good enough to earn a sizable cash prize and you can read it now.

 

Meltdown and Spectre: What they are, who’s affected, and what’s being done about them

ArsTechnica has a concise, well-written article on two recently-disclosed vulnerabilities found in nearly all Intel processors and some AMD and ARM processors.   Particularly worrisome is the impact these flaws can have on virtualised environments, which includes cloud-based virtual machines and their hypervisors.  Remedying these vulnerabilities will ultimately require replacing the processors.  However, near-term software-only solutions have been developed and are already being deployed.   This article gives a good, moderately technical overview of the what, who, and how of the flaws and the fixes.