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As a performance junkie, I’m less concerned about the security risks of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities—after all, there are no known exploits in use today—than I am about a performance hit from the fixes.And from what I’m seeing, my concerns are warranted.My sole experience with a fully updated platform so far is with Microsoft’s original Surface Book. It’s based on an Intel “Skylake” Core i7-6700U and has 16GB of LPDDR3 and a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro NVMe drive. The Surface Book is running the 64-bit Windows 10 Pro Fall Creator’s Update.[ Further reading: How to remove malware from your...

Users have complained that the updates released by Microsoft last week for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities cause Windows to break down on some computers with AMD processors. Several individuals whose computers rely on AMD processors, particularly older Athlon models, say they are unable to start Windows 10 after installing KB4056892, an update released by Microsoft in response to the disclosure of serious flaws affecting Intel, AMD and ARM processors. The security holes have been dubbed Spectre and Meltdown and they allow malicious applications to bypass memory isolation mechanisms and access passwords, photos, documents, emails, and other sensitive information. Both...

Here’s what you need to know about Meltdown and Spectre, the two huge bugs that affect practically every computer and device out there. What are these flaws? Short answer: Bugs at a fundamental level that allow critical information stored deep inside computer systems to be exposed. Security researchers released official documentation — complete with nicknames and logos —  of two major flaws found in nearly all modern central processing units, or CPUs. It’s not a physical problem with the CPUs themselves, or a plain software bug you might find in an application like Word or Chrome. It’s in between, at...

The 4th International Conference on Quantum Technologies held in Moscow last month was supposed to put the spotlight on Google, who were preparing to give a lecture on a 49-qubit quantum computer they have in the works. A morning talk presented by Harvard University’s Mikhail Lukin, however, upstaged that evening’s event with a small announcement of his own – his team of American and Russian researchers had successfully tested a 51-qubit device, setting a landmark in the race for quantum supremacy. Quantum computers are considered to be part of the next generation in revolutionary technology; devices that make use of...

No. This not a joke. It's real. The BBC has apparently decided Africans are simply too stupid to be expected to learn normal English. So, the news will now be delivered to them in Pidgin as if it is a real language. Would they ever deliver the news in Cockney? How about Leprechaun? Or maybe a heavy redneck Southern drawl?

If I say there are only two genders does this fact constitute 'hate speech' nowadays? After all, I am speaking against the authoritarian gender ideology that's being pushed on children right now. My disagreement with the agenda and with the attempts to socially engineer society is a form of political dissent in their eyes.

Ahhh, the resource is back. As popular as the Drudge website is, I never have and still don't like the format. Don't know if this is a resolvable computer problem. I've always had two desktops. One was for recording all TV shows that I would then watch without commercials. It was also the backup to the primary desktop but the machine recording video failed sometime last year. Tried to have it fixed to no avail. Got a replacement (refurbished) and put the primary disk drive in and up it came. This was in the shop where they take care of...

In early December 2016, Adam was doing what he’s always doing, somewhere between hobby and profession: looking for things that are on the internet that shouldn’t be. That week, he came across a server inside New York University’s famed Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing, headed by the brilliant Chudnovsky brothers, David and Gregory. The server appeared to be an internet-connected backup drive. But instead of being filled with family photos and spreadsheets, this drive held confidential information on an advanced code-breaking machine that had never before been described in public. Dozens of documents spanning hundreds of pages detailed the...

I want to clone the master (C:) drive, segment for segment, so that I can install the duplicate drive in another system and it will boot. See some packages but thought I'd pass it by here too. Kinda low level stuff, any suggestions?

IBM Q isn’t vaporware. It’s a project years-in-the-making that could help quantum computation reach its massive potential. The future of quantum computers may arrive sooner than you think. When news arrived of IBM’s move to offer the first commercially available universal quantum computer last week, it was characterized as a “handoff” from IBM Research to IBM Systems. According to the company’s CTO and vice president of quantum computing, technical strategy, and systems, Scott Crowder, that’s not entirely the case. “It’s not quite a ‘handoff,’ it’s really a partnership,” explained Crowder. “This is definitely a transition point from it being pure...

A few choice comments by Dave Cullen. Today's subject: CNBC - "Physicists assure us that we're not living in an alternate reality where Trump is president"http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/22/alternate-realities-and-trump-mandala-effect-and-what-cern-does.html

Has anyone been attacked by Cerber Ransomware? I work at a small non-profit and was attacked last week. Most people who work here are volunteers and since we are a small non-profit, not much money is available to pay the ransom. What to do, what to do....

Zero Wing, an old shooter most famous for its "All your base are belong to us" intro, was presumed (at least among Westerners) to have three to four different endings. Turns out only the English language version has three; the Japanese one has 35, most of which are absolute nonsense. Legends of Localization dug into the game at a reader's request and found that outside the game's more traditional endings there are a ton comprised of gibberish, lame jokes and references to pop culture gags made before most of us were even born. Each one of these secret endings uses...

"Going through old papers my dad gave me, I found his map of the internet as of May 1973. The entire internet."

Many companies and researchers are investigating quantum computing as one of the next major steps in the evolution of computers. The “spooky” effects of quantum physics, it is hoped, will enable the creation of computers that operate on certain tasks at unprecedented levels of performance. Microsoft is one of those companies, and it has been looking at quantum computing for some time now. Today, however, the company is taking the next step of actively investing in the creation of a real, scaleable quantum computer that can be used to tackle real-world problems, as the company outlines on the official Microsoft...

There’s a device out there called USB Kill 2.0 (or USB Killer and other variants) that can fry an electronic device with a USB port. While it looks like an every day USB flash drive, rather than memory, these devices have capacitors that can store up juice being transmitted over the USB bus and then discharge at once. The result is a high-voltage attack on your PC, Mac, smartphone, or other device that can fry the electronics.YouTuber EverythingApplePro posted a demonstration video with one of these devices where he fried a PC and tried to fry an iPhone 7 Plus...

I need help with RealPlayer. I have the last free version that was made available. RealPlayer apparently tries to connect to the Internet whenever the program is opened. This is, I think, causing it to crash whenever I play videos. I was without internet access for a week and the program never stopped working once.

Apple’s Phil Schiller thinks it’s sad that people use 5-year-old computers. Well, Phil, there’s an auto repair shop in Poland that’s going to send you spiraling into a long depression.Why? Because one of the computers they’re using on a day-to-day basis is a Commodore 64, and I don’t mean one of the slick nostalgic remakes. I’m talking about a classically beautiful beige C64 and its whirring, clunking 5.25″ floppy disk drive.It’s been there for more than 25 years. See, not everyone finds the idea of using an old computer sad. Some, like the mechanics at this shop in Gdansk, treat...

*********************clip The tremendous success of Pokemon Go, which is based on augmented reality, shows that the augmented reality/virtual reality era has arrived and is poised to be huge. With research firm Gartner predicting that 1.4 million virtual reality headsets will be shipped this year and 6.3 million will be shipped next year, investors should look to benefit from this trend. In 2020, 45.6 million augmented reality devices will be sold, another research firm IDC predicted.********************************************CLIP*********************************

I was poking around some old data today from some old backups, and I ran across something the old time computer folks will recognize and thought I'd share. Many, many moons ago, before the internet was much more than a few government systems set up to 'talk' to each other, we still had PCs and stuff, believe it or not. Granted, compared to the system you can buy for a few hundred dollars today from just about anywhere on the internet, they weren't much, but they were what we had. There were also things called "magazines" printed on thinly sliced...