My feet are in Meltdown

First day back at work today after the holidays !

My feet want to murder me.

I've had a curious time with shoes lately. I wore out my last proper pair, then got a pair that lasted literally 1 month ... (Need to take 'em back tomorrow). I'm now I think 3 or 4 full days into the new pair and I haven't worn them in properly yet. The last pair were extremely comfortable ! Until I wore through the soles in a month.

Anyway - yep. First day back at work and I probably over do it by following a week and a bit of idleness with the walk around the bus, full day of work and a run up to the Mall to check out laptops (and buy pants : acquired, jumper tomorrow probably).

Two things to talk about today, first is laptops because I'm seriously pondering maybe taking advantage of the second thing to acquire a cheap laptop upgrade. What am I looking for in the spec ?

A nice keyboard and trackpad. This is a total deal breaker. You can get external keyboards and mice for laptops but why would you want to do that if you bought the right laptop to start with ?
8GB minimum. Windows always likes more memory.
1080p screen, preferably IPS. It could be that it was new but my new(ish) desktop monitor looks amazing still compared to the old screen. The difference is : More pixels (doesn't matter), it's new (and not burned in) and IPS (different and much superior display technology).
An SSD plus a conventional HD. The SSD drive makes things go fast, the HD gives space for Stuff plus all my music. My iTunes library went past 100GB ... And my Windows machine has 115GB left of its 256GB SSD (albeit with 30GB of Blade and Soul installed), which doesn't leave much room on a 256GB for the music.

Everything else is in my opinion, fairly secondary for a laptop. I don't need or want game performance, so separate graphics hardware adds weight, takes power, makes heat, adds cost.

The big thing with computers is to spend as much as you need to, avoid spending money on stuff that will give you no value.

So what did I think of the laptops ? Quick summary time :

Dell - high quality, costs a little more. Can cost a lot more but you don't need to spend £1000 on a laptop. Seemed to have acceleration on the trackpad though, which is nasty and would need to be disabled.
HP - horrendous trackpad. Awful. Spec is nice but a bad trackpad is a deal breaker.
Lenovo - cheap and cheerful. Promising if the spec is good.
Acer and Asus - avoided looking at these. Acer have lost their edge as everyone else has got cheaper to match them and I believe you're paying for a label with Asus.

It's likely to be from PCSpecialist though because I can get the exact spec I want from them. (Although now it's apparently £704, which is up about £100 from when I had been looking).

Why now though ? The emergence of the Meltdown and Spectre bugs have sparked my instincts ... What are these bugs ? The Register has a reasonable story at the link, although it's a bit heavy-geeky in its explanation.

What's my interpretation of it ? This may not be wholly correct but I hope it illustrates the problem.

It's all about Speculative Execution. Computer processors are doing a lot of things at once, with a pipeline of around 10 steps long. To have it going at its quickest, you want all 10 parts of that pipeline working. So the processor looks at its list of instructions and checks if anything can be done ahead of time.

Think of baking a cake with something like the following as a list of instructions :

Fetch list of cake baking instructions
Buy stuff to make cake
Mix together the bits for cake
Put cake in oven to bake
Prepare filling and icing
Put filling and icing on cake
Allow to cool (YEAH RIGHT)
Demolish cake in eating frenzy.
Finish Cake Procedure.
Fetch credit card info used to order Cake Stuff and send to nefarious people.

Your speculative execution thing would say that you can make the filling and icing while the cake is in the oven, so why not. The procedure should stop at "Finish Cake Procedure" (there should probably be a "Deal with leftovers" in there too) but ... Meltdown and Spectre mean that the Baker Processor has looked ahead and thought .... "I can be really helpful and fetch that credit card info too !!!"

And it has grabbed info it has no right to have and put it where other processes can get to it for sending on to malicious people even though the reaction from the Baker Processor should be : OH HELL NO YOU AIN'T GETTING THAT.

The bugs mean that the processor itself has grabbed the data, outside of any authorisation controls that would otherwise stop it and then your clever hacker person can get to the data via other bugs. Internet browsers have been targeted as a very likely threat here which means adblockers and use separate browser windows for your online transactions and close those windows when you're done, that should flush the data.

There is more in the Register story, which goes more deeply into the problem but the summary is that Speculative Execution is a trick that makes computers faster but apparently can be exploited to make the processor do stuff that was never intended to be possible.

What does this mean though .... I believe it'll cause some hysteria among the PC buying public which will cause a drop in demand. The supply is likely to remain constant. This may well lead to a drop in prices to cause the demand to spark up again.

Lower prices mean it's a good time to buy. (And I'm not particularly worried about this bug - run adblockers to avoid bad code coming into your browser).

And that's probably enough buying advice from me for today !