SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Hoping the Meltdown and Spectre security problems might mean Intel would be buying you a shiny new computer after a chip recall? Sorry, ain't gonna happen.
Intel famously paid hundreds of millions of dollars to recall its Pentium processors after the 1994 discovery of the "FDIV bug" that revealed rare but real calculation errors. Meltdown and Spectre are proving similarly damaging to Intel's brand, sending the company's stock down more than 5 percent.
[...] But Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said the new problems are much more easily fixed -- and indeed are already well on their way to being fixed, at least in the case of Intel-powered PCs and servers. Intel said Thursday that 90 percent of computers released in the last 5 years will have fixes available by the end of next week. "This is very very different from FDIV," Krzanich said, criticizing media coverage of Meltdown and Spectre as overblown. "This is not an issue that is not fixable... we're seeing now the first iterations of patches."
Source: Nope, no Intel chip recall after Spectre and Meltdown, CEO says
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Saturday January 06 2018, @04:18PM (1 child)
If Intel gets away with this, they will probably scale down their QA, since they can rely on their customers to do beta-testing for them, like Google and Microsoft are already doing.
Microsoft is absolutely right to eliminate QA and let their customers do their beta testing. Why should they pay QA people to do this work when customers can do it instead? If the customers didn't like it, they could vote with their feet, but they haven't: they've shown over and over that they will take whatever software Microsoft gives them, no matter how buggy or inconvenient (e.g. forced updates), so exactly what incentive does MS have to make things easier for these customers?
Intel may or may not be able to work this way: it's possible customers could start demanding AMD CPUs in their computers instead. But I kinda doubt it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @12:50AM
What's more, as loud as feminists are about the problems in recent Windows OSes, we never see them use their numbers to move away from Microsoft en masse. Microsoft can be funding sex trafficking, and we still don't see the high priestesses of feminism handing down fatwas against Microsoft.
Newspapers report about things as though nobody besides Microsoft has operating systems and office software available and ready to use (except those Apple bros), further encouraging Microsoft to not give a fuck. Feminists instead lash out at people who already hate Microsoft, further encouraging Microsoft to not give a fuck. Why should Microsoft (and Intel) bother with quality when anybody who could hold them accountable bigtime is too busy tilting at windmills and saying that free software is something only for failed men?
To reiterate your point: entrenched companies like Microsoft and Intel can do whatever the crap they want, because there are no consequences for them.