12 ms·

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I find it completely fine and reasonable that CPUs are optimized for games and weakly optimized for crypto, because games

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I find it completely fine and reasonable that CPUs are optimized for games and weakly optimized for crypto, because games are what people want. Sometimes I can't help but wonder how the world where there is no need to spend endless billions on "cybersecurity", "infosec" would look like. Perhaps these billions would be used to create more value for the people. I find it insane that so much money and manpower is spent on scrambling the data to "secure" it from vandal-ish script kiddies (sometimes hired by governments), there is definitely something unhealthy about it.

camelNotation 10y ago
People spend a lot of money on physical security as well. They put locks on their homes and cars, install safes in banks, drive money around in armored cars, hire armed guards for events, and pay for a police force in every municipality. The simple fact is that if your money is easy to get, someone will eventually take it without your permission. That is reality, but calling it "unhealthy" implies that the current state of things is somehow wrong. I agree with that premise, but it carries with it a lot of philosophical implications.
- wmf 10y ago
  An interesting study on the growth of "guard labor": http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/15/one-nation-under-guard/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/15/one-nation-u...
- ythl 10y ago
  > That is reality, but calling it "unhealthy" implies that the current state of things is somehow wrong. I don't spend a lot of money on physical security. I leave my car and front door unlocked usually, and don't bother with security systems. If you find yourself having to lock and bolt everything under the sun lest it get damaged/stolen, then yes, I think it is an indication that the current state of things is wrong. There is something wrong with the economy/community/etc. in your area. I realize that "the internet" doesn't really have boundaries like physical communities do, but I too wish for a world where security was not an endless abyss sucking money into it and requiring security updates until the end of time. In other words - a world where you could leave the front door unlocked online without having to worry about malicious actors. It will never happen, of course (at least not until the Second Coming ;)
  - adrusi 10y ago
    You're only able to be lax about physical security because institutions take care of it for you. Your taxes go to police, FBI, military. You keep your money in a bank, and the bank spends money on security. If people stopped keeping their money in banks and started storing it in their homes, the incentive for burglary would go up in your area. I also assume you don't live in a dense city. Even in a utopia you couldn't have perfect safety without investing in security: some people are going to commit crimes and violate property just for fun, and when there's a lot of people in one area, that becomes a concern. There has never in history been a time when people can be secure without investing in security. To claim that investing in security is in indication of something "wrong" is therefore at best a sentiment far ahead of its time.
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      some people are going to commit crimes and violate property Why are we still assuming that as a given, instead of trying to change it at its roots?
      - Prefinem 10y ago
        He/She could believe that people are inherently bad.
      - adrusi 10y ago
        Breaking the rules is fun. The thrill in taking such risks is exhilerating and if you get good at it — if you can repeatedly break the rules and get away with it — you feel powerful. Unless you're suggesting a transhuman approach, there's no way to get around that. You can eliminate any incentives for crime, and eliminate all sources of childhood strife, and still have people who commit crime because it's a great hobby.
        eric_h 10y ago
        It certainly is. Personally, I've grown beyond purely breaking rules for the sake of it, without concern for the repercussions. I still break the rules, all the time, but only when I think the rules are wrong and no true harm will come from my breaking them. It's gotten much less fun in my old age, just seems rather boring and rational.
- seesomesense 10y ago
  "People spend a lot of money on physical security as well." You would have spent more money on personal entertainment than on your personal security. Your TV, tablet and books would have cost you a lot more than your locks. Add in the cost of tickets to concerts and plays and your entertainment expenses dwarf any security expenses that you have had.
- bobwaycott 10y ago
  > That is reality, but calling it "unhealthy" implies that the current state of things is somehow wrong. The current state of things is wrong, and unhealthy. We may one day achieve a healthier reality after recognizing this is so.
- cptskippy 10y ago
  Most digital "security" is theater. Enterprises waste billions on antivirus and vulnerability scanners that are practically worthless.
  - douche 10y ago
    Anti-virus scanners are viruses. There's nothing like having some yahoo decide that Windows Defender isn't good enough, and so you need multiple, heavily intrusive real-time virus scanners running, fighting with each other, constantly thrashing your hard drive, and making a beefy development workstation waddle along - I already have Visual Studio doing that, but at least that's helping me do my job, not obstructing it...
pingec 10y ago
I wonder the same about ads.
genericpseudo 10y ago
"Optimized for games" means "optimized for single-precision linear algebra", more or less.
- tgb 10y ago
  My experience is that double precision is very common on demanding game areas, notably physics. I recall older versions of the ODE physics engine recommending and defaulting to double precision and lots of newbies on the forums being surprised there wasn't much performance difference. That was all some time ago.
  - yoklov 10y ago
    My experience is that it's extremely uncommon, including on physics systems. While I no longer work in games, I did for several years, I probably can count the times that I used double precision on one hand (if you exclude the JavaScript work that plagued the end of my game development career). The reason for this is simple -- it's twice as slow. The vector width is half the size, and so you can do half as many operations at a time.
    - tgb 10y ago
      My experience is just as an amateur, so it's only worth so much. I'm pretty sure though that the difference was much less than a factor of two.
      - loup-vaillant 10y ago
        Probably because double precision floats are just as fast as single precisions if you don't vectorise. I bet you didn't. This would also explain for instance why many programming languages drop single precision floats altogether: they don't plan to vectorize in the first place.
        tgb 10y ago
        Yeah, it looks like ODE doesn't use SIMD or anything, and hence performs poorly compared to more modern engines: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/03/Comparing-ODE-and-Bullet http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/03/Comparing-ODE-and-Bullet
Swizec 10y ago
One day security will be unnecessary. On that day we will wonder how to use the 3 shells.
ex_amazon_sde 10y ago
Most frequently, good security is the absence of vulnerabilities. When vulnerabilities are bugs, security is software quality. A lot of other techniques are just mitigation, and the "endless billions on cybersecurity" is often security theater and optics.
giaour 10y ago
That's a key part of Bernstein's argument. ChaCha20 and Salsa20 take advantage of optimizations made for games.
- brigade 10y ago
  Games use floats and pointers, and I suspect the only floating point bits they use is the 52-bit integer multiply that was added specifically to optimize crypto algorithms. The integer vector extensions they're almost certainly using I'd argue are primarily designed to optimize various codecs not games; unsurprisingly, crypto algorithms tend to have similar CPU loads to compression algorithms.
skybrian 10y ago
Games can usually tolerate some cheating because it's just a game. But they're hardly immune. Spam and abuse make everything suck, definitely including games. Now, put real money on the line and you get the gambling industry which is much more serious about security.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
shadowbanneddd 10y ago
^ This comment brought to you by someone who thinks infosec is an air-quotes joke.
rocqua 10y ago
I didn't read this as lamenting the state of CPU development. Instead, the argument showed how chacha and similar software ciphers benefit more that hardware ciphers (such as aes) from the current state of CPU development.
nxzero 10y ago
Interested in understanding why spending billions to literally "play games" is okay, but it's illogical for governments to secure digital assets and if needed, attack digital assets as needed. Yes, I get it makes sense that there's more of a market for fun stuff than serious stuff, but putting aside security theatre, false flag operations, etc. - the idea that there aren't really threats in the world seems like it needs a bit more explanation.
tptacek 10y ago
Bernstein agrees with you. His point isn't that it's dumb that CPUs are optimized for games. It's that cipher designers should have enough awareness of trends in CPU development to design ciphers that take advantage of the same features that games do. That's what he did with Salsa/ChaCha. His subtext is that over the medium term he believes his ciphers will outperform AES, despite AES having AES-NI hardware support.
- codinghorror 10y ago
  This is so blaringly obvious that it's crazy that more Crypto people didn't realize this sooner.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    It is in retrospect a pretty banal observation. If cipher design is about achieving a certain security level at the lowest cost per byte, it sort of stands to reason that you'd want to design them around those features of a CPU on which the market is going to put the most pressure to improve. In fairness, some of this design philosophy --- which Bernstein has held for a very long time! --- gets a lot clearer with the advent of modern ARX ciphers, which dispense with a lot of black magic in earlier block cipher designs. A really good paper to read here is the original Salsa20 paper, which explains operation-by-operation why Bernstein chose each component of the cipher.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      Many non-obvious observations are banal in retrospect. :)
    - ajuc 10y ago
      If you base your cipher on features that will be cheaper in future, maybe you are also making it easier to brute-force it?
    - gcatlin 10y ago
      https://cr.yp.to/snuffle/spec.pdf https://cr.yp.to/snuffle/spec.pdf https://cr.yp.to/snuffle/design.pdf https://cr.yp.to/snuffle/design.pdf
Ar-Curunir 10y ago
Ehmm. That's how the world has functioned since before humans existed; it's inbuilt into our evolutionary system. Competing for resources is what we have evolved to do, whether this competition is against other humans or other animals is irrelevant. Nature doesn't have any inherent ethical system, so unless you can fault the universe for existing incorrectly, I don't buy your argument.
pavel_lishin 10y ago
> Sometimes I can't help but wonder how the world where there is no need to spend endless billions on "cybersecurity", "infosec" would look like. A goofy example, but I suspect that the aliens in the Independence Day film lived in such a world; their system didn't seem to have too much security - and why would you need any, in a telepathic society?
- deftnerd 10y ago
  Additionally, I believe they functioned as a hive mind. It would be like an individual trying to keep their password secret from another part of their body. That brings up an interesting hypothetical... Is it possible to have a password that you don't even know? Sure biometrics is one method, but are there any password schemes that work on things like word associations or unconscious behaviors found during the typing process, like statistical analysis of the time between key presses? I remember doing an online course and they had me type several paragraphs in order to determine my typing "signature" but it seems doubtful to me that it would be precise enough to be used for authentication.
  - comex 10y ago
    Yep, it's possible, at least to some extent. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515726/a-password-so-secret-you-dont-consciously-know-it/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515726/a-password-so-secr...
  - pimlottc 10y ago
    > Is it possible to have a password that you don't even know? Certainly, that's why the "forget password" link is so common ;)
  - ucho 10y ago
    > It would be like an individual trying to keep their password secret from another part of their body. Trying to recall a password that I commited only to muscle memory is damn near impossible without some kind of keyboard in front of me.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
bobajeff 10y ago
Yeah but games the majority of people want to play don't need special hardware. I mean how much horsepower does Solitaire, Tetris, Minecraft or Angry Birds take?
- mort96 10y ago
  How many people play call of duty? Overwatch? Battlefield? Skyrim? Not the majority of people, but a hell of a lot of people still.
  - bobajeff 10y ago
    But now the question is: is it still reasonable to design all CPUs for that segment of a segment of customers?
    - douche 10y ago
      Yeah, because gamers have the deepest pockets in consumer-grade hardware, that isn't a tiny niche segment. Business users aren't tricking out desktops to the tune of thousands of dollars to push the envelope of performance. Well, aside from the cult of Mac... They spend the same amount of money as gamers, but for bog-standard commodity hardware in a pretty case.
      - bobajeff 10y ago
        How much of a percentage do gaming rigs actually constitute of CPU sales?
        chronial 10y ago
        That is not the correct question. The correct question is: How much of a percentage do gaming rigs actually constitute of high-end CPU sales. Gamers are willing to pay three times the price for hardware just to get a few percent more performance. I would claim that drives innovation.
thinkloop 10y ago
Another possibly unpopular opinion: having some bad people makes us safer on the whole. If the world were perfectly safe, and we didn't have to study and invest in security, redundancy, weapons, emergency response, and so on - we become more vulnerable as a race to potential future badness. Phrased differently, if badness is physically/theoretically possible, we're better off having to practice defending against it, than be caught off guard when it does manifest later on (by natural events, aliens, whatever). Similarly with war, there is likely some optimal level above zero that increases our overall safety as humans by honing our abilities in force.
Terr_ 10y ago
Plus, cryptography's speed/strength levels aren't really the weak-link in security anyway. The real problem is, for lack of a better term, the mentality of individuals and businesses. It doesn't matter how uncrackable and fast your encryption is if nobody uses it because it's fundamentally inconvenient or hard to justify on a balance-sheet.
caf 10y ago
Yes - imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for - and no religion, too. Someone should write a song about it.
edem 10y ago
I feel you. Plus being a security expert means that you are competing in an arms race which you have no chance of winning. It always bothers me that there are a lot of people who want to brake things and I have to think about security concerns just because of them.
hinkley 10y ago
It was a really big deal for a long time that a better 2d graphics card meant your spreadsheet software ran faster. People would justify getting a better machine for playing games by saying that it would make their work more productive too. In more recent times, look at all of the video games that made sure they could run well enough for casual players on a reasonably recent vintage laptop. I know I bought a new laptop at least once specifically so that a video game would be playable. My code compiled a lot faster on it (SSD) but I accept that I really bought it for playing games.
- flashman 10y ago
  A long, long time ago, I read a blog post in which a developer chided people for making expensive-to-develop games that could only run on 5% of PCs, then complaining about low sales. His point was, "Why would you drive up your development costs just to drive down your potential sales?" edit: found it http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/303512/Piracy_PC_Gaming http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/303512/Piracy_PC_Gaming
jacobsenscott 10y ago
We lived in a world where we didn't spend anything on security, and it was awesome. That's the environment that unix, the internet, web browsers, IRC, and all the other really cools stuff we use every day was developed in. Hacking, exploring, and sharing was encouraged, easy, and expected. Now what do we have? Ssl protecting the packets that we broadcast to everyone on ad delivery platforms.
- jodrellblank 10y ago
  We grew our computer systems in a clean room, and inadvertently gave them Bubble-Boy syndrome - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Boy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Boy Now what do we have? Now we're spending more money time and effort, getting poor and limited solutions, trying to patch up email sender verification, shove SELinux around things, wrap every browser request in "are you sure?" modal dialogs and "Request refused for your protection" trip-ups, replace IRC-plain-text-chat with "text-chat in a browser" (Slack, Discord) or walled gardens (iMessage, Google, Skype), fight hard to replace C with languages where buffer-overflows aren't one mistake away and everything isn't de-facto built around rudimentary-types and string-concatenation, and do it all without compromising backwards compatibility or established user experience too hard. 'Awesome'.
Neil44 10y ago
I once heard a priest say: 'Every time I use a key in a lock, I am reminded that we live in a fallen world' It's kind of sad isn't it.

camelNotation 10y ago

People spend a lot of money on physical security as well. They put locks on their homes and cars, install safes in banks, drive money around in armored cars, hire armed guards for events, and pay for a police force in every municipality. The simple fact is that if your money is easy to get, someone will eventually take it without your permission. That is reality, but calling it "unhealthy" implies that the current state of things is somehow wrong. I agree with that premise, but it carries with it a lot of philosophical implications.

wmf 10y ago
An interesting study on the growth of "guard labor": http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/15/one-nation-under-guard/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/15/one-nation-u...
ythl 10y ago
> That is reality, but calling it "unhealthy" implies that the current state of things is somehow wrong. I don't spend a lot of money on physical security. I leave my car and front door unlocked usually, and don't bother with security systems. If you find yourself having to lock and bolt everything under the sun lest it get damaged/stolen, then yes, I think it is an indication that the current state of things is wrong. There is something wrong with the economy/community/etc. in your area. I realize that "the internet" doesn't really have boundaries like physical communities do, but I too wish for a world where security was not an endless abyss sucking money into it and requiring security updates until the end of time. In other words - a world where you could leave the front door unlocked online without having to worry about malicious actors. It will never happen, of course (at least not until the Second Coming ;)
- adrusi 10y ago
  You're only able to be lax about physical security because institutions take care of it for you. Your taxes go to police, FBI, military. You keep your money in a bank, and the bank spends money on security. If people stopped keeping their money in banks and started storing it in their homes, the incentive for burglary would go up in your area. I also assume you don't live in a dense city. Even in a utopia you couldn't have perfect safety without investing in security: some people are going to commit crimes and violate property just for fun, and when there's a lot of people in one area, that becomes a concern. There has never in history been a time when people can be secure without investing in security. To claim that investing in security is in indication of something "wrong" is therefore at best a sentiment far ahead of its time.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    some people are going to commit crimes and violate property Why are we still assuming that as a given, instead of trying to change it at its roots?
    - Prefinem 10y ago
      He/She could believe that people are inherently bad.
    - adrusi 10y ago
      Breaking the rules is fun. The thrill in taking such risks is exhilerating and if you get good at it — if you can repeatedly break the rules and get away with it — you feel powerful. Unless you're suggesting a transhuman approach, there's no way to get around that. You can eliminate any incentives for crime, and eliminate all sources of childhood strife, and still have people who commit crime because it's a great hobby.
      - eric_h 10y ago
        It certainly is. Personally, I've grown beyond purely breaking rules for the sake of it, without concern for the repercussions. I still break the rules, all the time, but only when I think the rules are wrong and no true harm will come from my breaking them. It's gotten much less fun in my old age, just seems rather boring and rational.
seesomesense 10y ago
"People spend a lot of money on physical security as well." You would have spent more money on personal entertainment than on your personal security. Your TV, tablet and books would have cost you a lot more than your locks. Add in the cost of tickets to concerts and plays and your entertainment expenses dwarf any security expenses that you have had.
bobwaycott 10y ago
> That is reality, but calling it "unhealthy" implies that the current state of things is somehow wrong. The current state of things is wrong, and unhealthy. We may one day achieve a healthier reality after recognizing this is so.
cptskippy 10y ago
Most digital "security" is theater. Enterprises waste billions on antivirus and vulnerability scanners that are practically worthless.
- douche 10y ago
  Anti-virus scanners are viruses. There's nothing like having some yahoo decide that Windows Defender isn't good enough, and so you need multiple, heavily intrusive real-time virus scanners running, fighting with each other, constantly thrashing your hard drive, and making a beefy development workstation waddle along - I already have Visual Studio doing that, but at least that's helping me do my job, not obstructing it...

pingec 10y ago

I wonder the same about ads.

genericpseudo 10y ago

"Optimized for games" means "optimized for single-precision linear algebra", more or less.

tgb 10y ago
My experience is that double precision is very common on demanding game areas, notably physics. I recall older versions of the ODE physics engine recommending and defaulting to double precision and lots of newbies on the forums being surprised there wasn't much performance difference. That was all some time ago.
- yoklov 10y ago
  My experience is that it's extremely uncommon, including on physics systems. While I no longer work in games, I did for several years, I probably can count the times that I used double precision on one hand (if you exclude the JavaScript work that plagued the end of my game development career). The reason for this is simple -- it's twice as slow. The vector width is half the size, and so you can do half as many operations at a time.
  - tgb 10y ago
    My experience is just as an amateur, so it's only worth so much. I'm pretty sure though that the difference was much less than a factor of two.
    - loup-vaillant 10y ago
      Probably because double precision floats are just as fast as single precisions if you don't vectorise. I bet you didn't. This would also explain for instance why many programming languages drop single precision floats altogether: they don't plan to vectorize in the first place.
      - tgb 10y ago
        Yeah, it looks like ODE doesn't use SIMD or anything, and hence performs poorly compared to more modern engines: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/03/Comparing-ODE-and-Bullet http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/03/Comparing-ODE-and-Bullet

Swizec 10y ago

One day security will be unnecessary. On that day we will wonder how to use the 3 shells.

ex_amazon_sde 10y ago

Most frequently, good security is the absence of vulnerabilities. When vulnerabilities are bugs, security is software quality. A lot of other techniques are just mitigation, and the "endless billions on cybersecurity" is often security theater and optics.

giaour 10y ago

That's a key part of Bernstein's argument. ChaCha20 and Salsa20 take advantage of optimizations made for games.

brigade 10y ago
Games use floats and pointers, and I suspect the only floating point bits they use is the 52-bit integer multiply that was added specifically to optimize crypto algorithms. The integer vector extensions they're almost certainly using I'd argue are primarily designed to optimize various codecs not games; unsurprisingly, crypto algorithms tend to have similar CPU loads to compression algorithms.

skybrian 10y ago

Games can usually tolerate some cheating because it's just a game. But they're hardly immune. Spam and abuse make everything suck, definitely including games. Now, put real money on the line and you get the gambling industry which is much more serious about security.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

shadowbanneddd 10y ago

^ This comment brought to you by someone who thinks infosec is an air-quotes joke.

rocqua 10y ago

I didn't read this as lamenting the state of CPU development. Instead, the argument showed how chacha and similar software ciphers benefit more that hardware ciphers (such as aes) from the current state of CPU development.

nxzero 10y ago

Interested in understanding why spending billions to literally "play games" is okay, but it's illogical for governments to secure digital assets and if needed, attack digital assets as needed. Yes, I get it makes sense that there's more of a market for fun stuff than serious stuff, but putting aside security theatre, false flag operations, etc. - the idea that there aren't really threats in the world seems like it needs a bit more explanation.

tptacek 10y ago

Bernstein agrees with you. His point isn't that it's dumb that CPUs are optimized for games. It's that cipher designers should have enough awareness of trends in CPU development to design ciphers that take advantage of the same features that games do. That's what he did with Salsa/ChaCha. His subtext is that over the medium term he believes his ciphers will outperform AES, despite AES having AES-NI hardware support.

codinghorror 10y ago
This is so blaringly obvious that it's crazy that more Crypto people didn't realize this sooner.
- tptacek 10y ago
  It is in retrospect a pretty banal observation. If cipher design is about achieving a certain security level at the lowest cost per byte, it sort of stands to reason that you'd want to design them around those features of a CPU on which the market is going to put the most pressure to improve. In fairness, some of this design philosophy --- which Bernstein has held for a very long time! --- gets a lot clearer with the advent of modern ARX ciphers, which dispense with a lot of black magic in earlier block cipher designs. A really good paper to read here is the original Salsa20 paper, which explains operation-by-operation why Bernstein chose each component of the cipher.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    Many non-obvious observations are banal in retrospect. :)
  - ajuc 10y ago
    If you base your cipher on features that will be cheaper in future, maybe you are also making it easier to brute-force it?
  - gcatlin 10y ago
    https://cr.yp.to/snuffle/spec.pdf https://cr.yp.to/snuffle/spec.pdf https://cr.yp.to/snuffle/design.pdf https://cr.yp.to/snuffle/design.pdf

Ar-Curunir 10y ago

Ehmm. That's how the world has functioned since before humans existed; it's inbuilt into our evolutionary system. Competing for resources is what we have evolved to do, whether this competition is against other humans or other animals is irrelevant. Nature doesn't have any inherent ethical system, so unless you can fault the universe for existing incorrectly, I don't buy your argument.

pavel_lishin 10y ago

> Sometimes I can't help but wonder how the world where there is no need to spend endless billions on "cybersecurity", "infosec" would look like. A goofy example, but I suspect that the aliens in the Independence Day film lived in such a world; their system didn't seem to have too much security - and why would you need any, in a telepathic society?

deftnerd 10y ago
Additionally, I believe they functioned as a hive mind. It would be like an individual trying to keep their password secret from another part of their body. That brings up an interesting hypothetical... Is it possible to have a password that you don't even know? Sure biometrics is one method, but are there any password schemes that work on things like word associations or unconscious behaviors found during the typing process, like statistical analysis of the time between key presses? I remember doing an online course and they had me type several paragraphs in order to determine my typing "signature" but it seems doubtful to me that it would be precise enough to be used for authentication.
- comex 10y ago
  Yep, it's possible, at least to some extent. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515726/a-password-so-secret-you-dont-consciously-know-it/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515726/a-password-so-secr...
- pimlottc 10y ago
  > Is it possible to have a password that you don't even know? Certainly, that's why the "forget password" link is so common ;)
- ucho 10y ago
  > It would be like an individual trying to keep their password secret from another part of their body. Trying to recall a password that I commited only to muscle memory is damn near impossible without some kind of keyboard in front of me.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago

bobajeff 10y ago

Yeah but games the majority of people want to play don't need special hardware. I mean how much horsepower does Solitaire, Tetris, Minecraft or Angry Birds take?

mort96 10y ago
How many people play call of duty? Overwatch? Battlefield? Skyrim? Not the majority of people, but a hell of a lot of people still.
- bobajeff 10y ago
  But now the question is: is it still reasonable to design all CPUs for that segment of a segment of customers?
  - douche 10y ago
    Yeah, because gamers have the deepest pockets in consumer-grade hardware, that isn't a tiny niche segment. Business users aren't tricking out desktops to the tune of thousands of dollars to push the envelope of performance. Well, aside from the cult of Mac... They spend the same amount of money as gamers, but for bog-standard commodity hardware in a pretty case.
    - bobajeff 10y ago
      How much of a percentage do gaming rigs actually constitute of CPU sales?
      - chronial 10y ago
        That is not the correct question. The correct question is: How much of a percentage do gaming rigs actually constitute of high-end CPU sales. Gamers are willing to pay three times the price for hardware just to get a few percent more performance. I would claim that drives innovation.

thinkloop 10y ago

Another possibly unpopular opinion: having some bad people makes us safer on the whole. If the world were perfectly safe, and we didn't have to study and invest in security, redundancy, weapons, emergency response, and so on - we become more vulnerable as a race to potential future badness. Phrased differently, if badness is physically/theoretically possible, we're better off having to practice defending against it, than be caught off guard when it does manifest later on (by natural events, aliens, whatever). Similarly with war, there is likely some optimal level above zero that increases our overall safety as humans by honing our abilities in force.

Terr_ 10y ago

Plus, cryptography's speed/strength levels aren't really the weak-link in security anyway. The real problem is, for lack of a better term, the mentality of individuals and businesses. It doesn't matter how uncrackable and fast your encryption is if nobody uses it because it's fundamentally inconvenient or hard to justify on a balance-sheet.

caf 10y ago

Yes - imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for - and no religion, too. Someone should write a song about it.

edem 10y ago

I feel you. Plus being a security expert means that you are competing in an arms race which you have no chance of winning. It always bothers me that there are a lot of people who want to brake things and I have to think about security concerns just because of them.

hinkley 10y ago

It was a really big deal for a long time that a better 2d graphics card meant your spreadsheet software ran faster. People would justify getting a better machine for playing games by saying that it would make their work more productive too. In more recent times, look at all of the video games that made sure they could run well enough for casual players on a reasonably recent vintage laptop. I know I bought a new laptop at least once specifically so that a video game would be playable. My code compiled a lot faster on it (SSD) but I accept that I really bought it for playing games.

flashman 10y ago
A long, long time ago, I read a blog post in which a developer chided people for making expensive-to-develop games that could only run on 5% of PCs, then complaining about low sales. His point was, "Why would you drive up your development costs just to drive down your potential sales?" edit: found it http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/303512/Piracy_PC_Gaming http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/303512/Piracy_PC_Gaming

jacobsenscott 10y ago

We lived in a world where we didn't spend anything on security, and it was awesome. That's the environment that unix, the internet, web browsers, IRC, and all the other really cools stuff we use every day was developed in. Hacking, exploring, and sharing was encouraged, easy, and expected. Now what do we have? Ssl protecting the packets that we broadcast to everyone on ad delivery platforms.

jodrellblank 10y ago
We grew our computer systems in a clean room, and inadvertently gave them Bubble-Boy syndrome - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Boy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Boy Now what do we have? Now we're spending more money time and effort, getting poor and limited solutions, trying to patch up email sender verification, shove SELinux around things, wrap every browser request in "are you sure?" modal dialogs and "Request refused for your protection" trip-ups, replace IRC-plain-text-chat with "text-chat in a browser" (Slack, Discord) or walled gardens (iMessage, Google, Skype), fight hard to replace C with languages where buffer-overflows aren't one mistake away and everything isn't de-facto built around rudimentary-types and string-concatenation, and do it all without compromising backwards compatibility or established user experience too hard. 'Awesome'.

Neil44 10y ago

I once heard a priest say: 'Every time I use a key in a lock, I am reminded that we live in a fallen world' It's kind of sad isn't it.