What does the phrase "blood sport" mean here?
Giving up literal blood sports seems so obvious as to not be worth mentioning, but metaphorical ones so vague that there's probably a better way to phrase it.
I should really read that paper, since I'm sort of confused by the threat model. Arbitrary queries seem like they would defeat the point. So I'm assuming this "using a secure, authenticated channel to communicate out, while still being monitored by the OS" model. That's a high bar for software not designed for SGX.
I presume it's relying on the paging behavior of SGX? (Either page faults or dirty bits).
One of the big selling points of x86 is backwards compatibility. If you have some OS from 1990 you can still run it (without emulation or virtualization, so long as it doesn't depend on clock speed), which is pretty crazy.
Slight aside, there are a lot of reasons that Itanium failed, but certainly one of them was lack of backwards compatibility.
Probably because the perceived skill difference between this and many other modern jobs is small. I can imagine people being incredulous that this is skill rather than something less deserved (luck/situation/...).
The skill difference between your average SWE (or even average college basketball player) and an NBA player is pretty massive (and quite visible). I'd imagine it's much harder to find an someone that says 'yeah that's easy I could do that' about an NBA career...
It's not that 'having' willpower is bad, it's that the concept is misleading. Pretty much any story where someone changes themselves (or tries to) can be coerced into an anecdote about willpower.
The point here is that the thing which decides whether or not someone succeeds at changing themselves is not the having/not having of willpower, it's everything else. And willpower as a concept is just one more distraction.
In particular, players would tend to lose on time more often when taking stimulants. When framed from the perspective of this article, that effect becomes "obvious".
Probably means that upgrades are done in-place. They don't move the VM between machines, but they do something like move it from the old process to and upgraded version (or in some other way upgrade the software underneath).
It's a solid book, although I don't recall the bit that you're citing. I didn't read it that thoroughly. Started it and realized that I'd rather work towards 5.13 than the summit of Everest/Denali/whatever.
Probably not (but who knows, you could probably use this as part of a fuzzer). Instruction emulation is a superset of instruction decoding. You need to decode and then emulate the behavior.
Aside: Instruction emulation is pretty finicky and bug prone. I'm not too familiar with Xen, but KVM has had at least 10 instruction emulation CVEs. There were talks at both KVM Forum and Xen Summit last summer mentioning the sketchiness of instruction emulation.
Not sure what is meant by that commenter, but weight loss and strength gains are common goals which running isn't the most efficient at achieving. Obviously, it still impacts these and, obviously, those aren't goals for everyone.
Running is great at improving cardiovascular output (honestly not sure how it compares to biking and swimming), but that isn't all of fitness.