“The End is Near… Slayer to make its exit with one, final world tour.”
The news is not a surprise to me, but I still feel sad about it.
Half of Slayer left in the band, with the passing of Jeff Hanneman and firing of Dave Lombardo. Even though Kerry King and Tom Araya still reigning on the road with the help of Paul Bostaph and Gary Holt; it doesn’t feel the same.
The last time I saw all four Slayer onstage and backstage was at Long Beach Arena, August 30, 2010. That was the last time I said hi to Jeff Hanneman, who later had to take a leave of absence due to necrotizing fasciitis on his arm. I saw Slayer a few times with Gary Holt standing in for Hanneman. Then comes the firing of Lombardo from the band following the death of Hanneman. At that time I thought that Slayer would have made their exit.
Over the last ten years, I had been hearing from Tom Araya talking about his reluctance on touring. One thing for sure, if Tom Araya decided to quit, that would be the end of Slayer.
There is one wish for me to see Slayer on stage one last time with all living band members, current and former. One can only dream.
Some one at the office reminded me that the candy bucket is almost empty. In the mean time, I’ve been busy following the Meltdown and Spectre news. My colleague and I have been talking about this subject since we got together after work.
If you don’t have the time and patience to read the details, you can get a summary from Ars Technica.
P.S.
For some reasons I thought about James Bond’s SPECTRE when I first read the news.
tl;dr: there is presently an embargoed security bug impacting apparently all contemporary CPU architectures that implement virtual memory, requiring hardware changes to fully resolve. Urgent development of a software mitigation is being done in the open and recently landed in the Linux kernel, and a similar mitigation began appearing in NT kernels in November. In the worst case the software fix causes huge slowdowns in typical workloads. There are hints the attack impacts common virtualization environments including Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine, and additional hints the exact attack may involve a new variant of Rowhammer.