Had this happen under a Dilbertian boss.. Other guy was a 'pet' of boss, couldn't make his project work. He told boss it was almost done 1-2 weeks of work left that could be finished off by a less senior coder. The bug he was running into took 3-5 days of run-time / crash to find.
It was multi-threaded/multi-cpu code back in the days BEFORE the Intel Core processor (we used multi-cpu motherboards to allow development of parallelism.
Problem was he had zero experience with parallel or multithreaded design, whereas I did, so I was perceived as the logical choice to find the last few remaining problems..
I didn't realize how much of a poser the other guy was -- and was naive when I agreed to finish it (as though I had a choice).
The project that ended up taking about 2-3 months due to the need to rewrite most of his code He was a new 'senior engineer by pay-grade because he'd been here on an H1B visa and had gotten a permanent residency status. He'd been a "under-the-gun" gung-ho developer while he was under the H1-B, but due this 80-100 hour weeks and desire to have our company sponsor his permanent status (which they did, all at their expense).
After he got it, he hinted he might leave, so to keep him, he was given a senior position in order to quality him for the benefits and salary range he wanted -- as well as not making him finish the code he had no idea how to do.
It took me 3 months to finish his work -- with it being fully tested. My first approach had been to optimize the code so that reproducing the bug could be done in a reasonable time. With over a 10X speed up, the bu could be reproduced in 20-30 minutes, max. It was then traced to his code not releasing locks that he'd acquired -- which seemed to work when the code was very slow.
When my boss wanted to know why I turned 1-2 weeks of work into 3 months, I pointed out the errors. He accused me of shifting blame and finger pointing. I ended up getting the 'review' the other guy should have got next cycle, while he came up smelling like a rose.
That experience and a few others like it really put me off working with other people -- as they, almost universally got stuck in their code with blame shifted to me. In no case was my code at fault -- but that doesn't stop management from blaming you.
Leave -- run, and avoid such situations at all costs. You will never come up with a positive result. The best you can do, usually is to minimize damage with copious amounts of evidence and documentation.
I thought about the idea of taking my SSI payout overseas in some 3rd world country where costs were 1/10th what they are in the US.
I found this is not allowed. If you payed into "your" SS account all your life, and expected to be able to withdraw on it after retirement age -- you could only do so in the US. Apparently, if you move overseas to retire -- you forfeit rights to money you paid into the system (at least while living abroad).
This is NOT about moving overseas and changing citizenship -- but is saying that US citizens can only receive US benefits if they remain in the US where SSI payouts qualify them for living under the US-poverty line.
What's up w/that? Of course many of the same supporters of such inane policies are also against paying benefits to those who immigrate into the US. The SSI rules are setup to prevent payouts to people who might move here to retire -- even if they become citizens, because benefits are based on money you pay in. So how can they justify NOT paying who live outside the US who did work?
If it wasn't the government doing it, it would be called fraud and theft...
But in the US, such things as fraud and theft are merely standard policy and law.
They were bought out by "attachmate" -- a maker of appliance like office support stuff. Suse was a desktop & server company, now they are focusing on a closed & secure boot for supporting user-tamper proof appliances -- not that it won't be usable for laptops and such, but makes user control and configuration much more difficult.
They claim that they are following in the steps of redhat on many of these issues who's also going to have a secureboot offering (booting w/binaries signed by MS-certs.
*shiver*.
Good luck w/that.
I hope you don't expect to update any SW on your system for a while.
opensuse has gone out of their way to make their systems NOT be systemV compat... including moving to a requirement for booting from a ramdisk image (because systemd doesn't handle PATH, it uses fixed paths for it's binaries), integrating the power, device, udev and logging subsystems into systemd, with logging going to a binary MS-like format that is, by default, not saved.
Also put all the var/run files on ram disk, so progs that were used to their own directory for run
it can be real hairy trying to get around all those problems and opensuse's official position is that any other config (including booting directly from your hard disk) is not supported.
When the computer industry was "young", there was little likely hood the NSA had co-opted your developers & SW providers. Now?
With every update you need to wonder if it contains a new backdoor at the request of the NSA, asked via a "security letter", which makes disclosure illegal.
Examples in linux abound as vendors stumble over each other to provide secure-boot distro's, complete with windows-like service managers (systemd), that move config control out of scripts where you can see what they are doing, into binaries, that you have to verify come from a source that is likely too large for most of us to audit -- not to mention the problem looking for a backdoor that might be very well hidden these days... (ex. pre-solved factoring keys for AES encryption), etc... You got the latest certs downloaded from *where-ever* (needed for https and such)? How many aren't already cracked?
I wouldn't have a problem with the NSA's spying, *IF* they didn't share anything not related to national security -- but our entire justice system is predicated on law-enforcement being 'human' and needing warrants to search private stuff -- but now? The NSA doesn't need those, and any info it finds is shared with generic, domestic law enforcement. It's already been seen that the FBI has been getting info dumps from the NSA that it's been using to start determined "take-down" efforts against *persons*. I.e. they just watch the people they want, and find some excuse to 'legally' find out the info, OR, find something else to bust them on.
Of course it's been well documented here on "/.", how both foreign visitors and US citizens lose their constitutional rights when they are at a border -- losing laptops and having decryption keys demanded.
What crap!.
One rectifying solution would be to have any illegally leaked evidence taint prosecution of someone for *any, "hidden", charge*, for some number of years (whatever statute of limitations might be).
By hidden, I mean things they'd have to probe into to find out -- not armed robbery or such...
It sounds problematic, and the details would have to be ironed out, but between that, and the profit motive for "charging" a "rightless" property with "crimes" instead of the person, our legal rights as citizens are falling below western standards and down into the "outcast/illegal/brutal" regimes that we supposedly "invade" for....
Who's gonna invade us to save us from our government? I think the only ones with the ability to save us are "us".
You could always read the "Windows [OS] Internals" books and find that it's trying to keep disk indices up to date, keep time and certificates up to date/current with appropriate servers, looking for updates, optimizing disk access, looking for changes in propagated rights and restrictions (which get "pushed" down from above), so old credentials are timed out and/or updated (effects of group policy, primarily, as group membership doesn't change dynamically)...checking that subscriptions are up-to-date (multiple formats (url based, rss, email, other messaging, etc).
Window's supported API is much larger than what most other OS's provide -- with MS still supporting programs from the XP era 10 years ago as well as modern DirectX11 progs
Linux doesn't really have a 3rd party market API to support. Many WinXP games work on Win7. Show me 1 3D-graphics prog from 2000 that runs on the linux of that day and today with no changes. Doesn't exist.
With a move of data to the cloud, with slower data rates and constant updates, (you do want your phone to beep when you have a new message, right?), devices need to stay on longer to get info. Windows has LONG been about supporting centralized business control over client machines. Vista was about creating a trusted computing core that could be known to be "integrous" so it could play encrypted digital media in a way that would be able to give guarantees to media owners about the media being protected -- something still in infancy in Linux, but with companies like RedHat & SuSE(now an "AttachMate" subsidiary) getting closer to secure boot & running of signed-only SW and central service control with Systemd.
The Linux versions that don't use much power are not providing those newer features and likely aren't systemd based.
What windows does in background is well documented -- and is a considerably longer list than what Linux provides. I can't even install and run a newer generation of "perl" on my linux box without being told it is "unsupported", vs. Windows providing Visual C interfaces from 2000-2013 in side-by-side libs that usually work).
I can't believe a comment based on ignorance got rated so highly for "insightful".....
(None of the above should be thought to indicate a love for MS or Windows... which give me ample reasons to hate them... But the wild-west development and support[sic] existing in Linux is getting worse as time goes on and giving me more reasons to appreciate the MS elephant in the room...)
Why is it that every half wit thinks that bitcoin is all about drug transactions and prostitution?
Because it's the propaganda spread by Federal law enforcement to get people "not to care" about something that is only used for such. That way, they have far more freedom trample on rights w/o the public at large being shocked or as upset...
I'm sure the ""Federated"-LargeBankClub (sometimes called the Federal Reserve Board, or "the Fed", like it has anything to do with the Federal government) is also trying to manipulate public perception. If they lost control of both issuing and constantly devaluing the currency -- and a currency like Bitcoin was perceived as not devaluing, (relative to other currencies), then deliberately devalued currencies (like the dollar -- usually only 2-3%/year, but, since Bush handed over ~ 50% of a years budget to his finance buds, it's been closer to double that (~6%/year).
The standard of living in the US as a whole continues to drop as we are told that a shrinking dollar is really "flat" inflation... yeah, right.
Now try to buy foreign-made products that would normally have gotten cheaper over the past 6-7 years as tech ages and becomes cheaper to produce. Instead of that -- prices have remained flat or gone up in areas where before there were about 15-20% price drops/year (as measured in $$/constant unit, where constant unit= things like CPU seconds (of some fixed generation), or $$/processor, or $$/diskspace unit, or memory... you name it, hasn't dropped nearly as much as before we were Bush-Wacked!
So if you create a website, and like nearly everyone else, you try to get ad-slots (probably using google) filled, to defray the costs or support server upgrades, wouldn't that allow them to call you "commercial"? I.e. if you take ads from them or anyone are you commercial?
Suppose you take "donations" -- and in return give "benefits" (examples include more space, on server, more downloads of "valued material" (whatever it is that people on the site want), or voting rights of what features will be implemented in 'vim'). The way things stand, google already supports such ventures through various google "offerings" (google groups, for example).
Are they going to set a limit of how much you can make per/year to be considered non-commercial? If you are a non-profit organization (or religious or political organization) are you exempt?
What a mushy, arbitrary line -- perfect for selective enforcement and abuse.
China is doing a great job of accumulating it's own massive debt. At some point it will probably turn into a race to see who gets there first although I'd give China the edge because I think their economy is not sustainable. For at least a decade some have suggested that China has been exaggerating it's economic growth and from what I know I tend to believe it. Sure things are great, for a very small subset of the population. Meanwhile the majority is exploited in the name of economic success.
And this is different from the US, how? Top CEO's earn 1000's of times what their exploited workers make:
The US is in the difficult position that they're the world's military.
And how did that come to be? By lying to their citizens, exploiting them and corrupting the government officials that were suppose to be protecting our interests.
China may not have doodoo that does not smell, but that doesn't mean they don't make valid points at times.
[blockquote]Let me repeat this, so it's clear: In the US, commercial TV broadcast is funded by advertising time. (And, in part, by selling rebroadcasting rights to cable channels.) That's why it's been classically "free" off-air to viewers. It's a different model from other countries, where you get taxed for owning a TV. The only exception is the US government sponsored PBS channel, which is still "free" to receive but is funded in part by income tax.[/blockquote]
The above model is seriously messed up in many areas were you can't receive more than 1-2 over-the air channels and need cable just to get the main 3 networks.
What's worse, IF we have cable , rebroadcast rights have already been paid by the cable company. I bitched to the cable company about having to pay extra for digital to get free-off-the-air digital channels. Comcast in my area is a monopoly, and sets their prices as they wish.
The TV broadcasters, sounds like they are simply making a play to demand more money from end-users. It's nothing about their rights being violated. Their rights have been paid for by cable and advertising fees. Now they want more just because I can record something and watch it elsewhere?
It's all about the entire entertainment industries desire to move to paying for each "play" of "their material"....
Notice how distribution is shifting away from hard goods -- and even they often need online connections for stuff to be validated? You can't buy many goods anymore -- just "license them"... which should be crap.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions... The new generation of script kiddies think little of being major pains. They've grown up in a world with no real feedback -- they don't have to see your face, nor be afraid of reprisals...
Gaming DOS's? Witnesses first hand a site down for 2 weeks over some 16'y/o being told to read the rules (which he'd violated in multiple ways) -- not that he was told in anything remotely, what I would call, a polite manner (i.e. the site "asked" for the treatment they got...). It was trivial though for him to just fly off the handle over a slight magnified by adolescent hormones and lack of experience. He was only stopped because the site had international members and one finally drove to the city where the kid lived and talked to his parents...
The BIG problem is that you (original poster) CANNOT stop or deal with the DOS on your end. It doesn't matter what you do with your router -- by the time it hits your router, the connection from you ISP to you has already been saturated. Do the wireshark thing(s) and gather evidence, but enlist your ISP's help -- technically, it is your ISP that is relaying the packets to your computer -- and if the traffic can be characterized, they could put in a filter at their end to disallow incoming traffic that fits some abusive pattern (with the idea that the filter would be a temporary solution)....
Good luck!
This is dangerous. This is very very dangerous. We openly acknowledge that those in charge have been fucking it up royal. But the media circus has convinced everyone that "my guy isn't the problem....
Not entirely -- the problem is that only a minority of people vote. Most of those who do are not the 89% who disapprove.
How do you think CA LOST legalizing same-sex marriage, when other states won? CA was thought to be a bell-weather state, and the mormons spent huge amounts of money to influence the "low-education" conservative voters to vote against it "en masse"... While they bought the election, in CA, it still passed elsewhere and by US-constitutional law, is likely valid in CA now as well.
Why do you think conservatives are against good public schools?
They just did. They closed the US Gvnmt.
Now if only it would stay closed.
I propose we have a constitutional convention now, quick, why the old government is officially shut-down.
[blockquote]GMail scans and extract the meaning of the communication
----
It depends on what algorithm they are using, but if it is a Bayesian type analysis, they aren't extracting meaning, but a mathematical pattern which correlate to certain subjects that trigger ads.
You can see this type of behavior in results and it doesn't show much in the way of intelligence or actually finding "meaning", any more than looking for 2+2 and giving 4.
Pattern recognition is a machine level, non-thinking action -- that can be correlated, statistically (another numeric formula w/probabilities) to give formulaic outputs that can be used to trigger ads.
That isn't the same as deciphering meaning.
Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel
