OK, apart from this Levy guy being a tier one nut job, and his goal is primarily to get more powers and money after showing repeated signs of incompetence, what kind of attack does he expect?

Maybe something that exposes important information to the public that would totally destroy confidence in a government or institution?

It depends on the kernel settings. I have a Phenom II 1090T (6-core) processor and it takes hours from a make clean to a complete install. Most of that time the processor is fully loaded.
But, I'm building a BIG kernel, like slackwares Huge.s. For a small embedded device it would take much less time.
As for what kernel config the stat was garnered from, I don't know.
I think I'll try to find it and then see how long it takes on my system. The I can post back my results.

I'm not a real gamer, so I've got a "brand" _office_ PC, just a bit enhanced with a simple GPU, more disk space, and additional RAM. But this is more than sufficient for my occasional gaming needs.

My daughter wanted to have a "Real Gaming Laptop" for last Christmas. I told her she could purchase such a rig from her own money, I would subsidize this project with the money I would spend on a normal (good but non-gaming) laptop. She looked up the prices for her dream rig, and now has a good, non-gaming laptop sponsored by mum and dad ;-)

Yep. Someone up high here had also read about SCRUM and asked why we don't use it. I told him that SCRUM makes no sense if you have only one developer (me) in that area of expertise. He asked why I could not team up for this with my co-workers from the PC software development department. I am not sure if I really convinced him that programming FPGAs in VHDL is a tad different from using C# on a windows PC.

We are in a small niche market. There may be a dozen people in this world with my specialized skill set, and half of them speak Chinese. New owner threw out my last co-worker for financial reasons, so I'm all alone in my department. If I go, the company is history. Same if I'm run over by a bus. I'm telling them for years now that they need to hire someone, even fresh from university, not only to bring fresh skills, but for me to transfer my knowledge and experience, and to have a backup just in case. For the last project, they hired a freelance to help me. I taught him everything necessary to help me with the job, he managed so-so, as it was a leaning experience for him, but he learned a lot, and would do better on the next project. But he is a freelancer and not an employee, and he is even older than me.

Yep. Web-everything is not a solution. My "Central Unit" can control up to 16k clients, has two different filesystems, a RAM-based database with TCP/IP interface, audio-streaming over TCP/IP and a text-based interface over Serial and TCP/IP. All this on a 60MHz ARM chip. The unit can be controlled by a small display with about 50 settings screens, or by an external application that controls the unit via the database interface.

And then product management came and said we need a Web interface to replace the need for an external control application. On this box. The RAM and the program flash is about 90% full...

Yep. I'm working in an environment where OO is either completely unsupported (VHDL), or useless (small embedded systems). If your processor only has 2K (yes, K!) of RAM, and everything is so tight that the bytes have to stand up in memory as there is no place for them to sit down, OO is a no-go.

For a big company with thousands of employees, this is fine. For a small company with 20 or 50 employees, this is a royal pain. You need one or two people permanently assigned to deal with ISO9000, and you need to have most of the software used in the company extended to support it. And sadly, quite a number of customers are so dumb that they demand this, just because someone told them to go for it.

And having an ISO9000 certificate does not guarantee a good, safe, or high quality product. Under ISO9000 you can produce life-jackets made from concrete. The ISO9000 certificate only guarantees that the quality of the concrete is sufficiently controlled and managed.

Or anywhere else where it does not belong.

We have a product where usually 50 units are held in a combined charging and transport box, The product itself was redesigned with a new case, so we needed a new charging and transport box for. This was outsourced to China. We gave them every information they needed, including data for the old units transport/charging box (so they only had to copy the charging part). What we got in the end was two boxes: A charging box that could not be used for transport (if the units were in the box, the lid would not close), and a transport box (without charging facility).

Sorry, it may sound a bit harsh, but this *is* a stupid idea. Different platforms have different abilities and are built and designed for different purposes.

To accomplish a "works everywhere" approach, every platform would have to have all abilities. To use the phone app on your desktop PC, it would need the proper hardware. How much sense would that make? Or a GPS in the same desktop system? Likewise, how do you put a quad-output video card into a mobile phone?

This is a pipe dream of people who only work with software, and totally forget that it needs hardware to run on.

It is still a criminal offense when seen from other countries. Basically, it shows again that an American-based company is not trustworthy.for storing any data at all.

A ship for 100 people is to small, Congress has 435 members. And you don't want to send them to Mars, anyway.

As part of a programming assignment I wrote two programs for finding primes.

The first one using a moving window technique. Lets say my window size is 100, so I fill in the numbers 1 to 100 into the window, do my sieve job on this, get the primes I got so far and put them in a list, and fill the window with the numbers 101 to 200, run them through the primes I got and then through whatever remains, extract the primes and add them to the list, etc...

The second was an instant filter system, i.e. I've got a list of tuples, each list element has a prime and a multiple of it, and my sieve table size is one, i.e. a counter. Lets say my list is A=(2,2) and B=(3,3), my counter is 4. While A2 is less than counter do A2 =A2+A1. A2 is now equal to A2, so counter is not prime. Next counter is 5, While A2 is smaller than counter do A2 = A2+A1, A2 is now bigger than counter, so it passes test A, while B2 is smaller than counter do B2=B2+B1, B2 is now bigger than counter, so it passes test B. End of prime list reached, so counter is prime. Create new tuple C(5,5) and add it to the list. Big advantage: No multiplications involved, the process of doing the while loop can be improved by using bit-shifted versions of the prime, so I only have additions, comparisons and bit shifts to deal with, which is easy and fast to implement with long integer implementations. And I need only to store the primes it found and their multiples, and the memory usage is very local and cache friendly.

Just out of curiosity I'd like to see their algorithm. Because some algorithms from math/CS look good on paper and are proven to run comparatively fast on a ideal Turing machine, but produce laughable results in real-life tests...