Then you really did work for an idiot. For that I'm sorry. Just remember, these kind of bosses are pretty easy to deal with. If you don't want to quit, just document everything and pull out the CYA trail when they throw you under the buss. (Yea, I've had to do that too.. )
I am tired of reading about how the Mars rovers miraculously lived so long.
It should be obvious to even the dumbest among us that the short "expected lifespan" of the rovers was just some contractual trigger for some bonus for some contractor and was in no way a design goal.
You are right, it was a design criteria, a requirement etc. 90 days was the warranty period, the contracted minimum lifespan required for the rovers and the absolute minimum design criteria for the entire system. It simply MUST work 100% for 90 days. I'm sure the "goal" was much longer. I'm just guessing, but had either of the rovers failed within the 90 days a sizable final payment would not have been made.
But, I'm not so tired of hearing that the rovers both have lasted more than the warranty. It is a credit to the engineers who designed, built and operate these systems that they actually lasted (and continue to last) for so much longer than the minimums. These little marvels serve as an example of how a successful mission is executed and what JPL and NASA can do, even on short budgets and timelines. Although the science being done by the remaining one is limited, I don't get tired of seeing new stories about them and their remarkable story and endurance.
...and doesn't know the first thing about the job the people under him do.
Actually this is NOT a reason to trash your boss. I've had a number of managers who didn't have a clue how to do my job who where extremely effective and great to work for. We had a mutual understanding and respect for each one's roll. With one, he didn't have a clue how to design a network and stand up the equipment because it was MY job to do that for him. He just pointed me to the project and we would discuss the details he needed to know (cost, schedule etc) and I did what was required. He knew I was going to tell him what I really thought about the cost and schedule and trusted me to do the work within the cost and schedule I gave him. I knew he would insulate me from the management garbage and wasn't going to throw me to the wolves if there was some unexpected slip or overrun. We did status reports on large projects and he would stop by regularly to talk about things, but he NEVER wanted to tell me how to do this or that, and if we where behind schedule or over cost I WAS TELLING HIM about it. We trusted each other to do their jobs and it worked great.
So, I actually think that the most effective bosses don't have to know all the ins and outs of what his employees do. But what they DO need is the ability to surround themselves with people who DO KNOW what needs to be done and empowering them to do their jobs. Bosses that know all the details are sometimes way to eager to try and micromanage their underlings and it takes a rare talent to let your employees do the work for you. I'll ALWAYS take a manager with the talent to delegate over one with perfect domain knowledge.
Come on, be honest. But before you open your mouth, THINK carefully.
I have a policy of ALWAYS assuming that any problem somebody brings me is MINE to fix. I most likely caused it and it's my responsibility to fix it. Problems are not always my fault in the end, but until I've proven to myself and more importantly to the person who brought the problem to my attention that it's NOT my fault I'm taking personal responsibility to see it gets fixed.
With that in mind, before you go off and start calling somebody you don't know well an idiot to his face you better be darn sure. And before you go tell anybody else about your suspicions they are an idiot you better be doubly darn sure you can back up the claim with absolute, you'd bet the farm on it, proof. Otherwise, you are going to be shot full of holes because YOU are the idiot.
Given that you obviously are NOT the subject matter expert (or why would you need one given to you) I would say that what we most likely have is a personality clash between you and the expert. There is a non zero chance this is not true, but unless you are ready to make yourself into the subject matter expert and PROVE it, you really have two choices...
First choice: You can suck it up, stop complaining and start working with the expert regardless of how you feel about them. You don't have to like them, but you need to respect them and stay professional about any disagreements. This will involve trying to figure out how you can best approach this person and doing things you would consider wasting time by taking their advice. Get their advice in hard copy, just to CYA in the future, but do your best to play in the sandbox with them.
Second choice: You can go in, guns blazing and shoot the idiot full of holes, preferably in public in front of management. If you are wrong, you will go down in a blaze of glory, fully burning the bridge behind your hasty departure. If you are right, and manage to prove it without stepping on a land mine in the process, nobody will ever want to work with you and the disgraced "expert" is still likely to be there, possibly on your team, which puts you back to your first choice where you will eventually have to work with them. When they start like this, such relationships don't go well and your life will be a mess.
So, I suggest you suck it up and do what it takes to work with the idiot and if you really just cannot make it work, look for another job.
So, let's get this straight. This is the FIRST STEP???? You guys have been at this for decades and have spend millions if not billions in the quest for "clean energy" and this "first step" is all we have to show for it? Besides cranking up a bunch of lasers all at once every now and again, what, exactly have you been doing?
I seem to recall a story about fusion just a few months ago that said "We are only a decade or two away from FREE energy!" Fusion, it's Coming!!! etc. Pardon my skeptic bent, but I think we should skip to the chase on what's really going on and get an answer to the REAL question.
How much money do you guys need now?
I'm all for research, but lets not fool ourselves. We are not even close on this one. We might be barking up the wrong tree with this and I think we should double down on our investment and start another group to try some different ideas if there are any. So perhaps we should half the last contribution and solicit some other bright folks to do some research with the other half.
I suppose they would sell you that if you insisted. But I ask, why would you want to buy SPARC hardware then run Linux on it? Oracle sells X86 iron for their Linux customers. I'm just guessing, but I'll bet there is more profit margin in X86 systems than SPARC hardware (even if there is a significant premium for SPARC iron). Oracle is obviously still selling SPARC stuff, but I'm guessing they don't see enough profit to pay for the NRE to keep advancing the SPARC platform performance and it's pretty much a dead horse. Same for Solaris.
But also remember that Oracle can change anything it likes in Linux. The source is available. As long as it abides by the license terms Oracle can do what it wants to Linux and deliver it to their customers. Might not be wise to cut across the grain of a open source project, but you can if you want.
The real problem for both SPARC and Solaris is that they are not selling in enough numbers to pay for the engineering costs to keep them viable in the market. They are dying. I know there are legacy customers with old applications that can only go Sparc Solaris and will have to pay Oracle what ever it costs for now, but eventually it's going to be less expensive to just move to Linux. After all, for most applications running on Sparc hardware, the porting to Linux is more about the infrastructure side (starting/stopping and monitoring the application) than the actual application, which is usually just a porting exercise to go from Sun's compilers to GNU compilers. It's a bit of effort at times, but it's NOTHING like porting to/from Windows.
Problem for *everybody* though is what's really going on is they are flooding the exchanges with false transactions, which slows down *real* transactions including the one that leads to the profit for the attacker. I suppose if you know when the DOS attack is going to end (because you control it) you can time the bottom, place your (sure thing) bet, verify the transaction has cleared and stop the attack. Then you wait for the SlashDot article about the DOS attack to get a few sheep to "invest" and drive up the price.
Or for the attacker who plans ahead, sell short, launch DOS attack, when the drop starts to slow - cover, wait for transaction to really clear and stop attack. PROFIT! Wait for awhile, rinse repeat until enough Profit is realized or you destroy BTC.
There are a number of "virtual currencies" you can do this with. I'll bet they all get hit the same way soon.
I'm not going to argue with you. Overtime for extended periods is a really BAD thing for all the reasons you outline. It is generally a great way to spend more, get less and loose your best and brightest employees to your competitors. Problem is that it is all too common for MBA's to buy into the "Mythical Man Month" farce and bow to the short sighted "manage to quarter" tactical approach in their management. After all, stock price what they generally get bonuses on either directly (as in stock options) or indirectly (though measures of how they contributed to stock price). Few look beyond the fiscal year but most are consumed by the next quarter. Almost every place I've worked in 30 years suffers from this to one degree or another.
I would advocate you start looking for another job if you are faced with a continued requirement to work overtime. If they are doing this to you, it proves they are short sighted, tactical thinkers, or are being managed by short sighted tactical thinkers and you will likely be better off elsewhere. In EVERY instance where I was *required* to work overtime by management order, either the company failed, the project was way over budget, finished way behind schedule, or was outright cancelled by the customer. I've never seen a successful conclusion. Get out, get out while you still have a job and it's easier to get another.
When their money is gone of course. (Or more to the point, when THEY cannot get their money back when they need it.)
Just remember though, only THEN they will demand government regulation. Before that it is all about the government not having any business regulating what they want to do. After they are fleeced, they will demand a bail out and rules.
Some of the best hackers work for governments. This may be an attempt to destroy digital currency so that people are forced to contend with the historical money makers.
I'm not into conspiracy theories. Government doesn't really care about BTC, as long as you are not using it to do shady things. This is just common hacking by brighter than average people with less than ideal morals who are out to make a buck. *Somebody* has figured out that money can be made doing this. Now if they are clearing millions or just enough to pay for the pizza is the real question.
IF the government wanted to end BTC, there are better and easier ways that would be a lot less complex and straight forward. No, this is just some yahoo's who figured out how to make a few bucks by tweaking things. More will come though, as organized crime gets into this technique. The swings will get bigger and bigger until they "fix" the processing of transactions to avoid the problem (assuming they can).
I'd be (and I am) out of BTC trading with any money you cannot afford to loose.... Way too risky, even for the kids inheritance money.. If you want to use your slot machine mad money here, it might be better odds, but just barely. (Not as entertaining though.)
Everyone was saying, "Bitcoin is just like currency, man, only better."
It is, especially if you are trying to pump, dump or crash and buy the things for profit. If a DOS attack can drive the price down and DOS attacks are fairly easy to do, you can bet somebody will try it.
it takes time to verify and fail the transaction, but even with all tellers open, there'll be a point where more people (legit and otherwise) arrive faster than they can handle so the lines get turned into crowds.
A virtual description of a bank run, or at least what *looks* for all the world to be a bank run.. Cannot be a good sign if BTC is somehow seen as not easily exchanged as it should be.
If you where working in any other industry, you'd get paid to do rework. Programming *should* be the same.
Problem is that it sometimes doesn't work out that way. Programmers are usually "Salary Exempt" in the USA, which means that if your bug breaks something and schedule is suffering, guess what? You fix it but you don't get paid more to do that. Sometimes that means burning the midnight oil during the nights and weekends. The same thing happens if you fall behind schedule. More hours, same pay.
This is the same question as "Should programmers get paid for over time?" Should employers be allowed to expect their salary workers to put in more than the standard work week? And for me, the answer is "it depends". If an employer is being flexible with me and my hours, I'm going to be flexible too. If you demand I'm in the office from 8 to 5 without fail, or suffer the consequences, don't expect me to stay outside those hours. If you are flexible about arrival and departure times, I don't mind working a extra, especially when you reach the critical phases of some project. But this should be the rare exception, and not the rule. When it becomes the rule, I'm going to start looking for other work if they do not cough up some kind of reward for extra hours.
Solaris was leading the pack, until Sun died, which was right about the time they went with the X86 port and shot themselves in the foot. Oracle buying them hasn't helped their prospects. Solaris is dying a slow and painful death.
It's just a theory of mine. Yea it's *possible* he just came up with all this stuff, he's a bright guy and all, but he is frighteningly close in some cases where I have first hand knowledge. Personally, and in the opinion of some folks that I've talked to, there is a bit more than clever observation going on.
At the very least, he's had detailed conversations with people who should have been a bit more careful. They may not have found a specific instance of leaking information to him, but in total he's been able to put enough puzzle pieces together to glean some pretty sensitive details. Proving he received classified information directly well enough to charge folks is one thing, having it actually happen in a thousand minor ways is quite another.
Chroot is really a process thing that changes how that process sees the file system. It doesn't do anything to the file system. But, pretty much everything is file system based in Linux so everything under the parent process lives in the chroot jail. If you are careful and you use schroot, you can actually run two different distributions (with common kernel) in different processes. I've seen systems running multiple incompatible versions of libC from multiple distributions including multiple IP addresses and X servers. It's been awhile, but I'm sure what you describe is possible.
Zones, where pretty much limited to running the same Solaris version in each zone. You could run different software loads as I recall, but you where stuck on the same kernel in each zone.
Oh you know it...At least they where buying SCO at the time. Say, maybe that was why SCO took a dump, Pizza Hut changed OS...
Come to think of it, maybe that was why they where porting to NT. Last I heard they had 5 Million in development costs on just back of house, but that was over a decade ago. Even so, I still see the old system in use at the less than modern Pizza Hut's.
Oh? Actually, I seem to recall that the back of house system contacted such a system via modem every evening to upload the day's numbers and supply orders.... So, I didn't touch it directly, but we had them..
Yes, but I've had more than one person who was "in the know" about specific classified things tell me that Tom Clancy had an uncanny ability to somehow come up with fiction that matched reality too close and too often to be just a coincidence. I think he did a lot of careful research but he was also given information about some things he shouldn't have known as well.
But that begs the question why would he be given such information? I think the answer is more complex than it looks at first blush. I actually think that he was given real and exaggerated information on purpose in an effort to make the US sound more capable than we actually where at the time, while having the aura of being valid by providing known classified information along side the fiction. It was partially fact, partially propaganda.
But, even if he wasn't feed information on purpose, I'm sure he ferreted out a number of things that where classified by his careful investigation and observation of the things he wrote about. Some where lucky guesses, but NOBODY is that lucky.... (Even card counters in Vegas)....
So if his story says field CIA offices in foreign countries watch cable news, I'm going to bet they likely do. In fact, I'll bet they have folks assigned to this 24/7/365 for every major news service in every language they can to raise warnings of world events.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you really did work for an idiot. For that I'm sorry. Just remember, these kind of bosses are pretty easy to deal with. If you don't want to quit, just document everything and pull out the CYA trail when they throw you under the buss. (Yea, I've had to do that too.. )
I am tired of reading about how the Mars rovers miraculously lived so long.
It should be obvious to even the dumbest among us that the short "expected lifespan" of the rovers was just some contractual trigger for some bonus for some contractor and was in no way a design goal.
You are right, it was a design criteria, a requirement etc. 90 days was the warranty period, the contracted minimum lifespan required for the rovers and the absolute minimum design criteria for the entire system. It simply MUST work 100% for 90 days. I'm sure the "goal" was much longer. I'm just guessing, but had either of the rovers failed within the 90 days a sizable final payment would not have been made.
But, I'm not so tired of hearing that the rovers both have lasted more than the warranty. It is a credit to the engineers who designed, built and operate these systems that they actually lasted (and continue to last) for so much longer than the minimums. These little marvels serve as an example of how a successful mission is executed and what JPL and NASA can do, even on short budgets and timelines. Although the science being done by the remaining one is limited, I don't get tired of seeing new stories about them and their remarkable story and endurance.
Just needed a fsck and it was then in /lost+found
That would be great except this is Windows 98 and somebody sent the format C:/ command....Anybody have a boot disk and a long arm?
HAL agrees, according to Seri. Haven't heard from Spirit Rover yet...
...and doesn't know the first thing about the job the people under him do.
Actually this is NOT a reason to trash your boss. I've had a number of managers who didn't have a clue how to do my job who where extremely effective and great to work for. We had a mutual understanding and respect for each one's roll. With one, he didn't have a clue how to design a network and stand up the equipment because it was MY job to do that for him. He just pointed me to the project and we would discuss the details he needed to know (cost, schedule etc) and I did what was required. He knew I was going to tell him what I really thought about the cost and schedule and trusted me to do the work within the cost and schedule I gave him. I knew he would insulate me from the management garbage and wasn't going to throw me to the wolves if there was some unexpected slip or overrun. We did status reports on large projects and he would stop by regularly to talk about things, but he NEVER wanted to tell me how to do this or that, and if we where behind schedule or over cost I WAS TELLING HIM about it. We trusted each other to do their jobs and it worked great.
So, I actually think that the most effective bosses don't have to know all the ins and outs of what his employees do. But what they DO need is the ability to surround themselves with people who DO KNOW what needs to be done and empowering them to do their jobs. Bosses that know all the details are sometimes way to eager to try and micromanage their underlings and it takes a rare talent to let your employees do the work for you. I'll ALWAYS take a manager with the talent to delegate over one with perfect domain knowledge.
Come on, be honest. But before you open your mouth, THINK carefully.
I have a policy of ALWAYS assuming that any problem somebody brings me is MINE to fix. I most likely caused it and it's my responsibility to fix it. Problems are not always my fault in the end, but until I've proven to myself and more importantly to the person who brought the problem to my attention that it's NOT my fault I'm taking personal responsibility to see it gets fixed.
With that in mind, before you go off and start calling somebody you don't know well an idiot to his face you better be darn sure. And before you go tell anybody else about your suspicions they are an idiot you better be doubly darn sure you can back up the claim with absolute, you'd bet the farm on it, proof. Otherwise, you are going to be shot full of holes because YOU are the idiot.
Given that you obviously are NOT the subject matter expert (or why would you need one given to you) I would say that what we most likely have is a personality clash between you and the expert. There is a non zero chance this is not true, but unless you are ready to make yourself into the subject matter expert and PROVE it, you really have two choices...
First choice: You can suck it up, stop complaining and start working with the expert regardless of how you feel about them. You don't have to like them, but you need to respect them and stay professional about any disagreements. This will involve trying to figure out how you can best approach this person and doing things you would consider wasting time by taking their advice. Get their advice in hard copy, just to CYA in the future, but do your best to play in the sandbox with them.
Second choice: You can go in, guns blazing and shoot the idiot full of holes, preferably in public in front of management. If you are wrong, you will go down in a blaze of glory, fully burning the bridge behind your hasty departure. If you are right, and manage to prove it without stepping on a land mine in the process, nobody will ever want to work with you and the disgraced "expert" is still likely to be there, possibly on your team, which puts you back to your first choice where you will eventually have to work with them. When they start like this, such relationships don't go well and your life will be a mess.
So, I suggest you suck it up and do what it takes to work with the idiot and if you really just cannot make it work, look for another job.
So, let's get this straight. This is the FIRST STEP???? You guys have been at this for decades and have spend millions if not billions in the quest for "clean energy" and this "first step" is all we have to show for it? Besides cranking up a bunch of lasers all at once every now and again, what, exactly have you been doing?
I seem to recall a story about fusion just a few months ago that said "We are only a decade or two away from FREE energy!" Fusion, it's Coming!!! etc. Pardon my skeptic bent, but I think we should skip to the chase on what's really going on and get an answer to the REAL question.
How much money do you guys need now?
I'm all for research, but lets not fool ourselves. We are not even close on this one. We might be barking up the wrong tree with this and I think we should double down on our investment and start another group to try some different ideas if there are any. So perhaps we should half the last contribution and solicit some other bright folks to do some research with the other half.
I suppose they would sell you that if you insisted. But I ask, why would you want to buy SPARC hardware then run Linux on it? Oracle sells X86 iron for their Linux customers. I'm just guessing, but I'll bet there is more profit margin in X86 systems than SPARC hardware (even if there is a significant premium for SPARC iron). Oracle is obviously still selling SPARC stuff, but I'm guessing they don't see enough profit to pay for the NRE to keep advancing the SPARC platform performance and it's pretty much a dead horse. Same for Solaris.
But also remember that Oracle can change anything it likes in Linux. The source is available. As long as it abides by the license terms Oracle can do what it wants to Linux and deliver it to their customers. Might not be wise to cut across the grain of a open source project, but you can if you want.
The real problem for both SPARC and Solaris is that they are not selling in enough numbers to pay for the engineering costs to keep them viable in the market. They are dying. I know there are legacy customers with old applications that can only go Sparc Solaris and will have to pay Oracle what ever it costs for now, but eventually it's going to be less expensive to just move to Linux. After all, for most applications running on Sparc hardware, the porting to Linux is more about the infrastructure side (starting/stopping and monitoring the application) than the actual application, which is usually just a porting exercise to go from Sun's compilers to GNU compilers. It's a bit of effort at times, but it's NOTHING like porting to/from Windows.
So... Are we going to toss the bottom 10% or the top?
Doesn't this work for Google?
Problem for *everybody* though is what's really going on is they are flooding the exchanges with false transactions, which slows down *real* transactions including the one that leads to the profit for the attacker. I suppose if you know when the DOS attack is going to end (because you control it) you can time the bottom, place your (sure thing) bet, verify the transaction has cleared and stop the attack. Then you wait for the SlashDot article about the DOS attack to get a few sheep to "invest" and drive up the price.
Or for the attacker who plans ahead, sell short, launch DOS attack, when the drop starts to slow - cover, wait for transaction to really clear and stop attack. PROFIT! Wait for awhile, rinse repeat until enough Profit is realized or you destroy BTC.
There are a number of "virtual currencies" you can do this with. I'll bet they all get hit the same way soon.
I'm not going to argue with you. Overtime for extended periods is a really BAD thing for all the reasons you outline. It is generally a great way to spend more, get less and loose your best and brightest employees to your competitors. Problem is that it is all too common for MBA's to buy into the "Mythical Man Month" farce and bow to the short sighted "manage to quarter" tactical approach in their management. After all, stock price what they generally get bonuses on either directly (as in stock options) or indirectly (though measures of how they contributed to stock price). Few look beyond the fiscal year but most are consumed by the next quarter. Almost every place I've worked in 30 years suffers from this to one degree or another.
I would advocate you start looking for another job if you are faced with a continued requirement to work overtime. If they are doing this to you, it proves they are short sighted, tactical thinkers, or are being managed by short sighted tactical thinkers and you will likely be better off elsewhere. In EVERY instance where I was *required* to work overtime by management order, either the company failed, the project was way over budget, finished way behind schedule, or was outright cancelled by the customer. I've never seen a successful conclusion. Get out, get out while you still have a job and it's easier to get another.
When will the gullible finally wise up?
When their money is gone of course. (Or more to the point, when THEY cannot get their money back when they need it.)
Just remember though, only THEN they will demand government regulation. Before that it is all about the government not having any business regulating what they want to do. After they are fleeced, they will demand a bail out and rules.
Some of the best hackers work for governments. This may be an attempt to destroy digital currency so that people are forced to contend with the historical money makers.
I'm not into conspiracy theories. Government doesn't really care about BTC, as long as you are not using it to do shady things. This is just common hacking by brighter than average people with less than ideal morals who are out to make a buck. *Somebody* has figured out that money can be made doing this. Now if they are clearing millions or just enough to pay for the pizza is the real question.
IF the government wanted to end BTC, there are better and easier ways that would be a lot less complex and straight forward. No, this is just some yahoo's who figured out how to make a few bucks by tweaking things. More will come though, as organized crime gets into this technique. The swings will get bigger and bigger until they "fix" the processing of transactions to avoid the problem (assuming they can).
I'd be (and I am) out of BTC trading with any money you cannot afford to loose.... Way too risky, even for the kids inheritance money.. If you want to use your slot machine mad money here, it might be better odds, but just barely. (Not as entertaining though.)
Everyone was saying, "Bitcoin is just like currency, man, only better."
It is, especially if you are trying to pump, dump or crash and buy the things for profit. If a DOS attack can drive the price down and DOS attacks are fairly easy to do, you can bet somebody will try it.
it takes time to verify and fail the transaction, but even with all tellers open, there'll be a point where more people (legit and otherwise) arrive faster than they can handle so the lines get turned into crowds.
A virtual description of a bank run, or at least what *looks* for all the world to be a bank run.. Cannot be a good sign if BTC is somehow seen as not easily exchanged as it should be.
So.. Is there a way to sell BTC short?
I'll bet you a dollar you can't!
If you where working in any other industry, you'd get paid to do rework. Programming *should* be the same.
Problem is that it sometimes doesn't work out that way. Programmers are usually "Salary Exempt" in the USA, which means that if your bug breaks something and schedule is suffering, guess what? You fix it but you don't get paid more to do that. Sometimes that means burning the midnight oil during the nights and weekends. The same thing happens if you fall behind schedule. More hours, same pay.
This is the same question as "Should programmers get paid for over time?" Should employers be allowed to expect their salary workers to put in more than the standard work week? And for me, the answer is "it depends". If an employer is being flexible with me and my hours, I'm going to be flexible too. If you demand I'm in the office from 8 to 5 without fail, or suffer the consequences, don't expect me to stay outside those hours. If you are flexible about arrival and departure times, I don't mind working a extra, especially when you reach the critical phases of some project. But this should be the rare exception, and not the rule. When it becomes the rule, I'm going to start looking for other work if they do not cough up some kind of reward for extra hours.
You can do what you want though.
Solaris was leading the pack, until Sun died, which was right about the time they went with the X86 port and shot themselves in the foot. Oracle buying them hasn't helped their prospects. Solaris is dying a slow and painful death.
Time to shoot the horse and stop beating it..
It's just a theory of mine. Yea it's *possible* he just came up with all this stuff, he's a bright guy and all, but he is frighteningly close in some cases where I have first hand knowledge. Personally, and in the opinion of some folks that I've talked to, there is a bit more than clever observation going on.
At the very least, he's had detailed conversations with people who should have been a bit more careful. They may not have found a specific instance of leaking information to him, but in total he's been able to put enough puzzle pieces together to glean some pretty sensitive details. Proving he received classified information directly well enough to charge folks is one thing, having it actually happen in a thousand minor ways is quite another.
Chroot is really a process thing that changes how that process sees the file system. It doesn't do anything to the file system. But, pretty much everything is file system based in Linux so everything under the parent process lives in the chroot jail. If you are careful and you use schroot, you can actually run two different distributions (with common kernel) in different processes. I've seen systems running multiple incompatible versions of libC from multiple distributions including multiple IP addresses and X servers. It's been awhile, but I'm sure what you describe is possible.
Zones, where pretty much limited to running the same Solaris version in each zone. You could run different software loads as I recall, but you where stuck on the same kernel in each zone.
Oh you know it...At least they where buying SCO at the time. Say, maybe that was why SCO took a dump, Pizza Hut changed OS...
Come to think of it, maybe that was why they where porting to NT. Last I heard they had 5 Million in development costs on just back of house, but that was over a decade ago. Even so, I still see the old system in use at the less than modern Pizza Hut's.
(Sarcasm on) So YOU don't like LVM? Shudder shudder..
Oh? Actually, I seem to recall that the back of house system contacted such a system via modem every evening to upload the day's numbers and supply orders.... So, I didn't touch it directly, but we had them..
Yes, but I've had more than one person who was "in the know" about specific classified things tell me that Tom Clancy had an uncanny ability to somehow come up with fiction that matched reality too close and too often to be just a coincidence. I think he did a lot of careful research but he was also given information about some things he shouldn't have known as well.
But that begs the question why would he be given such information? I think the answer is more complex than it looks at first blush. I actually think that he was given real and exaggerated information on purpose in an effort to make the US sound more capable than we actually where at the time, while having the aura of being valid by providing known classified information along side the fiction. It was partially fact, partially propaganda.
But, even if he wasn't feed information on purpose, I'm sure he ferreted out a number of things that where classified by his careful investigation and observation of the things he wrote about. Some where lucky guesses, but NOBODY is that lucky.... (Even card counters in Vegas)....
So if his story says field CIA offices in foreign countries watch cable news, I'm going to bet they likely do. In fact, I'll bet they have folks assigned to this 24/7/365 for every major news service in every language they can to raise warnings of world events.