I do most of my work at the command line. All that I do with my desktop is switch it between my terminal window, my browser, and my email client. I probably launch the GUI calculator once or twice per month. I probably wouldn't notice if 90% of the desktop environment dissapeared.
Since I don't really use the desktop for anything other than switching between those three windows, I've had no reason to switch away from Gnome, which was what I chose 15 years ago.
> Most of the stuff may work, but something less common such as ifconfig was deprecated in favor of other tools.
Ifconfig is actually a good example. I remember about 10-15 years ago I started to sometimes use "ip" and the other tools because I read that ifconfig was being deprecated. Mostly I still used ifconfig out of habit, though. A few weeks ago I something arcane with ifconfig on a CentOS system and got an error message saying I needed to use "ip" instead. So there was about 10-15 years during which you could use either one.
I recall a conversation on the Linux kernel mailing list. Somebody submitted a patch to remove some code related to some old hardware, because it was kinda in the way and probably nobody used the old thing with modern kernels anyway. Linus replied "are we sure nobody is using it?" Does anyone on the list know of anyone who could still be using this? If we have someone using it, we'll keep it in." Compare the "courage" of removing the headphone jack from Apple products.
> you must have a pretty awesome mom if she wrote linux shell scripts...
She is awesome, thanks. She wrote them for Unix, all the same utilities and most of the same conventions are on Linux.
> I wish there were some stuff to make the transition from Windows hell to Linux easier
Are you the type who enjoys fiddling with the registry? For most people, the switch is transparent. Chrome and Firefox still look and work exactly the same. Facebook is no different, Google Docs is exactly the same.
If you enjoy fiddling with the OS itself, Linux is very different and much easier. It's all about combining simple parts that are reused all over the place. One such simple thing is "everything is a file". Reading or searching your hard drive sectors works exactly the same as reading and searching a text file, because the bare drive is a file. Each partition is a file. A network connection is a file, an email is a file, even your keyboard is a file, which can be read like any other file (though slowly, unless you're a very fast typist). To search ANYTHING you can use the "grep" command. That'll search your drive sectors, it'll search your email, it'll search whatever because grep searches files, and everything is a file. That makes it much easier to learn because for example there is one tool that searches everything. There is another tool called "sort", which sorts - anything. You don't have to learn how to sort different kinds of things with different programs.
That's why the uproar about systemd - it's not a simple, small tool that can be used with other simple, small tools to build whatever you want, to whatever level of complexity you want. Like Microsoft Office, systemd is a big, complex thing with a lot to learn about it. Very not *nix style.
That's a good point. Modern cartridges, aka ammunition, allow the gun itself to be greatly simplified. There is no need for the matchlock mechanism used on the guns Columbus had, not the wheellock used by personal firearms aboard the Mayflower.
The wheellock used a mechanism similar to the sparking wheel found on a disposable lighter. With modern cartridges, a simple nail will do the trick of igniting the cartridge by striking the primer pre-installed at the rear of the cartridge ("bullet").
One simple and straightforward design for a gun can be seen in the.22 caliber nail guns uses to fire nails into concrete. Costing about $20 retail, it consists of an outer tube or pipe, an inside tube that slides into the outer, a nail, and a spring. The cartridge is placed in the end of the smaller tube. The smaller tube is then slid into the larger. This forms the chamber. The spring is placed on the nail and inserted into the end of the larger tube at the rear of the cartridge. Striking the nail fires the gun. If you don't want to have to carry something to tap the nail with, a trigger mechanism takes an additional 20 minutes to build.
Do not try this as home. If something goes wrong in your build, you'll be holding a small pipe bomb. Small, but enough to do some damage. You could also accidentally shoot yourself messing around like this. Don't do it. Try the Coke and Mentos thing instead, or make some obglek.
There is a long tail of specialty distributions that hardly anyone uses, and then there are four or five options that people use. Here they are with a rough popularity score:
91 Ubuntu 18 Debian 18 6 Red Hat 6 (higher if CentOs is included) 7 Mint 3 Suse 1 Manjaro
You see the top four is what almost everyone uses.
Most of the others are based on one of these anyway, so if you learn about Debian-like Linux systems, you just 80 different distros. Plus they are all Linux, of course. Often I don't know or care which distro I'm using at the moment. A paper towel is a paper towel is a paper towel, regardless of brand. In many ways, Linux is Linux, regardless of distro.
You've spent perhaps 20 years learning Windows, then re-learning it differently every three years when Microsoft redoes it. If you learn Linux in a week, that's about a thousand times faster than you learned Windows.
For the first few years I used Linux, I frequently referenced a Unix book from the early 1980s. Everything in the book still worked the same 20 years later. I have scripts my mom wrote 30 years ago which still run fine on my Linux machine today. No need to forget what you knew and learn completely different every few years like you do with Windows.
You don't even need any "metal shop" tools to make a gun. That just helps to make a better one. My nephew and I assembled one from metal plumbing parts a few days ago. It took about half an hour, with nothing but hand tools.
Guns have been around since the 1300s, around the same time the hourglass was invented. Which shows they can be built with tools and equipment less advanced than what Columbus had on board the Santa Maria.
> Is there even a point to stealing that much money?
I've been working in security and paying attention to the justice system for a long time. I've learned that crooks don't normally get caught the first time; they keep doing it until they get caught.
Stealing $100 or $1,000 or 10,000 isn't enough to change your life, just enough to risk going to jail or prison. To materially change your life, you'd have to steal $1,000 over and over again, until you got caught.
If someone steals $5 million in one weekend and stops, they can retire very comfortably, while having a good chance of not getting caught.
If someone steals $150 million, they can still retire comfortably, except they'll have the FBI and others seriously on their ass, putting significant resources into catching them.
Whether you have $5 million or $150 million you have more than enough money. You never have to work again. The big difference is whether you're one of the smaller cases the FBI has on file or one of the larger cases. I'd rather be at the bottom of the FBI's priority list.
So, if I were a thief, I'd steal about $5 million, quickly, then stop.
I want to start work there roughly June 2019 or maybe a little sooner. (I have to get an old house ready to sell.) If something happens at my current job, that could of course accelerate my timeline. I'm not looking at the ads in order to apply for the current openings, I'm looking in order to know how to be the perfect candidate for similar openings a year from now.
Looking at their ads, I see many mentions of Solaris and of Oracle database. I don't have much experience in those in particular, though I'm very good at SQL databases generally and at Linux. When I contact them, I'd prefer to answer "yes, I do have the experience you're looking for". My current job allows me flexibility in what I work on, so I'll try to work on some Solaris or Oracle DB over the next few months.
One item they want I can't put on my resume. That's a box I can't check off. So I want to be able to check off all of the other boxes, have everything else they want.
Two months before I'm ready to move, I'll either reach out proactively outside of any specific job listing, or apply for existing listings. They have a LOT of positions here that fit my background, so there will likely be advertied openings.
I did sign up for their email list of people interested in working for them. If it was a company that didn't employ so many people, so they didn't have multiple relevant listings at any given time, I would probably reach out. I'm also alert to side channels that may come up, such as meeting people who work there when I attend meetings of organizations related to the industry.
Do you happen to enjoy strategy games? Thinking ahead of a way to achieve the goal and working through it? Your career can be a strategy game, or it can be a series of accidents.
> You're such a genius
If I were a genius, I might not *need* a strategy. As it is, I need a long-term strategy. Right now I'm working on a company that I selected two months ago. I plan to apply probably May 2019, a year after I selected where I wanted to work.
> The only card I have to play is to look for another job and make it clear I'm doing so. If they value me then they'll try to keep me around, if not then nothing of value was lost. Am I right?
That may not be your only card. Making it clear that you plan to leave may well mean you aren't considered for advancement - why invest in training you for the next thing if you're going to leave anyway?
> what the fuck am I SUPPOSED to do about it?
You could start by choosing your goal. Decide on your destination before choosing your route. You could select what kind of position you want and identify two or three companies you want to work for. Glassdoor is one good place to do research. Maybe the company you're actually working for (not the staffing agency) is a place you'd like to work, maybe not.
You can look carefully at the want ads for positions you'd like to have 1-5 years from now, making a list of the skills they want for those jobs. Once you have a list of which skills you need your resume to illustrate in order to get the job you want, you can probably figure out strategies to get the skills and experience that will land you the job you really want. You may be able to practice many of those skills at your current job, volunteering for tasks or projects that give you the experience your next employer is looking for.
> work for a month and then gave up, saying that it was impossible to do. I took the challenge and within a week I had done it. I estimated that because I was able to do this impossible task, it saved half a million dollars to the company per year.
That's the kind of thing you document and discuss at your performance review. You can also call out those achievements on your resume.
I just posted in the other article about how my last two job changes each nearly doubled my take-home pay, so I'm making about four times as much as I did a few years ago.
I just posted in the other article about how my last two job changes each nearly doubled my take-home pay, and that my next move will be a strategic move to inoculate myself from offshoring and H1B issues. I've chosen my next company and listed which skills I need to have on my resume when I apply there, 10 months from now.
> It's a bad situation that needs to change.
Okay, your situation is bad and needs to change. What are you doing to change it?
My last two job changes each nearly doubled my take-home pay. My habit of studying rather than playing Candy Crush probably had something to do with that.
I could get another big jump in pay by switching again, but I REALLY like working from home rather than dealing with traffic. I also like that we don't normally work long hours.
My next move will probably be because of two things: A strategic move to inoculate myself from offshoring and H1B. Evidence that I won't be able to continue in my current position because either my job is being sent overseas or the company isn't doing well.
I've identified two companies near where I live in Dallas which will be my next destination, hopefully. Now I need to carefully read their want ads and make sure I become familiar with the skills they'll need.
> Wow 2021 before they can produce something that might work? Hope they can compete with Elon; he'll be pimping discount rocket launches on Amazon by then.
Yep, he'll be taking payment by Visa in 202. In 2031 he'll be announcing that it'll be just a few more years until you can actually get what you paid him for, years before.
> false dilemma on your "either we get a wall or we get unrestricted immigration". Nobody is arguing in favor of unrestricted immigration
Many, many people, especially Democrat politicians, are in fact saying we should not enforce immigration law, and indeed violating their oath of office by refusing to enforce the law. Ignoring, and even actively frustrating, the law is acting for unrestricted immigration, and then some. Giving driver's licenses and even voter registration cards to people who came in illegally because they couldn't get in legally favors more entry by people who aren't legally qualified. This is turn reduces the amount of legal immigration we can have before it's simply too many people too quickly.
If you personally think that when we make laws we ought not ignore them, that what we decide is the law, and write down as law, should actually be the enforced law, that's cool. That's a point of common ground from which we can discuss further. Many people don't believe that. Many people believe in passing laws legitimately via the Constitutional process and then utterly ignoring them. In some areas, the people who want to ignore the law are the majority.
Re economic effects: It can be shown that there are benefits to properly managed immigration. Having a moderate number of highly skilled workers added to the country increases our tax base and skill base.
It can also easily be shown that having 30 million illiterate people with little to no job skills enter the country this year would be an economic catastrophy. Of everyone from Mexico City came to Texas, then Texas would very quickly become a lot like Mexico City. The same people doing the same things would get the same results that they get there.
If you're at all familiar with the drug wars in Mexico, it doesn't take much imagination to think about what the effects of drug gangs armed with machine guns would do to low-income communities in the US.
So it's clear that immigration can have significant effects. Significant economic effects and significant other effects. You seem to be at least literate, so I can't imagine you can disagree with that. What effects it has depends entirely on who comes in, from where, an how many in a given year. Thirty German scientists was very good for the US. Ten thousand MS-13 members would be very bad.
So we know there are definite significant effects, and they can be positive or negative depending on who, from where, how many, etc. That means you can get great benefits by policies that manage immigration well, and really bad problems from policies that manage it poorly, or not at all. A de facto open border, failing to secure ones border, selects for more of the people who break the law, rather than having that capacity available to law-abiding people who follow the legal process. So the worst possible policy is one that doesn't let in many law-abiding people, while allowing those who don't follow laws to come in whenever they please.
Suppose that a task can be broken down into two parts. On a single core, part A takes 20 seconds on a typical CPU, part B takes 80 seconds. Part B is fully parallelizable. Part A is sequential. What is the minimum amount of time the task can take with an infinite number of cores?
Suppose you have a BILLION cores, each much simpler than a Core i7, but ten times slower. What would be the total time?
> if the code you run is properly sandboxed so you don't have to care what is run.
If you are talking about a script, that runs inside of a program,that runs in a process, that runs inside of an operating system, you can model things as "kind of like a kids sandbox". You can implement this metaphorical sandbox using the idealized model of a simple computer that is exposed to C++, the language the browser is written in.
There is no sand inside the CPU. In the microcode, there are no processes. The microcode deals with actual hardware registers, where each bit is six actual transistors. When they are used, they actually get hot, and heat up the other transistors which are other registers. In the microcode, you're not dealing with an idealized model of a simple computer, you're dealing with real, physical parts of an actual Core i7 CPU. There is no "kinda like a sandbox" or "kinda like" anything, there are actual logic gates made of real transistors.
The metaphors of processes, their assigned memory, and all thay are far away. Rather, it copies bits from one transistor to another, which represent amd64 instructions - the highest abstraction you have at that level. (Instructions are things like "copy register A to register B). Only an endless stream of instructions. There can be no sandbox, because there is no sand. It's been burned into silicon now, into actual transistors.
Hacking has been around long enough that there are NOW standard, well-known methods for turning minor issues into major ones. Something that doesn't seem like a big deal (guesstimating whether a given value might be cached) is leveraged into "read any memory location you want". Spectre is an example. If you read the basic vulnerability, it seems like not a really big deal. Hackers came up with ways to make it a big deal, though, to turn something small into something much bigger.
Those are whack-a-mole. Site isolation helps *reduce* the impact of Spectre attacks that happen to be done in JavaScript, in the same way that eating fruit reduces your risk from a heart attack . It doesn't do anything for the majority of Spectre-class attacks.
Similarly, so long as you have speculative execution, you're running code that wasn't supposed to ever run. Running code will have physical and microarchitecture side effects, too. Just as writing to one memory location has a side-effect on other memory locations (see Rowhammer).
You can play whack-a-mole patching up specific exploits after the bad guys start using them, but anything as complex as Core i7 is going to have "interesting" interactions that clever people can use in interesting ways. Hacking has been around long enough that there are no standard, well-known methods for turning minor issues like "can occasionally read one bit from memory" into owning the system.
> merely shrinking the existing architecture then that means they still haven't fixed the fundamental issue behind the Meltdown vulnerability.
That fundamental issues won't be changed in the next ten years, if ever. They can either keep playing whack-a-mole with different hardware and microcode side-effects, or you can add a very simple (and slow) separate CPU for security-sensitive operations.
Current CPUs are very complex, with out-of-order execution, speculative execution based on branch prediction, multiple concurrent threads of execution, various different types of caches, etc. All of this complexity is there for a good reason - it makes a huge improvement in performance. For that reason, it's not going away, we're not going back the 8086. All the complexity also means operations will effect caches and predictive microcode and other things, so CPU operations will have side effects. Side effects mean you get Spectre and Meltdown style vulnerabilities.
A very simple CPU which doesn't have any modern optimizations (complexity), with a single core running one thread at a time, could be much more secure in this regard. It would also be much slower, so it wouldn't be good as the main general-purpose CPU. It would need to be used to offload things like handling private keys that are particularly sensitive.
If travelling to and from terrorist areas meant that authorities would rifle through your bank account records, that would be a fourth amendment issue. If red flags mean that an air marshall physically looks at the person while in public on the plane - meh. Sounds like standard, proper investigation and protection to me.
"no influence over whether the sale occurs" means not cancelable. Insiders can go to prison for buying or selling stock in a way that they could cancel it.
> Otherwise, if I was a CEO, I'd be arranging a sale on each quarter and only exercise the ones where I knew the end of quarter report would be bad.
That would put you in prison.
However, a court case added a new wrinkle and some nuance to that. Rule 10b5-1 is part of the SEC implementation of a law (statute) that says it's illegal to buy or sell a security unfairly based on insider knowledge. The statute doesn't say it's unlawful to NOT sell the security based on insider knowledge, only that's it's unlawful to buy or sell on that basis.
In other words, if there is no trade, it can't be an insider trade, according to the text of the law. So one can cancel the plan ONE TIME and never sell again, the court ruled. Until the insider arranges a new plan and exercises the transaction, there has been trade, and therefore no insider trade. If the insider does want to trade again in the future (and they must in order to redeem the value of their holdings), any future trades could be insider trades. The SEC will look at any trades that occur after a cancellation, looking for exactly what you described. If the insider cancels trades ahead of bad news, and doesn't cancel trades ahead of good news, that's probably insider trading. They have to look at the totality of the circumstances.
Sometimes in those types of situations, it looks like the cancellations (and non-cancellations) were likely to based on insider information, but there isn't enough evidence to convict. In such cases, the SEC can levy civil penalties of up to three times the amount of profit or avoided loss. Additionally, other investors can sue the insider. Such civil suits require only 50/50 evidence, convincing the judge or jury that it is "more likely than not" that the insider traded based on non-public information.
The reference to rule 10b5-1 means the stock sales were arranged months in advance. Such arrangements do "not permit the person to exercise any subsequent influence over how, when, or whether to effect purchases or sales". [Quoting 10b5-1]
This is to ensure a) they aren't selling bases on some recent news that hasn't become public and b) plans of significant stock sales by executives serve as a warning to other investors, so the public can choose to sell their stock BEFORE the executives sell theirs, if they wish to do so.
I just realized I was missing a decimal point in my post. Amazon's profit is about 1.1% of its stock price, not 11%. Each dollar invested earns 1.1 cents profit.
More typical, all of the other listed companies, is about 12% profit.
Slashdot Mirror
I do most of my work at the command line. All that I do with my desktop is switch it between my terminal window, my browser, and my email client. I probably launch the GUI calculator once or twice per month. I probably wouldn't notice if 90% of the desktop environment dissapeared.
Since I don't really use the desktop for anything other than switching between those three windows, I've had no reason to switch away from Gnome, which was what I chose 15 years ago.
Maybe the fact that Ubuntu superficially resembles Windows in some ways makes it popular among people who have spent many years on Windows.
Personally, I use CentOS and recommend it for many people (use-case dependent). If been using CentOS and it's ancestors for nearly 20 years.
> Most of the stuff may work, but something less common such as ifconfig was deprecated in favor of other tools.
Ifconfig is actually a good example. I remember about 10-15 years ago I started to sometimes use "ip" and the other tools because I read that ifconfig was being deprecated. Mostly I still used ifconfig out of habit, though. A few weeks ago I something arcane with ifconfig on a CentOS system and got an error message saying I needed to use "ip" instead. So there was about 10-15 years during which you could use either one.
I recall a conversation on the Linux kernel mailing list. Somebody submitted a patch to remove some code related to some old hardware, because it was kinda in the way and probably nobody used the old thing with modern kernels anyway. Linus replied "are we sure nobody is using it?" Does anyone on the list know of anyone who could still be using this? If we have someone using it, we'll keep it in." Compare the "courage" of removing the headphone jack from Apple products.
> you must have a pretty awesome mom if she wrote linux shell scripts...
She is awesome, thanks. She wrote them for Unix, all the same utilities and most of the same conventions are on Linux.
> I wish there were some stuff to make the transition from Windows hell to Linux easier
Are you the type who enjoys fiddling with the registry? For most people, the switch is transparent. Chrome and Firefox still look and work exactly the same. Facebook is no different, Google Docs is exactly the same.
If you enjoy fiddling with the OS itself, Linux is very different and much easier. It's all about combining simple parts that are reused all over the place. One such simple thing is "everything is a file". Reading or searching your hard drive sectors works exactly the same as reading and searching a text file, because the bare drive is a file. Each partition is a file. A network connection is a file, an email is a file, even your keyboard is a file, which can be read like any other file (though slowly, unless you're a very fast typist). To search ANYTHING you can use the "grep" command. That'll search your drive sectors, it'll search your email, it'll search whatever because grep searches files, and everything is a file. That makes it much easier to learn because for example there is one tool that searches everything. There is another tool called "sort", which sorts - anything. You don't have to learn how to sort different kinds of things with different programs.
That's why the uproar about systemd - it's not a simple, small tool that can be used with other simple, small tools to build whatever you want, to whatever level of complexity you want. Like Microsoft Office, systemd is a big, complex thing with a lot to learn about it. Very not *nix style.
That's a good point. Modern cartridges, aka ammunition, allow the gun itself to be greatly simplified. There is no need for the matchlock mechanism used on the guns Columbus had, not the wheellock used by personal firearms aboard the Mayflower.
The wheellock used a mechanism similar to the sparking wheel found on a disposable lighter. With modern cartridges, a simple nail will do the trick of igniting the cartridge by striking the primer pre-installed at the rear of the cartridge ("bullet").
One simple and straightforward design for a gun can be seen in the .22 caliber nail guns uses to fire nails into concrete. Costing about $20 retail, it consists of an outer tube or pipe, an inside tube that slides into the outer, a nail, and a spring. The cartridge is placed in the end of the smaller tube. The smaller tube is then slid into the larger. This forms the chamber. The spring is placed on the nail and inserted into the end of the larger tube at the rear of the cartridge. Striking the nail fires the gun. If you don't want to have to carry something to tap the nail with, a trigger mechanism takes an additional 20 minutes to build.
Do not try this as home. If something goes wrong in your build, you'll be holding a small pipe bomb. Small, but enough to do some damage. You could also accidentally shoot yourself messing around like this. Don't do it. Try the Coke and Mentos thing instead, or make some obglek.
There is a long tail of specialty distributions that hardly anyone uses, and then there are four or five options that people use. Here they are with a rough popularity score:
91 Ubuntu
18 Debian 18
6 Red Hat 6 (higher if CentOs is included)
7 Mint
3 Suse
1 Manjaro
You see the top four is what almost everyone uses.
Most of the others are based on one of these anyway, so if you learn about Debian-like Linux systems, you just 80 different distros. Plus they are all Linux, of course. Often I don't know or care which distro I'm using at the moment. A paper towel is a paper towel is a paper towel, regardless of brand. In many ways, Linux is Linux, regardless of distro.
You've spent perhaps 20 years learning Windows, then re-learning it differently every three years when Microsoft redoes it. If you learn Linux in a week, that's about a thousand times faster than you learned Windows.
For the first few years I used Linux, I frequently referenced a Unix book from the early 1980s. Everything in the book still worked the same 20 years later. I have scripts my mom wrote 30 years ago which still run fine on my Linux machine today. No need to forget what you knew and learn completely different every few years like you do with Windows.
You don't even need any "metal shop" tools to make a gun. That just helps to make a better one. My nephew and I assembled one from metal plumbing parts a few days ago. It took about half an hour, with nothing but hand tools.
Guns have been around since the 1300s, around the same time the hourglass was invented. Which shows they can be built with tools and equipment less advanced than what Columbus had on board the Santa Maria.
> Is there even a point to stealing that much money?
I've been working in security and paying attention to the justice system for a long time. I've learned that crooks don't normally get caught the first time; they keep doing it until they get caught.
Stealing $100 or $1,000 or 10,000 isn't enough to change your life, just enough to risk going to jail or prison. To materially change your life, you'd have to steal $1,000 over and over again, until you got caught.
If someone steals $5 million in one weekend and stops, they can retire very comfortably, while having a good chance of not getting caught.
If someone steals $150 million, they can still retire comfortably, except they'll have the FBI and others seriously on their ass, putting significant resources into catching them.
Whether you have $5 million or $150 million you have more than enough money. You never have to work again. The big difference is whether you're one of the smaller cases the FBI has on file or one of the larger cases. I'd rather be at the bottom of the FBI's priority list.
So, if I were a thief, I'd steal about $5 million, quickly, then stop.
I want to start work there roughly June 2019 or maybe a little sooner. (I have to get an old house ready to sell.) If something happens at my current job, that could of course accelerate my timeline. I'm not looking at the ads in order to apply for the current openings, I'm looking in order to know how to be the perfect candidate for similar openings a year from now.
Looking at their ads, I see many mentions of Solaris and of Oracle database. I don't have much experience in those in particular, though I'm very good at SQL databases generally and at Linux. When I contact them, I'd prefer to answer "yes, I do have the experience you're looking for". My current job allows me flexibility in what I work on, so I'll try to work on some Solaris or Oracle DB over the next few months.
One item they want I can't put on my resume. That's a box I can't check off. So I want to be able to check off all of the other boxes, have everything else they want.
Two months before I'm ready to move, I'll either reach out proactively outside of any specific job listing, or apply for existing listings. They have a LOT of positions here that fit my background, so there will likely be advertied openings.
I did sign up for their email list of people interested in working for them. If it was a company that didn't employ so many people, so they didn't have multiple relevant listings at any given time, I would probably reach out. I'm also alert to side channels that may come up, such as meeting people who work there when I attend meetings of organizations related to the industry.
Do you happen to enjoy strategy games? Thinking ahead of a way to achieve the goal and working through it? Your career can be a strategy game, or it can be a series of accidents.
> You're such a genius
If I were a genius, I might not *need* a strategy. As it is, I need a long-term strategy. Right now I'm working on a company that I selected two months ago. I plan to apply probably May 2019, a year after I selected where I wanted to work.
> The only card I have to play is to look for another job and make it clear I'm doing so. If they value me then they'll try to keep me around, if not then nothing of value was lost. Am I right?
That may not be your only card. Making it clear that you plan to leave may well mean you aren't considered for advancement - why invest in training you for the next thing if you're going to leave anyway?
> what the fuck am I SUPPOSED to do about it?
You could start by choosing your goal. Decide on your destination before choosing your route. You could select what kind of position you want and identify two or three companies you want to work for. Glassdoor is one good place to do research. Maybe the company you're actually working for (not the staffing agency) is a place you'd like to work, maybe not.
You can look carefully at the want ads for positions you'd like to have 1-5 years from now, making a list of the skills they want for those jobs. Once you have a list of which skills you need your resume to illustrate in order to get the job you want, you can probably figure out strategies to get the skills and experience that will land you the job you really want. You may be able to practice many of those skills at your current job, volunteering for tasks or projects that give you the experience your next employer is looking for.
> work for a month and then gave up, saying that it was impossible to do. I took the challenge and within a week I had done it. I estimated that because I was able to do this impossible task, it saved half a million dollars to the company per year.
That's the kind of thing you document and discuss at your performance review. You can also call out those achievements on your resume.
I just posted in the other article about how my last two job changes each nearly doubled my take-home pay, so I'm making about four times as much as I did a few years ago.
I just posted in the other article about how my last two job changes each nearly doubled my take-home pay, and that my next move will be a strategic move to inoculate myself from offshoring and H1B issues. I've chosen my next company and listed which skills I need to have on my resume when I apply there, 10 months from now.
> It's a bad situation that needs to change.
Okay, your situation is bad and needs to change. What are you doing to change it?
My last two job changes each nearly doubled my take-home pay. My habit of studying rather than playing Candy Crush probably had something to do with that.
I could get another big jump in pay by switching again, but I REALLY like working from home rather than dealing with traffic. I also like that we don't normally work long hours.
My next move will probably be because of two things:
A strategic move to inoculate myself from offshoring and H1B.
Evidence that I won't be able to continue in my current position because either my job is being sent overseas or the company isn't doing well.
I've identified two companies near where I live in Dallas which will be my next destination, hopefully. Now I need to carefully read their want ads and make sure I become familiar with the skills they'll need.
> Wow 2021 before they can produce something that might work? Hope they can compete with Elon; he'll be pimping discount rocket launches on Amazon by then.
Yep, he'll be taking payment by Visa in 202. In 2031 he'll be announcing that it'll be just a few more years until you can actually get what you paid him for, years before.
> false dilemma on your "either we get a wall or we get unrestricted immigration". Nobody is arguing in favor of unrestricted immigration
Many, many people, especially Democrat politicians, are in fact saying we should not enforce immigration law, and indeed violating their oath of office by refusing to enforce the law. Ignoring, and even actively frustrating, the law is acting for unrestricted immigration, and then some. Giving driver's licenses and even voter registration cards to people who came in illegally because they couldn't get in legally favors more entry by people who aren't legally qualified. This is turn reduces the amount of legal immigration we can have before it's simply too many people too quickly.
If you personally think that when we make laws we ought not ignore them, that what we decide is the law, and write down as law, should actually be the enforced law, that's cool. That's a point of common ground from which we can discuss further. Many people don't believe that. Many people believe in passing laws legitimately via the Constitutional process and then utterly ignoring them. In some areas, the people who want to ignore the law are the majority.
Re economic effects:
It can be shown that there are benefits to properly managed immigration. Having a moderate number of highly skilled workers added to the country increases our tax base and skill base.
It can also easily be shown that having 30 million illiterate people with little to no job skills enter the country this year would be an economic catastrophy. Of everyone from Mexico City came to Texas, then Texas would very quickly become a lot like Mexico City. The same people doing the same things would get the same results that they get there.
If you're at all familiar with the drug wars in Mexico, it doesn't take much imagination to think about what the effects of drug gangs armed with machine guns would do to low-income communities in the US.
So it's clear that immigration can have significant effects. Significant economic effects and significant other effects. You seem to be at least literate, so I can't imagine you can disagree with that. What effects it has depends entirely on who comes in, from where, an how many in a given year. Thirty German scientists was very good for the US. Ten thousand MS-13 members would be very bad.
So we know there are definite significant effects, and they can be positive or negative depending on who, from where, how many, etc. That means you can get great benefits by policies that manage immigration well, and really bad problems from policies that manage it poorly, or not at all. A de facto open border, failing to secure ones border, selects for more of the people who break the law, rather than having that capacity available to law-abiding people who follow the legal process. So the worst possible policy is one that doesn't let in many law-abiding people, while allowing those who don't follow laws to come in whenever they please.
Suppose that a task can be broken down into two parts. On a single core, part A takes 20 seconds on a typical CPU, part B takes 80 seconds. Part B is fully parallelizable. Part A is sequential. What is the minimum amount of time the task can take with an infinite number of cores?
Suppose you have a BILLION cores, each much simpler than a Core i7, but ten times slower. What would be the total time?
> if the code you run is properly sandboxed so you don't have to care what is run.
If you are talking about a script, that runs inside of a program,that runs in a process, that runs inside of an operating system, you can model things as "kind of like a kids sandbox". You can implement this metaphorical sandbox using the idealized model of a simple computer that is exposed to C++, the language the browser is written in.
There is no sand inside the CPU. In the microcode, there are no processes. The microcode deals with actual hardware registers, where each bit is six actual transistors. When they are used, they actually get hot, and heat up the other transistors which are other registers. In the microcode, you're not dealing with an idealized model of a simple computer, you're dealing with real, physical parts of an actual Core i7 CPU. There is no "kinda like a sandbox" or "kinda like" anything, there are actual logic gates made of real transistors.
The metaphors of processes, their assigned memory, and all thay are far away. Rather, it copies bits from one transistor to another, which represent amd64 instructions - the highest abstraction you have at that level. (Instructions are things like "copy register A to register B). Only an endless stream of instructions. There can be no sandbox, because there is no sand. It's been burned into silicon now, into actual transistors.
That should read:
Hacking has been around long enough that there are NOW standard, well-known methods for turning minor issues into major ones. Something that doesn't seem like a big deal (guesstimating whether a given value might be cached) is leveraged into "read any memory location you want". Spectre is an example. If you read the basic vulnerability, it seems like not a really big deal. Hackers came up with ways to make it a big deal, though, to turn something small into something much bigger.
Those are whack-a-mole. Site isolation helps *reduce* the impact of Spectre attacks that happen to be done in JavaScript, in the same way that eating fruit reduces your risk from a heart attack . It doesn't do anything for the majority of Spectre-class attacks.
Similarly, so long as you have speculative execution, you're running code that wasn't supposed to ever run. Running code will have physical and microarchitecture side effects, too. Just as writing to one memory location has a side-effect on other memory locations (see Rowhammer).
You can play whack-a-mole patching up specific exploits after the bad guys start using them, but anything as complex as Core i7 is going to have "interesting" interactions that clever people can use in interesting ways. Hacking has been around long enough that there are no standard, well-known methods for turning minor issues like "can occasionally read one bit from memory" into owning the system.
> merely shrinking the existing architecture then that means they still haven't fixed the fundamental issue behind the Meltdown vulnerability.
That fundamental issues won't be changed in the next ten years, if ever. They can either keep playing whack-a-mole with different hardware and microcode side-effects, or you can add a very simple (and slow) separate CPU for security-sensitive operations.
Current CPUs are very complex, with out-of-order execution, speculative execution based on branch prediction, multiple concurrent threads of execution, various different types of caches, etc. All of this complexity is there for a good reason - it makes a huge improvement in performance. For that reason, it's not going away, we're not going back the 8086. All the complexity also means operations will effect caches and predictive microcode and other things, so CPU operations will have side effects. Side effects mean you get Spectre and Meltdown style vulnerabilities.
A very simple CPU which doesn't have any modern optimizations (complexity), with a single core running one thread at a time, could be much more secure in this regard. It would also be much slower, so it wouldn't be good as the main general-purpose CPU. It would need to be used to offload things like handling private keys that are particularly sensitive.
For someone with such a hammer fetish, I'm surprised you've never heard of a nail. Hammers only break nails when they are thumbnails.
Take a hammer and a hacksaw to my wedding ring and you'll just ruin your hacksaw and put a dent in the table.
If travelling to and from terrorist areas meant that authorities would rifle through your bank account records, that would be a fourth amendment issue. If red flags mean that an air marshall physically looks at the person while in public on the plane - meh. Sounds like standard, proper investigation and protection to me.
"no influence over whether the sale occurs" means not cancelable. Insiders can go to prison for buying or selling stock in a way that they could cancel it.
> Otherwise, if I was a CEO, I'd be arranging a sale on each quarter and only exercise the ones where I knew the end of quarter report would be bad.
That would put you in prison.
However, a court case added a new wrinkle and some nuance to that. Rule 10b5-1 is part of the SEC implementation of a law (statute) that says it's illegal to buy or sell a security unfairly based on insider knowledge. The statute doesn't say it's unlawful to NOT sell the security based on insider knowledge, only that's it's unlawful to buy or sell on that basis.
In other words, if there is no trade, it can't be an insider trade, according to the text of the law. So one can cancel the plan ONE TIME and never sell again, the court ruled. Until the insider arranges a new plan and exercises the transaction, there has been trade, and therefore no insider trade. If the insider does want to trade again in the future (and they must in order to redeem the value of their holdings), any future trades could be insider trades. The SEC will look at any trades that occur after a cancellation, looking for exactly what you described. If the insider cancels trades ahead of bad news, and doesn't cancel trades ahead of good news, that's probably insider trading. They have to look at the totality of the circumstances.
Sometimes in those types of situations, it looks like the cancellations (and non-cancellations) were likely to based on insider information, but there isn't enough evidence to convict. In such cases, the SEC can levy civil penalties of up to three times the amount of profit or avoided loss. Additionally, other investors can sue the insider. Such civil suits require only 50/50 evidence, convincing the judge or jury that it is "more likely than not" that the insider traded based on non-public information.
The reference to rule 10b5-1 means the stock sales were arranged months in advance. Such arrangements do "not permit the person to exercise any subsequent influence over how, when, or whether to effect purchases or sales". [Quoting 10b5-1]
This is to ensure a) they aren't selling bases on some recent news that hasn't become public and b) plans of significant stock sales by executives serve as a warning to other investors, so the public can choose to sell their stock BEFORE the executives sell theirs, if they wish to do so.
I just realized I was missing a decimal point in my post.
Amazon's profit is about 1.1% of its stock price, not 11%. Each dollar invested earns 1.1 cents profit.
More typical, all of the other listed companies, is about 12% profit.