Looking at the examples provided with the decompiler, I'd say that the answer is obvious. The decompiled code bears little resemblance to the original C code, and is almost useless for understanding what it does.
This is not to say that a decompiler cannot (in theory) do a better job...
If he does fire you for not working hard enough, would you be able to sue him for wrongful termination?
IANAL either, but the answer will vary depending on your employment conditions / contract and the labour laws for the country / state in which you work.
If the boss does decide to fire you, he will probably try to do it in a way that (he thinks) covers him against lawsuit for unfair dismissal.
For example, your formal notice of dismissal might state that you are being sacked because you are incompetent, uncooperative, late for work, etc.
This doesn't necessarily mean that you can't sue him anyway, but he's not likely to make it easy for you.
Anyhow, my feeling is that a typical boss won't sack you for refusing to bow to pressure to work excessive hours. If you can do it, the best way to deal with a bullying boss is to stand up to him/her.
If you are working insane hours, you need to take a hard look at how you are interacting with your line manager and/or clients. If the root problem is that clients expectations are ridiculous, you need to get your manager's help in exerting some pushback. For example, you and your manager can
formally prioritization work requests.
If the root problem is that your line manager has ridiculous expectations (or hasn't the guts / seniority to stand up to unreasonable clients), you could take two approaches. You could escalate the workload issue up the management chain, or to your HR dept (as a health and safety issue). This risks getting you into your line manager's bad books.
The other approach is to exert pushback against your manager's unreasonable expectations.
Get into the habit of giving your
boss written estimates of how long it will take
to do things, and keep a log of the actual time taken. If your boss knows you are doing this, he may think twice about overworking you.
If your boss sets you unreasonable deadlines, don't be afraid to miss them.
When your boss demands that you work excessive hours, don't. He cannot FORCE you to do this. Indeed, the chances are that he won't be in the office when you be leaving... so leave earlier. If he asks why, tell him the truth; i.e. that you were too tired to work effectively.
If you are overtired or stressed out because of overwork, take a sick day. If you can get a doctors certificate that says "work related stress" or "exhaustion", even better.
If your boss unreasonably threatens to sack you for not working hard enough, don't walk, or threaten to walk. Instead, bide your time while quietly start looking for a better job.
Remember, if your boss actually sacks you, he / his business will take a big hit in a number of areas; time / money to recruit a new person, loss of productivity, loss of morale, etc. If he has half a brain, he will know this.
These documents can no longer be used to try to invalidate the patent once the reexamination process is complete -- as the PTO has in effect 'blessed' those documents, asserting that the patent is valid in spite of them.
Is it this clear cut? Can't you still attempt to have a court overturn a patent, by (in effect) challenging the Patent Office's ruling about the novelness and non-obvious of the invention? Surely any prior art may be relevant to this, whether "known" to the PTO or not?
The "innocent until proven guilty" principle
applies in both criminal and civil cases. The
burden of proof is less in civil ("balance
of probability") than in criminal cases ("beyond
reasonable doubt"). But in both civil and
criminal cases, the onus is on the plaintiff /
prosecutor to prove the case to the court's
satisfaction.
This principle is occasionally trampled by
goevrnments introducing bad laws in the
name of "national security". But I don't
think that applies here...
(Now, proving this could be tough, theoretically, but in this case, it would be pretty easy, since even the major news networks have picked up on this.)
You won't need to prove that you didn't send the email. In the event the someone was foolish enough to attempt to sue you, the onus would be on them to prove that you did send the email. I'd say that you have a greater chance of being hit by a meteorite than to have this happen.
However, there's one large problem that stems from ballot differences between the US and pretty much everywhere else in the world: American ballots are usually much longer. In many parts of the world, you vote on just a couple (some places even just one) things.
The difference is not as great as you think. In a n Australian Federal Election, the voter has (at least) two ballot papers. For the House of Reps ballot, you have to put a number in the box for each candidate, often for up to 10 candidates. For the Senate ballot, you can vote "above the line" or "below the line". If you vote "below the line" you have to write numbers in (typically) 50 to 100 boxes. In some federal elections, there are also ballots for referenda to change the constitution.
Sounds like a return to literacy testing--especially if it requires the candidates name be written out or something similarly ridiculous.
Not a real problem, in Australia. All major
partys hand out "how to vote" cards outside of
each polling booth. Virtually any voter can
copy the numbers in boxes on a "how to vote"
card onto the corresponding boxes on the ballot
paper. (We have a preferential voting system...)
IIRC, in countries like India where a significant
proportion of the voters are illiterate, each
of the parties is identified by a graphic symbol.
All an illiterate voter needs to do is to mark
the box next to his party's symbol.
(I'm not aware of any country that uses a
literacy test these days.)
Put every candidate into one room, and get the voters to stand in a line outside. Give the first voter a gun loaded with a single bullet, and allow him/her to go into the room for a minute. Repeat until there is only one candidate "running for office".
The most transparent technology there is at the moment for recording votes is for voters to tick boxes (or write numbers) on printed ballot papers and put them into ballot boxes. Voting slips are counted by hand based, in the presence of witnesses. If the result is close, the voting slips can be recounted. This system works well in Australia at all levels of government.
OK, we do get problems occasionally. But they are
typically things like people impersonating other voters, and people voting multiple times at different polling booths. However, the system copes with this. If the number of voting irregularities detected is sufficient to effect the outcome of an election, a by-election is called in the seats in dispute. It really helps that the courts in Australia are not heavily politicised like they are in the US of A.
(The problems with voter impersonation, etc are also present when voting machines are used. The same solutions could be used in both cases; e.g. requiring voters to present photo ids, and throwing rorters into jail for a long time.)
Also his job could be on the line if SCO
files an injunction to close kernel.org.
While this might worry him (he is human after
all), he really hasn't got anything to worry
about. In the extremely unlikely case that
SCO succeeds in getting kernel.org closed,
Linus would get so many interesting job offers
he'd need to fight off potential employers
with a length of four by two!
Meanwhile SCOX will plumment and leave a lot of angry investors.
I have no time for so-called "investors" who are speculating on SCO winning their lawsuits and/or succeeding in extorting money from Linux end users. They are taking a calculated risk in the face of the widespread informed opinion that SCO has no hope of succeeding. When SCO folds, these "investors" will deserve no more sympathy than someone who backs a race horse that doesn't win.
Why is this not a front page story? Laws do have a tendency to spread, you know.
Because it isn't law, or even a draft law yet. It is just another press release from Senator Alston, who is well known for political grandstanding and generally shooting his mouth (and feet) off.
It only becomes really newsworthy when we see what the draft legislation looks like. If it is as bad as it sounds, there is little chance that it will get through the Senate without ammendment.
I agree with your main point. Indeed, if your real aim in life is to earn lots of money, you'd be better off doing an MBA and getting into management. (Or changing to another profession like lay or medicine.)
The real question is whether you want an academic job or a programmer job.
I think the real question is whether you want
an interesting IT job versus a boring IT job. If you are happy doing mundane IT development or management, a PhD offers no advantages. OTOH, if you want a job doing leading edge software R&D, a PhD in a relevant field of IT can be a distinct advantage, especially when combined with solid industrial software engineering experience.
(These days there is no industrial research being done outside of Microsoft Research.)
That is a bit unfair. While the author only deals with languages shipped by Microsoft, a number of others have been ported to the.Net platform.
See here
for a list.
As for "how much punishment is enough", well, that's for the courts and the burly prison men to decide.
Understand your effing Constitution! Jail inmates have no legal role in deciding how much punishment their fellow prisoners get. Jail rape and other jail abuse (up to and including murder!) is plain evil. It is patently illegal, unjust and should be stamped out. Anyone who thinks otherwise has obviously not thought through the issues.
If you really think jail rape is a just punishment, lobby your Congressman to pass a law which allows a Judge to impose it as a sentence. And you'll probably need to get your Constitution (which outlaws "cruel and unusual punishment")
ammended too...
Wow... Density does exist. Comtext is not a word. Perhaps you were thinking of context.
Oh, wow! I hadn't realised! I must be a total moron! Thank you for pointing this out... Mr Irony Impaired Anonymous Coward.
Does the joke make sense now? A nice comment on spellchecking with a mispelled word in it, get it?
I fail to see any real humour in pointing out someone's typing/spelling/grammar errors. Not in general, and not in this case. IMO, it is just pointless, unoriginal, unfunny wankery.
[And, if anyone else wants to demonstrate how pointless, unoriginal and unfunny they are, there may even be some uncorrected typos in this text. Remember to wipe your hands before you reply!]
Actually, it is not ridiculous to expect that spelling checking will be a lot better in 10 years time. In theory, it should be possible to spot that a word is incorrectly spelled for the comtext (e.g. "there" versus "their") and suggest corrections that make sense. This is not implausible for this to become reality, given 10 years research into natural language understanding, and an order of magnitude faster machines to run the spelling checkers.
In this case it would be much simpler to just
use BSD. Not so important.
I didn't say that this hypothetical patch was
a patch to the Linux kernel. Suppose that it was
a patch to the MySQL codebase.
The details of a hypothetical example
are not particularly important. My point is
that there are highly plausible examples where
proprietary patches could have sufficiently
high intrisic value to make the patching approach
attractive... if you ignore the moral issues,
and the potential cost of litigation.
Slashdot Mirror
" ... its your turn to ring down for a Pizza!"
Looking at the examples provided with the decompiler, I'd say that the answer is obvious. The decompiled code bears little resemblance to the original C code, and is almost useless for understanding what it does.
This is not to say that a decompiler cannot (in theory) do a better job ...
IANAL either, but the answer will vary depending on your employment conditions / contract and the labour laws for the country / state in which you work.
If the boss does decide to fire you, he will probably try to do it in a way that (he thinks) covers him against lawsuit for unfair dismissal. For example, your formal notice of dismissal might state that you are being sacked because you are incompetent, uncooperative, late for work, etc. This doesn't necessarily mean that you can't sue him anyway, but he's not likely to make it easy for you.
Anyhow, my feeling is that a typical boss won't sack you for refusing to bow to pressure to work excessive hours. If you can do it, the best way to deal with a bullying boss is to stand up to him/her.
If the root problem is that your line manager has ridiculous expectations (or hasn't the guts / seniority to stand up to unreasonable clients), you could take two approaches. You could escalate the workload issue up the management chain, or to your HR dept (as a health and safety issue). This risks getting you into your line manager's bad books.
The other approach is to exert pushback against your manager's unreasonable expectations.
-
Get into the habit of giving your
boss written estimates of how long it will take
to do things, and keep a log of the actual time taken. If your boss knows you are doing this, he may think twice about overworking you.
- If your boss sets you unreasonable deadlines, don't be afraid to miss them.
-
When your boss demands that you work excessive hours, don't. He cannot FORCE you to do this. Indeed, the chances are that he won't be in the office when you be leaving
... so leave earlier. If he asks why, tell him the truth; i.e. that you were too tired to work effectively.
-
If you are overtired or stressed out because of overwork, take a sick day. If you can get a doctors certificate that says "work related stress" or "exhaustion", even better.
If your boss unreasonably threatens to sack you for not working hard enough, don't walk, or threaten to walk. Instead, bide your time while quietly start looking for a better job. Remember, if your boss actually sacks you, he / his business will take a big hit in a number of areas; time / money to recruit a new person, loss of productivity, loss of morale, etc. If he has half a brain, he will know this.Is it this clear cut? Can't you still attempt to have a court overturn a patent, by (in effect) challenging the Patent Office's ruling about the novelness and non-obvious of the invention? Surely any prior art may be relevant to this, whether "known" to the PTO or not?
If I understand the article correctly, they are using diamond films a few microns (?) thick. DeBeers won't need to be worried.
This principle is occasionally trampled by goevrnments introducing bad laws in the name of "national security". But I don't think that applies here ...
You won't need to prove that you didn't send the email. In the event the someone was foolish enough to attempt to sue you, the onus would be on them to prove that you did send the email. I'd say that you have a greater chance of being hit by a meteorite than to have this happen.
The difference is not as great as you think. In a n Australian Federal Election, the voter has (at least) two ballot papers. For the House of Reps ballot, you have to put a number in the box for each candidate, often for up to 10 candidates. For the Senate ballot, you can vote "above the line" or "below the line". If you vote "below the line" you have to write numbers in (typically) 50 to 100 boxes. In some federal elections, there are also ballots for referenda to change the constitution.
Not a real problem, in Australia. All major partys hand out "how to vote" cards outside of each polling booth. Virtually any voter can copy the numbers in boxes on a "how to vote" card onto the corresponding boxes on the ballot paper. (We have a preferential voting system ...)
IIRC, in countries like India where a significant proportion of the voters are illiterate, each of the parties is identified by a graphic symbol. All an illiterate voter needs to do is to mark the box next to his party's symbol.
(I'm not aware of any country that uses a literacy test these days.)
It is easier to use the PENCIL provided in the polling booth.
Put every candidate into one room, and get the voters to stand in a line outside. Give the first voter a gun loaded with a single bullet, and allow him/her to go into the room for a minute. Repeat until there is only one candidate "running for office".
The most transparent technology there is at the moment for recording votes is for voters to tick boxes (or write numbers) on printed ballot papers and put them into ballot boxes. Voting slips are counted by hand based, in the presence of witnesses. If the result is close, the voting slips can be recounted. This system works well in Australia at all levels of government.
OK, we do get problems occasionally. But they are typically things like people impersonating other voters, and people voting multiple times at different polling booths. However, the system copes with this. If the number of voting irregularities detected is sufficient to effect the outcome of an election, a by-election is called in the seats in dispute. It really helps that the courts in Australia are not heavily politicised like they are in the US of A.
(The problems with voter impersonation, etc are also present when voting machines are used. The same solutions could be used in both cases; e.g. requiring voters to present photo ids, and throwing rorters into jail for a long time.)
While this might worry him (he is human after all), he really hasn't got anything to worry about. In the extremely unlikely case that SCO succeeds in getting kernel.org closed, Linus would get so many interesting job offers he'd need to fight off potential employers with a length of four by two!
Hmm ... that would have been funnier if Linus
actually came from Iceland :-(
like you'd expect from an Icelander :-)
I have no time for so-called "investors" who are speculating on SCO winning their lawsuits and/or succeeding in extorting money from Linux end users. They are taking a calculated risk in the face of the widespread informed opinion that SCO has no hope of succeeding. When SCO folds, these "investors" will deserve no more sympathy than someone who backs a race horse that doesn't win.
Because it isn't law, or even a draft law yet. It is just another press release from Senator Alston, who is well known for political grandstanding and generally shooting his mouth (and feet) off.
It only becomes really newsworthy when we see what the draft legislation looks like. If it is as bad as it sounds, there is little chance that it will get through the Senate without ammendment.
The real question is whether you want an academic job or a programmer job.
I think the real question is whether you want an interesting IT job versus a boring IT job. If you are happy doing mundane IT development or management, a PhD offers no advantages. OTOH, if you want a job doing leading edge software R&D, a PhD in a relevant field of IT can be a distinct advantage, especially when combined with solid industrial software engineering experience.
(These days there is no industrial research being done outside of Microsoft Research.)
That's simply not true.
That is a bit unfair. While the author only deals with languages shipped by Microsoft, a number of others have been ported to the .Net platform.
See here
for a list.
Understand your effing Constitution! Jail inmates have no legal role in deciding how much punishment their fellow prisoners get. Jail rape and other jail abuse (up to and including murder!) is plain evil. It is patently illegal, unjust and should be stamped out. Anyone who thinks otherwise has obviously not thought through the issues.
If you really think jail rape is a just punishment, lobby your Congressman to pass a law which allows a Judge to impose it as a sentence. And you'll probably need to get your Constitution (which outlaws "cruel and unusual punishment") ammended too ...
Oh, wow! I hadn't realised! I must be a total moron! Thank you for pointing this out ... Mr Irony Impaired Anonymous Coward.
Does the joke make sense now? A nice comment on spellchecking with a mispelled word in it, get it?
I fail to see any real humour in pointing out someone's typing/spelling/grammar errors. Not in general, and not in this case. IMO, it is just pointless, unoriginal, unfunny wankery.
[And, if anyone else wants to demonstrate how pointless, unoriginal and unfunny they are, there may even be some uncorrected typos in this text. Remember to wipe your hands before you reply!]
Your point is ... ?
Actually, it is not ridiculous to expect that spelling checking will be a lot better in 10 years time. In theory, it should be possible to spot that a word is incorrectly spelled for the comtext (e.g. "there" versus "their") and suggest corrections that make sense. This is not implausible for this to become reality, given 10 years research into natural language understanding, and an order of magnitude faster machines to run the spelling checkers.
The details of a hypothetical example are not particularly important. My point is that there are highly plausible examples where proprietary patches could have sufficiently high intrisic value to make the patching approach attractive ... if you ignore the moral issues,
and the potential cost of litigation.