While this may be useful for some small program with an unusual algorithm to protect, any medium to large program would most likely be easier to replicate by redevelopment than by decompiling. That's why hardly anyone worries about obfuscating.
You have the bank sign some legal document that says they pay for the harm if your source code gets out due to their fault. The lawyers know how to take care of this. Get one. Problem solved.
They're called public records, and one of the most vital principles of democracy is access to the records of your government. Would you like the government to be able to maintain secret lists of people they plan to exterminate? Besides, spam filters are so good now, who worries about spam any more? When spam was a problem I was receiving maybe 800-900 spams/day in my inbox, today that's down to one a week. But either way spam worries are not a good reason to give up important features of our democracy.
I'm sure they can write such an accept filter, the question is, do they know in advance they need to. If you're told in the morning 'we need to ban all usernames containing allah' by this afternoon because of this cartoon violence stuff going on, what would your implementation look like? Would you have taken the time for a surname search to find out every surname to unblock? And what uncommon name might you miss along the way? The problem is, you don't know what acceptable name you've accidentally filtered out until someone complains about being filtered. And then there's no way to fix it: the person is unhappy, the complaint is already public, and even if you turn around and fix the problem the next day or next week, nothing gained.
Unfortunately, AMD has no choice. They have to change sockets every time they upgrade memory types, because the memory controller is built into the chip. As a result, expect another socket change in 3 years to switch to DDR3.
There are a number of real reasons you don't want to go this direction as a chip maker:
1) The chance of a chip killing flaw is proportional to the area of the chip. 2) The cost of manufacturing each chip is proportional to the area of the chip. 3) The time to transmit a signal across a chip is proportional to the length of the chip. We can build multi-chip and multi-core setups, but they are slower due to between CPU communication overheads. 4) Clock distribution is a challenge over a large chip (this may possibly be solved by clockless chip designs in the future).
I'm sure there are more, those are just the ones off the top of my head.
To summarize the portion of that article of interest: A silicon atom is.3 nm across. We are currently building transistor devices on 45nm processes. So if we reduce the process size to a single atom (and that's being generous: how do we control a device composed of one atom?), we'd achieve 150x density, in two directions, which would be 22,500 times improvement. That's enough for less than 15 more doublings, but I'll be generouse and give you the full 15. So if Moore's law is 18 months (and heck, I'll give you 24 months for doubling these days as things slow down, and remember when it was 12 months?) then we have 30 years left in Moore's law, before we hit 'devices' that are somehow magically made out of single atoms, yet still do the work we expect them to do.
It's relatively clear now that soon we'll have to learn how to build multilayer (3D) chips to keep making meaningful advances in conventional computer performance (there's always the possibility that quantum computers will make conventional computing performance meaningless).
1 a (1) : a binding custom or practice of a community : a rule of conduct or action prescribed or formally recognized as binding or enforced by a controlling authority
That's the very first definition of law from m-w.
So in particular, the controlling authority (Moore) has decreed that transistor density shall double at such and such a rate, and the industry has obeyed this rule of conduct.
I do not quite understand it when you say that an employer has a MORAL RESPONSIBILITY to pay you fairly for your work. The only thing the employer has an obligation to do is to pay you what you and he have negotiated. If you didn't negotiate a proper wage for yourself, then the fault is YOURS, and not the business owner, and you need to accept the responsibility for this error, rather than pushing off the responsibility on someone else.
To be clear: I told the employer what I thought the fair wage was. The employer in fact agreed, and even thought the fair wage was higher. The employer tried to get away with paying me less than what he and I agreed was the fair wage for my work.
Also, your statement assumes that there is some higher power that sets what the proper wage is for everyone, which is, of course, doesn't happen. Your proper "market value" is solely based on what someone is willing to pay you. Just because someone happens to want to pay you more doesn't necessarily mean that the first person didn't give you a fair wage. It just means that one particular company is willing to pay you X and another is willing to pay you Y. Who's to say that the second company isn't actually overpaying you, because you happen to have a expertise which that company needs more than the first company.
This ignores the widespread use of salary surveys for similar work, the evidence I used in determining what would be fair for them to pay me.
Let's say that the second company is actually overpaying you because you fill a particular niche which that company just needs to have. Are you going to refuse the additional bump in salary above your market value? After all, according to your moral structure, you are acting immorally by accepting this extra money. In your own words, you are "stealing" from them, because you are accepting a wage higher than you believe that you are worth.
I'd have to say yes. I would not do that. I would not accept a job that I felt paid me unfairly. I don't take advantage of people like that. Some people are more moral than others.
I have NEVER heard of someone going into their manager's office and saying, "You know, I really appreciate the fact that you value me so highly, but I think that I am being overpaid, so I am asking you to cut my salary so that you are only paying me what I am actually worth." However, according to your own morality, you would be a hippocrate if you didn't do such a thing. Despite your supposedly high moral character, I seriously doubt that you would ever do such a thing. Therefore, I find it hard to take your moralizing very seriously.
I'm not terribly surprised you've never heard of this. Rarely do employers pay their workers fairly, instead typically preferring to keep up corporate profits for shareholders. High upper management are typically the only overpaid workers, and that represents something like a tenth of a percent or less of the workforce. And it typically takes a very low sense of morality to make it into those positions. So I just have to say: I'm sorry if you can't imagine a person being so morally consistent in their life that they would take such an action. That saddens me.
In fairness, as I have said in another thread, human nature is such that we all have a higher regard for our abilities than what is warranted. Therefore, it is more likely that we THINK that are we underpaid than to believe that we are overpaid. So it is understandable that you did not consider the flip side that you may be "stealing money" from your employer by being overpaid.
I have absolutely considered it. Very carefully. I've actually done thorough analysis based on the overall employee numbers and income of our company to determine just how much money I make them out of the overall pot, and fortunately I can say I am at no risk of actually being overpaid. My work brings the company well over 100x what they pay me, yet my pay is comfortably below both the salary average for my position and the median salary required to buy a home in a poor neighborhood.
Well, you'd go down in the history books as having patented the warp drive for one thing. Which he will do, regardless of whether his patent is later overturned or not, or whether he ever commercializes or not.
Yeah, thanks buddy. I have a working model that I'm ready to commercialize, but I should wait 20 years while this faker has the technique locked up in a phony patent?
Interestingly enough, that was what I was expecting to read here too. I'm actually a bit disappointed, I thought that was a cool premise, and you know, GM really could stand to learn something considering how well WOW is doing while GM struggles.
No, the owner of the business has a (moral) responsibility to pay me fairly for my work. This was a matter of morals, not expediency for the business. Offering me less than they thought I was worth is stealing from me. Offering me less than they can possibly afford is not. Business does obey a certain set of rules, which is known as ethics, but what I'm describing is the difference between ethical and moral behavior. Their actions may have been fully ethical, but I don't think ethics is at all worth caring about in life, I care about acting morally.
The thing that bothered me about the situation was: I had explained to them just how much underpaid I was: 20k. They lowballed me at 5k, then 10k, apparently in spite of:
a) being able to offer 30k b) feeling it would be worth 30k to keep me c) knowing it would cost at least 20k in salary and presumably more in time and training to replace me
Bottom line was that their behavior showed a lack of respect for me and my contribution to the company. I would have been able to forgive their first offer as hasty had their second offer been reasonable, and perhaps both had their third offer not revealed just how much their prior offers were attempts to steal from me.
As a programmer fresh out of college, I took a position for a fairly low offer, because I thought the company had potential. That didn't pan out, and by the time I had 2 years experience, in spite of having received high % raises, I was roughly 20k/year underpaid given the market. So I told my employer I was underpaid, and what would they be willing to do about it. They offered 5k increase. I told them I would think about it. Next day 10k increase offered. I took a couple of interviews, and when asked, I told them what I made, and why I was looking, and that in spite of a 10k increase that my company was offering, I would still be underpaid. One company made me an offer with an increase of 25k, which was more than fair, so I took it. When I told my company I was leaving them, suddenly they had 30k to offer me, but by then they had burned their bridges with me. They pretty well fell apart within 6 months after I left, so I guess I really was valuable to them, too bad they were too stingy.
The point of my story: tell people what you want. Particularly your current employer if you are committed to leaving if they will not pay you more. Asking for a raise is one way to get one, they don't always just happen on schedule. Your story didn't make it clear if you've done this or not, and gave no evidence (other than the windows stuff) that you have other reason to want to leave them.
He obviously meant 'economies of scale'. That is, exactly what you are talking about: improvements in efficiency based on the ability to invest more in a superior design when you build one big power plant rather than a thousand little ones.
The backlash developed as a result of claiming, and hyping, for years, that this invention would transform the world. When 'IT' was finally released.... it was an expensive yawn. Something that offered little more to the user than a good gas powered or electric scooter, yet cost ten times as much. People had really worked themselves up believing that something big and wondrous was about to make all of our lives better. And hence the backlash.
Many smokers are extremely satisfied with their cigarette product, far more than the expert Doctors suggest they should be based on the incidence of cancer.
It may be their metrics that determine sales, but not necessarily their metrics that determine what good is, or even what is in fact good for them.
Yep, as long as cocaine buyers are happy with their baking soda cut, who cares?
Seriously, there's a reason that we have truth in advertising laws. They're an attempt to keep people from getting stuck with a crappy product even if they don't know how to tell the difference. We all suffer when crappy tv's have good sales, because that reduces the manufacturer's incentive to produce better tvs.
Slashdot Mirror
While this may be useful for some small program with an unusual algorithm to protect, any medium to large program would most likely be easier to replicate by redevelopment than by decompiling. That's why hardly anyone worries about obfuscating.
You have the bank sign some legal document that says they pay for the harm if your source code gets out due to their fault. The lawyers know how to take care of this. Get one. Problem solved.
But they are not in fact displaying the entire work, and are in fact offering an excerpt of something like one in sixteen pixels.
They're called public records, and one of the most vital principles of democracy is access to the records of your government. Would you like the government to be able to maintain secret lists of people they plan to exterminate? Besides, spam filters are so good now, who worries about spam any more? When spam was a problem I was receiving maybe 800-900 spams/day in my inbox, today that's down to one a week. But either way spam worries are not a good reason to give up important features of our democracy.
Thank goodness I have a sufficiently common name that googling for me is effectively pointless.
I'm sure they can write such an accept filter, the question is, do they know in advance they need to. If you're told in the morning 'we need to ban all usernames containing allah' by this afternoon because of this cartoon violence stuff going on, what would your implementation look like? Would you have taken the time for a surname search to find out every surname to unblock? And what uncommon name might you miss along the way? The problem is, you don't know what acceptable name you've accidentally filtered out until someone complains about being filtered. And then there's no way to fix it: the person is unhappy, the complaint is already public, and even if you turn around and fix the problem the next day or next week, nothing gained.
You obviously haven't spent enough 'face time' with real recruiters.
Unfortunately, AMD has no choice. They have to change sockets every time they upgrade memory types, because the memory controller is built into the chip. As a result, expect another socket change in 3 years to switch to DDR3.
There are a number of real reasons you don't want to go this direction as a chip maker:
1) The chance of a chip killing flaw is proportional to the area of the chip.
2) The cost of manufacturing each chip is proportional to the area of the chip.
3) The time to transmit a signal across a chip is proportional to the length of the chip. We can build multi-chip and multi-core setups, but they are slower due to between CPU communication overheads.
4) Clock distribution is a challenge over a large chip (this may possibly be solved by clockless chip designs in the future).
I'm sure there are more, those are just the ones off the top of my head.
http://www.hal-pc.org/journal/03feb/column/baby/ba by.html
.3 nm across. We are currently building transistor devices on 45nm processes. So if we reduce the process size to a single atom (and that's being generous: how do we control a device composed of one atom?), we'd achieve 150x density, in two directions, which would be 22,500 times improvement. That's enough for less than 15 more doublings, but I'll be generouse and give you the full 15. So if Moore's law is 18 months (and heck, I'll give you 24 months for doubling these days as things slow down, and remember when it was 12 months?) then we have 30 years left in Moore's law, before we hit 'devices' that are somehow magically made out of single atoms, yet still do the work we expect them to do.
To summarize the portion of that article of interest: A silicon atom is
It's relatively clear now that soon we'll have to learn how to build multilayer (3D) chips to keep making meaningful advances in conventional computer performance (there's always the possibility that quantum computers will make conventional computing performance meaningless).
It is a law:
1 a (1) : a binding custom or practice of a community : a rule of conduct or action prescribed or formally recognized as binding or enforced by a controlling authority
That's the very first definition of law from m-w.
So in particular, the controlling authority (Moore) has decreed that transistor density shall double at such and such a rate, and the industry has obeyed this rule of conduct.
To be clear: I told the employer what I thought the fair wage was. The employer in fact agreed, and even thought the fair wage was higher. The employer tried to get away with paying me less than what he and I agreed was the fair wage for my work.
This ignores the widespread use of salary surveys for similar work, the evidence I used in determining what would be fair for them to pay me.
I'd have to say yes. I would not do that. I would not accept a job that I felt paid me unfairly. I don't take advantage of people like that. Some people are more moral than others.
I'm not terribly surprised you've never heard of this. Rarely do employers pay their workers fairly, instead typically preferring to keep up corporate profits for shareholders. High upper management are typically the only overpaid workers, and that represents something like a tenth of a percent or less of the workforce. And it typically takes a very low sense of morality to make it into those positions. So I just have to say: I'm sorry if you can't imagine a person being so morally consistent in their life that they would take such an action. That saddens me.
I have absolutely considered it. Very carefully. I've actually done thorough analysis based on the overall employee numbers and income of our company to determine just how much money I make them out of the overall pot, and fortunately I can say I am at no risk of actually being overpaid. My work brings the company well over 100x what they pay me, yet my pay is comfortably below both the salary average for my position and the median salary required to buy a home in a poor neighborhood.
Well, you'd go down in the history books as having patented the warp drive for one thing. Which he will do, regardless of whether his patent is later overturned or not, or whether he ever commercializes or not.
Yeah, thanks buddy. I have a working model that I'm ready to commercialize, but I should wait 20 years while this faker has the technique locked up in a phony patent?
Interestingly enough, that was what I was expecting to read here too. I'm actually a bit disappointed, I thought that was a cool premise, and you know, GM really could stand to learn something considering how well WOW is doing while GM struggles.
No, the owner of the business has a (moral) responsibility to pay me fairly for my work. This was a matter of morals, not expediency for the business. Offering me less than they thought I was worth is stealing from me. Offering me less than they can possibly afford is not. Business does obey a certain set of rules, which is known as ethics, but what I'm describing is the difference between ethical and moral behavior. Their actions may have been fully ethical, but I don't think ethics is at all worth caring about in life, I care about acting morally.
The thing that bothered me about the situation was: I had explained to them just how much underpaid I was: 20k. They lowballed me at 5k, then 10k, apparently in spite of:
a) being able to offer 30k
b) feeling it would be worth 30k to keep me
c) knowing it would cost at least 20k in salary and presumably more in time and training to replace me
Bottom line was that their behavior showed a lack of respect for me and my contribution to the company. I would have been able to forgive their first offer as hasty had their second offer been reasonable, and perhaps both had their third offer not revealed just how much their prior offers were attempts to steal from me.
As a programmer fresh out of college, I took a position for a fairly low offer, because I thought the company had potential. That didn't pan out, and by the time I had 2 years experience, in spite of having received high % raises, I was roughly 20k/year underpaid given the market. So I told my employer I was underpaid, and what would they be willing to do about it. They offered 5k increase. I told them I would think about it. Next day 10k increase offered. I took a couple of interviews, and when asked, I told them what I made, and why I was looking, and that in spite of a 10k increase that my company was offering, I would still be underpaid. One company made me an offer with an increase of 25k, which was more than fair, so I took it. When I told my company I was leaving them, suddenly they had 30k to offer me, but by then they had burned their bridges with me. They pretty well fell apart within 6 months after I left, so I guess I really was valuable to them, too bad they were too stingy.
The point of my story: tell people what you want. Particularly your current employer if you are committed to leaving if they will not pay you more. Asking for a raise is one way to get one, they don't always just happen on schedule. Your story didn't make it clear if you've done this or not, and gave no evidence (other than the windows stuff) that you have other reason to want to leave them.
Mmmmmmmm .... carbohydrate laden heart sludge.
dung, air dry 12.0 MJ/kg (compare to 45.8 for automotive gasoline).
e mical/
http://hypertextbook.com/physics/matter/energy-ch
I'm not talking about competing with a vespa, the vespa has a lot more to offer. I'm talking about competing with the gas powered razor ($250 ish).
He obviously meant 'economies of scale'. That is, exactly what you are talking about: improvements in efficiency based on the ability to invest more in a superior design when you build one big power plant rather than a thousand little ones.
http://today.answers.com/topic/economies-of-scale
The backlash developed as a result of claiming, and hyping, for years, that this invention would transform the world. When 'IT' was finally released .... it was an expensive yawn. Something that offered little more to the user than a good gas powered or electric scooter, yet cost ten times as much. People had really worked themselves up believing that something big and wondrous was about to make all of our lives better. And hence the backlash.
Many smokers are extremely satisfied with their cigarette product, far more than the expert Doctors suggest they should be based on the incidence of cancer.
It may be their metrics that determine sales, but not necessarily their metrics that determine what good is, or even what is in fact good for them.
Yep, as long as cocaine buyers are happy with their baking soda cut, who cares?
Seriously, there's a reason that we have truth in advertising laws. They're an attempt to keep people from getting stuck with a crappy product even if they don't know how to tell the difference. We all suffer when crappy tv's have good sales, because that reduces the manufacturer's incentive to produce better tvs.