To abuse an old quote: "No one ever got fired for buying a database from Oracle."
I used to work for one of the OODBMS firms mentioned, and a lot of our customers at that time were universities and a few companies doing small pilot projects with the database. But if you're an IT manager doing a serious database project, which vendor are you going to choose: a multi-billion dollar company like Oracle, or a relatively tiny OODBMS vendor that might not be around in a few years?
Of course not. It's much more convenient for Ashcroft and his ilk to use the entertainment industry -- and the video game industry in particular -- as a whipping boy. After all, those groups typically don't give much in the way of either money or votes to the GOP.
IMO, it is reasonable to expect that an employer will not want you working for a competitor, regardless of whichever side ends the employer/employee relationship, and regardless of whether a NDA or NCA was signed or not. And even if it wasn't reasonable, if a former employer decides to sue you for working for a competitor, it's going to cost you money to fight it (unless you were savvy enough to get the new employer to agree to pay any legal bills that might arise from the situation), which makes any victory over that employer a pyhrric (sp?) victory at best.
That is one reason why it pays to not get too wedded to one particular problem domain. Each job that I've had, I've been working in a different problem space, and have learned something from each one. It's easy to do in software; I don't know how easy this is for other professions. In my experience, knowing the details of a particular language or OS seems to be more important to prospective employers than the specifics of the kind of work you've actually done in the past.
Let me see if I got this straight. The legislator sponsoring this bill has an AOL account. He or his kids got some pr0n/spam (a long-time "feature" of the service, as this former user can attest) that somehow was not blocked by AOL's "parental controls". And he has filed a bill to regulate the PC manufacturers.
Did I miss something here? Sounds like the problem is his ISP, not his PC.
www.softpro.com would be another place to check out. They have stores in Massachusetts and Colorado, but do online orders, as well.
Re:outlook is actually pretty horrible....
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Bad News from Yahoo
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This is the first time that I have heard that a "loose money supply" and this monstrous corporate debt are to blame for the current problems. Just curious, but are there any actual references to support these claims?
As for laying all of this at Greenspan's feet, I'm not sure that that is at all fair -- he has been warning of "irrational exuberance" in the stock market for quite some time. No one paid much attention to him then, even when tech companies like Yahoo were trading at P/E ratios measured in the hundreds (or thousands in some cases). Meanwhile, prices of "Old Economy" stocks -- even those businesses with sound business plans that actually were growing -- stagnated during this last "boom", while investors jacked the stock prices of the tech companies into the stratosphere. Smartmoney ran an article about a year ago on how some investors were blaming Greenspan for their portfolios tanking. Guess what those portfolios were loaded with?
Greenspan's philosophy has been to keep inflation low -- something that a loose money supply would not help. In fact, he hiked interest rates several times during 1999 trying to keep the economy from overheating (and therefore keep inflation at bay). If anything, he's now being criticized more for going too far in those hikes (especially in the face of then-rising oil prices), than for an overly loose money supply.
The elimination of the "fair catch" rule was a massive bunch of hype; the XFL simply replaced that rule with the "5-yard halo" rule (where the punting team must stay five yards away from the punt returner until he touches the ball -- I think this is used in college football). I saw one of these called in one of the Sunday games, and it was a five-yard penalty.
First, don't ask for an estimate until the engineers have some ideas regarding a design, especially if they haven't done something like this before. It's nearly impossible to figure out how long a task is going to take until the engineers have had a chance to think about it for a bit.
(And, btw, don't presume to know what should be simple, "with no new technologies". If it really is, then the engineers will figure out that they've "been there, done that," without having that dictated to them.)
In many larger projects, there typically is a designated project lead, who is responsible for gathering and tracking project schedules, and should be technical enough to know when a given estimate is too low (or too padded). That should be your point of contact. Let them gather the estimates.
Also, make sure your product requirements are VERY specific, VERY clear and VERY complete BEFORE you ask for an estimate. Often, the engineers won't give an estimate because they have no idea what marketing wants in the first place, because the published requirements are far too vague and/or incomplete. I've worked on projects where no one thought of how anyone was supposed to support the software once it was running (and where developing the necessary tools added about eight weeks to the schedule, much to the chagrin of the business types).
Finally, even if you don't think you're going to get a usable estimate from the engineers, ask anyways. If you set a schedule without the input of the technical staff, they definitely will feel more free to blow off your estimates, since they didn't buy into it in the first place.
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To abuse an old quote: "No one ever got fired for buying a database from Oracle."
I used to work for one of the OODBMS firms mentioned, and a lot of our customers at that time were universities and a few companies doing small pilot projects with the database. But if you're an IT manager doing a serious database project, which vendor are you going to choose: a multi-billion dollar company like Oracle, or a relatively tiny OODBMS vendor that might not be around in a few years?
I'm sure no politician will EVER support this,...
Of course not. It's much more convenient for Ashcroft and his ilk to use the entertainment industry -- and the video game industry in particular -- as a whipping boy. After all, those groups typically don't give much in the way of either money or votes to the GOP.
IMO, it is reasonable to expect that an employer will not want you working for a competitor, regardless of whichever side ends the employer/employee relationship, and regardless of whether a NDA or NCA was signed or not. And even if it wasn't reasonable, if a former employer decides to sue you for working for a competitor, it's going to cost you money to fight it (unless you were savvy enough to get the new employer to agree to pay any legal bills that might arise from the situation), which makes any victory over that employer a pyhrric (sp?) victory at best.
That is one reason why it pays to not get too wedded to one particular problem domain. Each job that I've had, I've been working in a different problem space, and have learned something from each one. It's easy to do in software; I don't know how easy this is for other professions. In my experience, knowing the details of a particular language or OS seems to be more important to prospective employers than the specifics of the kind of work you've actually done in the past.
Good question -- I think the mother would have had to get the police involved first.
Let me see if I got this straight. The legislator sponsoring this bill has an AOL account. He or his kids got some pr0n/spam (a long-time "feature" of the service, as this former user can attest) that somehow was not blocked by AOL's "parental controls". And he has filed a bill to regulate the PC manufacturers.
Did I miss something here? Sounds like the problem is his ISP, not his PC.
www.softpro.com would be another place to check out. They have stores in Massachusetts and Colorado, but do online orders, as well.
This is the first time that I have heard that a "loose money supply" and this monstrous corporate debt are to blame for the current problems. Just curious, but are there any actual references to support these claims?
As for laying all of this at Greenspan's feet, I'm not sure that that is at all fair -- he has been warning of "irrational exuberance" in the stock market for quite some time. No one paid much attention to him then, even when tech companies like Yahoo were trading at P/E ratios measured in the hundreds (or thousands in some cases). Meanwhile, prices of "Old Economy" stocks -- even those businesses with sound business plans that actually were growing -- stagnated during this last "boom", while investors jacked the stock prices of the tech companies into the stratosphere. Smartmoney ran an article about a year ago on how some investors were blaming Greenspan for their portfolios tanking. Guess what those portfolios were loaded with?
Greenspan's philosophy has been to keep inflation low -- something that a loose money supply would not help. In fact, he hiked interest rates several times during 1999 trying to keep the economy from overheating (and therefore keep inflation at bay). If anything, he's now being criticized more for going too far in those hikes (especially in the face of then-rising oil prices), than for an overly loose money supply.
The elimination of the "fair catch" rule was a massive bunch of hype; the XFL simply replaced that rule with the "5-yard halo" rule (where the punting team must stay five yards away from the punt returner until he touches the ball -- I think this is used in college football). I saw one of these called in one of the Sunday games, and it was a five-yard penalty.
First, don't ask for an estimate until the engineers have some ideas regarding a design, especially if they haven't done something like this before. It's nearly impossible to figure out how long a task is going to take until the engineers have had a chance to think about it for a bit.
(And, btw, don't presume to know what should be simple, "with no new technologies". If it really is, then the engineers will figure out that they've "been there, done that," without having that dictated to them.)
In many larger projects, there typically is a designated project lead, who is responsible for gathering and tracking project schedules, and should be technical enough to know when a given estimate is too low (or too padded). That should be your point of contact. Let them gather the estimates.
Also, make sure your product requirements are VERY specific, VERY clear and VERY complete BEFORE you ask for an estimate. Often, the engineers won't give an estimate because they have no idea what marketing wants in the first place, because the published requirements are far too vague and/or incomplete. I've worked on projects where no one thought of how anyone was supposed to support the software once it was running (and where developing the necessary tools added about eight weeks to the schedule, much to the chagrin of the business types).
Finally, even if you don't think you're going to get a usable estimate from the engineers, ask anyways. If you set a schedule without the input of the technical staff, they definitely will feel more free to blow off your estimates, since they didn't buy into it in the first place.