The slander would actually be my biggest concern. In the current market having a C*O wandering around the golf course telling his buddies you're a cyberterrorist who he's reported to the FBI would be, well, not good.
It may be worth having a lawyer draft a letter explaining the salient points, including some advice to the CEO not go spreading malicious rumours.
Note that you should never do that sort of thing yourself - its very easy to drift from (perfectly legitimately) expressing your concerns and knowledge of your right to protect your reputation into the territory of threats...
Actually depends. GPs seem to be OK, but there are some nasty stories around some specialists acting like a cartel.
Plus the present New Zealand government would be a great deal more willing to intervene with the heavy hand of legislation than the present Australian government, which helps keep them in line.
Oh yeah. It was the stupid upper management that couldn't get designs to tape out successfully. It was the stupid upper management that delivered cards with messed up RGB output and failed to notice it in testing. It was stupid upper management that ignored the AGP spec when designing cards. Of course, how stupid of me!
And here was I thinking that if the chip teams can't even get red signals coming out of the red outputs on a DAC, it might be their fault!
It's interesting that the writer starts out slamming the CEO for not understanding technology and implies that his decisions to try to follow the market for single-board solutions was to blame for the company's demise, but it becomes clear the core problems is the technical teams were incompetant - unable to execute. Chipsets that never worked, DACs that had the colour round the wrong way, boards that were out of spec for AGP support, you name it.
1 - By the time the Voodoo 3 was out, the writing was on the wall. People were beginning to notice better image quality and features from NVIDIA and ATI.
The reason it (the story) didn't mention Glide was the whole piece was a whine trying to blame management for 3dfx's failure - when it was pretty clear that the technical teams were consistenly failing to deliver.
Depends. I know a Brazilian who's having a hard time because New Zealand is antsy about accepting Brazilian qualifications - she has to work under supervision for a while, and places which are screaming for staff in the papers won't take her on on that basis.
OTOH, I believe quals from places like the States and UK are more likely to be taken at face value.
The only way a lot of the KDE guys would be happy is if RH excised GNOME, ditched every gtk+ app, fired everyone who worked on GNOME, and ran a Stalinesque show trial where everyone publicly humiliated themselves for having ever dared to do anything other than pour money into KDE.
Well, obviously Oracle is fucked and should be replaced by the mighty MySQL, since you'll get diddly performance out of it without ANALYZEing tables and indexes periodically.
Now, there are some surprises in how the PG optimiser deals with queries on indexed tables, but having to ANALYZE tables to get the full benefit ain't one of them.
You can look at PostgreSQL's pgaccess (which is OK, not that flash). ToRA now works with PostgreSQL and MySQL as well as Oracle, and is like a (very, very slow) TOAD.
is feature X worth the price differential between what you pay now ($0 for gpl license)
Or, of course, you could take off your blinkers and look and the number of real RDBMSes which are freely available. Why bother with a sub-standard product when you can have PostgreSQL, SAPDB, or Firebird?
Even where it may be an acceptable substitute (you want to do all your stuff in client side code and don't care about data integrity), if you already have a squad of DB2 or SQLServer DBAs, it may be cheaper to use what you've already got than retrain them for another DB.
In New Zealand law, I believe the placement of unenforable clauses has been rule, in the past, to invalidate other clauses, leaving default employment law coverage in place. So, for example, if you have a legit restraint of trade (no poaching clients) with illegitiate clauses (you may not work for any company in any related field in a 50 km radius of the city you currently work in, a real clause from one of mine), you can poach clients, because that's been struck down.
The courts here have ruled that way in an effort to prevent contracts being loaded up with rubbish; I've seen companies respond by then explicity state that provisions struck down shall not affect the validity of other provisions. I'm not sure why they feel trying to contract out of the law of the land will work, but there you are.
(Usual disclaimers apply - IANAL, consult your lawyer, etc).
To reiterate: if bufoons in HR departments and managerial roles spent this time on thinking of ways to keep the staff happy, they'd find far fewer retention problems.
I can work for whoever the hell I want to work for.
This is true in New Zealand to a large extent. The courts have consistently ruled that restraints of trade in employee contracts (a) cannot stop someone earning a living in their chosen field and (b) must be specifically compensated (that is, if you want me to sit on my hands for six months, you have to pay me something for that six months, not just claim my regular salary covers it).
The only provisions which have been consistently upheld here are the ones relating to forbidding employees from soliciting clients or co-workers from their now ex-employer. Also, all bets are off in the case of redundancy (you can't sack someone and then prevent them from earning a living).
Unfortunately, the popularity of the absurdly facistic contracts becoming standard in the US ("We own everything you've ever thought of now aand for ever and you can never work for anyone doing anything more meaningful than burger-flipping again") has influenced many New Zealand companies in the direction of putting illegal provisions in their emploment contracts - either because they're too stupid to consult a competant employment lawyer, or because they're cynically hoping the threat of legal action will allow them to beat employees into line.
If companies put a fraction of the effort they put into trying to terrorise employees into making them happy while they're still at the company they'd probably get better retention of key personel.
The difference is that Apple want to sell me yesterday's performance at today's price. If Apple would sell me a 800 MHz G4 for what it costs to build a low-end P4/Athlon system with a budget GeForce 4 card, I might be interested.
(As is, I'm still doodling along with an 800 MHz Athlon. The only things I'd consider buying is a cheap second hand formerly high end GeForce 2/GeForce 3 to replace my GeForce 256 or a modern IDE drive to replace my aging Fast SCSI Barracudas).
A client of mine uses a product which ships a binary-only plug-in. They haven't qualified a plug-in for Apache 2.0.x, so that's that. Vignette's software is pretty popular. Add in products like Websphere, Oracle iAS, and all the other proprietary tools that flocked to Apache and you've got a solid chunk of the market.
Personally, I haven't upgrade either of my personalservers, because I fail to see any real benefit from doing so. Both are on seperate 128Kbit links with adequate horsepower to serve pages behind them, so why mess with a new mod_perl?
Replacing it can be harder. I used to work in newspaper publishing; the core editorial systems of one employer were old ATEX J11 systems with a proprietary, tightly integrated OS and application suite. Over time, various aspects of the system were offloaded to more modern systems (eg, PostScript output and integration with graphics from desktop systems had dedicated AIX systems, imagesetters driven by PostScript RIPs, dumb terminals run from dedicated I/O boards replaced with terminal emulators on the desktop).
Despite all this tweaking, the crufty old systems stayed in place. Why? Well, on each of these old boxes, we could support 25-30 journos and the systems just worked, grinding out newspapers day after day.
People kept talking about replacing them, not least because we had to train up operators and engineers on them every time new staff came in, parts were hard to come by (the standards-not-compatible SCSI and ethernet interfaces were picky about what they talked to, and the filesystem could only address 600 MB of disk per system), and they used huge amounts of power and floor space.
For the three years I worked there and in the three years hence no-one has been able to deliver an editorial system that just works. When vendors rolled their rigged demos in, they crash. The major vendors like CyberGraphics and ATEX couldn't point to successful implementations of their new systems producing a decent number of newspapers on the basis of more than one edition per day.
Would it have been nice to have a Unix or Windows based system? Sure. Reduced overheads and training burdens, able to buy the latest and greatest hardware, and so on. But no-one could actually deliver something that worked better than the crufty old J11 systems.
NASA are probably in a similar bind; it's a very familiar problem: old systems developed by tight, focused, skilled teams and developed over the years are very, very hard to replace.
Slashdot Mirror
The slander would actually be my biggest concern. In the current market having a C*O wandering around the golf course telling his buddies you're a cyberterrorist who he's reported to the FBI would be, well, not good.
It may be worth having a lawyer draft a letter explaining the salient points, including some advice to the CEO not go spreading malicious rumours.
Note that you should never do that sort of thing yourself - its very easy to drift from (perfectly legitimately) expressing your concerns and knowledge of your right to protect your reputation into the territory of threats...
Actually depends. GPs seem to be OK, but there are some nasty stories around some specialists acting like a cartel.
Plus the present New Zealand government would be a great deal more willing to intervene with the heavy hand of legislation than the present Australian government, which helps keep them in line.
Oh yeah. It was the stupid upper management that couldn't get designs to tape out successfully. It was the stupid upper management that delivered cards with messed up RGB output and failed to notice it in testing. It was stupid upper management that ignored the AGP spec when designing cards. Of course, how stupid of me!
And here was I thinking that if the chip teams can't even get red signals coming out of the red outputs on a DAC, it might be their fault!
It's interesting that the writer starts out slamming the CEO for not understanding technology and implies that his decisions to try to follow the market for single-board solutions was to blame for the company's demise, but it becomes clear the core problems is the technical teams were incompetant - unable to execute. Chipsets that never worked, DACs that had the colour round the wrong way, boards that were out of spec for AGP support, you name it.
1 - By the time the Voodoo 3 was out, the writing was on the wall. People were beginning to notice better image quality and features from NVIDIA and ATI.
The reason it (the story) didn't mention Glide was the whole piece was a whine trying to blame management for 3dfx's failure - when it was pretty clear that the technical teams were consistenly failing to deliver.
Depends. I know a Brazilian who's having a hard time because New Zealand is antsy about accepting Brazilian qualifications - she has to work under supervision for a while, and places which are screaming for staff in the papers won't take her on on that basis.
OTOH, I believe quals from places like the States and UK are more likely to be taken at face value.
They can avoid retiring. Move to somewhere sane that wants doctors. Like New Zealand.
The only way a lot of the KDE guys would be happy is if RH excised GNOME, ditched every gtk+ app, fired everyone who worked on GNOME, and ran a Stalinesque show trial where everyone publicly humiliated themselves for having ever dared to do anything other than pour money into KDE.
Hmm. Nikon employee disses Canon, Kodak products. Nikon fanboy takes them at face value without reading the articles.
News at 11.
Well, obviously Oracle is fucked and should be replaced by the mighty MySQL, since you'll get diddly performance out of it without ANALYZEing tables and indexes periodically.
Now, there are some surprises in how the PG optimiser deals with queries on indexed tables, but having to ANALYZE tables to get the full benefit ain't one of them.
You can look at PostgreSQL's pgaccess (which is OK, not that flash). ToRA now works with PostgreSQL and MySQL as well as Oracle, and is like a (very, very slow) TOAD.
Of course. That's why IBM diss Linux. Wouldn't wan't to upset their AIX team.
Perhaps IBM don't want to look like dicks by promoting things that don't work for the customers they typically deal with.
Or, of course, you could take off your blinkers and look and the number of real RDBMSes which are freely available. Why bother with a sub-standard product when you can have PostgreSQL, SAPDB, or Firebird?
Frankly, Berkley/GNU DB is more robust than vanilla MySQL for transactional integrity.
Even where it may be an acceptable substitute (you want to do all your stuff in client side code and don't care about data integrity), if you already have a squad of DB2 or SQLServer DBAs, it may be cheaper to use what you've already got than retrain them for another DB.
In New Zealand law, I believe the placement of unenforable clauses has been rule, in the past, to invalidate other clauses, leaving default employment law coverage in place. So, for example, if you have a legit restraint of trade (no poaching clients) with illegitiate clauses (you may not work for any company in any related field in a 50 km radius of the city you currently work in, a real clause from one of mine), you can poach clients, because that's been struck down.
The courts here have ruled that way in an effort to prevent contracts being loaded up with rubbish; I've seen companies respond by then explicity state that provisions struck down shall not affect the validity of other provisions. I'm not sure why they feel trying to contract out of the law of the land will work, but there you are.
(Usual disclaimers apply - IANAL, consult your lawyer, etc).
To reiterate: if bufoons in HR departments and managerial roles spent this time on thinking of ways to keep the staff happy, they'd find far fewer retention problems.
This is true in New Zealand to a large extent. The courts have consistently ruled that restraints of trade in employee contracts (a) cannot stop someone earning a living in their chosen field and (b) must be specifically compensated (that is, if you want me to sit on my hands for six months, you have to pay me something for that six months, not just claim my regular salary covers it).
The only provisions which have been consistently upheld here are the ones relating to forbidding employees from soliciting clients or co-workers from their now ex-employer. Also, all bets are off in the case of redundancy (you can't sack someone and then prevent them from earning a living).
Unfortunately, the popularity of the absurdly facistic contracts becoming standard in the US ("We own everything you've ever thought of now aand for ever and you can never work for anyone doing anything more meaningful than burger-flipping again") has influenced many New Zealand companies in the direction of putting illegal provisions in their emploment contracts - either because they're too stupid to consult a competant employment lawyer, or because they're cynically hoping the threat of legal action will allow them to beat employees into line.
If companies put a fraction of the effort they put into trying to terrorise employees into making them happy while they're still at the company they'd probably get better retention of key personel.
The difference is that Apple want to sell me yesterday's performance at today's price. If Apple would sell me a 800 MHz G4 for what it costs to build a low-end P4/Athlon system with a budget GeForce 4 card, I might be interested.
(As is, I'm still doodling along with an 800 MHz Athlon. The only things I'd consider buying is a cheap second hand formerly high end GeForce 2/GeForce 3 to replace my GeForce 256 or a modern IDE drive to replace my aging Fast SCSI Barracudas).
Why would you get cancer? They can take a nuclear blast. I doubt the microwave is going to bug anyone in the bunker.
If you have a hankering for a wee plot o' land and can telecommute, 2 acres and a 200' radio mast would be a bargain for $25k.
No sir, can't shoot fast moving objects with digital cameras. Especially not this one.
Pretty much all the high-end cameras use firewire.
I'm sure it's a trivial piece of work that would take less time to write than to whine about on slashdot.
A client of mine uses a product which ships a binary-only plug-in. They haven't qualified a plug-in for Apache 2.0.x, so that's that. Vignette's software is pretty popular. Add in products like Websphere, Oracle iAS, and all the other proprietary tools that flocked to Apache and you've got a solid chunk of the market.
Personally, I haven't upgrade either of my personal servers, because I fail to see any real benefit from doing so. Both are on seperate 128Kbit links with adequate horsepower to serve pages behind them, so why mess with a new mod_perl?
Replacing it can be harder. I used to work in newspaper publishing; the core editorial systems of one employer were old ATEX J11 systems with a proprietary, tightly integrated OS and application suite. Over time, various aspects of the system were offloaded to more modern systems (eg, PostScript output and integration with graphics from desktop systems had dedicated AIX systems, imagesetters driven by PostScript RIPs, dumb terminals run from dedicated I/O boards replaced with terminal emulators on the desktop).
Despite all this tweaking, the crufty old systems stayed in place. Why? Well, on each of these old boxes, we could support 25-30 journos and the systems just worked, grinding out newspapers day after day.
People kept talking about replacing them, not least because we had to train up operators and engineers on them every time new staff came in, parts were hard to come by (the standards-not-compatible SCSI and ethernet interfaces were picky about what they talked to, and the filesystem could only address 600 MB of disk per system), and they used huge amounts of power and floor space.
For the three years I worked there and in the three years hence no-one has been able to deliver an editorial system that just works. When vendors rolled their rigged demos in, they crash. The major vendors like CyberGraphics and ATEX couldn't point to successful implementations of their new systems producing a decent number of newspapers on the basis of more than one edition per day.
Would it have been nice to have a Unix or Windows based system? Sure. Reduced overheads and training burdens, able to buy the latest and greatest hardware, and so on. But no-one could actually deliver something that worked better than the crufty old J11 systems.
NASA are probably in a similar bind; it's a very familiar problem: old systems developed by tight, focused, skilled teams and developed over the years are very, very hard to replace.