Unfortunately, juries aren't selected completely randomly. Lawyers for both sides get a chance to reject people they consider "biased". I got to watch this happen on a trial I sat on as an alternate that involved some pretty heavy expert testimony involving biomechanics. I remember watching them throw out anyone with any sort of scientific knowledge. Hell, the plaintiff's lawyer told me after the trial that the only reason he hadn't sent me home was that he had run out of challenges. Pretty sad, considering that science background is all in cognitive science, and I don't know a heck of a lot about biomechanics!
What this means here is that you can bet that anyone with any sort of computer background won't make it on that jury. What you'll get is a panel of neophytes whose only knowledge of Bill Gates is what they read in the papers. These will be the people who think that Bill Gates invented the PC, and then went on to invent the internet.
Personally, I'd much rather a judge were trying this case, for this very reason.
(I've actually used Dr-Dos, BTW. It was round one in my quest to have a Non-MS PC. I'm on round three, now.)
Access is far more of a problem then NT. A good comparison would be Access:SQL Server::Win95:WinNT. Access is horrendous. I wouldn't trust it with my todo list.
You certainly can run an e-Commerce server on NT. My company sells an NT payments system, which is essentially the brick-and-morter version of an e-Commerce system. I'm not about to get into an argument as to whether or not NT is better for this because, quite frankly, I have my own doubts about that. (More than doubts, actually.) But that does not mean that NT isn't workable. We've got numerous installations that stay up for months, and given the load they get, I see no reason why an NT e-Commerce system wouldn't be similar.
One thing people need to remember is that "not as good" is not the same as "unworkable".
The whole idea seems silly to me. One would think that anyone who was so concerned at being out of touch that they'd want an internet connection for a cab ride would have a wireless modem already.
How long is the average cab ride? It just doesn't seem like it would be long enough to justify wasting money on this thing. It is like all those airport kiosks. If you are going to habitually spend $2/hour for connectivity, just buy that damn wireless modem?
If you can't convert the whole damn thing to Linux, I strongly suggest you look into MSDE. MSDE ("MicroSoft Data Engine") was released with Office 2000 and is essentially the core of Microsoft SQL server without all the admin stuff. It also lets you access *.mdb files without Access. (Or so I'm told. I haven't tried that part of it myself.) Access is truly a dog, but SQL Server performs pretty well and from what you've said of your app, should easily handle your load. (From what I understand, Oracle is superior, but it isn't exactly cheap.) MSDE does not have any runtime charge like SQL Server, so there is really no cost to use it. (More Info)
(Of course, being Microsoft, there's already been one service pack...)
But then, the uptime of the average human brain only runs about 66%...
But in any case, can you imagine the effect when the Microsoft Brain project makes it to the bladder? oh my...
Anyway, all this reminds me of a good book I read recently in which everyone was implanted with "brainware" at birth that did a lot of things mentioned here, like damping panic attacks and such. Of course, there were the requisite brain viruses, and hackers who illegally modified their own brainware.
The article skimps on the important details quite a bit. What kind of molecule are we talking about, here? O2? Hemoglobin? I mean, there isn't really any size limit to how big a molecule can be, so might not even be all that interesting.
Just a day or so ago, it was reported that a teenage old boy was put in jail for writing a Halloween story in which his classmates and teacher were killed. This, despite receiving an "A" on the paper and despite the fact that it was obviously a work of fiction, not intent.
Why? Well, it was one of those "zero-tolerance" things passed in the aftermath of Columbine. Few oppose such things because, of course, only people writing threatening material would be effected...
Well.
Anyway, this is pretty much the typical "criminals don't deserve rights" argument. The trouble with that argument is that it fails to understand that the rights aren't there to protect criminals. They are there to protect people mistaken for criminals...
The reason to oppose things like this is because it puts too much power in the hands of people who perhaps might not be able to tell the difference between a serious terrorist threat and an innocuous one. We already know that some police officials may have trouble telling the difference between a game company and system crackers (see Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown). Do you real want to trust them going through random e-mail?
"If you are talking about bombing the Whitehouse in your e-mails, frankly, I want the government to take a closer look at what you are doing."
Hmmm... I once used the phrase "Take a shotgun to the Oval Office", or words to that effect, on a public BBS. Of course, I was describing the "Duke Nuke'm" add-on "Duke it out in DC". Do we trust the people in charge here to understand the intent? I sure as hell don't! (Again, see The Hacker Crackdown.)
That, to me at least, indicates that TCO for Windows is lower, at least sometimes.
If you've already got a trained staff of windows programs, you bet it is lower, at least in the short term, given the difficulty of hiring good people these days.
I was talking about a very particular sort of situation. The word "actually" in the phrase...for a Windows shop, it may actually be more expensive... should give you a pretty good indication of my opinion of the TCO on the average.
God, you guys are touchy. All I was saying was that TCO is important. Apparently no one read far enough to see this in the original post:
Of course, their statistical analysis of how Windows compares to other OSes in TCO is complete crap, but the basic idea, that it is the total cost of ownership that is important, is correct.
I think some Linux advocates would do better if they didn't act like a bull seeing red every time the see the word Microsoft.
But the point is that all of those things are not equal between different OSes. Different OSes require different sized support staffs with different knowledge sets.
FTP, NFS, WWW installs of Red Hat, along with the software RH is working on to automate multiple installs == non-issue here too.
Well, uh, no. It is hardly a non-issue given that the automation software you mention isn't here yet. It should be obvious that it is cheaper to use an automated tool that requires little knowledge then it does to maintaing ftp scripts. You can't just wave your hands and pretend it is all equal.
Quite frankly, Windows would kick Linux's ass in all of these respects if it weren't for one simple thing: their software tends not to work as advertised. Their automated tools are great, and would bring the TCO down to the figures Microsoft quotes, if it weren't for the fact that the savings quickly get eaten up trying to get the latest %$#^$ service pack to work.
Over the last few years, Microsoft has been playing up the idea of "Total Cost of Ownership" and playing down the actual cost of the product. And you know what? They are right. It is the TCO that is important. You can say that Linux cost $0 all you want, but you still have to pay the salary of the guy who downloads it. You still have to pay to burn CDROMs to install multiple machines. You still need to pay your support staff. Start adding up those costs for any OS, and $200 per seat quickly becomes a drop in the bucket.
Presumably they feel that they've made this argument successfully, and that the price of the OS itself is no longer that important.
Of course, their statistical analysis of how Windows compares to other OSes in TCO is complete crap, but the basic idea, that it is the total cost of ownership that is important, is correct.
Linux may be cheap, but it ain't free (as in beer) in the sense that you still need a bartender. And the truth is, for a Windows shop, it may actually be more expensive, given retraining costs and the tightness of the labor market in technical areas.
I'm always a little leery of theories that tell us what we want to believe. And you have to admit that the idea that the oil supply is endless is mighty attractive in many circles.
If everyone came out to vote, we could ensure that the likelihood of a stupid candidate being elected would drop.
I don't know about that... The whole definition of apathy is not caring. If you demand a choice from someone who doesn't care, you aren't going to get a lot of thought in the decision. I suspect that the likelihood of a stupid candidate would increase, as you get a bunch of people who are voting based on little more than name recognition. I mean, if someone isn't putting in the effort to go down to the polling station, or filling out an absentee ballot (which takes what, ten mintutes?) are we really going to expect them into doing any sort of research into what their voting on?
That is all well and true, but what I think most people don't realize is that our current voting system is wildly insecure. Hell, my wife changed her name five years ago, and she *still* gets voter pamplets in both names every year. As far as we can tell, she could vote twice without anyone being the wiser (using absentee ballots).
When you register to vote this days, at least in California, there is almost no checking to ensure that you are a legal citizen and are not registered elsewhere. There was a big article on this in the San Francisco paper (I think) a year or so ago. Wish I could remember more, but the upshot of the whole thing was that it was pretty easy to register illegally.
I know it would work with me. I'm one of those guys who buys motherboards. I almost never buy complete systems. When I started playing around with Linux, I had one concern: cost. Having only a 28.8 modem, I went out and got the cheapest distribution I could find.
Had the motherboard come with one, I would have installed that, no question. I understand the distribution wars, but for me, it doesn't really matter. I'll work with what I've got, assuming it isn't utter crap. Put a free disk in front of me, and I'll use that until it becomes clear that it is not working. That's why I'm a Red Hat guy right now. It was cheapest and it works.
If you assume that there are a lot of people like me, then this is very smart on Corel's part. They'll get a lot of marketshare.
There are a lot of OS/2 boxes out there today. While OS/2 tanked in the consumer market, it did pretty well in vertical market applications. Back when Egghead Software (may it rest in peace) refused to sell OS/2 applications, their in-store server ran OS/2! That was pretty typical. Those sorts of installations don't change rapidly, so while I doubt that anyone is buying much in the way of new OS/2 boxes, I am sure that there are a lot of running OS/2 systems out there right this minute.
I doubt that either Be or IBM are likely to start giving their OSes free any time soon.
But yeah, it would be a great thing.
(Actually, IBM probably should start giving away OS/2. It isn't like they make much of their profit on it.)
I wish that at least some company, somewhere, would start a trend; so that you could walk into a computer store and select any of a cornucopia of OS for your new computer.
Oddly enough, this was IBM's original plan for the PC. But OS #2 was late, and the rest is history.
The original was top-down on the Apple][ and stressed tense situations (who could forget the fear of the SS storming in knowing only a grenade could take them out?) over rampant shooting.
I still remember holding up grunt soldiers for their bullets with an empty gun. Now that was cool.
One sad thought I had while watching the latest Star Wars (which I did enjoy quite a bit, by the way) was that with most "greatest loved tales", the authors rarely quit early enough.
Well, at least B5 was supposed to be dead by now. One of the things I liked about that show was that it had enough courage to plan an actual ending. Too bad the spin-off didn't fly.
Perhaps they just need to start spending the money on something entirely new for a change.
I gave up on Star Trek when the only solution they could come up with to solve writing problems was to bring in someone with bigger tits. (No joke, the TV went off at the last commercial break.) Since then, I have not been able to watch an episode all the way through. I've tried a couple of times, both Voyager and Deep Space 9, but the parts I've seen seem to have more to do with "The Young and the Restless" then they did with the shows, the original and The Next Generation, that used to be such the guilty pleasure. It all seemed to be about who was sleeping with who. And even worse, all of the "relationship" crap wasn't even original, but one more iteration of "having to understand their differences".
But then that has been the whole problem with the series since Voyager and even before. It is all "Been there, done that". I mean, how many times does the goddamn holodeck have to break before they decide that maybe, perhaps they should turn it off?
But then, how far down do ratings have to go before they hire a new writing staff? I mean, Babylon 5 managed to find writer...er...ok, maybe not, but Strasynski's not doing anything these days. Maybe he could teach a class or something.
Anyway, sorry for the incindiery post. I should probably stop now before I piss everyone completely off. But I wouldn't loathe the damn thing so much if I hadn't loved it in the first place.
(What really makes me sad is that every once in awhile, a really good SF show pops up, and then dies a quick death. Last year, I absolutely loved Brimstone, but it only lasted half a season. And yet they keep this decaying mess on year after year... Sorry. Bye. Probably ought to post AC.)
An issue that is doubly sticky when that new employer is you, yourself. You can't exactly unlearn confidential knowledge.
If I work for four years for company X, and then go off to form a competing company, I have something none of company X's competitors do. That is, I have a complete working knowledge of company X's source code.
(Of course, for most of the companies I've worked for, that would only have been good the amusement value, but you get the idea...)
And perhaps I can steal the customer because my costs are lower, those costs being lower because I don't have to train the guy doing all the work (me) the way my former employer did.
Why shouldn't you attempt to acquire a new customer, after all, you're the one who did the work.
It is very, very rare that one person in a company does all the work.
Much of it depends on the scope of the agreement. If we are talking about a narrow field that competes for a small group of customers, then I'd say that non-competes are understandable. It would be one thing to demand that an employee not sell general programming services for a year after quitting. It would be quite another to demand that an employee of, say, Borland's compiler division, not quit and join Microsoft's compiler design team. (And actual event.)
In addition, employees aren't always ethically free in these situations. If, for example, I worked for a web designer, became disgruntled, quit, contacted my former company's largest customer, and convinced them to switch to my new company, well, I don't see how that is particularlly "ethical". There the ones that did the work necessary to aquire the customers. Why should I profit off of that? I think that it is perfectly reasonable for a company to demand that I not deliberately go after their customers if I quit.
On the other hand, it should be obvious that with a reasonable agreement, I should be able to quit and go off and form my own web design company, as long as I don't deliberately try to take my former company's customers with me.
I can't vouch for it personally, but when my Yoga instructor had the surgery about a month ago, two other people piped up that they'd had it, and loved it. I'm currently saving up.
It cost her $4200, and she was out for less than a week.
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Unfortunately, juries aren't selected completely randomly. Lawyers for both sides get a chance to reject people they consider "biased". I got to watch this happen on a trial I sat on as an alternate that involved some pretty heavy expert testimony involving biomechanics. I remember watching them throw out anyone with any sort of scientific knowledge. Hell, the plaintiff's lawyer told me after the trial that the only reason he hadn't sent me home was that he had run out of challenges. Pretty sad, considering that science background is all in cognitive science, and I don't know a heck of a lot about biomechanics!
What this means here is that you can bet that anyone with any sort of computer background won't make it on that jury. What you'll get is a panel of neophytes whose only knowledge of Bill Gates is what they read in the papers. These will be the people who think that Bill Gates invented the PC, and then went on to invent the internet.
Personally, I'd much rather a judge were trying this case, for this very reason.
(I've actually used Dr-Dos, BTW. It was round one in my quest to have a Non-MS PC. I'm on round three, now.)
Access is far more of a problem then NT. A good comparison would be Access:SQL Server::Win95:WinNT. Access is horrendous. I wouldn't trust it with my todo list.
You certainly can run an e-Commerce server on NT. My company sells an NT payments system, which is essentially the brick-and-morter version of an e-Commerce system. I'm not about to get into an argument as to whether or not NT is better for this because, quite frankly, I have my own doubts about that. (More than doubts, actually.) But that does not mean that NT isn't workable. We've got numerous installations that stay up for months, and given the load they get, I see no reason why an NT e-Commerce system wouldn't be similar.
One thing people need to remember is that "not as good" is not the same as "unworkable".
The whole idea seems silly to me. One would think that anyone who was so concerned at being out of touch that they'd want an internet connection for a cab ride would have a wireless modem already.
How long is the average cab ride? It just doesn't seem like it would be long enough to justify wasting money on this thing. It is like all those airport kiosks. If you are going to habitually spend $2/hour for connectivity, just buy that damn wireless modem?
If you can't convert the whole damn thing to Linux, I strongly suggest you look into MSDE. MSDE ("MicroSoft Data Engine") was released with Office 2000 and is essentially the core of Microsoft SQL server without all the admin stuff. It also lets you access *.mdb files without Access. (Or so I'm told. I haven't tried that part of it myself.) Access is truly a dog, but SQL Server performs pretty well and from what you've said of your app, should easily handle your load. (From what I understand, Oracle is superior, but it isn't exactly cheap.) MSDE does not have any runtime charge like SQL Server, so there is really no cost to use it. (More Info)
(Of course, being Microsoft, there's already been one service pack...)
But then, the uptime of the average human brain only runs about 66%...
But in any case, can you imagine the effect when the Microsoft Brain project makes it to the bladder? oh my...
Anyway, all this reminds me of a good book I read recently in which everyone was implanted with "brainware" at birth that did a lot of things mentioned here, like damping panic attacks and such. Of course, there were the requisite brain viruses, and hackers who illegally modified their own brainware.
The article skimps on the important details quite a bit. What kind of molecule are we talking about, here? O2? Hemoglobin? I mean, there isn't really any size limit to how big a molecule can be, so might not even be all that interesting.
Just a day or so ago, it was reported that a teenage old boy was put in jail for writing a Halloween story in which his classmates and teacher were killed. This, despite receiving an "A" on the paper and despite the fact that it was obviously a work of fiction, not intent.
Why? Well, it was one of those "zero-tolerance" things passed in the aftermath of Columbine. Few oppose such things because, of course, only people writing threatening material would be effected...
Well.
Anyway, this is pretty much the typical "criminals don't deserve rights" argument. The trouble with that argument is that it fails to understand that the rights aren't there to protect criminals. They are there to protect people mistaken for criminals...
The reason to oppose things like this is because it puts too much power in the hands of people who perhaps might not be able to tell the difference between a serious terrorist threat and an innocuous one. We already know that some police officials may have trouble telling the difference between a game company and system crackers (see Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown). Do you real want to trust them going through random e-mail?
"If you are talking about bombing the Whitehouse in your e-mails, frankly, I want the government to take a closer look at what you are doing."
Hmmm... I once used the phrase "Take a shotgun to the Oval Office", or words to that effect, on a public BBS. Of course, I was describing the "Duke Nuke'm" add-on "Duke it out in DC". Do we trust the people in charge here to understand the intent? I sure as hell don't! (Again, see The Hacker Crackdown.)
That, to me at least, indicates that TCO for Windows is lower, at least sometimes.
...for a Windows shop, it may actually be more expensive... should give you a pretty good indication of my opinion of the TCO on the average.
If you've already got a trained staff of windows programs, you bet it is lower, at least in the short term, given the difficulty of hiring good people these days.
I was talking about a very particular sort of situation. The word "actually" in the phrase
God, you guys are touchy. All I was saying was that TCO is important. Apparently no one read far enough to see this in the original post:
Of course, their statistical analysis of how Windows compares to other OSes in TCO is complete crap, but the basic idea, that it is the total cost of ownership that is important, is correct.
I think some Linux advocates would do better if they didn't act like a bull seeing red every time the see the word Microsoft.
But the point is that all of those things are not equal between different OSes. Different OSes require different sized support staffs with different knowledge sets.
FTP, NFS, WWW installs of Red Hat, along with the software RH is working on to automate multiple installs == non-issue here too.
Well, uh, no. It is hardly a non-issue given that the automation software you mention isn't here yet. It should be obvious that it is cheaper to use an automated tool that requires little knowledge then it does to maintaing ftp scripts. You can't just wave your hands and pretend it is all equal.
Quite frankly, Windows would kick Linux's ass in all of these respects if it weren't for one simple thing: their software tends not to work as advertised. Their automated tools are great, and would bring the TCO down to the figures Microsoft quotes, if it weren't for the fact that the savings quickly get eaten up trying to get the latest %$#^$ service pack to work.
Over the last few years, Microsoft has been playing up the idea of "Total Cost of Ownership" and playing down the actual cost of the product. And you know what? They are right. It is the TCO that is important. You can say that Linux cost $0 all you want, but you still have to pay the salary of the guy who downloads it. You still have to pay to burn CDROMs to install multiple machines. You still need to pay your support staff. Start adding up those costs for any OS, and $200 per seat quickly becomes a drop in the bucket.
Presumably they feel that they've made this argument successfully, and that the price of the OS itself is no longer that important.
Of course, their statistical analysis of how Windows compares to other OSes in TCO is complete crap, but the basic idea, that it is the total cost of ownership that is important, is correct.
Linux may be cheap, but it ain't free (as in beer) in the sense that you still need a bartender. And the truth is, for a Windows shop, it may actually be more expensive, given retraining costs and the tightness of the labor market in technical areas.
I'm always a little leery of theories that tell us what we want to believe. And you have to admit that the idea that the oil supply is endless is mighty attractive in many circles.
If everyone came out to vote, we could ensure that the likelihood of a stupid candidate being elected would drop.
I don't know about that... The whole definition of apathy is not caring. If you demand a choice from someone who doesn't care, you aren't going to get a lot of thought in the decision. I suspect that the likelihood of a stupid candidate would increase, as you get a bunch of people who are voting based on little more than name recognition. I mean, if someone isn't putting in the effort to go down to the polling station, or filling out an absentee ballot (which takes what, ten mintutes?) are we really going to expect them into doing any sort of research into what their voting on?
That is all well and true, but what I think most people don't realize is that our current voting system is wildly insecure. Hell, my wife changed her name five years ago, and she *still* gets voter pamplets in both names every year. As far as we can tell, she could vote twice without anyone being the wiser (using absentee ballots).
When you register to vote this days, at least in California, there is almost no checking to ensure that you are a legal citizen and are not registered elsewhere. There was a big article on this in the San Francisco paper (I think) a year or so ago. Wish I could remember more, but the upshot of the whole thing was that it was pretty easy to register illegally.
I know it would work with me. I'm one of those guys who buys motherboards. I almost never buy complete systems. When I started playing around with Linux, I had one concern: cost. Having only a 28.8 modem, I went out and got the cheapest distribution I could find.
Had the motherboard come with one, I would have installed that, no question. I understand the distribution wars, but for me, it doesn't really matter. I'll work with what I've got, assuming it isn't utter crap. Put a free disk in front of me, and I'll use that until it becomes clear that it is not working. That's why I'm a Red Hat guy right now. It was cheapest and it works.
If you assume that there are a lot of people like me, then this is very smart on Corel's part. They'll get a lot of marketshare.
There are a lot of OS/2 boxes out there today. While OS/2 tanked in the consumer market, it did pretty well in vertical market applications. Back when Egghead Software (may it rest in peace) refused to sell OS/2 applications, their in-store server ran OS/2! That was pretty typical. Those sorts of installations don't change rapidly, so while I doubt that anyone is buying much in the way of new OS/2 boxes, I am sure that there are a lot of running OS/2 systems out there right this minute.
I doubt that either Be or IBM are likely to start giving their OSes free any time soon.
But yeah, it would be a great thing.
(Actually, IBM probably should start giving away OS/2. It isn't like they make much of their profit on it.)
I wish that at least some company, somewhere, would start a trend; so that you could walk into a computer store and select any of a cornucopia of OS for your new computer.
Oddly enough, this was IBM's original plan for the PC. But OS #2 was late, and the rest is history.
The original was top-down on the Apple][ and stressed tense situations (who could forget the fear of the SS storming in knowing only a grenade could take them out?) over rampant shooting.
I still remember holding up grunt soldiers for their bullets with an empty gun. Now that was cool.
One sad thought I had while watching the latest Star Wars (which I did enjoy quite a bit, by the way) was that with most "greatest loved tales", the authors rarely quit early enough.
Well, at least B5 was supposed to be dead by now. One of the things I liked about that show was that it had enough courage to plan an actual ending. Too bad the spin-off didn't fly.
Perhaps they just need to start spending the money on something entirely new for a change.
I gave up on Star Trek when the only solution they could come up with to solve writing problems was to bring in someone with bigger tits. (No joke, the TV went off at the last commercial break.) Since then, I have not been able to watch an episode all the way through. I've tried a couple of times, both Voyager and Deep Space 9, but the parts I've seen seem to have more to do with "The Young and the Restless" then they did with the shows, the original and The Next Generation, that used to be such the guilty pleasure. It all seemed to be about who was sleeping with who. And even worse, all of the "relationship" crap wasn't even original, but one more iteration of "having to understand their differences".
But then that has been the whole problem with the series since Voyager and even before. It is all "Been there, done that". I mean, how many times does the goddamn holodeck have to break before they decide that maybe, perhaps they should turn it off?
But then, how far down do ratings have to go before they hire a new writing staff? I mean, Babylon 5 managed to find writer...er...ok, maybe not, but Strasynski's not doing anything these days. Maybe he could teach a class or something.
Anyway, sorry for the incindiery post. I should probably stop now before I piss everyone completely off. But I wouldn't loathe the damn thing so much if I hadn't loved it in the first place.
(What really makes me sad is that every once in awhile, a really good SF show pops up, and then dies a quick death. Last year, I absolutely loved Brimstone, but it only lasted half a season. And yet they keep this decaying mess on year after year... Sorry. Bye. Probably ought to post AC.)
An issue that is doubly sticky when that new employer is you, yourself. You can't exactly unlearn confidential knowledge.
If I work for four years for company X, and then go off to form a competing company, I have something none of company X's competitors do. That is, I have a complete working knowledge of company X's source code.
(Of course, for most of the companies I've worked for, that would only have been good the amusement value, but you get the idea...)
And perhaps I can steal the customer because my costs are lower, those costs being lower because I don't have to train the guy doing all the work (me) the way my former employer did.
Why shouldn't you attempt to acquire a new customer, after all, you're the one who did the work.
It is very, very rare that one person in a company does all the work.
Much of it depends on the scope of the agreement. If we are talking about a narrow field that competes for a small group of customers, then I'd say that non-competes are understandable. It would be one thing to demand that an employee not sell general programming services for a year after quitting. It would be quite another to demand that an employee of, say, Borland's compiler division, not quit and join Microsoft's compiler design team. (And actual event.)
In addition, employees aren't always ethically free in these situations. If, for example, I worked for a web designer, became disgruntled, quit, contacted my former company's largest customer, and convinced them to switch to my new company, well, I don't see how that is particularlly "ethical". There the ones that did the work necessary to aquire the customers. Why should I profit off of that? I think that it is perfectly reasonable for a company to demand that I not deliberately go after their customers if I quit.
On the other hand, it should be obvious that with a reasonable agreement, I should be able to quit and go off and form my own web design company, as long as I don't deliberately try to take my former company's customers with me.
I can't vouch for it personally, but when my Yoga instructor had the surgery about a month ago, two other people piped up that they'd had it, and loved it. I'm currently saving up.
It cost her $4200, and she was out for less than a week.