while I'm certainly no fan of M$ (understatement) my experience among the 5 large companies for which I've worked (some as contractor/some as employee) largely mirrors the article. frankly, my contract experience (admittidly 10 yrs ago) with a well-known beverage company here in Atlanta was at least as bad as that sounded (bigtime "class" culture there). at a biG TElecom a contractor's car was stolen from office lot & they did nothing for him (security cameras weren't even being taped) and even terminated his contract a couple of months later (cost cutting; he was actually very productive). nowhere that I've worked have contractors been invited to parties, got discounts/fringes, etc. for fear of those types of suits.
my opinion is that while some people have blue chip skills/experience and choose contracting ($$$), employers do frequently take advantage of laid-off workers this way but I'm not convinced that M$ is any worse about it than anyone else (at least that I've been involved with). maybe I'm a anecdotal statistical cluster but that's been my experience...
haven't read entire thread (time) so sorry if this point's been made BUT:
how is it that M$ source code (or anyone else's for that matter) isn't discoverable evidence in a civil case?
generally speaking, parties in civil cases have tremendous latitude in discovery. if my neighbor sues me because my tree fell on his car he can pretty much demand to see my 4th grade report card and I'll be held in contempt if I don't hand it over. it seems like a slam-dunk that source would be relevant evidence in M$'s claim that IE is just "too integrated" to be separated from OS. the judge would probably seal the records but I have to believe someone involved would leak (especially M$ code).
IANAL but I did take some law classes in school (though IO'll admit that's kind of like saying corporations should follow GAAP cause that's what they taught in accounting:)
are there any slashdotters w/JDs who can shed some light on this?
as DBA w/6+ yrs on Oracle (OCP), 3+ on SQL/Server, 2+ on mySQL & 1+ on DB/2 it has been my experience that Oracle, despite pricetag & sleazy salesforce (topic for another thread), is orders of magnitude more stable than M$. for the last two yrs my prod Oracle instances have fed a ~20M page/day website while doing enough DML to switch a 100M logfile ~15/min with >99.8% uptime (again, over 2yrs!). by contrast, I have a SQL/Server (2K) install for a backend app which has to be rebooted at least twice/wk despite processing considerable less data. just to add insult to injury, we also have mySQL backend for another app which handles as much data as the SQL/Server instance yet has uptime comparable to Oracle.
this is not FUD, just simple FACT!
show me a SQL/Server install which processes >5G of DML/day w/>200 client connections and stays up >90 days then we'll talk about FUD...
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while I'm certainly no fan of M$ (understatement) my experience among the 5 large companies for which I've worked (some as contractor/some as employee) largely mirrors the article. frankly, my contract experience (admittidly 10 yrs ago) with a well-known beverage company here in Atlanta was at least as bad as that sounded (bigtime "class" culture there). at a biG TElecom a contractor's car was stolen from office lot & they did nothing for him (security cameras weren't even being taped) and even terminated his contract a couple of months later (cost cutting; he was actually very productive). nowhere that I've worked have contractors been invited to parties, got discounts/fringes, etc. for fear of those types of suits. my opinion is that while some people have blue chip skills/experience and choose contracting ($$$), employers do frequently take advantage of laid-off workers this way but I'm not convinced that M$ is any worse about it than anyone else (at least that I've been involved with). maybe I'm a anecdotal statistical cluster but that's been my experience...
haven't read entire thread (time) so sorry if this point's been made BUT: how is it that M$ source code (or anyone else's for that matter) isn't discoverable evidence in a civil case? generally speaking, parties in civil cases have tremendous latitude in discovery. if my neighbor sues me because my tree fell on his car he can pretty much demand to see my 4th grade report card and I'll be held in contempt if I don't hand it over. it seems like a slam-dunk that source would be relevant evidence in M$'s claim that IE is just "too integrated" to be separated from OS. the judge would probably seal the records but I have to believe someone involved would leak (especially M$ code). IANAL but I did take some law classes in school (though IO'll admit that's kind of like saying corporations should follow GAAP cause that's what they taught in accounting:) are there any slashdotters w/JDs who can shed some light on this?
as DBA w/6+ yrs on Oracle (OCP), 3+ on SQL/Server, 2+ on mySQL & 1+ on DB/2 it has been my experience that Oracle, despite pricetag & sleazy salesforce (topic for another thread), is orders of magnitude more stable than M$. for the last two yrs my prod Oracle instances have fed a ~20M page/day website while doing enough DML to switch a 100M logfile ~15/min with >99.8% uptime (again, over 2yrs!). by contrast, I have a SQL/Server (2K) install for a backend app which has to be rebooted at least twice/wk despite processing considerable less data. just to add insult to injury, we also have mySQL backend for another app which handles as much data as the SQL/Server instance yet has uptime comparable to Oracle. this is not FUD, just simple FACT! show me a SQL/Server install which processes >5G of DML/day w/>200 client connections and stays up >90 days then we'll talk about FUD...