Clause to prevent you from staying at the same position with the same company and changing job shops or becoming a "consultant" in that position for XX weeks or months. This protects the company that placed you from having you wangle a beter % dealwith a different agency, and prevents agencies from "poaching" employees from each other.
I've worked through VOLT in AZ several times... and either never saw that kind of a non-compete clause or struck it out as unacceptable and got no arguments from them.
That said, a "you will not jump ship to another agency and continue to work on the same project" clause doesn't bother me at all. But the "you will not accept ANYTHING through another agency for 90 days after end of project" is ludicrous. If they want me to keep working for them, they have to scrounge up another contract quickly. And they know it up front. I'm loyal until the last timecard is signed, then it's back to the singles bar.
Read about "summary judgements" and "temporary restraining orders". And telling the agency that they run the risk of getting that clause voided for ALL their contracts might make them back off.
Basically you immediately file a request for a TRO, to prohibit the agency from enforcing the disputed clause until the trial date and allow you to work for any agency that actually has jobs. (of course you have to make sure you don't sign any more non-competes)
Then at trial you ask for a summary judgement because the clause is an inconscionable restraint on your ability to pursue your career, and that the agency has not offered anything of value as compensation for their lock on your services. There are lots of judgements against non-compete clauses to cite as references.
"The non-compete section of Robb's contract with Volt, one of Microsoft's biggest suppliers of short-term contractors, stipulated that he could not work for another agency for 90 days following the end of a contract with them. So Robb was left to collect Washington State unemployment insurance while he waited for Volt to find him another contract or 90 days passed - whichever came first."
If Volt had been unable to come up with a job for him in 6 weeks, they are clearly not doing enough for him, and if Microsoft managers are calling other agencies, they are not doing enough for Microsoft either.
Several ways around this... the most direct is to take the job with the agency that has it and forget about the non-compete clause, which can get thrown out of court as "unconscionable" because it forces him to sit idle for 3 months after every contract with VOLT, while it does not obligate them to pay him anything for this idle period. A clause which prohibited his switching job shops during active employment on a project, or from converting to a "consultant" on that same project protects the job shop from ship-jumpers and is not inconscionable.
I just mark through anything that restricts my freedom AFTER the natural end of a contract... some agencies are unhappy, but I tell them that while I am willing to go along with the "anti ship-jumping" clauses, as soon as I am no longer working on the project they found the contract for I am a free agent and if they want to keep me exclusively theirs they can pay me a retainer fee for those months. They usually see the light. Only one agency has refused to initial the changes, so I tore up the application and threw it in the trash as I walked out.
I have used Win95/98/9K/ME NT3.5/4.0/etc. and even XP for various employers, and am totally unimpressed with the general speed or stability, even when supported by supposedly qualified MS certified IT staffers. I see no reason to upgrade my adequately stable (if you use it right) Win95 for anything Microsoft has produced so far.
"a mature, rock-solid, fully protected server quality operating system" Say what? The fully protected server-quality OS that brought us vulnerability to various worms like CODERED and NIMDA, with the "patch a week" record holding steady for the last year or so? Is that the OS you are talking about?
I was SOOOO happy I had NT and not Win2K at one position, because I heard about the problems the others were having with their systems.
People that laugh at the products MS produces really do have to look hard at how THEY would manage and TEST 50 MILLION lines of code."
If I were that product manager, my first question would be... "Why does it have ALL THAT CODE?"
With 50 million lines of code you're looking at virtually an infinate number of tests to run, which is obviously impossible to do.
No, if it were properly modular and each module well-tested, there would be much less code and much less testing. What Micro$oft suffers from is an inability to make a PLAN for what their software is supposed to do and stick to it. They are always trying toi stuff in more features, which increases complexity exponential.
Thus you either have to roll out a product that hasn't been 100% tested because of its size or keep testing and never make money. Since its all about the money you obviously roll out the product and try to patch it as fast as you can when somone does find a bug that got by Q&A and the testers. You need to find a balance between testing a product completely and releasing a product to make money.
Their record for promptly fixing bugs is abysmal. Your "its all about the money [so] you obviously roll out the product and try to patch it"... is exactly what they do, and why there is such disdain for them.
Its a fine line and MS has done a fairly good job given the size of their code base and the pressure on them from the comsumer to get new products out in a timely way.
Pressure? WHAT PRESSURE? I'd rather wait another year and have something that was lean, rock-solid and reliable. I'm still using Win95 because they haven't produced anything worth upgrading for.
The EEC is "designed to let the company's customers duplicate their specific environments in a lab setting and see how various Microsoft software upgrades, migrations, and deployments perform using those company's real-world data and systems"
And despite this, embarassments like the server security problems STILL get out. This is no substitute for good programming practices.
The real advantage to Micro$soft is that it lets them lock in the customer while the software is still in beta.
I posted that bug on a forum and was told this: "The "fatal bug" you are referencing is a well known, widely used, snippet of test code. I've used it many times to test error handling routines in products that use shlwapi.dll. The purpose of it is to cause a crash."
Shouldn't a widely known "test code" be avoidable by browser writers?
They want ad agencies to sign their clients up for this in hopes of getting advertising dollars from companies that are now spending a bundle on TV. Not by making ads that actually work well on the web, but making the web work like the only ad medium that is making a lot of money: TV.
Here's part of their sales pitch:
"The Full Screen Superstitial® offers advertisers visual proof that the Internet can support the kinds of creative ideas they are used to delivering on Television -- a single message that dominates the medium while it is delivered to the consumer.
"This format breaks-through the shackles imposed by pixel-constrained and technology-led units, giving creatives a full and blank canvas to work from and with:" ... advertising agencies and marketing departments have been frustrated with the limitations of the web as long as it's been around. They HAVE A VISION and they want to see it happen. Text is not flashy enough for an ad agency - they have to have a flashier ad than the next agency, in a bizarre form of "mine's bigger than yours".
"*A full screen, 15-second commercial that utilizes all of the page's real estate to engage, entertain, & even sell"
Ad agencies think in multiples of 15 seconds.
"Ads play in the proper transitional space as the consumer moves between pages, as opposed to units that 'play when ready' or distract consumers in the middle of reading an article, researching a purchase, composing e-mail or searching for information. The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
It sounds like they will be preloading these, much like those damned exit ad popups, and think they have a technology that will somehow FORCE the consumer to accept it. If I have to wait 15 seconds before a link works, just to see something an ad agency thinks will help their customer retain my loyalty, I'll be off that site in about 15 ms.
And what really suckjs is that it's not even a NEW boondoggle. I've been hearing about the promised land of single source documents for at least a decade.
Anyone remember "Information Mapping" with its expensive seminars and rigid templates? Where are they now?
There is prior art, in early mainframe systems... help file or client record stayed in one frame (area of the screen) while navigation fields were in another. You had to tab to the field, but that's because mice had not been invented yet.
If I look at a site with code for FRAMES with a browser that does not support them, I do not see the frames. It takes a combination of the various BROWSERS and the HTML CODE from the site to make this so-called infringing applicaiton show up.
Maybe they should sue Microsoft forenableing the infringement by having MSIE support frames.
In hacker terms... it's a pain in the ass to use, but PHBs like the idea and the sales staff convince them that it will make the project flow better.
It does code check in and out, but so do other tools.
It did make it possible to make sure we had all the requirements tested and passed (but a simple spreadsheet or bug reporter could have done the same thing). Unfortunately its tendency to blow up and trash documents unless the editing was done in a certain not-quite-documented sequence makes the thought of using it as more than a simple repository for tidbits of information about a project frightening. And as a repository of information, a file directory is just as good.
Exactly what I have found. They are lost in the trees and can't see the forest.
They know the product (code or hardware) so well that they forget some of the preliminaries, and the stuff they produce is not task oriented. A cookbook produced by a similar method would have the titles for all the recipes listed together, all the ingredients in another place, all the mixing instructions together, all the cooking instructions listed together. Actually cooking something would require that you consult several spots in the same manual and hope that the title for what you picked actually had something to do with what you wanted to eat.
"AurigaDoc is a java-xml-xsl based documentation tool for writing xml documents and converting them to other open formats like HTML (single and multi page), DHTML, PDF, PostScript, Formatting Object(FO), RTF, Java Help and HTML Help(.chm)"
Repurposing text != changing the file format. It means that what I write for a product specification can be reused in a user manual, a help system, or web page WITH NO FURTHER WORK editing or rewriting.
That requires a level of granularity and consistency in tagging that is not currently cost effective. It requires DTDs, and means you MUST use them. At the moment, it's not cost-effective.
"use XML. provides re-use of content. no big deal. and now there are collaborative XML editors, which allows authors to work on various sections of the same document."
Have you ever produced content that was successfully "repurposed" without re-editing, just by using information embedded in the text at the time of creation? In other words, parsable something (SGML. XML, or whatever) that produced complete and coherent presentations with no human intervention after the initial content was produced?
That has been the Holy Grail of documentation s long as I've been a tech writer, and I have yet to see it happen without requiring significantly more work getting it ready to repurpose than it would take to just sit down and do some editing and rewriting.
I somewhat agree... i've worked on a few projects where the management had a wild idea that we could create content that could be used for web pages, user manuals, maintenance manuals, etc. with no further human intervention... they had not thought about the limitations of the presentation medium.
Realistically, the best you can do is create "chunks" that are easy to recycle because they are not contaminated with irrelevant information, have a consistent style, and do not depend on outside infomation.
"Minor detail: a third degree burn involves charring of the skin. This is very difficult to do with what is essentially liquid water."
Medical detail: what laypersons call "third degree burns" does not require charring, it merely requires destruction of "full thickness" of the epidermis, which is easily accomplished by liquids at 180 degrees F. You can't drink coffee that hot without severely burning your mouth.
Legal detail: McDs had received numerous complaints that the coffee had caused burns at serving temperature, but persisted in having the coffee makers set ABOVE the manufacturer's recommended brewing temps. It was economics - the hotter the brewing water, the less coffee has to be used to get a certian strength coffee. The jury award was based on the daily sales of coffee by McD's (one day's sales, I believe).
Part of the explanation given at that dealer's link is: "Therefore to protect their IP GW will be closing the internet to all uses of their intellectual property except for a handful of permitted images."
Absolute HOGWASH. About the only thing you can't do with a copyrighted design is reproduce it for sale. Check the USA Copyright law... they can not prevent anyone from taking a picture to use in an eBay ad or on an Internet sale site.
One of the explicitally allowed reproductions of copyrighted designs, such as a game figure or an expensive fabric, is to take a photo of it to use in advertising it for sale. You just have to take your own photos of it, not scavenge the manufacturer's site for photos.
Criticism and commentary is also permitted - again, if you want to talk about the good or bad design, just take your own picture of the products. Showing a picture of your favorite figure or your entire collection on your website is also OK as long as you take your own pictures.
No. It's more like being a football coach with bad knees. Typing speed and accuracy is not the main skill* needed by technical writers. If it were, any secretary would make a good technical writer, and the 120WPM ones would be better than the 60WPM ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Clause to prevent you from staying at the same position with the same company and changing job shops or becoming a "consultant" in that position for XX weeks or months. This protects the company that placed you from having you wangle a beter % dealwith a different agency, and prevents agencies from "poaching" employees from each other.
That said, a "you will not jump ship to another agency and continue to work on the same project" clause doesn't bother me at all. But the "you will not accept ANYTHING through another agency for 90 days after end of project" is ludicrous. If they want me to keep working for them, they have to scrounge up another contract quickly. And they know it up front. I'm loyal until the last timecard is signed, then it's back to the singles bar.
Basically you immediately file a request for a TRO, to prohibit the agency from enforcing the disputed clause until the trial date and allow you to work for any agency that actually has jobs. (of course you have to make sure you don't sign any more non-competes)
Then at trial you ask for a summary judgement because the clause is an inconscionable restraint on your ability to pursue your career, and that the agency has not offered anything of value as compensation for their lock on your services. There are lots of judgements against non-compete clauses to cite as references.
If Volt had been unable to come up with a job for him in 6 weeks, they are clearly not doing enough for him, and if Microsoft managers are calling other agencies, they are not doing enough for Microsoft either.
Several ways around this ... the most direct is to take the job with the agency that has it and forget about the non-compete clause, which can get thrown out of court as "unconscionable" because it forces him to sit idle for 3 months after every contract with VOLT, while it does not obligate them to pay him anything for this idle period.
A clause which prohibited his switching job shops during active employment on a project, or from converting to a "consultant" on that same project protects the job shop from ship-jumpers and is not inconscionable.
I just mark through anything that restricts my freedom AFTER the natural end of a contract ... some agencies are unhappy, but I tell them that while I am willing to go along with the "anti ship-jumping" clauses, as soon as I am no longer working on the project they found the contract for I am a free agent and if they want to keep me exclusively theirs they can pay me a retainer fee for those months. They usually see the light. Only one agency has refused to initial the changes, so I tore up the application and threw it in the trash as I walked out.
"a mature, rock-solid, fully protected server quality operating system" Say what? The fully protected server-quality OS that brought us vulnerability to various worms like CODERED and NIMDA, with the "patch a week" record holding steady for the last year or so? Is that the OS you are talking about?
I was SOOOO happy I had NT and not Win2K at one position, because I heard about the problems the others were having with their systems.
If I were that product manager, my first question would be ... "Why does it have ALL THAT CODE?"
With 50 million lines of code you're looking at virtually an infinate number of tests to run, which is obviously impossible to do.
No, if it were properly modular and each module well-tested, there would be much less code and much less testing. What Micro$oft suffers from is an inability to make a PLAN for what their software is supposed to do and stick to it. They are always trying toi stuff in more features, which increases complexity exponential.
Thus you either have to roll out a product that hasn't been 100% tested because of its size or keep testing and never make money. Since its all about the money you obviously roll out the product and try to patch it as fast as you can when somone does find a bug that got by Q&A and the testers. You need to find a balance between testing a product completely and releasing a product to make money.
Their record for promptly fixing bugs is abysmal. Your "its all about the money [so] you obviously roll out the product and try to patch it" ... is exactly what they do, and why there is such disdain for them.
Its a fine line and MS has done a fairly good job given the size of their code base and the pressure on them from the comsumer to get new products out in a timely way.
Pressure? WHAT PRESSURE? I'd rather wait another year and have something that was lean, rock-solid and reliable. I'm still using Win95 because they haven't produced anything worth upgrading for.
And despite this, embarassments like the server security problems STILL get out. This is no substitute for good programming practices.
The real advantage to Micro$soft is that it lets them lock in the customer while the software is still in beta.
So the ultimate validation for software patents is licensing them to Microsoft?
Any unrecognized input type will work, or none at all. The browser should NOT croak over bad HTML, it should just skip it and go on to the next tag.
I posted that bug on a forum and was told this:
"The "fatal bug" you are referencing is a well known, widely used, snippet of test code. I've used it many times to test error handling routines in products that use shlwapi.dll. The purpose of it is to cause a crash."
Shouldn't a widely known "test code" be avoidable by browser writers?
http://www.unicast.com/gallery/index.asp
They want ad agencies to sign their clients up for this in hopes of getting advertising dollars from companies that are now spending a bundle on TV. Not by making ads that actually work well on the web, but making the web work like the only ad medium that is making a lot of money: TV.
Here's part of their sales pitch:
"The Full Screen Superstitial® offers advertisers visual proof that the Internet can support the kinds of creative ideas they are used to delivering on Television -- a single message that dominates the medium while it is delivered to the consumer.
"This format breaks-through the shackles imposed by pixel-constrained and technology-led units, giving creatives a full and blank canvas to work from and with:"
... advertising agencies and marketing departments have been frustrated with the limitations of the web as long as it's been around. They HAVE A VISION and they want to see it happen. Text is not flashy enough for an ad agency - they have to have a flashier ad than the next agency, in a bizarre form of "mine's bigger than yours".
"*A full screen, 15-second commercial that utilizes all of the page's real estate to engage, entertain, & even sell"
Ad agencies think in multiples of 15 seconds.
"Ads play in the proper transitional space as the consumer moves between pages, as opposed to units that 'play when ready' or distract consumers in the middle of reading an article, researching a purchase, composing e-mail or searching for information. The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
It sounds like they will be preloading these, much like those damned exit ad popups, and think they have a technology that will somehow FORCE the consumer to accept it. If I have to wait 15 seconds before a link works, just to see something an ad agency thinks will help their customer retain my loyalty, I'll be off that site in about 15 ms.
And what really suckjs is that it's not even a NEW boondoggle. I've been hearing about the promised land of single source documents for at least a decade. Anyone remember "Information Mapping" with its expensive seminars and rigid templates? Where are they now?
If I look at a site with code for FRAMES with a browser that does not support them, I do not see the frames. It takes a combination of the various BROWSERS and the HTML CODE from the site to make this so-called infringing applicaiton show up.
Maybe they should sue Microsoft forenableing the infringement by having MSIE support frames.
It does code check in and out, but so do other tools.
It did make it possible to make sure we had all the requirements tested and passed (but a simple spreadsheet or bug reporter could have done the same thing). Unfortunately its tendency to blow up and trash documents unless the editing was done in a certain not-quite-documented sequence makes the thought of using it as more than a simple repository for tidbits of information about a project frightening. And as a repository of information, a file directory is just as good.
They know the product (code or hardware) so well that they forget some of the preliminaries, and the stuff they produce is not task oriented. A cookbook produced by a similar method would have the titles for all the recipes listed together, all the ingredients in another place, all the mixing instructions together, all the cooking instructions listed together. Actually cooking something would require that you consult several spots in the same manual and hope that the title for what you picked actually had something to do with what you wanted to eat.
And how does that help the quality of the CONTENTS?
Repurposing text != changing the file format. It means that what I write for a product specification can be reused in a user manual, a help system, or web page WITH NO FURTHER WORK editing or rewriting.
That requires a level of granularity and consistency in tagging that is not currently cost effective. It requires DTDs, and means you MUST use them. At the moment, it's not cost-effective.
Have you ever produced content that was successfully "repurposed" without re-editing, just by using information embedded in the text at the time of creation? In other words, parsable something (SGML. XML, or whatever) that produced complete and coherent presentations with no human intervention after the initial content was produced?
That has been the Holy Grail of documentation s long as I've been a tech writer, and I have yet to see it happen without requiring significantly more work getting it ready to repurpose than it would take to just sit down and do some editing and rewriting.
I somewhat agree ... i've worked on a few projects where the management had a wild idea that we could create content that could be used for web pages, user manuals, maintenance manuals, etc. with no further human intervention ... they had not thought about the limitations of the presentation medium.
Realistically, the best you can do is create "chunks" that are easy to recycle because they are not contaminated with irrelevant information, have a consistent style, and do not depend on outside infomation.
"Minor detail: a third degree burn involves charring of the skin. This is very difficult to do with what is essentially liquid water." Medical detail: what laypersons call "third degree burns" does not require charring, it merely requires destruction of "full thickness" of the epidermis, which is easily accomplished by liquids at 180 degrees F. You can't drink coffee that hot without severely burning your mouth. Legal detail: McDs had received numerous complaints that the coffee had caused burns at serving temperature, but persisted in having the coffee makers set ABOVE the manufacturer's recommended brewing temps. It was economics - the hotter the brewing water, the less coffee has to be used to get a certian strength coffee. The jury award was based on the daily sales of coffee by McD's (one day's sales, I believe).
Part of the explanation given at that dealer's link is: "Therefore to protect their IP GW will be closing the internet to all uses of their intellectual property except for a handful of permitted images." Absolute HOGWASH. About the only thing you can't do with a copyrighted design is reproduce it for sale. Check the USA Copyright law ... they can not prevent anyone from taking a picture to use in an eBay ad or on an Internet sale site.
One of the explicitally allowed reproductions of copyrighted designs, such as a game figure or an expensive fabric, is to take a photo of it to use in advertising it for sale. You just have to take your own photos of it, not scavenge the manufacturer's site for photos.
Criticism and commentary is also permitted - again, if you want to talk about the good or bad design, just take your own picture of the products. Showing a picture of your favorite figure or your entire collection on your website is also OK as long as you take your own pictures.
"On the third boot-up, it spotted the printer correctly, but the Wizard did not hold the settings. I had to reselect everything later.
Knoppix didn't even hold the settings from the Wizard in RAM for a single session
Never mentioned Gentoo.
* it's information analysis and organization
"you probably just aren't familiar with the shell" The shell? You mean which shell?