More Politics Stories

Politics in compatibility testing

This, of course, is just one example. Even worse is when you’re involved with a division of a larger corporation such as STMicrolectronics and perhaps VIA Technologies.

One person in their developer relations team was given a bit of grief over having games on his work system. For those who do not know, developer relations personnel work with game developers, testing software to ensure compatibility. His job, therefore, required game testing making game installations mandatory. Of course, the IT manager could not seem to grasp this concept, so the developer relations employee went and spoke with this person’s boss to get the situation cleared up.

The level of network restrictions made this situation even worse. The IT department had gagged the network of any game play, making testing over the network or on the corporate Internet connection impossible. A dialup account was then created with a separate phone line for testing. This, being far from ideal with the slow transfer rates, was all that could be done.

The Dreaded NDA

The Non-Disclosure Agreement is a key paper in every part of the technology industry. In effect, it says that if you repeat anything that has been disclosed to you, trouble is sure to come. The concept is that when partners, analysts, and members of the media are given information, they keep it to themselves. This is a great theory, but it is only a theory. In reality, people are given information and they run home and tell their friends. I’ve seen it happen countless times. So to be quite frank, NDAs don't mean jack. If this isn’t obvious, consider a few points.

Everyone can certainly remember when NVIDIA had issues with leaking drivers. Why was this happening though? Somebody was breaking a NDA. What about every time a person sees preliminary product specifications before they are announced? Somebody is breaking an NDA. Every time a product preview is posted by one particular site a few hours before everyone else? Somebody is breaking an NDA. It happens ALL the time and to such an extent that I know at the very moment I’m writing this, if I wanted to go find out information about future products of any given company, I could do it.