NET RESULTS: Get ready for the good tech times again. Just around the corner are the champagne company launches and giddy stock portfolios. Maybe that's an overstatement but the drums of tech recovery do seem to be beating, going by the cover story in Newsweek ("Silicon Valley Reboots") and a special report in Business Week ("The Tech Rebound").

Certainly, there's a bit of headline braggadocio here, given that the companion stories to the more sombre Business Week piece are stories such as "It's Too Early for a Tech-Stock Rally" and "Where are all the Bright Ideas?"

Over at Newsweek, the companion stories are more upbeat - predictably, perhaps, for one of the US's two main weekly news magazines, where chirpiness is seen as a writerly virtue. The subheading to the main piece says it all: "The dotcom bust was bad for Wall Street, but it was the best thing to happen to this high-tech crucible."

That's a bit flippant. With unemployment up around 7 per cent - levels not seen in decades in the Valley - personal misfortune has ridden iron-shod hooves over thousands of people who worked slavish hours and hoped they were reaching towards a dream future.

Many of these people were immigrants from poorer parts of the world.

Over the past two years I've spoken to many of the people out in the Valley affected by the plummeting economy and not one would say it is the best thing that's happened to them, the Valley or even to innovation.

One 20-year veteran of the cycles of the silicon chip industry sounded shell-shocked when he described the worrying impact of the downturn to me nearly two years ago, at its start.

Many Irish companies full of ideas and talent are struggling to keep a presence in California and a foothold in the US market, and some have folded.

Some long-time tech-industry employees are moving on to new pastures, having been stretched to the limit emotionally and financially by the industry uncertainty. Even people I know who are not within the industry sound exhausted and worried, their main hope being that the downturn will have at least one upside - that of lowering the precipitous Valley house prices. All in all, the Valley is deflated and frustrated.

"The best thing?"

Give me a break.

Still, the Newsweek story is written by the generally wonderful writer on technology topics, Mr Steven Levy. His studies on hackers, Apple Computer, and cryptographers are some of the best and informative reads in the genre. And after you read a fair way through this long piece, it turns out what he's really saying is that, just as the boom stories were often over exaggerated, so are those of the Valley's demise.

Well, sure, anyone in the broad technology industry can tell you that economic lulls are a good time to invent, dream, build, innovate.

Bill Hewlett and David Packard moved to Palo Alto and set up shop during the depression. Intel forged a chip market during the dull 1970s and 1980s. And Apple debuted the Macintosh during inflationary 1984. I was cheered in the article to read that "Woz" - Steve Wozniak, the beaming, bearish, quieter co-founder of Apple (with the higher profile, gregarious Steve Jobs) - has a start-up in the works. Go Woz!

But my gag reflex kicks in when I read Silicon Valley venture capitalists (VCs) - yes, they who carry a good deal of responsibility for the silly investments and gluttonous greed that pushed the whole boom over the cliff - talking about what a great time this is for setting up a business.

Here are my favourite, gimme a break VC quotes from the piece: "It's a great time to start a new company," says Ms Heidi Roizen of Mobius Venture Capital.

And from Mr Jim Breyer, a partner at VC firm Accel: "This is exactly what was happening in the early 1990s [before the internet exploded\]."

No, it's not. The market wasn't limping along and small investors weren't sitting on massive losses after VCs blithely pumped money into business concepts a 10-year-old would have sniffed at. A child would have wondered why her parents were ordering dog food over the web and paying to have it shipped to the house when a quick trip to the corner shop would do the job more cheaply.

Amazingly, Mr Breyer adds: "We're still doing deals but now they're well thought through."

And if that leaves you open-mouthed with disbelief, or laughing mirthlessly, try this paragraph.

Nothing I have read in the wake of the crash comes close for pure, unadulterated, "blame everyone but we who gave them the money" gall:

"The bubble years were like the last days of the Roman Empire - business practices were totally weird and dysfunctional," says Mr Greg Galanos of Mobius.

Now he won't consider companies without viable business plans, working prototypes and a sense of commitment instead of a delusional exit plan.

These concepts may be too much for some pampered dotcomies to process.

"There may be a lost generation of bubble entrepreneurs who won't be able to adjust to realistic valuations and practices," says Mr Galanos.

Au contraire. The "bubble entrepreneurs" had a greater sense of reality - take the money and run - than the pampered, preening Valley VCs who doled out buckets of cash to them.

The VCs were, after all, the investor frontline who foolishly, swooningly succumbed to these hare-brained business plans. Their questionable practices helped to cause many good companies to topple in the downturn's aftermath.

"Realistic valuations" indeed.