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ArsDigita Shut Down
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Looks like it's official. Philip Greenspun's ArsDigita has been closed, its assets sold to Red Hat. No word on what Red Hat is planning to do with the GPL'd ArsDigita Community System." You may remember ArsDigita from its grand plans during the dot-com boom.
Did that ever take off to any extent?
Well, at least photo.net is still around. This is Philip Greenspun's other venture.... a valuable resource for all things photography. Check it out.
Keeping
WOW, Buzzwords galore on their website, no doubt they were trying to ride the DotCom bandwagon. I still cant figre out what it does, anytime I see, collaboration, enterprise content managment, Web content framework, Im assuming it something for people too stupid to write or autogen their own pages and automatically upload em, aka use rsync
This isnt the univeristy document system that was suppsed to handle 100'000 of thousands of technical papers, automatic updates etc is It ?
Why is redhat buying them ? Fixed assests ? All those juicy Oracle liscences ? Or the servers that refuse to be slashdotted ?...
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Philip left ArsDigita a while ago.
Is there any connection other than the similar-sounding name?
...is how much of arsdigita was skill, and how much was dotcom bubble.
Greenspun is right, he and some friends built the company up to be quite formidable. It could be argued that they did this at just the correct time. He personally had a lot of technical insight (as evidenced by his book Philip and Alex's guide to Web Publishing) but was perhaps lacking in business acumen.My own suspicion is if they were still in charge and had *not* gone for funding, the company would still be around. It has been unfortunate watching the company stagnate, and the layman would certainly see the progression of success, funding, stagnation, winding up.
The VC's certainly didn't seem to understand the culture when they took on the company, which led to quite a few people leaving, and disquiet from the people who had previously supported the culture and ethos of the firm. Whether it was this that caused the problems, or the simple fact that the company, once obtaining approximately 30 million, would have to earn that back to be even back to 0, it is difficult to tell.
When Greenspun took on the VC's, which was a gutsy move which ended up in court as fully described here, he failed to take the company back, but it is conjectured that he got a nice settlement in the article.
What do people think? Was his culture a winner? He comes in for quite a bit of stick about his methods to get the best out of software engineers (work them extremely hard, don't give them a family life, but give them fishbowls, toys, and the hope of a ferrari). I personally don't think they should have gone to the VC's but I don't blame him. The idea of cashing out with millions personally would probably make me do the same thing. However, that's the one thing you've got to realise. If you go to VC's, you have got to read the contract, and try to imagine that the impossible could happen.
thenerd.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
ArsDigita is searching for energetic and accomplished individuals to join its expanding team. If you are:
Please surf our Web site to learn more about ArsDigita, its culture, and benefits. Then be sure to check out our opportunities.
speaks volumes of the quality and/or "ease-of-use" for their "Web Content Framework", doesn't it :-)
Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
See also this thread on OpenACS bboards for more info, and also Philip Greenspun's comments
Twas a good thing - just remember, however greedy you get, never succomb to the temptation of VC
http://www.arstechnica.com is still up. Forgot the URL last time. Sorry!
ArsDigita switched to the ArsDigita Public Liscense a few months ago when they released ACS 4.6. As you can imagine, this pissed off many people in the community. However the folks at OpenACS have ported ACS 3 and ACS 4.2 (both under the GPL) to Postgresql. Work continues, unabated by short-sighted VC's.
Each lecture seems to come in at about half a gig, although YMMV. Not something to download lightly, at least not on a common cable modem line.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
So did they pronounce their name "Arse Digiter"?? If so, they wouldn't have had much of a chance in the British market...
IT appeared to be a selection of MIT CS courses in one year, from the syllabi on the web. Many of the courses appeared to be little different from those at MIT (I took the MIT ones) and many of the instructors had MIT backgrounds. The AD course were taught in intensive serial fashion at a month each.
My guess is the MIT OpenCourseware initiative wil put a similar range on the web in upcoming years. The first installment will be this autumn according to the MIT site. (If bore through MIT's online course catalog, many syllabi are already on the web.)
The benefits of a MIT education, tempered by real-world experience, without the MIT prices, and without the MIT diploma.
My company, which grew over 2 years to 35 employees, raised 5 million dollars in venture capital, and was making over a million a year, slipped out of my control entirely earlier this year. We got an incompetent CEO put in place by our venture backers. Since we (the founders) had lost control of the board of directors there was nothing we could do about it. Of course, at the time, we needed the venture capital to fund development and attract good management, which we needed to close deals, etc. etc.
Looking back on it, at almost every stage I made lots of decisions, but most of them were the right decisions at the time. The decision to take VC funding was unavoidable at the time - we were coming into direct competition with companies that had already raised 30 to 40 million dollars. Ironically, those companies went out of business long before we did because their burn rates were outrageous.
Just my personal experiences anyway - I started out knowing a lot about technology and very little about business, and I know a lot more now. If your business if fundamentally sound without venture financing, then you don't need it. If your business is one that requires so much up front venture financing that you anticipate losing control (>50% of the shares of the company), before you get through the initial growth phase of the company, I would recommend rethinking starting that business, unless the returns seem outrageous. Use VC wisely, and only sell minority shares of the company during the early years. Once you get off the ground, you'll be in a much stronger position to negotiate for further funding anyway.
"The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but Greenspun has since purchased an RV and an airplane". So at least we know he did OK! Beats me why RH bought the company, when they could have brought in - openacs
I met Philip Greenspun a couple of years ago when Arsdigita was a growing company. He was (and probably still is) a very ambitious guy and told me that it was about time to do something and get into the Internet gig. Luckily, I decided to get an education first and had the opportunity to watch the bubble burst without being involved.
When the VCs got in, the management became greedy and Philip got out (or kicked out, whatever). The company's death, focussing on web tools, was more or less inevitable considering the sharp economic downturn and executives realising that they won't be raking in the profits with mere Internet presence (no matter what the technology behind it).
RedHat getting a number of experienced staff makes perfect sense since the web application services might complement their business with existing clients. And, it's all Open Source, in fact we might see more rapid integration of ACS with PostgreSQL, maybe it even becomes the development platform and won't have to be ported anymore (see http://openacs.org).
So, maybe it is a good thing after all, at least for web developers using the ACS.
Just my 2 Eurocents
I feel so sig.
Seemed like a nice bloke, fairly genuine, and with some "big picture" views.
According to the article mentioned in the post, the acting CEO of ArsDigita was a venture partner of the Greylock firm. Greylock is also an investor in Redhat.
As someone who is involved with a group of ex-engnieers with a large company now starting our own firm I wonder what VC's are thinking of when they remove control from the founders - as the only people who know our code and the direction its going in removing us would be rather futile - yes I know other ENGINEERS would understand our direction but that's not the point. Our company is our baby and yes my financial input isn't to anywhere near the VC level but my risks (IE no job,money or house) are just as bad - we're as determined as they are to see our company succeed.. and I'm sure this goes for other startups as well - LEAVE THE FOUNDERS IN PLACE if you want your ROI to be as good as promised.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
That the VC culture eventually brought the company down is disillusioning (word?) but should provide a more useful object lesson than the big splash failures the press is usually so quick to jump on.
I am still optimistic, I think the web has space for start-ups who want to write good software, make good sites and provide good services...but it isn't easy and there are an awful lot of mistakes to be made out there....
acs uses aolserver, rumours were around aol buying out redhat, redhat bought arsdigita (and acs). is there any link?
Ironically we've done about six times more ACS work than ArsDigita has done this year, including beating them out for the Children's Hospital at Montefiore project, a really cool project which put our site, based on the ACS at every bed in the Children's Hospital, next to Plasma screens and wireless keyboards. We're stable, and growing, and have never had an employee leave the company since we started in 1998.
Also, we've been enhancing the ACS-Tcl steadily for the last year; it's a totally different project than what Ars Digita has for download -- more stable, faster, better features, etc. OpenACS is nice, but it's still all alpha code. And if you think their 4.X product works with Postgres, you haven't read very carefully. They've been releasing OpenACS 4.X sites on Oracle this year.
I'm the president of ybos, and yesterday felt like I was living a case study at HBS. "You own a growing boutique firm. Your major partner/sometime competitor was just bought out by a billion dollar company. What do you do?"
Actually I think it gets rebooted ever 24 hours but has a bad machine in front of it... greenspun handed photo.net over to some friends of his and those remaining raj, lisa, and audrey and our soon to be new employee kyle are workign on the site. While aD has been :) (although we are not paying most of these folks)
"letting employees go" photo.net is hiring
so its still up and running totally separate from aD.
We just switched to running linux front end boxes combined with aolserver band arsdigita's oracle driver. we're having trouble with that combination. are there any other folks donig 8 million hits a day (with a lot of db hits) using linux combined with aolserver and the wonderful arsdigita oracle driveer. It seems like some pages keep on coming up blank. Maybe when we try solaris we'll have better luck.
We also have an exciting announcement soon with regard to retailers who are helping to support photo.net.
-raj
I bet there is plenty of capital in the hands of the right people (techie entrepreneurs who have built successful businesses - Jobs, Gilmore ... ) and they already invest in interesting projects. I'd really like to see some cooperation among them to support more business ideas that are based on interesting technology.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Althouh they released all of their early code via a GPL liscence, the vast majority (at least 95%) of the development was done by paid employees. Contrast that with a company like Redhat were the majority of the development is done by unpaid volunteers. Arsdigita therefore had all of the expenses of a closed source company, without the benefit of having proprietary assets.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think they should have kept their code closed source but they really missed out on not using what was at one time a very active development community to enhance their product.
Wait, it's alpha code unfit to sneeze on -- but they've been releasing sites on it? I guess you must feel pretty marginalized with way more people involved with openacs than with ybos's pseudo-fork of the acs, but don't let that drive you into making statements that just make you look foolish.
The story is no longer on the web, nor is it in google's cache but it is available from the wayback machine
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
He didn't understand why this was not a 'good idea'. The VC's wanted him out because he was/is a loose canon. How would comments like this have been interpreted by the World Bank?
philg@mit.edu went on to justify this by stating:
There is almost nothing else that needs to be said.
and it's definitely not beta software. It's just the new 4.x that's still alpha. New versions don't always spring fully grown from the forehead of another corporation that did all the work... tho i guess that's the only model ybos has used.
had to google for it, but I found it. (ah, for the days when .net denoted ISPs...) you're going to think I'm being rude again, but you really should hire someone with some aesthetic taste. i did check "developers" for some trace of this New And Improved Ybos ACS, but didn't see anything. just some 3.x modules.
and re being rude, you don't think FUD like "And if you think their 4.X product works with Postgres, you haven't read very carefully" counts?
I would love to be more of a part of OpenACS. I think they're doing great stuff, and I hope our work furthers the effort. But we can't devote the resources we'd like to to it.
Anyway, stay tuned for some kick-ass enhancements, including an ACS that plays well with Oracle 9i, and utilities to migrate from 8i to 9i.
Dont get me wrong. I've greatly enjoyed PG websites, books and photos. However, his attitude comes across as "I'm so much smarter than everyone else" when creating his web design business and his computer school. This attitude, which was pretty common at MIT and in the dot.com era may be good for getting new ventures started, but not for sustaining them. We all got to work together sometime.
Let's see. I joined aD in the summer of 2000 and worked there for about a year.
.5 - 1 year ago). Trust me. Red hat buys aD. What a waste of money. Inside word is that Greylock (investors of both) didn't want aD to look like a complete failure. (It really wasn't a complete failure. It was just another dot-com tragedy).
.5 - 1 year and dying is still dying. Basically I don't think their model worked (or it was stable enough to work in a poor economy (given the amount of cash they were burning)). Maybe that's why Ybos is still alive.
I think there are many many misconceptions about Arsdigita and Phil Greenspun that people get having not worked with Arsdigita. (Disclaimer: as an ex-employee I'm sure my views are biased too.).
1) Phil Greenspun was not a genius (as some people thought him to be). Don't get me wrong. He's extremely smart and he was good at writing books and giving seminars and that kinda crap that can get people excited about software. I met him personally and I, myself, was excited. In a nerd-to-nerd way he can be inspirational in making you want to be something more than you are. Part of Phil's problem is that he kind of has a chip on his shoulder. He's not a REAL MIT professor. All these claims of starting the business from $10,000 and other exaggerated claims are simply that: exaggerations.
2) Arsdigita is kinda like communism (as some might say). It's good on paper but doesn't work in real life. Sure there were the cars, (the hoes), the food, the money, the vacation houses, etc. I don't think anyone ever got hooked up with a ferrari. I don't think anyone really went to the vacation houses except for him and a select few. If anything, all these utopian ideas were part of the same gimick to hire more employees and give the illusion of his ability to run the "cool" internet company. He was using the same (dare i say) "marketing techniques" to promote ACS to show the "success" of arsdigita.
Having been there a limited time, my view is that aD was f0cked froma little bit of everything. It wasn't really the board that put aD into the dump (they just took them there slightly quicker). If anything was to be a main factor to their failure it was the economy (look around). So it's not one persons fault but a lack of demand. No clients = no company. I'm glad to see Ybos is still up, though. Go Ybos!
PhilG was, needless to say, not a people person. Simply put (as stated somewhere above) he wasn't a people person. He knew how to make people in the company f-ing pissed and a good number of engineers quit because of his being a "loose cannon". You can't have someone like that in control (you don't want nazi germany either despite the level of efficiency the achieved).
So lets review:
1) (before my employment ( summer'00)), there were already incidents with philg alienating aD employees. some good ones left. aD still had life.
2) (during employment (next year or so)), aD had already begun to die. I think this is the same for most internet companies out there. Back then nobody thought it was a recession but basically the economy (and demand) was basically coming to a halt. So what was left was a bunch of "business consultants" scrambling to get whatever they could.
3) (post employment) philg gets the boot. he actually gets the better end of the deal. they pay him $$$$$ to leave and go away. this is what makes me laugh. the business people were just so stingy to grab control of the company that they were blind in seeng that they were fighting for a lost cause. they basically paid him $$$ so they could lose more money. fools.
4) aD FINALLY dies. (it should've been dead
P.S. One more thing. You could go on to say that if someone else had run it has truly "open source" that it would've been still alive. Possibly. But living for another
(sorry admins. "accidently" clicked on to post anonymously. forgive the repost)
.5 - 1 year ago). Trust me. Red hat buys aD. What a waste of money. Inside word is that Greylock (investors of both) didn't want aD to look like a complete failure. (It really wasn't a complete failure. It was just another dot-com tragedy).
P.S. One more thing. You could go on to say that if someone else had run it has truly "open source" that it would've been still alive. Possibly. But living for another .5 - 1 year and dying is still dying. Basically I don't think their model worked (or it was stable enough to work in a poor economy (given the amount of cash they were burning)). Maybe that's why Ybos is still alive.
Let's see. I joined aD in the summer of 2000 and worked there for about a year. I think there are many many misconceptions about Arsdigita and Phil Greenspun that people get having not worked with Arsdigita. (Disclaimer: as an ex-employee I'm sure my views are biased too.). 1) Phil Greenspun was not a genius (as some people thought him to be). Don't get me wrong. He's extremely smart and he was good at writing books and giving seminars and that kinda crap that can get people excited about software. I met him personally and I, myself, was excited. In a nerd-to-nerd way he can be inspirational in making you want to be something more than you are. Part of Phil's problem is that he kind of has a chip on his shoulder. He's not a REAL MIT professor. All these claims of starting the business from $10,000 and other exaggerated claims are simply that: exaggerations. 2) Arsdigita is kinda like communism (as some might say). It's good on paper but doesn't work in real life. Sure there were the cars, (the hoes), the food, the money, the vacation houses, etc. I don't think anyone ever got hooked up with a ferrari. I don't think anyone really went to the vacation houses except for him and a select few. If anything, all these utopian ideas were part of the same gimick to hire more employees and give the illusion of his ability to run the "cool" internet company. He was using the same (dare i say) "marketing techniques" to promote ACS to show the "success" of arsdigita. Having been there a limited time, my view is that aD was f0cked froma little bit of everything. It wasn't really the board that put aD into the dump (they just took them there slightly quicker). If anything was to be a main factor to their failure it was the economy (look around). So it's not one persons fault but a lack of demand. No clients = no company. I'm glad to see Ybos is still up, though. Go Ybos! PhilG was, needless to say, not a people person. Simply put (as stated somewhere above) he wasn't a people person. He knew how to make people in the company f-ing pissed and a good number of engineers quit because of his being a "loose cannon". You can't have someone like that in control (you don't want nazi germany either despite the level of efficiency the achieved). So lets review: 1) (before my employment ( summer'00)), there were already incidents with philg alienating aD employees. some good ones left. aD still had life. 2) (during employment (next year or so)), aD had already begun to die. I think this is the same for most internet companies out there. Back then nobody thought it was a recession but basically the economy (and demand) was basically coming to a halt. So what was left was a bunch of "business consultants" scrambling to get whatever they could. 3) (post employment) philg gets the boot. he actually gets the better end of the deal. they pay him $$$$$ to leave and go away. this is what makes me laugh. the business people were just so stingy to grab control of the company that they were blind in seeng that they were fighting for a lost cause. they basically paid him $$$ so they could lose more money. fools. 4) aD FINALLY dies. (it should've been dead
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
......but they certainly deliver results.
I used to work for an investment web site that used Arsdigita. I was an investment analyst and was closely involved in specifying the site.
Originally development was done by one of those web development company's that came out of nowhere to be worth billions at the height of the dotcom boom (I am sure every one knows the type). They failed to deliver anything that worked after months. The little that almost worked was overcomplicated (e.g. java applets to implement cascading drop down menus).
When we switched to Arsdigita we had some pages working within weeks. These used data extracted from several different financial data feeds (which are complex) which was stored in database (which they also implemented) and content from a content management system (which they also implemented).
I worked with them both to specify the site (what we wanted on what page, how to calcualte it, where to get the data from) and to debug it (they did the code, I did the financial maths) and I thought the process they used very efficient. Maybe be it is approach rather than, say skill at coding, that made them efficient the answer to the question may depend on how you define skill.
We just switched to running linux front end boxes combined with aolserver band arsdigita's oracle driver. we're having trouble with that combination.
Maybe that explains why it's been so slow lately. I'm sitting behind a T-1 at work and it looks like my 28.8 connection at home.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I want to know what Eve Andersson will be doing now that ArsDigita been sold...
I suppose that hiring her as my personal masseuese isn't very realistic.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
In Bostonics, which is still spoken in certain Cambridge enclaves, Ars Digita is pronounced in exactly the same way as arse digiter would be if people there would say arse digiter.
In all seriousness:
Courtesy of the wayback machine here is Phil's side of the story.
This is a quality read and highly recommended for any entrepreneur.
He removed it from his site when he entered into the settlement.
I could have spared myself the research headache, and gone straight to the source for an answer.
I guess I deserve a (-1, Clueless) mod for that.
Believe me, Alex El-Ali (the videographer) got sick of hearing me complain about this. And Richard Stallman's talk was pulled from the web because he didn't want his image to appear in a proprietary format like real. (It's now available audio-only in ogg vorbis format).
I've been trying to find a convenient way to convert my collection of the videos to mpeg, but Real is pretty damned closed, and my efforts so far have involved trying to sync screen captures with audio, which have failed miserably.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
We are not in the business of building a toolkit. We are in the business of building quality websites. That is what we get paid for. We are more than happy to add our improvements to the toolkit in the process, and to employ the improvements made by others.
I'm sorry we can't afford to be idealistic in this respect. But the toolkit didn't get to where it is simply because of idealism. A lot of money went into making it what it is. A lot of money goes into the improvements we make.
We're not super-rich people, and we're not really looking to be. We're just looking to use our skills to make great sites and earn good money.
Just because your competition is well funded does not mean you necessarily need to "sellout" to VCs. Check out Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry's vs. Amazon by Joel Spolsky. He compares Ben & Jerry's profitable, slow-growth business model to Amazon's get-big-fast model. Do Ben & Jerry style companies have to stay small? No. Consider that Microsoft has been successfully chugging along since the 1970s.. and growing.. and growing..
cpeterso
ACS/tcl did (and openacs does too).
Money may not buy happiness, but happiness definitely doesn't buy food for the table.
Your recollection of my comment about Slashdot is ALMOST correct (I'm glad someone in the room was listening anyway). I mentioned that the guys who wrote Slashdot weren't professional programmers but that they built a great site by carefully tailoring the software to the evolving users' needs. I mentioned that some people have thrown rocks at the way it was coded (but not me since I've actually never looked at it; I have enough trouble with my own source code!) but that it really doesn't matter since data model plus page flow are the only things that affect the user experience.
.NET or openacs.org, etc. It is much more relaxing to limit myself to teaching one semester per year at MIT (6.171; Software Engineering for Internet Applications -- to avoid the kinds of tool flame wars that one sees on Slashdot we don't mandate the use of any particular tools except an ACID-compliant RDBMS (practically speaking that means Postgres, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server)).
You must have caught one of my last one-day courses. I've stopped doing them because I think that enough people have heard what I have to say. The ideas are out there for anyone who needs them, either in a document I've written or in the heads of former students, users of photo.net, embodied in products such as Microsoft
I spend the rest of my time taking flying lessons (doing my primary training now, airplane arrives on March 1, starting instrument training in March, leaving for a 3-month Alaska trip on June 1). There is nothing quite so humbling as learning to fly. You show up at the airport and, with 60 hours of experience, are almost surely the most incompetent person on the property. If your instructor is "old-school" (mine is) there is an intermittent shouting in your headset ("more right rudder"; "what do you think you're doing?"; "don't you see where the nose is pointed?"). Everything is happening way too fast.
Anyway, flying sure makes arguments about the proper way to code up a Web script (which after all is simply merging the results of an SQL query with an HTML template) seem irrelevant. Every time you bring the airplane down in a crosswind you're putting your life and your passengers' lives on the line. Screw up a bit and you've got yourself a $228,000 pile of vaguely airplane-shaped scrap. Screw up more than a bit and you've dug yourself an airplane-shaped grave right on the runway.
Anyway I guess I should close by thanking the Slashdot guys once again for their great achievement in building this site. I often use it as an example to students of how one does not need or want too many collaboration areas on a site. Users need to be able to find the discussion. What I like about Slashdot is that one need only check the front page in order to see what is being discussed.
It is gratifying to me that people still like photo.net and learn on the site (up to more than 1 million user-visits per month). But I also find it alarming that people blame me when the site is dead or slow. I was never an expert Unix sysadmin or Oracle dba. Being an MIT Lisp Machine programmer, I always hated Unix. I learned as little as possible about. As for Oracle, it is a wonderful tool with a great abstraction barrier (SQL) but I don't know of anyone who would say "I had a lot of fun last night administering my Oracle installation."
If you thought the site was a pig in 1997 you can blame me because I was personally involved with some of the sysadmin/dbadmin stuff back then. But I'm retired now! I do the stuff that (a) is fun, and (b) that only I can do. So I write articles for photo.net and critique learning photographers' submissions to the image critique forum but I don't try to beat Unix and Oracle into submission. I drove to Nova Scotia for the entire month of September. I spent the rest of the fall in art museums, Civil War battlefields, and National Parks between Boston and Texas. When I got back from three solid months on the road, what did I find? Email from people blaming me for something that they didn't like on some Internet server somewhere.
Rajeev and his merry band will eventually slay the sysadmin dragon and photo.net will be responsive once more. But when it happens you should thank him and not me!
Mea culpa. I shouldn't have advised you to get into the Internet craze. I started loving the Internet because it lets people learn from other people. That was back in 1976 when I began using ARPAnet. And what is amazing is that I can still wonder in 2002 at how useful Internet is. For example, I've learned so much lately from other pilots whom I've met on the Internet and could never have connected with as a practical matter otherwise. One of my interests is in getting a Stemme S-10 motorglider. They build 18 per year for sale worldwide. None are based in the Boston area. But I found the owners and their impressions of the aircraft on rec.aviation.* groups (thanks to dejanews (Google Groups now), of course). Then I emailed them and they were very helpful to me, despite my status as a novice pilot.
At the end of the 1990s this wonder turned into something more akin to fever. And, along with the pressures that come from managing a company that was growing 1000%/year, that didn't bring out the most attractive parts of my personality. Bottom line: I'm sorry for giving you unsolicited career advice. If you come to the US and you don't value your life too much, I'll take you up on a sightseeing flight! (with Alex in the back seat, of course)
[And don't sell Internet apps short just yet. With some improvements in infrastructure, such as ubiquitous high-speed wireless IP connectivity and reasonable conversational speech recognition software, a lot of interesting new applications should be enabled. Of course, it might be 5 or 10 years before we have this infrastructure in place, which is why I'm working with young people at MIT instead of trying to build the stuff myself.]
Thank you for pointing out the fact that my last day of influence at ArsDigita was in April 2000 (nearly two years ago). Here I am, a quiet retired schoolteacher, and people are still beating me up for opinions and attitudes that they think I might have had at some time in the preceding decade. I try to leave the old writings up on my Web site so as to be a good Internet citizen and not break links. But people take things that I wrote in the early 1990s and assume that I still hold these opinions. To take a non-controversial example: I struggled to get Windows NT 3.51 working and couldn't. I vented my rage against Bill Gates in some site. But now I love Microsoft. About half of my students use the .NET tools and are extremely productive. I'm running Windows XP on two computers at home and haven't spent more than 15 minutes on sysadmin. The interesting research in online communities is all being done at ... you guessed it, Microsoft Research.
I'll come back home after walking the dog or get out of the bathtub where I've been reading New Yorker magazine. I amble over to the computer and there is email from someone yelling at me to "Get a life and stop picking on Bill Gates you miserable envious poverty-stricken grad student."
Online communities only work if someone puts forth a strong opinion against which others can react. This is why photo.net works so well. We write "Nikon autofocus sucks" and that yields a huge pile of interesting comments from Nikon users about how they've been able to get great photos with the Nikon AF system. But when you have people with long memories and/or Google to dredge up these ancient opinions, which may never have been held strongly to begin with, life gets kind of confusing.
... instead of "submit", it reads "probe my ars".
http://eveander.com/cancun/images/43.jpg
We (myself and mine) pull down $200/hr and if you're doing better, and still can't afford to participate, there's something seriously wrong with your world view.
I completely agree with you. If the reason for your hostility is you think we're making more money than you and still not sharing with the rest of the community, then let me assure you that this is not the case. If we could afford it, we would.
Maybe at some point in the future, we will be able to. But for now, we're not starving, but we aren't buying any yachts either.