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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.
ArsDigita university was wound up, although you can still access all the lectures on downloadable video (rm format I think), and the reading lists, etc. They will even send you a hard drive with all the lectures on, if you want to give yourself a CS degree =).
Their web site is still up at aduni.org.
thenerd
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
The University happened and I attended it. There were some funding issues halfway through the year but they came through on their commitments.
It was a great experience and I hope that the idea will be picked up again someday by another corporation that feels guilty about its sudden wealth.
read about it at aduni.org if you're curious. You can watch/download pretty much all the lectures on line, do the problem sets, etc.
In fact, if someone out there is interested in mirroring about 40 gigabytes worth of video content from this server I believe that there is still a need for additional storage space.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
From aduni.org:
The goal of ArsDigita University was to offer the world's best computer science education, at an undergraduate level, to people who were otherwise unable to obtain it. ADUni.org is now a site run by alumni of the school seeking to carry on that mission.
In 2000-2001, 34 talented and motivated college graduates attended a one-year, intensive, comprehensive undergraduate computer science program, for free. The program was an experiment in curriculum design, free education, and the effect of the Internet on the future of education. ArsDigita University was the brainchild of entrepreneur Philip Greenspun and the ArsDigita Foundation.
After one year, ArsDigita University lost funding and was forced to close its physical doors. Yet, we prefer to think of the program as dormant, not dead. As we redesign aduni.org, we will continue to host all of our course materials and will provide as much information as possible about the workings of this past year - who we are, what we did, how we did it, what worked, what didn't work, and what we're doing now.
Me
...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.
So did they pronounce their name "Arse Digiter"?? If so, they wouldn't have had much of a chance in the British market...
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
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.
We're still out here. The university itself closed its doors at the end of the academic year last July, and the alumni acted to save everything we could from the ashes. We run the aduni.org site, as others have posted on this thread.
All of our content (80 GB worth) is available online -- about 275 hours of lectures, problem sets, exams, notes, and solutions -- with courses like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (the much-loved MIT Scheme intro to CS course), Discrete Math, Algorithms, Theory, AI, Databases, and a couple of courses in Software Engineering (one of which is taught by Greenspun).
But we're a shoestring alumni organization that can't afford the bandwidth to stream the videos very well, unfortunately. So as an alternative we'll ship an 80GB hard drive full of the stuff to anyone who wants one for $220. Everything's available under the Open Content License. E-mail me (chris@aduni.org) for more details.
Thanks.
Chris
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.
(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.
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.