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Last Great Internet Bubble Auction
jlouderb writes "At least that's what they are calling it. Cowan Alexander is getting ready to auction off the assets of MP3.com (now owned by CNet) on March 10th and 11th. The items up for sale include lots of those dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs that were so popular, along with servers and notebooks that are probably hopelessly out of date. The best part, though -- a 1997 yellow hummer and a 1994 "Fat Boy" Harley. Plus, they've got pictures!"
Too bad they aren't selling the mp3 database itself! All those songs, lost.. there should be a law or something.
Although that Axis Systems (now part of Verisity Design) machine looks pretty nice. Hm, $1M initial price.. I wonder for how much it'll go now. We could use one at work for various things.
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servers and notebooks that are probably hopelessly out of date
But if these machines have hard drivers still hooked up, then there might be lots of interesting stuff lying around on those (maybe mp3s too!)
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Aerons are quite nice, especially if you get the "fully featured" ones. I used one for about a year at one job, and now even 4 years later, I still long for an Aeron. It's not like they're going to massage you while you sit there, but they are quite comfortable, and since the "fabric" has lots of holes in it, they keep you cooler than a standard chair does.
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lots of those dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs that were so popular
You got something against the Aeron? I'm sitting in one right now, I've been using it everyday for years, it is hands-down the best chair I've ever plopped my ass down in.
I used to have back pains every morning after sitting a lot, and discomfort after long coding sessions, even with an alarm that I set to tell me to stand up every 30 minutes. But all that went away with the Aeron, it is a "life changer".
It got popular during the boom, like every expensive luxary item. How come you don't say "big dumb Hummer trucks", it seems like every dotcom CEO had one.
Just sticking up for a good product. I have several other Herman Miller products, including a *very* nice Eames lounge chair, they are worth the money.
The Hummer has 50,000 miles on it and it's on its second engine. What did they do to that thing?
-N
I've nothing to say here...
Some of the stuff is teenage oriented.
However, if you look at the photos from the link in the article, there is
and other goodies for those who live near La Jolla in San Diego.
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What in God's name were they doing with all that computer hardware? It's a website with a database. In a single picture there were several (five?) Sun Enterprise level servers, any one of which could do everything by itself.
I see two problems.
A) People have dumb ideas and think "the Internet" and more computers will help them make money.
B) Some other idiots loan the idiots in problem A more money than is required.
They've got a bunch of cool stuff though.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
As an artist that had music offered on MP3.com, I am very disappointed that MP3.com died. It's very sad, really. I've listened to bands for the first time on MP3.com which I later went out to buy a CD of. The people who suffer most from this failure is the underground music scene. The ability to get your sound out to a large audience was really a good thing for both the artists (free distro, big audience) and the listeners (free songs from a wide variety of music). All my favorite bands (MeWithoutYou, Nina Pinta and the Santa Maria, Zao, etc.) had a few free songs offered on MP3.com, and it was great if you ever wanted to show someone else some cool band. If MP3.com closed because of lawsuits, it's likely partly because major labels (or corps like ClearView) felt threatened by the ability to hear any new band out there from any musical style without being controlled by the major labels. And the idea of free AND legal music downloading must have been horrible to them. As far as those people who want to control my freedom to express myself to a large audience and to support talented bands without having to pay a large record label (most of the bands are on indie labels, if any label), I hope they rot in AO*cough*L.
The kneeling chairs take a bit of getting used to. You have to adjust your position to the desk a bit, they aren't just a "drop in" replacement for a standard chair.
They also take a bit of time to build up the necessary muscular structure. People who sit in standard chairs have woefully underdeveloped trunk muscles, since the chair is explicitly designed to use as few muscles as possible, as seldom as possible.
It becomes a feedback cycle. The more you use a standard chair, the more you need one.
If you're willing to adapt your desk to the chair, rather than the other way around, a simple and common Japanese meditation bench will replace the sort of kneeling chair you are talking about. The trick for comfort with these is to place the bench on a zabuton, not directly on a hard floor.
What I like to use though is a simple platform, about 30"x36" on which one can sit crosslegged, move around, change postion constantly, etc. These can be built at normal chair hight for use with a standard desk.
Once you get used to these and build up a certain amount of supporting musculature you'll be loath to every go back to a standard chair. No matter how "ergonomic" a chair is it just isn't designed to hold a person in a position for which human body was designed. The old Greek and Roman benches on which one relined were far more suitable for human use.
Good luck getting one into your office though.
KFG
That's a desk from BioMorph. If you have an Aeron chair, you need the Herman-Miller of desks to go along with it, which would be BioMorph. Seriously nice desks, with the attendant pricetag. *sigh*
You want to know the secret? It is appearances. If they have a boring cubicle farm and realistic goals, then no venture capitalist wants to give them BIG money.
But if they have a flashy business plan, and all sorts of things that "break the corporate model," then they can say that they're going to "create a paradigm shift" and "change the laws of business."
Otherwise, they get no more venture capital. A venture capital funded company is usually trying to get more venture capital, so all that junk is basically marketing for the moneybags.
"See! We're revitalized the employee-work relationship! Standard notions of economic production do not apply to us! We'll make it up in volume! Buy now!"
Note that the smaller venture firms are very rarely heard about, until they become big successes. They play their cards right, unlike LittleFeet (next door to us), who burnt through 25 million in just over a year. They had thousands of items of their product, but no market. So I got a laser printer, a torque wrench, and a table for pennies on the dollar at the auction.
Vive la vulture capital!
Fellowship 9/11
Not to mention the pool table and dart board. And were the games so exhausting that you needed to do your laundry at work (what's with the washing machine and dryer)? =^)
Seriously though...what was it like working there? Inquiring minds want to know...
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.