Slashdot Mirror
Fortune Takes a Look at Bram Cohen
jackstack writes "Fortune has an interesting article about bittorrent creator Bram Cohen. 'Right now I'm the CEO because I don't trust anyone else to be the CEO,' Bram says. The article goes into some interesting detail about Bram's state of mind, his poor history in college, and gives a glimpse of what it's like to go from being an unknown, brilliant geek - to the CEO of an $8.75 Million startup company."
It's important to note that it's a self-diagnosis, not a medical one.
Besides, CEO's of american companies are usually in it for the quick buck and end up screwing over the company they work for and all of it's workers. One CEO of a rather large company, forget his name...well...he presided over the company while its stock plumetted 20%, took a massive severence package and ended up making $54,000 an hour when it was all said and done. The average yearly salary of his employees...$35,000.
Asperger's Syndrome, for those who don't know what it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger's_Syndrome
Asperger's lies on the Autism Spectrum. However, the Autism Spectrum is extraordinarily vast, ranging all the way from barely impaired to completely nonfunctional. Most geeks are probably somewhere on the spectrum, they just aren't severe enough to consider getting tested. Since this guy is self-diagnosed, it's impossible to tell where on the spectrum he is. Most Asperger's people have perfectly normal lives, and can learn to be great communicators with training.
In my Management class last semester, we had a few CEOs of local companies come in. One said he had always been extremely introverted and technical (Asperger's? Possibly), but had learned to overcome it to an extent. As long as he could have his required periods of downtime by himself, he could handle the day to day CEO duties, including the public and social aspects.
A person with Asperger's is not necessarily retarded, and in some ways can be profoundly gifted. In my mind, someone with the analytical frame of mind that most Asperger's people have is the perfect candidate for a CEO position, which is concerned mainly with long-term strategy.
If I've told you once, I've told you a billion times to not exaggerate.
/. community knows about it. That does not consitute millions and millions.
I think millions and millions is really overstating it. Sure, everybody in the
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Watch Slashdot fail again! Automatic +2 to someone who doesn't know what the hell they are talking about!
I don't see how classifying people that have a tendency to follow a specific behavior pattern is in any way ostracising them or being controlled by the "pharma-industrio" complex. Should we treat people that have mental and/or behavioral disorders on a case-by-case basis, discarding any prior research on the matter and start from scratch with each individual? Because, in essence, that's what you're proposing. Just because research might show that a particular drug can mitigate the symptoms of the behavior in 75% of the population that has the disorder doesn't mean we should use that research! Just throw it away, let people suffer!
OTOH it is patently ridiculous for any journalist or Slashdot editor to include a reference to whatever disorders Cohen may suffer from if it implies that he obtained some recognition or position because of said disorder.
Aspergers isn't an illness -- it's a neurodevelopmental disorder on the autism spectrum. It's also not "shortcomings" to be designed to do things differently than most people.
According to experts on autism Baron-Cohen, Atwood, and Wing, people identifying as being on the autism spectrum are accurate 99% of the time, because the internal characteristics are so striking. They can include severe sensory sensitivity, extreme motor clumsiness, weak or lacking depth perception, difficulty speaking (often with loss of speech under stress), extreme difficulty changing from one task to the other even if we want to, native use of different (autistic) body language that is incompatible with that of non-autistics, having multiple senses report one sense's information (like seeing colors for sounds)...
A LOT of stuff that comes nowhere near the neurotypical experience, and that we're aware is different long before we can name it.
Speaking as the moderator of three of the largest online discussion groups for adults on the spectrum, plus having been heavily involved in the community for four years now, I can pretty much verify their claim. Out of the many hundreds of people that have joined thinking that they're AS, I can only offhand think of one clearly that was obviously wrong, and two or three where I was uncertain.
Also, I can't imagine why anybody would *want* to claim they're one of us if they aren't. It doesn't get us out of anything that isn't obviously a meltdown-inducing problem (plus rarely even then), we're subject to constant criticism based on our differences or what we are... I'm proud to be autistic, but I hate the prejudice I encounter.
If you read the article, it sounds like BitTorrent Inc. is trying to build a mostly-unrelated business (media-on-demand, similar to the iTunes music/TV store) that happens to use the BitTorrent technology and brand.
I don't mean to troll, but given that he has Asperger's Syndrome, should it not be in his best interest to give the job of CEO to somebody who is more charismatic (in the sense that he can communicate exactly what people will want to hear)
Balmer, Fiona, or Gates were neither charismatic nor said things I wanted to hear...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Right now there are 600,000 people running Azureus. There are probably over 3 Million active users. This is just one of many Bit Torrent Clients. I wouldn't say millions and millions is an exaggeration.
Here's a testimony of a person suffering from AS http://www.well.com/~jerod23/bp/AspergersSyndrome. htm . From the link:
"An odd fact that has turned up in my brain scan and in studies of other autistic individuals across the spectrum is that our cerebellums are smaller than normal while other parts of our brains, and our total brain sizes, are larger than normal. This helps to explain some of the behavior explained above and to focus on which genes to hunt for abnormalities."
So there IS some proof that Asperger's syndrome is real.
There ya go. The problem with discrimination is that people don't understand those who are different, and reject them.
You know, you seem pretty ignorant - thinking a disease doesn't exist just because YOU can't find any evidence of it. Therefore, you end up thinking that all people with social problems have them because their own fault (reminds me of the guy who wanted to clean a negro and ended up killing him because he couldn't wash his blackness away).
Finally, let me say that while I don't agree with some buzzwords (compulsive eater, for example), that doesn't mean they aren't real. Some might not be, but some ARE real. Trying to generalize all mental diseases as buzzwords describing a normal phenomenon, is just plain nonsense.
Well, the article says that 45 million people have downloaded Bittorrent. It doesn't cite a source, but I'd imagine it means the offical client downloads. Plenty of other people download clients from other sources -- Azureus from Sourcefoge comes to mind -- so the real number may be much, much higher. Still, even if it isn't, and 45 million includes a lot of duplicates, I wouldn't be surprised if a few million people know what Bittorrent is. Certainly at least a few of my non-geek friends, the same ones who would give me a funny look if I said "Slashdot", know what Bittorrent is, which indicates to me that it's penetrated the mainstream at least somewhat.
It's Ali G's older brother
He is a doctor though at Cambridge Simon Baron-Cohen
not Sasha Baron-Cohen
That's Ali G
Heard their proud of each other though..awww
you like my sig, he likes you too. can't you just feel it!
I'd have to say your list of symptoms allows for a pretty wide spectrum...
.. and that kind of thing.), or the few people that were close to me just saw the "other side" of me, where I was much happier, being around my friend with similar interests and all. Still, I "solved" this problem on my own, by convincing my folks to pull me out of the private, all-boys' school I was attending, and switching to a public school where I felt like I had a chance to make a "fresh start" in a much more "normal" social environment.
I won't address *all* of those points of yours one by one, but I can comment on a number of them selected at random to try to illustrate my point.
1. Thoughts of suicide? Yes, I spent most of my first couple years of high-school thinking about "just ending it all" practically every day. I was extremely unhappy and depressed, yet most people probably never had a clue I really felt THAT bad. Most of them were either too busy just having fun at my expense (Hey guys, let's steal his shoes again and run off with them so he goes bezerk trying to get 'em back!
2. Codependent? I suppose, but not *extremely* so. I lived at my parents' house a lot longer than some people I knew, but by the time I was 21, I did move out. Screwed up with my first apartment and roommate due to not finding a decent job to pay my share of the bills, and had to go back to mom and dad for another stint... But I finally did buy a house and move out on my own. I guess this was partially the "fear of the unknown" thing plus a bit of laziness, but I didn't have parents that were pushing for me to leave either. In fact, my folks still cried the day I moved out - and called all the time wanting me to come back to help them with any number of misc. things they'd come up with.
3. Social interaction? I definitely had problems in this area. To this day, keeping eye contact with someone while talking to them is really difficult for me and always feels very uncomfortable. I've learned to force myself to do it in situations where I know it's expected of me (job interviews and such) but I'm very bad about doing it with someone I care about (a lover, a good friend, etc.) because I'm comfortable with them and don't feel the need to force myself to do it anymore around people who have already fully accepted me as a friend. I used to be very shy around people too, and I can't imagine ever just striking up conversations with strangers at a dance club or bar, to this day. But I'm very talkative when I'm in a small group and can chat one-on-one with people about anything of interest.
4. Hyper-focusing. This is one of those areas where my "disorder" was surely an advantage, work or project-wise. I used to be able to absolutely absorb myself into a project - like writing and working on an early BBS system I put together. I made it into one of the most popular ones in town (and greatly expanded my social circle in the process) - but I was walking around in classes with the greenbar paper printouts of my code and editing things with a pencil during school whenever I could get away with it. It was an obsession, simply because it really interested me. Nowdays, I don't even get the opportunity to get myself into that "mode" because all the responsibilities of having a kid to take care of, a house to take care of, bills to pay, my own business to build up, etc. etc. removes that option.
Try utorrent, it's like Azureus but without the bloat of java.
# Typical memory use less than 4 MB
# Incredibly small: 96 KB
http://www.utorrent.com/
Only thing it's missing is uPnP and if you have that enabled you should be shot.
Have you metaroderated recently?
W..T..F.. have you been smoking? The edonkey protocol has had nearly exactly the same transfer method as BitTorrent 2-3 years before BitTorrent came out.
BitTorrent gets slower if there are more leechers than seeders. Sum of Upload = Sum of Download. Rule of any p2p app.