Slashdot Mirror
Torvalds's Former Company Transmeta Acquired and Gone
desmondhaynes sends along a posting from the TechWatch blog detailing the sale of Transmeta (most recently discussed here). Linus moved ten time-zones west, from Finland to Santa Clara, CA, to join Transmeta in March 1997, before this community existed. Here is our discussion of the announcement of the Crusoe processor from 2000. Our earliest discussion of Transmeta was the 13th Slashdot story. "Transmeta, once a sparkling startup that set out to beat Intel and AMD in mobile computing, announced that it will be acquired by Novafora. The company's most famous employee, Linux inventor Linus Torvalds, kept the buzz and rumor mill about the company throughout its stealth phase alive and guaranteed a flashy technology announcement in early 2000. Almost nine years later Transmeta's journey is over." Update: 11/21 16:25 GMT by KD : It's not the 13th Slashdot story, only the 13th currently in the database. We lost the first 4 months at one point.
From the article:
Transmeta today announced that Novafora will acquire Transmeta and its assets for $255.6 million in cash.
Transmeta's cash, cash equivalents and short term investments at September 30, 2008 totaled $255.2 million.
So, the entire worth of the company intellectual property was about $0.4M?
Layne
Makes me feel old... oh wait I am. Crap.
How ironic.
If you count something as "wasted" just because it was a part of something that failed many years later, then virtually all of humanity's efforts are wasted in the long run.
E.g., what was the point of building cities and inventing civilization in Mesopotamia, since millenia later it fell to the semitic populations, then to the iranians (indo-europeans), and finally to the arabs? Even Sumerian, the language of the first human civilization, soon was a dead language kept just for religious services and texts. (Much like what millenia later would happen to Latin.) Was Hammurabi's life wasted on working on that law code and construction and whatnot, since he worked for Babylon which later got conquered by Assyria and today is just a bunch of ruins?
Was the life of every Roman that ever lived wasted, because their country would eventually implode and be conquered by a tribe as primitive as the Longobards?
Was Egipt all a big waste for that same reason?
Sometimes it makes sense to live in the present. It matters what you do now, not what will become of it in 10 years. What may make a difference in the long run is that you were one of the guys who tried and contributed a bit to the advancement of technology/culture/whatever, not whether you left some monumental legacy that will for ever be intact. Because if you're aiming for the latter, you might as well give up now, 'cause in the long run everything turns to dust.
Even the the Great Lighthouse, or the Colosus of Rhodes, or whatever, eventually turned to little more than ruins or disappeared altogether. Was it a waste of someone's years to build them? Well, no, they served their purpose while they existed, _and_ more importantly humanity learned something new in the process. Even if it's how to stack a lot of bricks to build a f-ing huge lighthouse. The road to the mighty gothic cathedrals of later, or to the Hagia Sophia, goes through such earlier achievements. Even if the grand monumental testament to someone's work is gone, their contribution to the species' knowledge lived on and accumulated.
Plus, in this case we're not even talking about some personal failure, but the failure of one company he worked for. Well, gee.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That a small start up could take on Intel in a serious way?
Well, that wasn't what killed them. There are many stories of garage companies taking on the fat, lazy big boys and winning (Microsoft/Apple against IBM, for one).
What killed them was the Fundamentally Wrong Approach. They wanted to, in essence, make a "magic optimizer" that would take Intel instructions and convert them to run on a very simple, low-power device. The "magic optimizer" was left as an "exercise to the geniuses". The business plan for that consisted solely of hand waving. "Hey, we'll just hire smart people and let them figure it out."
Unfortunately, optimization is a notoriously difficult problem, and is really a subset of Strong A.I. No one programs in assembly language these days, so one really understands how bad compilers really are at producing code, compared to human optimized code. Computers are so fast and programmers are so expensive, so we don't really care anymore.
Taking assembly and trying to translate/recompile it into another very-low-level assembly and do this on-the-fly without any time or performance penalty is a fool's game. It was never going to work. I could probably even dig up my posts on this subject way back when. :)
See also: VLIW processors, where the hardware guys fool themselves by saying, "the software guys will figure out how to compile to it."
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.