The LACK OF quality of most Linux GUI software it quite astonishing.
It looks like a bunch of ten year olds cobbled it together. It is far better than a CLI but its got a ways to go still before it becomes a standard platform.
START by stealing copies of Apple's GUI guide lines. And then FOLLOW them.
Word files are RAM dumps. The memory is allocated, uh, oddly and chunks are scattered all over and over and over (because parts have been re-indexed but not yet over-written or garbage collected.)
If you don't know the scheme, you haven't got much of chance of re constituting the document. Even if you DO know the scheme, it still bites. In fact that's why versions of Word files are incompatible. Not even M$ can do that properly. (Actually its because they'd need to have redundant implementations of code to perform the same functions from the different versions. Its easier to turn that incompatibility into a marketing lever.)
The streaming I/O performance is actually quite poor compared to that of WordPerfect. And they lock up the files so you have to use DDE or OLE to get at the actual text stream.
Just because I got out of the media/money-fed rat race a few years ago does not mean that my life sucks...
I go to shows to hear the musicians. I go to plays and see the artists. I go to museums and expose myself to art (so far, no arrests.) I go to the neighborhood bar, bend the elbow and talk to friends. I borrow and read books from the public library.
I stay home, cook and invite friends over. I surf the net, hack, write, sing, play, live and, yes, I even make love, have sex and screw like a crazed weasel. Whatever ya wanna call it.:-)
Meanwhile Valenti and Rosen can go fuck themselves but they're NOT doing it with my money.
But can I ask you/.-ers if the porno industry is shelling out to the MPAA? (I guess so. As Vespasian said after taxing Rome's public toilets: "money has no odor.")
It certainly isn't about quality of the material now is it.
They're losing the developer war to open-source, (Its a bug in the OS. [An easy call for a developper to make.] I can't fix it, you'll have to live with it!) Not fuckin' likely. Since most of the development is shifting to India, that's where they'll open the code to with draconian penalties. They'd open to China but they're already going Linux.
They're losing the education war to open source (yeah, go to school and NOT be able to study OSs? [you could be busted under the DMCA {you can be busted for revealing a store's price list!}])
So does Ada, APL, C++, J++, Java, Perl, PL/I, Set-L, and Simula (used them all & Basic, C, COBOL, JCL [I know, that doesn't realy count] & RPG,) and a whole bunch of language I have only seen the EBNFs for. (Okay Occam was & is in a class by itself. It must get lonely)
Now Smalltalk ain't perfect. It has a few major blind spots (specially concerning object relationships and instatiation in context,) but it has everythig else beat.
Try Squeak ( http://www.squeak.org ) and once you , uh, "get it," come back to anything else... You'll go YUCK!
In the "consumer space" CPU brand, MIPS, Mega-flops, megs of RAM and gigs of disk space don't matter worth crap.
What counts is all on the bottom line.
M$ is kidding itself if it thinks people give a tinker's cuss about it's software. Most people never "got it" and haven't ever had a friggin' clue as to what all the screaming was about.
M$ Office in on the way out in the consumer space because OpenOffice is available for about half a friggin' grand less. M$ Windows is on the way out in the consumer space because Linux is available for a few hundred less.
What sells in the consumer space is whatever's "good enough" and "fast enough" (something M$ is definitely LOUSY at,) to do what people want.
The hardware is already there, has been for a couple of years. The software/bloatware is what's been holding up the works.
On the business front, as a software developer, I'd rip my own lungs out before buying Lindows for what my professional needs are, but the user work-stations (read that again "work" "station") and the MIS departments that have to keep the boxen alive are glad to have a cheap M$ alternative.
Rolling out Lindows boxen sounds like some MIS manager's big "I saved X-amount of dollars" bonus opportunity.
And at home Lindows'd be good enough... If I wasn't typing this on a slackware8.1 box and if I wasn't already a Mac maniac for my other machines.:-)
My biggest challenge is teaching my techno-indifferent wife to use the Linux box. (She doesn't want to use the Mac either.)
Gee... Maybe the art of conversation will return to cab drivers. And for more than what re-run wasn't watched on TV last night.
The reaction NOT seems to be the one expected, quiet acceptance while the pockets are being picked, but one of "Fuck 'em I'll read a book and talk to you instead...
Moshe Safdie and Habitat is one great concept
on
Open Source Housing
·
· Score: 2
Check out http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Habitat_67.html
for some ideas of how integrated and modular construction can be at the same time.
I lived in Montreal at the time and it was a great idea that showed great promise. The structures even looked good (still do on Montreal's rejuvenated harbor) as well as being easy to build, cheap in volume and the interlocking of units where part of the roof of one unit is the patio of some unit on the level above creates a surprisingly livable architecture.
OS X shouldn't be on their radar. Apple is harware
on
Linux Spurs MS Price Cuts
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Job isn't in their market and it doesn't interest him in the least.
M$ is starting to see defection to Linux and resistence to their subscription schemes, flat or negative PC sales as good enough is good enough for users.
It doesn't help sales that all of the bells and whisles M$ is bundling into the OS are things that businesses definitely don't want their employeer playing with at work and most PCs are owned by corporations.
People are scared to upgrade even more than they are of getting viruses. As Linux gets more respect for security and M$ slowlky strangles users' machines with unused feature-itis the desertions will accelerate.
Since M$ has always assumed that revenues would always grow and all of their financial planning is based on this fallacy. Meanwhile hardware sales are in replacement mode (flat) and upgrades are meeting solid walls (negative territory.)
Revenue will crash at some point and M$ has no real assets compared to manufacturing companies. The X-Box is a money loser. Their partnerships are non-producing. The competition is getting tougher. Users are getting fed up. The economy sucks and price points are getting too tight to keep a resource hog like M$ in business. All things being equal, like admin costs... Linux is free acquisition.
Apart from word processors, spread-sheets and other "untrusted" apps, banks and anybody else who spends upwards of six mil a year for development and maintenance, will damn well make sure that they get the code.
For some of their stuff on mainframes and PCs they HAVE to to comply with banking commission and/or SEC and/or government regulations. Its more than just a good idea, its the law.
They have to be able to TOTALLY reassure the auditors and inspectors that NOBODY is 'skimming' pennies from each transaction. When you're talking a trillion transactions a day, week, month or year, it adds up to big time fraud damn quickly.
You CAN'T do that with a "pig in a poke." They get the source code to keep the baddies who can shut 'em down from shutting 'em down.
If they ain't votin' they ain't human - Wes Borg
on
Human-Mouse Hybrids?
·
· Score: 2
This ethical debate is ridiculous since we don't seem to mind killin' em after they're born.
If you're coding an app and you are spending time on the GUI you are just creating a maintenance headache for maintenance programmers later on.
Most documentation is horrid if it even exists (learn a human language first and use it to actually write meaningful comments, specifications, test scripts, internal and user documentation.)
Most of this industry doesn't know dick about SLAs or optimization for time (first) or space (last.)
Most of this industry doesn't know dick about configuration management, capacity planning or correctness.
The difference between duffers (most of this industry,) and the pros is that the pros don't "paint little master-pieces" in a a guild-like cottage industry. They generate "art by the yard" in industrial settings for mass dispersal, distribution and "invisible" use.
Good luck and remember, computing is nothing but a problem in N-Dimensional topology. If anybody tell you different, they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
ALL objects have states and state transitions, code for that first and the rest will follow. Start from a thorough, correct and complete meta-model and you won't get into trouble later.
As for languages, CASE tools, GUIs, IDEs and the rest. Learn to do it the long and hard way first so you'll: a) know what's being optimized and abstracted out, b) appreciate it, c) know what happens when it fails.
Herge, the Belgian, (not French Belgian, "Je ne suis pas un maudit Francais madame, je suis un sale Belge,") who created Tintin must be turning in his grave.
Hollywood/Spielberg will make some clap-trap dumbed-down gets-the-girl-in-the-end rendition of something which doesn't belong anywhere but on the printed page.
Fuck, why does Hollywood insist on tearing the heads off all my memories and jerkin' off down the neck. I'm going to stay well away from this Anglofied doggerel.
The only reason I got a TiBook is that I knew that eventually the G3 would croak (it finally did this month,) and, even at that, I waited until the TiBooks could burn CDs and CD-RWs.
Backups (redundant data & hardware bought before a catastrophy,) take all the ugency out of buying a replacement.
I may not buy a new computer for a decade. Maybe some boards, more RAM and a new monitor (just picked a Nokia 4445Xpro for the Linux box,) some new bigger drives (I ripped ALL my 200+ CDs to Mp3s,) but I don't use Windows so I never got on the upgrade treadmill.
My client's a bank and their thousands of NT4.0 SvcPk6 boxen are definitely NOT multi-media ready (bad idea with the public doan'cha'no? You're supposed to be at work, not playing games and watching DVDs.) NO CD burners, no audio cards.
The apps that we write and that run on those desktops are client-server so they don't need more than a 200MHz pentium III, a 4GB drive and 64MB RAM (and even at that most of that foot print is the OS.)
Frankly, pitching DRM at these people is a waste of time. Pitching 90% of the software is a waste of time. Pitching 90% of the hardware is a waste of time.
The working world needs better security, better user authentication, better subnet management tools and 100% reliability. The rest is noise.
I can save them the 50M Yen, the time and tell you the recommendation they'll give. "Throw money at M$"
Japanese are definitely not incoruptible. Just ask the Yakuza.
There'll be kick-back deals happening in the initial process of deciding on where to hold the closed-door meetings and who should cater the meals and "entertainment."
That's what Pointdexter's about to discover. These guy too. That my brain can store a 100 terabytes of data is almost immaterial if its all undifferentiated.
Running a Google search engine on an ever growing mass of data data is not enough.
The data has to be corelated. The engine has to understand, (read that word again, understand, an AI problem,) what its looking at and the appropriate level of granularity to use when parsing the data when extracting the memes it contains.
Our computers are damn near deaf, dumb, blind and stupider than cockroackes and we're having systemic, Korzibskian semantic anomalies and pattern recognition failures as it is.
I'd be happy when one has the information processing capacity of an annoying Pomeranian. It'll be about as useful too but I'd be happy.
"You couldn't become either an automotive engineer or a mechanic without taking cars apart, nor can you become a decent CS grad, or admin, without disecting a few systems and seeing what makes them tick."
from the LANs to the web with an eye dropper and only through "twice firewalled" intranets.
Good thing too. Its a bank with networks of OLD pentium machines running NT 4.0 SvcPk 6. (Sniffers of any kind would degrade performance so severely as to be noticable!)
Production systems run on mainframes and connect via encrypted leased lines that have no connection from the mainframes to the 'Net.
Our computers are: - deaf (except using very specific software for very specific purposes,) - dumb (text-to-speech still sucks bad enough to be funny and instantly recognizable when we hear it,) - blind, (the good shit with image interpretation and understanding is still way classified,) - flat (we scroll a mouse icon on phosphor and fool ourselves into thinking that its pointing at something. Ask a kid to point at a leaf on a tree and you'll see some real-time, real-world pointing,) - stupid, - spoofable, - trusting to levels approaching imbecility.
And this bozo thinks, ah never mind. He wouldn't see the point.
The law is as it always was, an ass and way behind the curve. The market place (M$ own customers are its own worst ennemy,) will decide.
When M$ becomes as reliable (cough, cough,) and secure (hack, hack, gasp,)) as Linux or when Linux desktop becomes consistent ("rach ptui",) enough then... the marketplace will switch to 64 bit desktops anyway and Linux will have the edge because I don't think M$ will ever get off the x86.
And NO Mr. Moore, 32 bits is NOT enought.
Our computers are still blind, deaf and dumb (also stupid and way too easily fooled.)
The amount of RAM and CPU our machines need to have and use should let them be as agile and as environmentally aware as a pet cat or canary.
I don't have to type in a spoofable password on a keyboard for my pet for it to know that I'm me. (existential security based on biometric recognition.)
I point with my finger (not a mouse,) and track objects with my eyes in 3D (no equivalent,).
I speak and I don't run spell-check as I talk. (Of course there's still the old "I know you think you understand what you heard but I don't think you realize that what I said was not what I meant.")
Sometimes the company founder goes away, the company gets managed almost to oblivion and then the founder comes back (or some corporate take-over king) and kicks the mis-managers in the ass and turns the company around.
In either case (founder or take-over king) the company is saved from its own management by throwing them out.
I have found a use for lawyers and MBAs: Fertilizer.
Slashdot Mirror
That will save time for overclockers who push the enveloppe too far. Just put it on a tripod and get the weenies and buns ready.
The LACK OF quality of most Linux GUI software it quite astonishing.
It looks like a bunch of ten year olds cobbled it together. It is far better than a CLI but its got a ways to go still before it becomes a standard platform.
START by stealing copies of Apple's GUI guide lines. And then FOLLOW them.
Word files are RAM dumps. The memory is allocated, uh, oddly and chunks are scattered all over and over and over (because parts have been re-indexed but not yet over-written or garbage collected.)
If you don't know the scheme, you haven't got much of chance of re constituting the document. Even if you DO know the scheme, it still bites. In fact that's why versions of Word files are incompatible. Not even M$ can do that properly. (Actually its because they'd need to have redundant implementations of code to perform the same functions from the different versions. Its easier to turn that incompatibility into a marketing lever.)
The streaming I/O performance is actually quite poor compared to that of WordPerfect. And they lock up the files so you have to use DDE or OLE to get at the actual text stream.
Just because I got out of the media/money-fed rat race a few years ago does not mean that my life sucks...
:-)
/.-ers if the porno industry is shelling out to the MPAA? (I guess so. As Vespasian said after taxing Rome's public toilets: "money has no odor.")
I go to shows to hear the musicians. I go to plays and see the artists. I go to museums and expose myself to art (so far, no arrests.) I go to the neighborhood bar, bend the elbow and talk to friends. I borrow and read books from the public library.
I stay home, cook and invite friends over. I surf the net, hack, write, sing, play, live and, yes, I even make love, have sex and screw like a crazed weasel. Whatever ya wanna call it.
Meanwhile Valenti and Rosen can go fuck themselves but they're NOT doing it with my money.
But can I ask you
It certainly isn't about quality of the material now is it.
M$ sees the real handwriting on the wall.
They're losing the developer war to open-source, (Its a bug in the OS. [An easy call for a developper to make.] I can't fix it, you'll have to live with it!) Not fuckin' likely. Since most of the development is shifting to India, that's where they'll open the code to with draconian penalties. They'd open to China but they're already going Linux.
They're losing the education war to open source (yeah, go to school and NOT be able to study OSs? [you could be busted under the DMCA {you can be busted for revealing a store's price list!}])
So does Ada, APL, C++, J++, Java, Perl, PL/I, Set-L, and Simula (used them all & Basic, C, COBOL, JCL [I know, that doesn't realy count] & RPG,) and a whole bunch of language I have only seen the EBNFs for. (Okay Occam was & is in a class by itself. It must get lonely)
Now Smalltalk ain't perfect. It has a few major blind spots (specially concerning object relationships and instatiation in context,) but it has everythig else beat.
Try Squeak ( http://www.squeak.org ) and once you , uh, "get it," come back to anything else... You'll go YUCK!
In the "consumer space" CPU brand, MIPS, Mega-flops, megs of RAM and gigs of disk space don't matter worth crap.
:-)
What counts is all on the bottom line.
M$ is kidding itself if it thinks people give a tinker's cuss about it's software. Most people never "got it" and haven't ever had a friggin' clue as to what all the screaming was about.
M$ Office in on the way out in the consumer space because OpenOffice is available for about half a friggin' grand less. M$ Windows is on the way out in the consumer space because Linux is available for a few hundred less.
What sells in the consumer space is whatever's "good enough" and "fast enough" (something M$ is definitely LOUSY at,) to do what people want.
The hardware is already there, has been for a couple of years. The software/bloatware is what's been holding up the works.
On the business front, as a software developer, I'd rip my own lungs out before buying Lindows for what my professional needs are, but the user work-stations (read that again "work" "station") and the MIS departments that have to keep the boxen alive are glad to have a cheap M$ alternative.
Rolling out Lindows boxen sounds like some MIS manager's big "I saved X-amount of dollars" bonus opportunity.
And at home Lindows'd be good enough... If I wasn't typing this on a slackware8.1 box and if I wasn't already a Mac maniac for my other machines.
My biggest challenge is teaching my techno-indifferent wife to use the Linux box. (She doesn't want to use the Mac either.)
And you have eyes so you should pay the MPAA.
Gee... Maybe the art of conversation will return to cab drivers. And for more than what re-run wasn't watched on TV last night.
The reaction NOT seems to be the one expected, quiet acceptance while the pockets are being picked, but one of "Fuck 'em I'll read a book and talk to you instead...
Check out http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Habitat_67 .html
for some ideas of how integrated and modular construction can be at the same time.
I lived in Montreal at the time and it was a great idea that showed great promise. The structures even looked good (still do on Montreal's rejuvenated harbor) as well as being easy to build, cheap in volume and the interlocking of units where part of the roof of one unit is the patio of some unit on the level above creates a surprisingly livable architecture.
that OLD news...
Job isn't in their market and it doesn't interest him in the least.
M$ is starting to see defection to Linux and resistence to their subscription schemes, flat or negative PC sales as good enough is good enough for users.
It doesn't help sales that all of the bells and whisles M$ is bundling into the OS are things that businesses definitely don't want their employeer playing with at work and most PCs are owned by corporations.
People are scared to upgrade even more than they are of getting viruses. As Linux gets more respect for security and M$ slowlky strangles users' machines with unused feature-itis the desertions will accelerate.
Since M$ has always assumed that revenues would always grow and all of their financial planning is based on this fallacy. Meanwhile hardware sales are in replacement mode (flat) and upgrades are meeting solid walls (negative territory.)
Revenue will crash at some point and M$ has no real assets compared to manufacturing companies. The X-Box is a money loser. Their partnerships are non-producing. The competition is getting tougher. Users are getting fed up. The economy sucks and price points are getting too tight to keep a resource hog like M$ in business. All things being equal, like admin costs... Linux is free acquisition.
When the end comes, it will be stunningly quick.
Apart from word processors, spread-sheets and other "untrusted" apps, banks and anybody else who spends upwards of six mil a year for development and maintenance, will damn well make sure that they get the code.
For some of their stuff on mainframes and PCs they HAVE to to comply with banking commission and/or SEC and/or government regulations. Its more than just a good idea, its the law.
They have to be able to TOTALLY reassure the auditors and inspectors that NOBODY is 'skimming' pennies from each transaction. When you're talking a trillion transactions a day, week, month or year, it adds up to big time fraud damn quickly.
You CAN'T do that with a "pig in a poke." They get the source code to keep the baddies who can shut 'em down from shutting 'em down.
This ethical debate is ridiculous since we don't seem to mind killin' em after they're born.
If you're coding an app and you are spending time on the GUI you are just creating a maintenance headache for maintenance programmers later on.
Most documentation is horrid if it even exists (learn a human language first and use it to actually write meaningful comments, specifications, test scripts, internal and user documentation.)
Most of this industry doesn't know dick about SLAs or optimization for time (first) or space (last.)
Most of this industry doesn't know dick about configuration management, capacity planning or correctness.
The difference between duffers (most of this industry,) and the pros is that the pros don't "paint little master-pieces" in a a guild-like cottage industry. They generate "art by the yard" in industrial settings for mass dispersal, distribution and "invisible" use.
Good luck and remember, computing is nothing but a problem in N-Dimensional topology. If anybody tell you different, they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
ALL objects have states and state transitions, code for that first and the rest will follow. Start from a thorough, correct and complete meta-model and you won't get into trouble later.
As for languages, CASE tools, GUIs, IDEs and the rest. Learn to do it the long and hard way first so you'll:
a) know what's being optimized and abstracted out,
b) appreciate it,
c) know what happens when it fails.
Herge, the Belgian, (not French Belgian, "Je ne suis pas un maudit Francais madame, je suis un sale Belge,") who created Tintin must be turning in his grave.
Hollywood/Spielberg will make some clap-trap dumbed-down gets-the-girl-in-the-end rendition of something which doesn't belong anywhere but on the printed page.
Fuck, why does Hollywood insist on tearing the heads off all my memories and jerkin' off down the neck. I'm going to stay well away from this Anglofied doggerel.
The only reason I got a TiBook is that I knew that eventually the G3 would croak (it finally did this month,) and, even at that, I waited until the TiBooks could burn CDs and CD-RWs.
Backups (redundant data & hardware bought before a catastrophy,) take all the ugency out of buying a replacement.
I may not buy a new computer for a decade. Maybe some boards, more RAM and a new monitor (just picked a Nokia 4445Xpro for the Linux box,) some new bigger drives (I ripped ALL my 200+ CDs to Mp3s,) but I don't use Windows so I never got on the upgrade treadmill.
My client's a bank and their thousands of NT4.0 SvcPk6 boxen are definitely NOT multi-media ready (bad idea with the public doan'cha'no? You're supposed to be at work, not playing games and watching DVDs.) NO CD burners, no audio cards.
The apps that we write and that run on those desktops are client-server so they don't need more than a 200MHz pentium III, a 4GB drive and 64MB RAM (and even at that most of that foot print is the OS.)
Frankly, pitching DRM at these people is a waste of time. Pitching 90% of the software is a waste of time. Pitching 90% of the hardware is a waste of time.
The working world needs better security, better user authentication, better subnet management tools and 100% reliability. The rest is noise.
They should NOT have a place on the board.
The very fact that there is more than one person to speak for OSS should be revealing to the Japanese.
M$ is part of this...
I can save them the 50M Yen, the time and tell you the recommendation they'll give. "Throw money at M$"
Japanese are definitely not incoruptible. Just ask the Yakuza.
There'll be kick-back deals happening in the initial process of deciding on where to hold the closed-door meetings and who should cater the meals and "entertainment."
That's what Pointdexter's about to discover. These guy too. That my brain can store a 100 terabytes of data is almost immaterial if its all undifferentiated.
Running a Google search engine on an ever growing mass of data data is not enough.
The data has to be corelated. The engine has to understand, (read that word again, understand, an AI problem,) what its looking at and the appropriate level of granularity to use when parsing the data when extracting the memes it contains.
Our computers are damn near deaf, dumb, blind and stupider than cockroackes and we're having systemic, Korzibskian semantic anomalies and pattern recognition failures as it is.
I'd be happy when one has the information processing capacity of an annoying Pomeranian. It'll be about as useful too but I'd be happy.
"You couldn't become either an automotive engineer or a mechanic without taking cars apart, nor can you become a decent CS grad, or admin, without disecting a few systems and seeing what makes them tick."
And you can't do it without the source.
And this is Deep Space Nine... Not great cinema was it...
And when the format changes (as it will, you can pay all over again.)
You can. I won't. I hope that there's too few suckers out there for the studios to make yet another buck off this.
from the LANs to the web with an eye dropper and only through "twice firewalled" intranets.
Good thing too. Its a bank with networks of OLD pentium machines running NT 4.0 SvcPk 6. (Sniffers of any kind would degrade performance so severely as to be noticable!)
Production systems run on mainframes and connect via encrypted leased lines that have no connection from the mainframes to the 'Net.
Can't be too careful with financial systems.
Our computers are:
- deaf (except using very specific software for very specific purposes,)
- dumb (text-to-speech still sucks bad enough to be funny and instantly recognizable when we hear it,)
- blind, (the good shit with image interpretation and understanding is still way classified,)
- flat (we scroll a mouse icon on phosphor and fool ourselves into thinking that its pointing at something. Ask a kid to point at a leaf on a tree and you'll see some real-time, real-world pointing,)
- stupid,
- spoofable,
- trusting to levels approaching imbecility.
And this bozo thinks, ah never mind. He wouldn't see the point.
The law is as it always was, an ass and way behind the curve. The market place (M$ own customers are its own worst ennemy,) will decide.
... the marketplace will switch to 64 bit desktops anyway and Linux will have the edge because I don't think M$ will ever get off the x86.
When M$ becomes as reliable (cough, cough,) and secure (hack, hack, gasp,)) as Linux or when Linux desktop becomes consistent ("rach ptui",) enough then
And NO Mr. Moore, 32 bits is NOT enought.
Our computers are still blind, deaf and dumb (also stupid and way too easily fooled.)
The amount of RAM and CPU our machines need to have and use should let them be as agile and as environmentally aware as a pet cat or canary.
I don't have to type in a spoofable password on a keyboard for my pet for it to know that I'm me. (existential security based on biometric recognition.)
I point with my finger (not a mouse,) and track objects with my eyes in 3D (no equivalent,).
I speak and I don't run spell-check as I talk. (Of course there's still the old "I know you think you understand what you heard but I don't think you realize that what I said was not what I meant.")
I listen. (ViaVoice ain't there yet.)
I draw on cocktail napkins...
Sometimes the company founder goes away, the company gets managed almost to oblivion and then the founder comes back (or some corporate take-over king) and kicks the mis-managers in the ass and turns the company around.
In either case (founder or take-over king) the company is saved from its own management by throwing them out.
I have found a use for lawyers and MBAs: Fertilizer.