I'm sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine. Every idiot in the world speaks authoritatively about dumping when they have no idea whatsoever what it actually is.
Here's a hint: "Selling a product at a loss" is not dumping. Not even a little bit. If you produced a product and gave it away for free, that still wouldn't be dumping.
Dumping is very simple: It is selling a product in a foreign market for less than you normally sell it for in your domestic market. If you don't believe me ask the World Trade Organization. So unless you believe that MS is selling the Xbox cheaper overseas (hint: they're not), MS is not dumping.
You may now all return to your ignorant, dogmatic lives.
> Because of the Hurd's multi-server microkernel > architecture. If we keep relying on monolithic > kernels (Linux, *BSD) forever, we eventually > won't' be able to keep up with proprietary OSs, > and the Free/Open Source software movement will die
Whahuh? What the hell are you talking about?
What in tarnation does the architecture of a kernel have to do with "keeping up" with some other OS? That's a completely orthagonal issue.
Hint: You can write unmaintainable crap code with any architecture. You can write clean maintainable code with any architecture.
I see absolutely no evidence for your hysterical assertion.
The "complete advantage" of running 'would-be threads' in separate process spaces also has the "complete disadvantage" of an inability to share data without using some heavyweight mechanism. Not to mention a heavyweight context switch.
Yes, threads can be misused and abused, but for some problems they're the right tool. All the developers in this article are trying to do is develop a hammer that won't break the first time they hit a nail with it (IMHO, Linux's inability to deal with massive numbers of threads without severe performance degredation makes the threading implementation approach uselessness. I'm glad someone is fixing it).
Well, that's a little harsh. I mean, we all do things that we want to do. I "could" be writing software to cure cancer and AIDS, but instead I'm working at a storage startup trying to make the big bucks and work with a great group of people. We can't all sacrifice our lives for the Great Cause.
And I agree that 20 years ago, "wouldn't it be nice if there was a free operating system" seemed like such a cause. But ever since BSDi settled the unix issues, it seems to me that BSD [footnote 1] became that free operating system.
-pete footnote 1: Substitute Linux depending on your political preferences. Void where prohibited by law. Call before midnight tonight for complete refund of price of purchase. Terms available, don't be fooled by cheap imitations, no salesman will visit your home. My apologies to Tom Waits.
That being said, I think the Hurd is pretty much a solution in search of a problem. Who cares? And why? The FreeBSD kernel does everything Hurd purports to want to be able to do, and is more mature, stable, and feature-complete. The same could probably be said of the Linux kernel.
Does that mean the Hurd guys should stop what they're doing? Of course not. Writing operating systems is fun.
It does, however, probably mean that the stuff they're doing isn't really news.
Trackpoint on mac laptops.
on
Mac Case Mods
·
· Score: 2
If I could get a Mac laptop modified to support a trackpoint, I'd buy a new iBook or Tibook tomorrow.
It's not my word, although I'm not sure where it was first used. Obviously, it's a reference to the facehuggers in Alien The canonical piece of facehuggerware is, and pretty much always has been, RealPlayer.
The WordPerfect suite is installed on the laptop I'm using right now. It's somewhat less useful than Office (in a "my co-workers don't have it installed" kind of way), but the flip side of that coin is that it is substantially less facehugging, although it has its own annoyances (it puts about 63,000 little icons in the system tray. yuck.)
So far my favorite part of it is the calendar applet, which is smart, unobtrusive, and useful.
There is no logical reason why a "non-native" interface would have to be slower than a native one.
I think you're completely wrong.
Would you guys listen to yourselves? You're harping about the difference in rendering between Mozilla and IE -- which can't be more than a few milliseconds at most -- and blowing off skins as "not significant".
Pretty much all UI studies show that the UI has an immediate impact on the user's ability to react quickly and efficiently. In other words, the slowest part of any given browser (or any given program, really) is in the interface between the chair and the mouse. Guess what: gprof doesn't measure that.
That's why a non-native interface has to be slower than a native one.
Many of us find soldering to be a relaxing activity which can be performed in our spare time. We think nothing of soldering 20 leads to legs of surface mount components because we have a temperature-controlled iron with a chisel tip and we aren't afraid to use it.
Ok, Ok, I admit it. Your penis is absolutely huge. I bow before your mighty staff, o hacker of hackers.
As for me -- I actually charge quite a bit for leisure time. It's the most precious time I have. If you find soldering to be as rewarding an activity as playing videogames, then you're right -- installing modchips is a valuable use of your time. Those of us who find it an annoying, menial activity that is a complete waste of our gigantic brains, however, have a different decision-making process.
Hint: It's not because they care if you play pirated games.
Frankly, it's not as though mod chips are a very good deal for the consumer. They're expensive, they're a pain in the ass to install, and whatever you "save" in money (which, given the expense and risk that you ruin your console in installing them is already marginal) you easily outspend in time wasted copying lousy games. Frankly, the biggest problem facing today's gamer is not "games are too expensive" but "there are too many lousy games out there, how do I determine which ones to play?" A few well-chosen rentals are a more effective way of saving money than spinning your wheels doing surgery or CD burning.
No. Very few consumers -- other than those addicted to piracy on general principles, or who get a kick out of feeling like they're getting away with something -- will ever install or use mod chips. The copy protection isn't there to prevent you from playing pirated games. The real target of copy protection in consoles is -- other game companies.
For every PS2 game made, Sony gets a cut. For every Gamecube game made, Nintendo gets a cut. For every Xbox game made, Microsoft gets a cut. The copy protection on these consoles is the console manufacturer's way of making sure that they are not squeezed out of the transactions between the game developers and the consumer, the way Atari was with 3rd-party 2600 games.
I don't believe that MS is losing money hand over first for the hardware. I think this is a common myth.
I mean, I don't know of course. And I'm sure they were losing money at first. But let's face it, the Xbox has a great advantage over its competitors: it's made with pretty much off-the-shelf components. Those components get cheaper over time with a dramatic slope.
Look at the PC you are using right now. Did you buy it more than a year ago? How much did it cost then? How much would it cost today?
Basically, I think people repeat this because they heard it once and they like to fantasize about MS going bankrupt.
I don't buy it.
The Xbox was surely a loss leader at first. It surely is not today.
Hi, please don't be a huge raging dickhead. You're completely, utterly, and didactically wrong.
I used to work for the CMU CS facilities department; we did make all our backups on 9 track tapes, they are kept forever, and it was a huge pain in the ass for Jeff to track down the relevant equipment to do the restore. We're lucky he was able to get it restored -- very often, tapes that old just disintegrate, even when stored properly, as these were.
So don't call friends of mine liars, and I won't call you a vacuous drooling moron, OK?
And as for how it could spread quickly, don't forget the meme theory of ideas, and the fact that CMU was on Usenet from a hideously early date.
Note that I'm not affiliated with either CMU (except as an alumni and former co-worker) or Microsoft.
Good design doesn't allow the user to make mistakes. Read "The Design of Everyday Things" some time; a well designed device (or interface) leads the user subconsciously to do the right thing. A poorly designed one leads to confusion.
Now, you -might- be arguing that Zarf (who, might I observe, has a lot more street cred than you) is stupid.
But, of course, you're wrong. Big surprise.
"Well, the Slashdot community is composed largely of people whose self-esteem is entirely based on their ability to figure out and use bad interfaces." --my friend Nat.
My impression is that the combination of dense-mode multicast (flood then prune) in the core and sparse-mode and dense/sparse ("opt-in" at rendezvous point) actually do solve the majority of bandwidth issues.
Of course, that assumes it is correctly configured. Which it usually isn't.
There are some problems that are totally intractable -- particularly with respect to security. If you have a multicast group that is sharing a key, you basically are forced to regenerate and redistribute keys every time someone leaves the group. Which is very impracticable. So no one does it. So it is almost never secure.
Multicast: The dog of IP technology that just refused to hunt.
Now, now, don't get all worked up on me, here. For years I've been using the MBone tools, and I figure the pain involved in that experience earns me the right to be a little cranky. IP multicast just instinctively seems like such a good idea that it is always upsetting to discover that, in practice, it has been just about useless.
Part of this, I think, is because of the applications chosen. Many to many videoconferences are a bad demo app because the truth is that most people don't need many-to-many -- they need some-to-some, or more likely one-to-many, both of which can be done adequately (read: better, also known as "more predictably") with unicast technologies.
There was also a culture that grew up around the MBone that discouraged innovation, both in terms of the tools and the community using them (which, let's face it, was basically, "only those of us that were NANOG regulars. No one wanted to build or to use new tools, because we've got these free TCL tools that suck! And did we mention that they're free? Yep, vic, vat, and sdr -- that's all you need! Never mind that they were "technology demos" that were never actually supposed to be permanent parts of the infrastructure. Why take any effort to make better ones? Worse is better
And of course, unless you were part of NANOG or the nsfnet clique generally, just try to multicast something on the MBone that actually served another community. I remember getting a van-o-gram because I was multicasting WRCT on the MBone. Van didn't like that I was taking bandwidth away from his friends. The MBone crowd would rather stop people from using the network than, say, admit publically that pruning didn't work and that maybe they should stop recommending multicast as a solution to any problem, anywhere, until this was fixed (which I believe, thank god, it finally has been).
But this -- now this is a cool use for multicast. Watching Counterstrike games is amazingly cool, but there is such a penalty for the players of a game to allow unlimited spectating, since each additional unicast client would slow down the server and clog the network further. Kudos to these guys for going the extra mile (and coming up with an application compelling enough to convince a community with a natural urge to monkey with the network to get involved in multicast).
My only concern is: is multicast really deployed end-to-end? This is a trick question, because really I'm saying "No fucking way is multicast deployed end to end!" In fact, I'd be amazed if more than about half of the big national providers did multicast even in their backbone. Or am I being pessimistic? I'd be curious to know if anyone has real statistics on this issue.
>First, there were supposed to be 7 people on the > board, but the VCs blocked appointments for the > last 2 seats. That enabled them to get a > majority when voting as a bloc.
So? Can Phil count? If so, maybe he should have considered that before he signed the contract.
> Second, the VCs stopped holding board meetings, and instead > started holding "investor's meetings", which excluded > Greenspun, which made board-level decisions.
Frankly, I simply don't believe this. It sounds like utter and complete bullshit. Assuming that meetings of the board are required by the corporate bylaws (hint: they almost certainly are), then failure to have those meetings would make the board liable to a suit. From the shareholders. Namely, Phil.
So in other words, I view the fact that Phil hasn't sued them for this as evidence that the claim isn't true.
> Third, they used company money to finance litigation in > an attempt to subvert the shareholders' legitimate interests > in the financial welfare of the company.
I'm going to say this as gently as I can: That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard said by anyone since the beginning of time, ever.
Let's play a game. It's called "Pretend."
Pretend you are a board member of a company. You hear that a stockholder calls a fake meeting of the shareholders (fake because he fails to inform all shareholders that the meeting is taking place) where the stockholder arguably violates an agreement and declares that the officers you appointed aren't in charge any more, he is, nanny-nanny-boo-boo!
What do you do? Do you:
A) Say "Well, I guess that's it" and give up and go home.
B) Defend the corporation with personal funds.
C) Defend the corporation with corporate funds.
Hint: if you do (A) you have violated your fiduciary duty as a board member, and if you do (B) you are piercing the corporate veil by mixing personal assets with corporate ones.
When corporations get into disputes, they pay lawyers. The idea that somehow they should have just rolled over and died is moronic. Get over it.
I am about to rant. If you are in my way, please step the fuck down.
I have read with interest the fawning adulation and tea-and-biscuit sympathy the slashdot community has for PhilG on this issue. Oh, wait, did I say "interest"? I meant "disgust." What the fuck is wrong with you people? I'd suggest that your mothers dropped you on your heads as children, but it looks more like she thwacked you with a sledgehammer. Twice.
There are two assertions that people seem to be making:
Look, isn't it terrible how the evil venture capitalists gave Ars Digita lots of money and then took control of the company?
If only PhilG had been left in charge, Ars Digita would have been as large as Microsoft, except it would have given us all free ice cream. And Aeron chairs.
Both of these statements are pathetically false.
First off, I don't know PhilG personally. Maybe he's a nice guy. Maybe he spends all his spare time saving kittens and helping nuns cross the street. Maybe he is god's gift to the Internet, computer science, photography, and women. But none of that has anything to do with whether he has been wronged here. Fundamentally, Philip signed a contract. For him to now claim that it is unfair for the VCs to exercise the rights Philip gave them when he signed the contract is irritating at best and utterly disingenuous and deceptive at worst.
Phil had a very easy way to keep control of aD: don't take the fucking money. He took the money. He made his bed. Now he sleeps in it.
Furthermore, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about why companies seek venture capital financing. Here's a hint: it ain't just for the money. Finding money, if you have a good idea and aren't a schmuck, isn't all that hard. Running a successful business: now that's hard -- a lot harder that building a few tools used to create web sites. Founders of companies (or at least, smart founders of companies) seek VC not just because of the money but to gain access to a pool of talented people that know how to do something they don't: grow a small company into a larger one.
That Philip doesn't seem to understand this is sad.
I suspect the people who will win out, in the long term, are the people working at Ars Digita, who now have the benefit of professional management without the interference of an amateur (why do I say amateur? If you sign a contract for millions of dollars that you don't seem to have read, you're an amateur) that, from what I've heard, wasn't able to effectively manage any group larger than about 5 people.
I wish Ars Digita success, I wish Philip well, too. I hope all of you that think that the VCs are somehow wrong for trying to do their job are injured in fiery auto accidents with large-breasted German women.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine. Every idiot in the world speaks authoritatively about dumping when they have no idea whatsoever what it actually is.
Here's a hint: "Selling a product at a loss" is not dumping. Not even a little bit. If you produced a product and gave it away for free, that still wouldn't be dumping.
Dumping is very simple: It is selling a product in a foreign market for less than you normally sell it for in your domestic market. If you don't believe me ask the World Trade Organization. So unless you believe that MS is selling the Xbox cheaper overseas (hint: they're not), MS is not dumping.
You may now all return to your ignorant, dogmatic lives.
Hey guys? There's this miraculous technology that has existed for a few years called "caching."
Google has used it, and no one has sued them over it. Maybe you could use it too? And then things wouldn't suck quite so bad EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Please? Pretty please? It's really easy, I swear.
What? No GIFs of the pictures you drew as a kid? I feel violated and ripped off.
Slashdot: Your stream-of-consciousness news source.
Peterb
PS: Did I say "violated and ripped off?" I meant "relieved."
> Because of the Hurd's multi-server microkernel
> architecture. If we keep relying on monolithic
> kernels (Linux, *BSD) forever, we eventually
> won't' be able to keep up with proprietary OSs,
> and the Free/Open Source software movement will die
Whahuh? What the hell are you talking about?
What in tarnation does the architecture of a kernel have to do with "keeping up" with some other OS? That's a completely orthagonal issue.
Hint: You can write unmaintainable crap code with any architecture. You can write clean maintainable code with any architecture.
I see absolutely no evidence for your hysterical assertion.
The "complete advantage" of running 'would-be threads' in separate process spaces also has the "complete disadvantage" of an inability to share data without using some heavyweight mechanism. Not to mention a heavyweight context switch.
Yes, threads can be misused and abused, but for some problems they're the right tool. All the developers in this article are trying to do is develop a hammer that won't break the first time they hit a nail with it (IMHO, Linux's inability to deal with massive numbers of threads without severe performance degredation makes the threading implementation approach uselessness. I'm glad someone is fixing it).
Well, that's a little harsh. I mean, we all do things that we want to do. I "could" be writing software to cure cancer and AIDS, but instead I'm working at a storage startup trying to make the big bucks and work with a great group of people. We can't all sacrifice our lives for the Great Cause.
And I agree that 20 years ago, "wouldn't it be nice if there was a free operating system" seemed like such a cause. But ever since BSDi settled the unix issues, it seems to me that BSD [footnote 1] became that free operating system.
-pete
footnote 1: Substitute Linux depending on your political preferences. Void where prohibited by law. Call before midnight tonight for complete refund of price of purchase. Terms available, don't be fooled by cheap imitations, no salesman will visit your home. My apologies to Tom Waits.
Is harder than most people seem to think it is.
That being said, I think the Hurd is pretty much a solution in search of a problem. Who cares? And why? The FreeBSD kernel does everything Hurd purports to want to be able to do, and is more mature, stable, and feature-complete. The same could probably be said of the Linux kernel.
Does that mean the Hurd guys should stop what they're doing? Of course not. Writing operating systems is fun.
It does, however, probably mean that the stuff they're doing isn't really news.
If I could get a Mac laptop modified to support a trackpoint, I'd buy a new iBook or Tibook tomorrow.
It was an accident, I swear! (I even wrote it up in my journal...)
(will the slashdot First Post Wanker's Union come break my legs now because I violated their monopoly?)
I still have a Janis Ian vinyl 45 of "At Seventeen..."
Memo to self: rip this to MP3 later this week, release new "At Seventeen (hardcore Phunked-up remix)"
9-tracks, right?
It's not my word, although I'm not sure where it was first used. Obviously, it's a reference to the facehuggers in Alien The canonical piece of facehuggerware is, and pretty much always has been, RealPlayer.
God, I hate them so much.
The WordPerfect suite is installed on the laptop I'm using right now. It's somewhat less useful than Office (in a "my co-workers don't have it installed" kind of way), but the flip side of that coin is that it is substantially less facehugging, although it has its own annoyances (it puts about 63,000 little icons in the system tray. yuck.)
So far my favorite part of it is the calendar applet, which is smart, unobtrusive, and useful.
I think you're completely wrong.
Would you guys listen to yourselves? You're harping about the difference in rendering between Mozilla and IE -- which can't be more than a few milliseconds at most -- and blowing off skins as "not significant".
Pretty much all UI studies show that the UI has an immediate impact on the user's ability to react quickly and efficiently. In other words, the slowest part of any given browser (or any given program, really) is in the interface between the chair and the mouse. Guess what: gprof doesn't measure that.
That's why a non-native interface has to be slower than a native one.
Ok, Ok, I admit it. Your penis is absolutely huge. I bow before your mighty staff, o hacker of hackers.
As for me -- I actually charge quite a bit for leisure time. It's the most precious time I have. If you find soldering to be as rewarding an activity as playing videogames, then you're right -- installing modchips is a valuable use of your time. Those of us who find it an annoying, menial activity that is a complete waste of our gigantic brains, however, have a different decision-making process.
Hint: It's not because they care if you play pirated games.
Frankly, it's not as though mod chips are a very good deal for the consumer. They're expensive, they're a pain in the ass to install, and whatever you "save" in money (which, given the expense and risk that you ruin your console in installing them is already marginal) you easily outspend in time wasted copying lousy games. Frankly, the biggest problem facing today's gamer is not "games are too expensive" but "there are too many lousy games out there, how do I determine which ones to play?" A few well-chosen rentals are a more effective way of saving money than spinning your wheels doing surgery or CD burning.
No. Very few consumers -- other than those addicted to piracy on general principles, or who get a kick out of feeling like they're getting away with something -- will ever install or use mod chips. The copy protection isn't there to prevent you from playing pirated games. The real target of copy protection in consoles is -- other game companies.
For every PS2 game made, Sony gets a cut. For every Gamecube game made, Nintendo gets a cut. For every Xbox game made, Microsoft gets a cut. The copy protection on these consoles is the console manufacturer's way of making sure that they are not squeezed out of the transactions between the game developers and the consumer, the way Atari was with 3rd-party 2600 games.
--peterb
I don't believe that MS is losing money hand over first for the hardware. I think this is a common myth.
I mean, I don't know of course. And I'm sure they were losing money at first. But let's face it, the Xbox has a great advantage over its competitors: it's made with pretty much off-the-shelf components. Those components get cheaper over time with a dramatic slope.
Look at the PC you are using right now. Did you buy it more than a year ago? How much did it cost then? How much would it cost today?
Basically, I think people repeat this because they heard it once and they like to fantasize about MS going bankrupt.
I don't buy it.
The Xbox was surely a loss leader at first. It surely is not today.
Hi, please don't be a huge raging dickhead. You're completely, utterly, and didactically wrong.
I used to work for the CMU CS facilities department; we did make all our backups on 9 track tapes, they are kept forever, and it was a huge pain in the ass for Jeff to track down the relevant equipment to do the restore. We're lucky he was able to get it restored -- very often, tapes that old just disintegrate, even when stored properly, as these were.
So don't call friends of mine liars, and I won't call you a vacuous drooling moron, OK?
And as for how it could spread quickly, don't forget the meme theory of ideas, and the fact that CMU was on Usenet from a hideously early date.
Note that I'm not affiliated with either CMU (except as an alumni and former co-worker) or Microsoft.
Oh, great, just what SCSI needs -- more protocols with new, incompatible interfaces.
That'll solve the problem!
Here is a link to the list of restaurants and places that Telerama has wireless service. Including my almost-favorite coffee shop, Jitterz!
You're right. It is obvious. It's bad design.
Good design doesn't allow the user to make mistakes. Read "The Design of Everyday Things" some time; a well designed device (or interface) leads the user subconsciously to do the right thing. A poorly designed one leads to confusion.
Now, you -might- be arguing that Zarf (who, might I observe, has a lot more street cred than you) is stupid.
But, of course, you're wrong. Big surprise.
"Well, the Slashdot community is composed largely of people whose self-esteem is entirely based on their ability to figure out and use bad interfaces." --my friend Nat.
Of course, that assumes it is correctly configured. Which it usually isn't.
There are some problems that are totally intractable -- particularly with respect to security. If you have a multicast group that is sharing a key, you basically are forced to regenerate and redistribute keys every time someone leaves the group. Which is very impracticable. So no one does it. So it is almost never secure.
Now, now, don't get all worked up on me, here. For years I've been using the MBone tools, and I figure the pain involved in that experience earns me the right to be a little cranky. IP multicast just instinctively seems like such a good idea that it is always upsetting to discover that, in practice, it has been just about useless.
Part of this, I think, is because of the applications chosen. Many to many videoconferences are a bad demo app because the truth is that most people don't need many-to-many -- they need some-to-some, or more likely one-to-many, both of which can be done adequately (read: better, also known as "more predictably") with unicast technologies.
There was also a culture that grew up around the MBone that discouraged innovation, both in terms of the tools and the community using them (which, let's face it, was basically, "only those of us that were NANOG regulars. No one wanted to build or to use new tools, because we've got these free TCL tools that suck! And did we mention that they're free? Yep, vic, vat, and sdr -- that's all you need! Never mind that they were "technology demos" that were never actually supposed to be permanent parts of the infrastructure. Why take any effort to make better ones? Worse is better
And of course, unless you were part of NANOG or the nsfnet clique generally, just try to multicast something on the MBone that actually served another community. I remember getting a van-o-gram because I was multicasting WRCT on the MBone. Van didn't like that I was taking bandwidth away from his friends. The MBone crowd would rather stop people from using the network than, say, admit publically that pruning didn't work and that maybe they should stop recommending multicast as a solution to any problem, anywhere, until this was fixed (which I believe, thank god, it finally has been).
But this -- now this is a cool use for multicast. Watching Counterstrike games is amazingly cool, but there is such a penalty for the players of a game to allow unlimited spectating, since each additional unicast client would slow down the server and clog the network further. Kudos to these guys for going the extra mile (and coming up with an application compelling enough to convince a community with a natural urge to monkey with the network to get involved in multicast).
My only concern is: is multicast really deployed end-to-end? This is a trick question, because really I'm saying "No fucking way is multicast deployed end to end!" In fact, I'd be amazed if more than about half of the big national providers did multicast even in their backbone. Or am I being pessimistic? I'd be curious to know if anyone has real statistics on this issue.
> board, but the VCs blocked appointments for the
> last 2 seats. That enabled them to get a
> majority when voting as a bloc.
So? Can Phil count? If so, maybe he should have considered that before he signed the contract.
> Second, the VCs stopped holding board meetings, and instead
> started holding "investor's meetings", which excluded
> Greenspun, which made board-level decisions.
Frankly, I simply don't believe this. It sounds like utter and complete bullshit. Assuming that meetings of the board are required by the corporate bylaws (hint: they almost certainly are), then failure to have those meetings would make the board liable to a suit. From the shareholders. Namely, Phil.
So in other words, I view the fact that Phil hasn't sued them for this as evidence that the claim isn't true.
> Third, they used company money to finance litigation in
> an attempt to subvert the shareholders' legitimate interests
> in the financial welfare of the company.
I'm going to say this as gently as I can: That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard said by anyone since the beginning of time, ever.
Let's play a game. It's called "Pretend."
Pretend you are a board member of a company. You hear that a stockholder calls a fake meeting of the shareholders (fake because he fails to inform all shareholders that the meeting is taking place) where the stockholder arguably violates an agreement and declares that the officers you appointed aren't in charge any more, he is, nanny-nanny-boo-boo!
What do you do? Do you:
A) Say "Well, I guess that's it" and give up and go home.
B) Defend the corporation with personal funds.
C) Defend the corporation with corporate funds.
Hint: if you do (A) you have violated your fiduciary duty as a board member, and if you do (B) you are piercing the corporate veil by mixing personal assets with corporate ones.
When corporations get into disputes, they pay lawyers. The idea that somehow they should have just rolled over and died is moronic. Get over it.
I have read with interest the fawning adulation and tea-and-biscuit sympathy the slashdot community has for PhilG on this issue. Oh, wait, did I say "interest"? I meant "disgust." What the fuck is wrong with you people? I'd suggest that your mothers dropped you on your heads as children, but it looks more like she thwacked you with a sledgehammer. Twice.
There are two assertions that people seem to be making:
- Look, isn't it terrible how the evil venture capitalists gave Ars Digita lots of money and then took control of the company?
- If only PhilG had been left in charge, Ars Digita would have been as large as Microsoft, except it would have given us all free ice cream. And Aeron chairs.
Both of these statements are pathetically false.First off, I don't know PhilG personally. Maybe he's a nice guy. Maybe he spends all his spare time saving kittens and helping nuns cross the street. Maybe he is god's gift to the Internet, computer science, photography, and women. But none of that has anything to do with whether he has been wronged here. Fundamentally, Philip signed a contract. For him to now claim that it is unfair for the VCs to exercise the rights Philip gave them when he signed the contract is irritating at best and utterly disingenuous and deceptive at worst.
Phil had a very easy way to keep control of aD: don't take the fucking money. He took the money. He made his bed. Now he sleeps in it.
Furthermore, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about why companies seek venture capital financing. Here's a hint: it ain't just for the money. Finding money, if you have a good idea and aren't a schmuck, isn't all that hard. Running a successful business: now that's hard -- a lot harder that building a few tools used to create web sites. Founders of companies (or at least, smart founders of companies) seek VC not just because of the money but to gain access to a pool of talented people that know how to do something they don't: grow a small company into a larger one.
That Philip doesn't seem to understand this is sad.
I suspect the people who will win out, in the long term, are the people working at Ars Digita, who now have the benefit of professional management without the interference of an amateur (why do I say amateur? If you sign a contract for millions of dollars that you don't seem to have read, you're an amateur) that, from what I've heard, wasn't able to effectively manage any group larger than about 5 people.
I wish Ars Digita success, I wish Philip well, too. I hope all of you that think that the VCs are somehow wrong for trying to do their job are injured in fiery auto accidents with large-breasted German women.
Good day.