"I saw that people were getting tired of my irritating childishness and my desire to stamp my own ownership on the concept of non-ownership, so I backed off until I could find another way to impose my will on developers who wishes to associate themselves with open source, which I of course invented and I of course own."
ArsDigita was one of the few net companies actually developing a useful product that people wanted.
Did you ever use the product? How would you know?
Eve I'm sorry you got screwed. You did your job well, but no matter getting rich quick means someone else is paying for it.
Really? According to people who actually worked there, she was mostly absent and often toxic. Once again, what are you basing your opinion on?
Oh well, I invite you to join my world. A soon to be college graduate looking at a very tight job market because a few dot-commers wanted little red sports cars.
Yes, thats right, its the rest of us who have spoiled everything for you. How could we have been so thoughtless. You'd be a millionaire today if not for our greed and arrogance.
Yes, all of the tech companies from the bubble would still be prospering if they had just left the programmers in charge!!
Do you people really believe this?
The Ars folks built a company that failed, and they want someone to blame. So they blame the people to whom they had an adversarial relationship from day one. Surprise surprise.
Counter that with every major tech company in the world today who could not have gotten off of the ground without VCs..you know, Intel, Apple, EBay. Gee, how could these companies have possibly succeeded if VCs were universally toxic?
Maybe the Ars folks should just admit that they sat on a bubble that burst. The market for AOL-server and Tcl was never going to be huge - they were both fringe products. They had a good run and now its over. Deal.
Funds: Conservative companies don't go to venture capitalists for funds
If you think a bank is going to loan you money to start the type of company typified by Ars, you are crazy. Try it. Try any bank in your city. People go to loan sharks for a reason. Also, VCs can give you a great deal of expertise and assistance, but the arrogant mentality of/. precludes them thinking that they would ever need assistance getting cheap office leases or HR services, right?
This is a chicken and egg problem. How would you ever know that these bugs would crop up other than to download the code? Don't tell me "reading BugTraq" because we all know damn well that maybe 0.5% of/. users and even network admins read it
Come on now, when is the last time you wrote a data structure to store the primitive types of your language in a way that hasn't been done before?
When is the last time you thought it necessary to analyze (algorithmically) code that you are writing?
Its far more important to be very good in the programming language you have chosen and its libraries. Knowing how to write quicksort in your latest language is a dead skill - its already been done better by someone else, and added into the SDK.
So essentially the CLR and the.NET framework on top of it must necessarily be the most productive way of producing code?
No, I'm not sure that will be the case, but it could end up being the most popular, which is likely more important. I share some of your concerns that this may wipe out some innovation in language features, but I have long held the opinion that programming is ultimately a dismal profession and MacCode (a pun on MacDonald's) is the future.
However because imperative languages lack a read-eval loop, it is a nontrivial exercise to turn parsed code into a callable function, a trivial exercise in LISP.
But this debate has already been played out. LISP has numerous cool features, but it is dead in the marketplace. I don't think the coolness of LISP is going to change anyone's life or share price at this point in any case.
Nonetheless you make some good points and I think your posts are very well-informed, I just strongly believe that market forces are shaping programmer tools more than technical excellence. Java seems to bear this out.
I agree that users of non-OO/imperative languages will be forced to accept a lower common denominator if they employ.Net framework classes, but I predict that the benefits will outweigh the loses. Most exotic language features go unused for good and bad reasons, and as processor speed increases and memory cheapens, framework portability and coder productivity will outstrip the benefits of relying on the exotic features.
This is an old tactic. Sun took the best threat to its low end off of the market by absorbing it and then slowly killing it. Frankly it was a smart thing for Sun to do - they can't beat linux boxes on cost, so they have to try to outstrategize the linux market. Now that IBM and HP are throwing serious resources behind linux though, Sun has probably run out of room.
Scott McNealy has obsessed himself with battling Microsoft. Its a battle he can't win but it looks like he is going to keep burning up cycles until the bitter end. When will this man learn that he can't win? Take a note from Steve Jobs - route around MS where you can, play nice with them where you must.
As for linux, Sun can pander to the market in some tacit fashion for now, but ultimately linux can destroy Sun's entire business. IBM knows this. So does HP. So does Intel. Sun's proprietary solution set is on its last legs, and in five years will be gone.
If you're looking for dividends from research, military research is without a doubt far more productive than general scientific research. Take for example...the internet. Or GPS. Or half a dozen other things you use every day. If its "spin offs" you want, you should be jumping for joy over this budget.
Its Miguel's company, and in the free market he's free to make whatever strategic decisions he likes. If RMS doesn't like it, he can either make an equity investment in Ximian, or he can shut his cake hole.
This man is becoming increasingly irritating, a modern day Rasputin (in looks as well as deeds).
Bob Young continues to demonstrate a good grasp of the market, and the position linux can best dominate in it. Red Hat has been distinguished by better management (from what we can see) than the other linux companies so far, and Young's ability to move to the market instead of the hype is setting Red Hat apart.
Its funny how these groups attempt to make a go of old-school once-a-month publishing format when sites like O'Reilly Network, IBM DeveloperWorks, and MSDN have demonstrated that the publish-while-you-go method, online only, is far more useful.
I suspect that over time this effort will die and Perl.com will become the de facto route for publishing articles that perl users need to read.
OpenBSD was the result of auditing an existing codebase. As previous posters have mentioned very few of the security measures in unix today existed when it was designed. Your quote plays well, but it has no base in reality and illustrates a pedestrian level of understanding.
If you can buy better third party support with the money you AREN'T spending on OS licenses and proprietary hardware, you're ahead. At some point Sun can't fend off the huge x86 economy that brings this to bear.
No, I mean Larry said he was going to have the entire code base of Oracle products move to CORBA. I'm not debating if this is good or bad, I'm only saying that Larry has a habit of making grand pronouncements he rarely follows through on.
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"I saw that people were getting tired of my irritating childishness and my desire to stamp my own ownership on the concept of non-ownership, so I backed off until I could find another way to impose my will on developers who wishes to associate themselves with open source, which I of course invented and I of course own."
Did you ever use the product? How would you know?
Eve I'm sorry you got screwed. You did your job well, but no matter getting rich quick means someone else is paying for it.
Really? According to people who actually worked there, she was mostly absent and often toxic. Once again, what are you basing your opinion on?
Oh well, I invite you to join my world. A soon to be college graduate looking at a very tight job market because a few dot-commers wanted little red sports cars.
Yes, thats right, its the rest of us who have spoiled everything for you. How could we have been so thoughtless. You'd be a millionaire today if not for our greed and arrogance.
Because coders can do no wrong, right? (cynicism)
Do you people really believe this?
The Ars folks built a company that failed, and they want someone to blame. So they blame the people to whom they had an adversarial relationship from day one. Surprise surprise.
Counter that with every major tech company in the world today who could not have gotten off of the ground without VCs..you know, Intel, Apple, EBay. Gee, how could these companies have possibly succeeded if VCs were universally toxic?
Maybe the Ars folks should just admit that they sat on a bubble that burst. The market for AOL-server and Tcl was never going to be huge - they were both fringe products. They had a good run and now its over. Deal.
If you think a bank is going to loan you money to start the type of company typified by Ars, you are crazy. Try it. Try any bank in your city. People go to loan sharks for a reason. Also, VCs can give you a great deal of expertise and assistance, but the arrogant mentality of /. precludes them thinking that they would ever need assistance getting cheap office leases or HR services, right?
This is a chicken and egg problem. How would you ever know that these bugs would crop up other than to download the code? Don't tell me "reading BugTraq" because we all know damn well that maybe 0.5% of /. users and even network admins read it
When is the last time you thought it necessary to analyze (algorithmically) code that you are writing?
Its far more important to be very good in the programming language you have chosen and its libraries. Knowing how to write quicksort in your latest language is a dead skill - its already been done better by someone else, and added into the SDK.
No, I'm not sure that will be the case, but it could end up being the most popular, which is likely more important. I share some of your concerns that this may wipe out some innovation in language features, but I have long held the opinion that programming is ultimately a dismal profession and MacCode (a pun on MacDonald's) is the future.
However because imperative languages lack a read-eval loop, it is a nontrivial exercise to turn parsed code into a callable function, a trivial exercise in LISP.
But this debate has already been played out. LISP has numerous cool features, but it is dead in the marketplace. I don't think the coolness of LISP is going to change anyone's life or share price at this point in any case.
Nonetheless you make some good points and I think your posts are very well-informed, I just strongly believe that market forces are shaping programmer tools more than technical excellence. Java seems to bear this out.
I agree that users of non-OO/imperative languages will be forced to accept a lower common denominator if they employ .Net framework classes, but I predict that the benefits will outweigh the loses. Most exotic language features go unused for good and bad reasons, and as processor speed increases and memory cheapens, framework portability and coder productivity will outstrip the benefits of relying on the exotic features.
Wow, if I had known how lucrative extremely high-end, proprietary hardware was, I would have invested in Cray and SGI. I'd be a rich man, right?
This is an old tactic. Sun took the best threat to its low end off of the market by absorbing it and then slowly killing it. Frankly it was a smart thing for Sun to do - they can't beat linux boxes on cost, so they have to try to outstrategize the linux market. Now that IBM and HP are throwing serious resources behind linux though, Sun has probably run out of room.
As for linux, Sun can pander to the market in some tacit fashion for now, but ultimately linux can destroy Sun's entire business. IBM knows this. So does HP. So does Intel. Sun's proprietary solution set is on its last legs, and in five years will be gone.
Short this company.
If you're looking for dividends from research, military research is without a doubt far more productive than general scientific research. Take for example...the internet. Or GPS. Or half a dozen other things you use every day. If its "spin offs" you want, you should be jumping for joy over this budget.
Yes, you have to wonder about the validity of a profile created by an advicacy group. Well, if it was a Microsoft thing people would be all over it.
And why cannot Miguel branch off of GNOME and simply release it as the Ximian desktop environment???
This man is becoming increasingly irritating, a modern day Rasputin (in looks as well as deeds).
Bob Young continues to demonstrate a good grasp of the market, and the position linux can best dominate in it. Red Hat has been distinguished by better management (from what we can see) than the other linux companies so far, and Young's ability to move to the market instead of the hype is setting Red Hat apart.
I suspect that over time this effort will die and Perl.com will become the de facto route for publishing articles that perl users need to read.
OpenBSD was the result of auditing an existing codebase. As previous posters have mentioned very few of the security measures in unix today existed when it was designed. Your quote plays well, but it has no base in reality and illustrates a pedestrian level of understanding.
If you can't tell the difference, there is no difference.
Don't they offer Sequent Intel-based hardware that is considerably beefier than your average 1U server?
In any case its not clear that this move was some calculated measure to simply undermine someone. You're reading too much politics into it.
If you can buy better third party support with the money you AREN'T spending on OS licenses and proprietary hardware, you're ahead. At some point Sun can't fend off the huge x86 economy that brings this to bear.
No, I mean Larry said he was going to have the entire code base of Oracle products move to CORBA. I'm not debating if this is good or bad, I'm only saying that Larry has a habit of making grand pronouncements he rarely follows through on.
This isn't too say he's lying, but don't think Oracle is going to go chucking valuable platforms to back up his rhetoric.