Hmm. It seems I may have been unnecessarily harsh on the state of Delaware - just relaying mumbles without checking on them properly (IANAL and all that).
Whatever, you need to be certain to incorporate in a jurisdiction that gives ultimate control to shareholders. It should be possible for the majority owners of the company to dismiss the current management. In ArsDigita's case, you had a lawsuit between two groups of shareholders - the co-founders, and the new management - where the company itself sided with the current board. So they were using the investors' own money to sue the investors! That has to be fishy, although it may not be related to the particular state aD was incorporated in.
I know that some European countries have expressed interest in giving more control to management at the expense of owners: protection against 'hostile' takeovers, for example.
The website wasn't always buzzword bingo. It used to be reasonably informative, although with some amount of Greenspun-style bombast (which you might think is worse). You can probably find some of the older content still on there, 'ACS Developer Journal' articles, tutorials and so on. The site
developer.arsdigita.com
is where most of the info moved to.
As Joel Spolsky suggests, you could take the decline in the website's usefulness as indicating the general health of the company.
Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate
on
ArsDigita Shut Down
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Greenspun may not have been the most pleasant boss (I have no experience of this personally) or the wisest possible businessman, but compared to the VCs and managers who took over the company he looks like Solomon. It's hard to credit the amount of sheer stupidity in the running of the company after the takeover. It must have taken some real effort to take a profitable, slow-growing company and turn it into a loss-making whale which didn't have any non-vapourware products.
I think that this is a software equivalent of the Edsel story: be very wary of changing product direction solely for marketing and not technical reasons, to give customers 'what they say they want' (in this case Java). And don't let the engineers get sidetracked into building something horribly overengineered and way too complex (second system syndrome).
I agree that Philip and co.'s code is crufty and difficult to maintain: but it's an absolute dream compared to the never-finished successor in Java. FWIW, the Tcl-based ACS is still being maintained as OpenACS, they have a port to Postgres (as well as Oracle) and the forthcoming version 4.0 is progressing nicely.
Use VC wisely, and only sell minority shares of the company during the early years.
Well, that was Greenspun's plan as well. The cofounders sold a small stake in the company to two VC firms in exchange for two seats on the board. Two board seats would not normally be enough to exercise control. However, there were several board positions left unfilled at the beginning, and appointment of new members had to be approved by the existing board members - so the two VC board members plus the chief exec. they appointed managed to get effective control with a minority stake. A 'shareholder agreement' and Delware's company laws (which I'm told favour management rather than shareholders) enforced this.
I guess the lesson is: be very very careful, check for loopholes, and be suspicious if you're asked to incorporate in Delaware rather than a state with more shareholder-friendly regulations.
Instead of adapting systems to meet the state's rules, they are warning that Vermont residents may be excluded en masse from the kinds of offers and information that data sharing allows.
Oh, how my heart bleeds for the deprived residents of Vermont.
However, government action cannot be the sole objective. Various people and institutions in South Africa, including small and large companies, are already using open software products (notably Linux and associated software tools) precisely because they already have the freedom to do so rather than because they have been prompted by government policy.
The bare minimum is to ensure that this freedom is not curtailed by introduction of inappropriate policy.
The arch repositories seem rather frighteningly brittle as well, given that anyone could use file access tools to subtly corrupt the repositories.
Huh? The same applies to CVS - any monkey with a text editor could go in and edit the,v files in the repository. Or you could just remove the repository entirely, or rot13 encode half of the files, or whatever. If a version control system uses a Berkeley DB database, anyone could use rm(1) to 'silently corrupt' that. This is a property of any program which stores data on disk. So what?
You could argue that the problem is too much privelege - one shouldn't need direct write access to the repository in order to check in code. However I don't think this is a big deal in practice, if you trust someone to make direct commits to your tree you probably trust them not to do idiotic things generally.
I guess you're right. The cheap alternative to a touchscreen would be ten finger-sized buttons on the underside of the unit. You could type by pressing chords in the same way as those odd keyboards that never really took off.
Who would have thought that *Mandrake* would be the distribution to slim down to such an impressive size? Up to now I've run Slackware on small boxes because it was the only thing I could fit into 60 or 120 megabytes. But I'll consider switching to Mandrake - it should be possible to get a system with X and ssh in under a hundred megabytes.
All I need to do is recompile the whole distribution without Pentium opcodes:-(.
If you look on Simtel there are at least two Desqview-a-like DOS multitaskers, shareware or freeware. But no graphics. In fact it's amazing the amount of weird shit in the Simtel DOS archive.
a display driver for Windows to allow Windows apps to run across the network in a DESQview/X window
That in itself sounds damn useful. Assuming it uses the standard X protocol and not some Desqview extension. You could set up Windows 3.1 under dosemu, bochs or whatever with this display driver, and it would display on your X server. Hopefully in a 'rootless' style so no separate emulated screen was necessary. In any case it would be faster and with higher-res fonts than an emulated screen.
Must try this sometime. I wonder if Win9x can use these drivers...
Automatic reformatting of PDFs is cool. It does get rid of one selling point of PDF, that you have 100% control over how your document will appear. But that's probably not important anyway.
Hmm, if a PDF contains enough information about the original text to do searching and reformatting, it should be possible to edit the text. I don't imagine Adobe will be putting out a PDF editor any time soon, but it would be a useful tool to have. If only to drive home the point that digital signatures are the only way you can ensure an unmodified document, and 'security through manky file format' doesn't work.
The point I was making isn't that PDF is a bad format - it is good at what it does. But that it gets misused as a general method for document exchange when it's really too low-level and restricted to a particular paper size, margins and so on.
I take back the first part of my earlier comment: PDF is not an idiotic format. It's just idiots who take down working HTML pages and 'improve' them into PDF files which are much harder to read.
In a way, PDF is one of the most idiotic formats for document interchange ever designed. Who exactly thought it would be a good idea to hardcode the paper size?
At a minimum this means that all internationally distributed PDFs have to come in two variants, A4 and Letter. And you need a screen wide enough to view a whole line of text - no possibility of reformatting into narrower columns for palmtops etc.
There are plenty of good things about PDF, taken as a way to represent a printed page. But it certainly is not a good format to exchange documents that are meant to be readable by everyone.
Surrendering the trademark Aspirin was part of Germany's reparations after WWI (I think). That's why it's a generic term in Britain and the US (it may still be a trademark in Germany).
Remember the Adobe vs Killustrator case? That was in Germany too. Someone said that it's common practice for legal firms to act 'freelance' and track down supposed violations without the prior approval of the trademark holder. Perhaps this is the same firm even.
The article suggests Netscape as the best browser for a 32 meg machine (which I guess is what counts as 'low-memory' these days). But if you really want a small but usable browser, try Dillo. It worked beautifully last time I tried it - apart from a problem logging in to Slashdot, which was enough to make me go back to Mozilla:-(.
FVWM is small, fast and configurable - but perhaps _too_ configurable. I haven't used it since Slackware 3.x, but I remember the default setup being rather crufty and awkward (at least to a new user). Icewm has a good default configuration which is easy to tweak. You can just start using it and customize it later when you feel like it. Generally the default setup just feels more solid than fvwm 1's or fvwm 2's default setup. Icewm's motto is: Feel is more important than look.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. It seems I may have been unnecessarily harsh on the state of Delaware - just relaying mumbles without checking on them properly (IANAL and all that).
Whatever, you need to be certain to incorporate in a jurisdiction that gives ultimate control to shareholders. It should be possible for the majority owners of the company to dismiss the current management. In ArsDigita's case, you had a lawsuit between two groups of shareholders - the co-founders, and the new management - where the company itself sided with the current board. So they were using the investors' own money to sue the investors! That has to be fishy, although it may not be related to the particular state aD was incorporated in.
I know that some European countries have expressed interest in giving more control to management at the expense of owners: protection against 'hostile' takeovers, for example.
The website wasn't always buzzword bingo. It used to be reasonably informative, although with some amount of Greenspun-style bombast (which you might think is worse). You can probably find some of the older content still on there, 'ACS Developer Journal' articles, tutorials and so on. The site developer.arsdigita.com is where most of the info moved to.
As Joel Spolsky suggests, you could take the decline in the website's usefulness as indicating the general health of the company.
Greenspun may not have been the most pleasant boss (I have no experience of this personally) or the wisest possible businessman, but compared to the VCs and managers who took over the company he looks like Solomon. It's hard to credit the amount of sheer stupidity in the running of the company after the takeover. It must have taken some real effort to take a profitable, slow-growing company and turn it into a loss-making whale which didn't have any non-vapourware products.
I think that this is a software equivalent of the Edsel story: be very wary of changing product direction solely for marketing and not technical reasons, to give customers 'what they say they want' (in this case Java). And don't let the engineers get sidetracked into building something horribly overengineered and way too complex (second system syndrome).
I agree that Philip and co.'s code is crufty and difficult to maintain: but it's an absolute dream compared to the never-finished successor in Java. FWIW, the Tcl-based ACS is still being maintained as OpenACS, they have a port to Postgres (as well as Oracle) and the forthcoming version 4.0 is progressing nicely.
Yes, that is more or less the pronunciation, hence the abbreviation 'a.d.'.
Well, that was Greenspun's plan as well. The cofounders sold a small stake in the company to two VC firms in exchange for two seats on the board. Two board seats would not normally be enough to exercise control. However, there were several board positions left unfilled at the beginning, and appointment of new members had to be approved by the existing board members - so the two VC board members plus the chief exec. they appointed managed to get effective control with a minority stake. A 'shareholder agreement' and Delware's company laws (which I'm told favour management rather than shareholders) enforced this.
I guess the lesson is: be very very careful, check for loopholes, and be suspicious if you're asked to incorporate in Delaware rather than a state with more shareholder-friendly regulations.
Shouldn't Linus at least have tried out CVS first before moving to something exotic like Bitkeeper?
Huh? The same applies to CVS - any monkey with a text editor could go in and edit the ,v files in the repository. Or you could just remove the repository entirely, or rot13 encode half of the files, or whatever. If a version control system uses a Berkeley DB database, anyone could use rm(1) to 'silently corrupt' that. This is a property of any program which stores data on disk. So what?
You could argue that the problem is too much privelege - one shouldn't need direct write access to the repository in order to check in code. However I don't think this is a big deal in practice, if you trust someone to make direct commits to your tree you probably trust them not to do idiotic things generally.
Not only 'what about Subversion' but also 'what about CVS, what about Aegis'. If you include non-free systems then what about Perforce or Bitkeeper.
:-(.
This is getting worse than journalling filesystems
I guess you're right. The cheap alternative to a touchscreen would be ten finger-sized buttons on the underside of the unit. You could type by pressing chords in the same way as those odd keyboards that never really took off.
But does it run Linux?
Seriously. It has an ARM9 and 8Mbyte RAM, you could port ARM Linux to the thing and use it as a poor man's Ipaq.
Oh - one more thing - imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Looking through the Cooker archives I can't find the de-Pentiummed Mandrake you mention. Let me know if you find it.
Who would have thought that *Mandrake* would be the distribution to slim down to such an impressive size? Up to now I've run Slackware on small boxes because it was the only thing I could fit into 60 or 120 megabytes. But I'll consider switching to Mandrake - it should be possible to get a system with X and ssh in under a hundred megabytes.
:-(.
All I need to do is recompile the whole distribution without Pentium opcodes
If you look on Simtel there are at least two Desqview-a-like DOS multitaskers, shareware or freeware. But no graphics. In fact it's amazing the amount of weird shit in the Simtel DOS archive.
That in itself sounds damn useful. Assuming it uses the standard X protocol and not some Desqview extension. You could set up Windows 3.1 under dosemu, bochs or whatever with this display driver, and it would display on your X server. Hopefully in a 'rootless' style so no separate emulated screen was necessary. In any case it would be faster and with higher-res fonts than an emulated screen.
Must try this sometime. I wonder if Win9x can use these drivers...
Maybe the special emphasis on GPS is to answer the question 'where is Woz nowadays?'. He just needs to carry one of the handhelds at all times.
Is anyone still maintaining XFree86 3.3.x?
Automatic reformatting of PDFs is cool. It does get rid of one selling point of PDF, that you have 100% control over how your document will appear. But that's probably not important anyway.
Hmm, if a PDF contains enough information about the original text to do searching and reformatting, it should be possible to edit the text. I don't imagine Adobe will be putting out a PDF editor any time soon, but it would be a useful tool to have. If only to drive home the point that digital signatures are the only way you can ensure an unmodified document, and 'security through manky file format' doesn't work.
The point I was making isn't that PDF is a bad format - it is good at what it does. But that it gets misused as a general method for document exchange when it's really too low-level and restricted to a particular paper size, margins and so on.
I take back the first part of my earlier comment: PDF is not an idiotic format. It's just idiots who take down working HTML pages and 'improve' them into PDF files which are much harder to read.
In a way, PDF is one of the most idiotic formats for document interchange ever designed. Who exactly thought it would be a good idea to hardcode the paper size?
At a minimum this means that all internationally distributed PDFs have to come in two variants, A4 and Letter. And you need a screen wide enough to view a whole line of text - no possibility of reformatting into narrower columns for palmtops etc.
There are plenty of good things about PDF, taken as a way to represent a printed page. But it certainly is not a good format to exchange documents that are meant to be readable by everyone.
Surrendering the trademark Aspirin was part of Germany's reparations after WWI (I think). That's why it's a generic term in Britain and the US (it may still be a trademark in Germany).
Remember the Adobe vs Killustrator case? That was in Germany too. Someone said that it's common practice for legal firms to act 'freelance' and track down supposed violations without the prior approval of the trademark holder. Perhaps this is the same firm even.
The article suggests Netscape as the best browser for a 32 meg machine (which I guess is what counts as 'low-memory' these days). But if you really want a small but usable browser, try Dillo. It worked beautifully last time I tried it - apart from a problem logging in to Slashdot, which was enough to make me go back to Mozilla :-(.
FVWM is small, fast and configurable - but perhaps _too_ configurable. I haven't used it since Slackware 3.x, but I remember the default setup being rather crufty and awkward (at least to a new user). Icewm has a good default configuration which is easy to tweak. You can just start using it and customize it later when you feel like it. Generally the default setup just feels more solid than fvwm 1's or fvwm 2's default setup. Icewm's motto is: Feel is more important than look.