It wasn't really innovative even back then. But at least Tektronix (the company that owned the patent) did invest in research and contributed a lot to computer graphics.
It doesn't matter how long it actually took them to rewrite it; presumably, given that they had working software, this wasn't high priority to them. But the value they got out of it is still only what it would have cost them to develop and deploy their own software if they had made that a priority.
Most VC's have never been entrepreneurs themselves. Never started a company.
Why would I care? When I'm looking for a VC, the VC isn't the founder of the company, I am. In a VC, I want a proven track record as a VC, not as an entrepreneur or founder.
Your calculation is wrong. The only value Yahoo! got out of the purchase was the few months that it would have taken them to implement their own and acquire a comparable number of customers.
(And does Yahoo! even still use any of Viaweb's original Lisp code? I suspect not.)
I find the credentials of this group of people pretty weak when it comes to startups; making a lucky sale during the early Internet boom years is not the same as having sustained startup or business experience.
So basically, this would do the same thing that USENET did, but without the network of static coordinating servers. It, instead, replaces the static servers with dynamic servers and a method of locating those dynamic servers.
That's the way USENET used to be used, and a lot of USENET software still supports that usage, including automatically locating and subscribing to newsgroups only when a user demands it. It's become more static and centralized because users preferred using it that way, not because of any limitations in USENET.
FeedTree is recreating the original, dynamic USENET, using a slightly different addressing scheme (URLs) and content format (XML). It may be worth doing that, but it's certainly not a new technology. And if it catches on, it will likely undergo the same ossification as USENET, with most "peers" ending up being servers, because people tend not to want to participate in such networks from their workstations or laptops.
Except that FeedTree doesn't propagate articles for usenet, it propagates entries posted to RSS feeds.
USENET propagates news items with metadata in a tree-like fashion, overlayed over the Internet. FeedTree propagates news items with metadata in a tree-like fashion, overlayed over the Internet.
There are some minor differences in standards (MIME vs. XML) and usage (well-known article hierarchies vs. ad-hoc RSS feeds), but that doesn't make FeedTree new technology. I don't think it's even a "re-invention", unless the people who created it are so out of touch that they have never heard of USENET.
OS X is a combination of an open source kernel (Mach), an open source kernel interface (BSD), open source command line tools (BSD), and open source compiler (GNU). It's a GUI that was bought from NeXT, which originally took the language and much of the library design from Stepstone and Xerox, and the imaging model and imaging system from Adobe. And for the last decade, Apple has not invested much at all in research--pretty much every "innovation" they have shipped was invented elsewhere.
Yes, Apple has the copyright on the whole thing, and BSD doesn't disallow what they are doing, but it's not like OS X is some hugely innovative piece of software that was entirely created by Apple. So, assert your rights in court if you like, but stop the whining--it's inappropriate.
So you're telling me that any of the 1 billion in China wouldn't want to leave the oppression of their country to move to the U.S.
I'm sure there are many of them willing to leave, but the elite is increasingly going elsewhere or staying at home--hence the outsourcing to India and China.
When 1,500 people get wiped out in a matter of seconds in the Philippines, I have to appreciate everything that I have.
Big natural disasters happen everywhere, including the US.
I just wish those who complain about things being broken would put in as much energy into their jobs as they do into whining about the little things.
"Little things" like people dying in the streets? Like race riots? Like high child mortality? Like parents working multiple jobs? Like human rights violations and burgeoning prison populations? Because that's the reality in the US today.
The fact of the matter is that we're so spoiled here in the U.S. [...] I have to appreciate everything that I have.
Yes, you express it quite succinctly: you are spoiled. So am I, actually. But at least I try to look outside my perfect little world. You should do that, too, sometimes.
In neither case are these people very interested in a safety net. Also, it has been US policy to push away people who are coming to this country who are coming just for social services.
It's not about the safety net for the immigrants, it's about what kind of society they are moving into. Immigrants are increasingly put off by the lack of safety net for others--by the lack of civic-mindedness and civil society, by the drug addicts, violence, mental illness, dirt and homeless in the streets, by the lack of good schools, and by the racial and social conflicts. That's in addition to the paranoia and xenophobia that's sweeping the country.
Renting is one of the worst financial moves you can make(the others being credit cards and interest only adjustable rate mortgages).
Wrong on all counts.
Renting is an excellent deal in the West right now because it's far less than you pay in interest on a mortgage. Of course, buying may still be the rational choice for your particular situation, but that doesn't make rentals bad.
Whether interest-only adjustable rate mortgages are a good or a bad idea depends on how long you intend to stay in your home and whether you expect housing prices to rise.
As for credit cards, they're a good deal for consumers because they give you lots of purchase protections you wouldn't get otherwise. They only become a bad deal if you don't pay them off every month.
Actually they can, it would just be extremely expensive because they are in such limited supply. So I don't know where the "it would be cheaper to employ people to do it" is coming from in your comment.
The supply of mathematicians doesn't magically increase just because you decide to pay them more. If there are 10000 available mathematicians in the UK and 20000 are needed, then 10000 jobs must be outsourced, no matter how much the UK employer decides to pay.
And a population of 60 million people only produces a limited supply of highly-skilled mathematicians, no matter how much education you throw at them.
So, you are saying that the main reason for buying Vista is compatibility with a proprietary but otherwise outdated standard.
Well, I'd say those are excellent reasons not to buy Vista, then: while running Windows for compatibility reasons may be be expedient in the short term, we have to pay for it dearly in the long term.
In fact, people have a simple choice: don't upgrade. Windows XP will keep running for many years to come, and in a few years, hopefully, your "compatibility" reasons will have disappeared, as even more apps are available for other platforms.
Nothing that requires the servitude of other people is a right.
Well, if you don't like the social contracts society sets up, you can go out into the wilderness and live by yourself; you can get by without paying taxes in the US if you don't make too much money, or you can move to a third world nation that doesn't have all those annoying rules.
But if you benefit from society, its services (education, government, etc.), and its infrastructure, then you have to pay your share for the upkeep of those services. Businesses want a pool of educated and healthy workers to choose from, so they have to pay for the maintenance of that pool, not just when they are using something out of the pool, but also when they don't. It's no different from road maintenance, where you also can't pick and choose based on the specific roads you happen to think are useful.
None of that is negotiable. It's been part of human society for as long as humans have existed. You should be happy that it's become more rational over the last few centuries.
You are no more entitled to health care at other people's expense, than you are entitled to force other people to feed, clothe, or shelter you.
Yes, and you are entitled to having other people feed, clothe, and shelter you when you are unable to do so yourself. That kind of social behavior and group support is what sets humans apart from lizards. It's what has made humans the dominant species on the planet despite us being physically weak and unimpressive.
Don't our lawmakers understand that this communist style approach to government will only drive businesses away?
You're making the fundamentally wrong assumption that outsourcing at the level discussed in the article is driven by cost. IBM and Microsoft are going to India not because it's too expensive for them to hire Indians and move them to the US, but because it's becoming too difficult (in a way that no amount of money can fix).
Dismantling the US safety net even further is only going to accelerate outsourcing: the more brutal and socially irresponsible the US appears, the less attractive it is to many immigrants. In particular, highly-skilled immigrants coming to the US don't want to have to have a business degree in order to figure out health care or retirement.
In any case, you seem to think that not requiring health care benefits or retirement somehow saves money; it doesn't. Those services still need to be paid for, and if they aren't paid for by companies, they need to raise salaries so that employees can pay for them. Of course, at the low end, companies may use lack of such requirements as a means of cutting salaries, but they are simply cost-shifting: since we generally don't let people die in the streets, health care then ends up being paid through taxes, at a premium rate.
Granted, I think employer-supported health care is broken, but not for the reasons you likely would agree with; what we really need is tax-payer funded universal health care.
Why are we having to outsource these kinds of technical jobs?
Because other nations are beginning to figure out that the talent that the US used to syphon off is valuable and they are doing everything they can to keep it/attract it. In the past, the US got a very valuable resource very cheaply, and that's inevitably changing.
Most people don't quite seem to appreciate the crisis that the UK is going through in maths, science and engineering
Average high school education may suck, but at the top end, the UK is producing a significant number of the highly skilled immigrants to the US. And, in this case, it's only the top end that counts. If the UK could figure out how to make life in the UK more attractive for them, maybe they'd stay. What would the UK need to do? Massively increase academic salaries, massively increase government research grants, change the laws to encourage more high-risk high-tech investment, and get rid of any vestiges of nobility and hereditar privilege (the last step is mostly symbolic, but an indication to people that the "self-made man" is more valuable and important to society than someone who inherited a title).
Why do you think the US became such a science and engineering powerhouse? Because the farm boys that lived in this mostly rural nation were so smart? Because Harvard was such a great school for country gents? The US did have its pool of US-born talent, but what made the US so big and powerful was smart, education-oriented immigrants and their immediate descendants. In particular of the post-WWII technology boom was fueled by European refugees (as well as by the lack of competition from a world in shambles).
Guess what? They are seriously considering other options. Why? Because the US has become a less attractive place to live, because academic funding in the US is getting worse, because the focus of US science and technology is blowing up things, because their countries of origin have become more attractive, and because the US has become so xenophobic that US voters are increasingly keeping out the talent.
The US population has gotten an unfair share of the world's talent for the past 50 years. The US will have to get used to competing for talent globally: there are a lot of nice places in the world that don't have Bush as a president, that do value science and education, and that are cheap to live in. The US still has a lot going for it for smart immigrants, but it's not the only choice anymore.
In the end, it's all market economy: which nation is making itself the most attractive to the part of the global laborforce that brings in the most amount of money.
VisiCalc was great at a time when bell bottom pants and leisure suits were still more than a dim memory, but the user interface sucks from a 21st century perpective.
There have been a number of new takes on the spreadsheet since VisiCalc, permitting manipulation of tabular data but in a more intuitive way than formulas involving row and column references. Unfortunately, Microsoft Excel killed all that with its mediocre imitation of the original VisiCalc.
I hope that web-based spreadsheets will happen. I also hope that whatever succeeds in that space, it'll finally exorcise the ghost of VisiCalc and Excel.
Bringing marketing and product designers into the software creation process doesn't change anything: those people aren't any more concerned with solving the user's problems than programmers, they're concerned with selling stuff. And that's assuming that they are any good, which most marketing and designer types aren't.
Creating a great product requires the right kind of people, the right kind of management, and a great deal of luck. Anybody who thinks he can reduce it to cookie-cutter organization structures is a complete fool.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, trouble is, no matter which you pick, you'll still be programming from Java.
It wasn't really innovative even back then. But at least Tektronix (the company that owned the patent) did invest in research and contributed a lot to computer graphics.
It doesn't matter how long it actually took them to rewrite it; presumably, given that they had working software, this wasn't high priority to them. But the value they got out of it is still only what it would have cost them to develop and deploy their own software if they had made that a priority.
I don't get it--if these people don't want to get indexed by Google, why don't they just tell Google so with a robots.txt file?
Most VC's have never been entrepreneurs themselves. Never started a company.
Why would I care? When I'm looking for a VC, the VC isn't the founder of the company, I am. In a VC, I want a proven track record as a VC, not as an entrepreneur or founder.
Your calculation is wrong. The only value Yahoo! got out of the purchase was the few months that it would have taken them to implement their own and acquire a comparable number of customers.
(And does Yahoo! even still use any of Viaweb's original Lisp code? I suspect not.)
The word "credentials" is a four letter word to entrepreneurs.
Actually, that's kind of my point: Graham and YCombinator has lots of those kinds of credentials (academic credentials)--books on Lisp, Ph.D.'s, etc.
The question is: what good are they as VCs?
I find the credentials of this group of people pretty weak when it comes to startups; making a lucky sale during the early Internet boom years is not the same as having sustained startup or business experience.
Why isn't Secunia being flamed here for releasing details of an exploit before Apple has had a chance to patch it?
Because this exploit is beyond stupid. This is the kind of thing even a casual thought about security at Apple should have revealed.
So basically, this would do the same thing that USENET did, but without the network of static coordinating servers. It, instead, replaces the static servers with dynamic servers and a method of locating those dynamic servers.
That's the way USENET used to be used, and a lot of USENET software still supports that usage, including automatically locating and subscribing to newsgroups only when a user demands it. It's become more static and centralized because users preferred using it that way, not because of any limitations in USENET.
FeedTree is recreating the original, dynamic USENET, using a slightly different addressing scheme (URLs) and content format (XML). It may be worth doing that, but it's certainly not a new technology. And if it catches on, it will likely undergo the same ossification as USENET, with most "peers" ending up being servers, because people tend not to want to participate in such networks from their workstations or laptops.
Except that FeedTree doesn't propagate articles for usenet, it propagates entries posted to RSS feeds.
USENET propagates news items with metadata in a tree-like fashion, overlayed over the Internet. FeedTree propagates news items with metadata in a tree-like fashion, overlayed over the Internet.
There are some minor differences in standards (MIME vs. XML) and usage (well-known article hierarchies vs. ad-hoc RSS feeds), but that doesn't make FeedTree new technology. I don't think it's even a "re-invention", unless the people who created it are so out of touch that they have never heard of USENET.
OS X is a combination of an open source kernel (Mach), an open source kernel interface (BSD), open source command line tools (BSD), and open source compiler (GNU). It's a GUI that was bought from NeXT, which originally took the language and much of the library design from Stepstone and Xerox, and the imaging model and imaging system from Adobe. And for the last decade, Apple has not invested much at all in research--pretty much every "innovation" they have shipped was invented elsewhere.
Yes, Apple has the copyright on the whole thing, and BSD doesn't disallow what they are doing, but it's not like OS X is some hugely innovative piece of software that was entirely created by Apple. So, assert your rights in court if you like, but stop the whining--it's inappropriate.
So you're telling me that any of the 1 billion in China wouldn't want to leave the oppression of their country to move to the U.S.
I'm sure there are many of them willing to leave, but the elite is increasingly going elsewhere or staying at home--hence the outsourcing to India and China.
When 1,500 people get wiped out in a matter of seconds in the Philippines, I have to appreciate everything that I have.
Big natural disasters happen everywhere, including the US.
I just wish those who complain about things being broken would put in as much energy into their jobs as they do into whining about the little things.
"Little things" like people dying in the streets? Like race riots? Like high child mortality? Like parents working multiple jobs? Like human rights violations and burgeoning prison populations? Because that's the reality in the US today.
The fact of the matter is that we're so spoiled here in the U.S. [...] I have to appreciate everything that I have.
Yes, you express it quite succinctly: you are spoiled. So am I, actually. But at least I try to look outside my perfect little world. You should do that, too, sometimes.
In neither case are these people very interested in a safety net. Also, it has been US policy to push away people who are coming to this country who are coming just for social services.
It's not about the safety net for the immigrants, it's about what kind of society they are moving into. Immigrants are increasingly put off by the lack of safety net for others--by the lack of civic-mindedness and civil society, by the drug addicts, violence, mental illness, dirt and homeless in the streets, by the lack of good schools, and by the racial and social conflicts. That's in addition to the paranoia and xenophobia that's sweeping the country.
Renting is one of the worst financial moves you can make(the others being credit cards and interest only adjustable rate mortgages).
Wrong on all counts.
Renting is an excellent deal in the West right now because it's far less than you pay in interest on a mortgage. Of course, buying may still be the rational choice for your particular situation, but that doesn't make rentals bad.
Whether interest-only adjustable rate mortgages are a good or a bad idea depends on how long you intend to stay in your home and whether you expect housing prices to rise.
As for credit cards, they're a good deal for consumers because they give you lots of purchase protections you wouldn't get otherwise. They only become a bad deal if you don't pay them off every month.
Actually they can, it would just be extremely expensive because they are in such limited supply. So I don't know where the "it would be cheaper to employ people to do it" is coming from in your comment.
The supply of mathematicians doesn't magically increase just because you decide to pay them more. If there are 10000 available mathematicians in the UK and 20000 are needed, then 10000 jobs must be outsourced, no matter how much the UK employer decides to pay.
And a population of 60 million people only produces a limited supply of highly-skilled mathematicians, no matter how much education you throw at them.
So, you are saying that the main reason for buying Vista is compatibility with a proprietary but otherwise outdated standard.
Well, I'd say those are excellent reasons not to buy Vista, then: while running Windows for compatibility reasons may be be expedient in the short term, we have to pay for it dearly in the long term.
In fact, people have a simple choice: don't upgrade. Windows XP will keep running for many years to come, and in a few years, hopefully, your "compatibility" reasons will have disappeared, as even more apps are available for other platforms.
Here's what to be excited about: 1. Security, security, security
Is Ballmer writing his own ad copy now?
Nothing that requires the servitude of other people is a right.
Well, if you don't like the social contracts society sets up, you can go out into the wilderness and live by yourself; you can get by without paying taxes in the US if you don't make too much money, or you can move to a third world nation that doesn't have all those annoying rules.
But if you benefit from society, its services (education, government, etc.), and its infrastructure, then you have to pay your share for the upkeep of those services. Businesses want a pool of educated and healthy workers to choose from, so they have to pay for the maintenance of that pool, not just when they are using something out of the pool, but also when they don't. It's no different from road maintenance, where you also can't pick and choose based on the specific roads you happen to think are useful.
None of that is negotiable. It's been part of human society for as long as humans have existed. You should be happy that it's become more rational over the last few centuries.
You are no more entitled to health care at other people's expense, than you are entitled to force other people to feed, clothe, or shelter you.
Yes, and you are entitled to having other people feed, clothe, and shelter you when you are unable to do so yourself. That kind of social behavior and group support is what sets humans apart from lizards. It's what has made humans the dominant species on the planet despite us being physically weak and unimpressive.
Don't our lawmakers understand that this communist style approach to government will only drive businesses away?
You're making the fundamentally wrong assumption that outsourcing at the level discussed in the article is driven by cost. IBM and Microsoft are going to India not because it's too expensive for them to hire Indians and move them to the US, but because it's becoming too difficult (in a way that no amount of money can fix).
Dismantling the US safety net even further is only going to accelerate outsourcing: the more brutal and socially irresponsible the US appears, the less attractive it is to many immigrants. In particular, highly-skilled immigrants coming to the US don't want to have to have a business degree in order to figure out health care or retirement.
In any case, you seem to think that not requiring health care benefits or retirement somehow saves money; it doesn't. Those services still need to be paid for, and if they aren't paid for by companies, they need to raise salaries so that employees can pay for them. Of course, at the low end, companies may use lack of such requirements as a means of cutting salaries, but they are simply cost-shifting: since we generally don't let people die in the streets, health care then ends up being paid through taxes, at a premium rate.
Granted, I think employer-supported health care is broken, but not for the reasons you likely would agree with; what we really need is tax-payer funded universal health care.
Why are we having to outsource these kinds of technical jobs?
Because other nations are beginning to figure out that the talent that the US used to syphon off is valuable and they are doing everything they can to keep it/attract it. In the past, the US got a very valuable resource very cheaply, and that's inevitably changing.
Most people don't quite seem to appreciate the crisis that the UK is going through in maths, science and engineering
Average high school education may suck, but at the top end, the UK is producing a significant number of the highly skilled immigrants to the US. And, in this case, it's only the top end that counts. If the UK could figure out how to make life in the UK more attractive for them, maybe they'd stay. What would the UK need to do? Massively increase academic salaries, massively increase government research grants, change the laws to encourage more high-risk high-tech investment, and get rid of any vestiges of nobility and hereditar privilege (the last step is mostly symbolic, but an indication to people that the "self-made man" is more valuable and important to society than someone who inherited a title).
Why do you think the US became such a science and engineering powerhouse? Because the farm boys that lived in this mostly rural nation were so smart? Because Harvard was such a great school for country gents? The US did have its pool of US-born talent, but what made the US so big and powerful was smart, education-oriented immigrants and their immediate descendants. In particular of the post-WWII technology boom was fueled by European refugees (as well as by the lack of competition from a world in shambles).
Guess what? They are seriously considering other options. Why? Because the US has become a less attractive place to live, because academic funding in the US is getting worse, because the focus of US science and technology is blowing up things, because their countries of origin have become more attractive, and because the US has become so xenophobic that US voters are increasingly keeping out the talent.
The US population has gotten an unfair share of the world's talent for the past 50 years. The US will have to get used to competing for talent globally: there are a lot of nice places in the world that don't have Bush as a president, that do value science and education, and that are cheap to live in. The US still has a lot going for it for smart immigrants, but it's not the only choice anymore.
In the end, it's all market economy: which nation is making itself the most attractive to the part of the global laborforce that brings in the most amount of money.
VisiCalc was great at a time when bell bottom pants and leisure suits were still more than a dim memory, but the user interface sucks from a 21st century perpective.
There have been a number of new takes on the spreadsheet since VisiCalc, permitting manipulation of tabular data but in a more intuitive way than formulas involving row and column references. Unfortunately, Microsoft Excel killed all that with its mediocre imitation of the original VisiCalc.
I hope that web-based spreadsheets will happen. I also hope that whatever succeeds in that space, it'll finally exorcise the ghost of VisiCalc and Excel.
Bringing marketing and product designers into the software creation process doesn't change anything: those people aren't any more concerned with solving the user's problems than programmers, they're concerned with selling stuff. And that's assuming that they are any good, which most marketing and designer types aren't.
Creating a great product requires the right kind of people, the right kind of management, and a great deal of luck. Anybody who thinks he can reduce it to cookie-cutter organization structures is a complete fool.