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Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

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Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#21

Post by hardwaresofton »

SwellJoe wrote: post #17

For what it's worth, Justin Frankel continues to produce great software. He founded Cockos Incorporated, which produces REAPER; I think it's pretty widely accepted in the audio recording community that REAPER is the best value in the multitrack recording DAW market, and among the best overall tools for the purpose. He's obviously wealthy enough to never need to work again. It's clear Frankel just loves music, and wan…

Also, don't forget Licecap, one of the easiest to use and most consistent cross-platform gif-screen-capture tools:

http://www.cockos.com/licecap/

I said a very audible "holy shit, this is that guy?" when the link to jesussonic took me to Cockos.

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#22

Post by bricss »

foxhop wrote: post #18
bricss wrote: post #9

Small guide on How to use WASTE -> http://www.cs.montana.edu/~huff/waste/howto/Waste.html

I was just thinking about WASTE recently in the last 2 weeks since Trump took office. WASTE was written in Java and was sort of tricky to setup / understand. At one point about 10 years ago, I had a small 8 person "dark net" running with WASTE, shit was so 1337 for its time. Bit torrent was just making waves around this time and made downloading WAY faster, but was more risky then sharing directly over WASTE.

WASTE was written on entire C++, you can find sources here http://slackerbitch.free.fr/waste/download.html or somewhere here https://sourceforge.net/projects/waste/

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#23

Post by hardwaresofton »

ereyes01 wrote: post #7

What kind of snot-nosed brat takes millions from AOL and then publishes software perfect for ripping off Time Warner's entire catalog? Frankel, a grunge-dressing slacker from Sedona, Ariz., was a teenage college dropout in 1997 when he wrote Winamp, the first program that made playing MP3s on a PC point-and-click simple. How times have changed. There's now so many snot-nosed grungy slackers who could buy the author's…

While it's certainly true that there are many more 20-somethings/30-somethings with lots of money in tech these days, I think the attitude he had is pretty rare.

Most people wouldn't dare to release software that might get them fired because they just wanted to make it, and thought it should exist. Of course, it's well within the rights of a company to fire an employee for doing so, but pretty sure most tech workers these days just stay in line, relegate open source work to when they're told they can do it (nights and weekends), and gnash teeth but ultimately submit when a company shoves something they don't like down their throat.

Then again, he did have "fuck you" money after the acquisition so...

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#24

Post by nol13 »

ethbro wrote: post #14
gdulli wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A whole generation of a potentially interested audience who was not yet aware of Nullsoft in 2004.

A generation who can't imagine the novelty of performing a first search on Napster or Direct Connect. Magic!

Downloads on the campus direct connect network in '02 are still the fastest I've achieved real world then or since, with a selection probably at least comparable to any torrent site. They've just never seen real file sharing.

Or is file sharing just now obsolete now? A bit out of the loop :/

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#25

Post by cdelsolar »

Splines wrote: post #12
Teever wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling it isn't. I used to have winamp on my android phone and when I got a new phone a few months ago I discovered that they had removed winamp from the store. Which is unfortunate because winamp was surprisingly great on android too.

I would be surprised if it has. For most people playing compressed music is a solved problem.

It's not about the problem being solved, Winamp was fast, minimal and beautiful. I miss it.

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#26

Post by myrandomcomment »

For me I stopped using Winamp when I went full OSX and iPod. There was no reason to use anything else. Now, I hate iTunes but it is not easy to change. Right now I only use it for managing the library as a source of truth. The files are on a network share and played in Kodi on the compute stick plugged into the TV thought an external DAC to a tube amp. ;)

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#28

Post by jccalhoun »

symlinkk wrote: post #8
LeoPanthera wrote: post #4

The Nullsoft brand was sold to Radionomy in 2014. nullsoft.com now redirects to winamp.com, which astonishingly still exists.

I remember reading a few posts on the Winamp forums around a year ago that they were revitalizing development on Winamp, not sure if that went anywhere though.

Looking through the posts on their site it looks like it is still being worked on: http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=374929 From what I have read they had to rewrite a lot of code. I can't imagine that there are that many people working on it given how long it has been.

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#29

Post by koolba »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #21
SwellJoe wrote: post #17

For what it's worth, Justin Frankel continues to produce great software. He founded Cockos Incorporated, which produces REAPER; I think it's pretty widely accepted in the audio recording community that REAPER is the best value in the multitrack recording DAW market, and among the best overall tools for the purpose. He's obviously wealthy enough to never need to work again. It's clear Frankel just loves music, and wan…

Also, don't forget Licecap, one of the easiest to use and most consistent cross-platform gif-screen-capture tools: http://www.cockos.com/licecap/ I said a very audible "holy shit, this is that guy?" when the link to jesussonic took me to Cockos.

Wow I didn't know he made licecap as well. As far as gif recordings go, it really whips the llamas ass!

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#30

Post by hardwaresofton »

koolba wrote: post #29
hardwaresofton wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, don't forget Licecap, one of the easiest to use and most consistent cross-platform gif-screen-capture tools: http://www.cockos.com/licecap/ I said a very audible "holy shit, this is that guy?" when the link to jesussonic took me to Cockos.

Wow I didn't know he made licecap as well. As far as gif recordings go, it really whips the llamas ass!

Licecap definitely changed how I worked. If you want the rest of your frontend development team to think you're a god, include licecap or other gifs of features/bugfixes on code reviews. It's a thing most developers don't even think of doing (at least most didn't in my experience). Makes it easy for stake holders (if they're allowed near your code reviews/tickets/whatever), devs, qa, to easily see how functionality has changed.

I first learned of it from a young QA at a company I previously worked at, and I am so grateful I met him and was able to learn from him.

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