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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)

#101

Post by kijin »

derefr wrote: post #15
neotek wrote: post #11

Man I would kill for an ultra-simple, ultra-lightweight, robust music player for macOS that was just like Winamp 2.81, the last good version. No, not foobar.

"Ultra-lightweight" can mean two very different (and nearly opposite) things: some people want a player that has no external dependencies (and thus must do everything itself, like VLC); while others want a player with minimal binary size (which thus will then rely on the OS's AV frameworks as much as possible for media support.) Personally, I prefer the second definition, but it's the harder of the two to satisfy. I…

Here's another definition of "ultra-lightweight" that has nothing to do with dependencies or binary size: I want a music player that just plays any mp3/aac/ogg/flac/wav file I throw at it, and nothing more.

It should not try to categorize my music library by genre/artist/album/whatever. It should not try to "visualize" the audio with crappy abstract art that look like a screensaver. It should not connect to a remote service to download metadata about a song. It need not even support ID3 tags. No, I don't need yet another equalizer. Playlist support would be nice, but not terribly important. Just pipe the damn song to the speaker, period.

I'm pretty sure that if you do this and nothing more, you will end up with a small binary with minimal dependencies that starts playing before you can even lift your finger off the button. Modern music players spend most of their CPU cycles doing something completely unrelated to parsing the actual audio file.

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

#102

Post by Trundle »

peterwwillis wrote: post #97
Trundle wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think revenue is generated? People give you money because they rather have your good/service than the money. Selling something to someone is benefitting them.

> Selling something to someone is benefitting them. This is so myopically capitalist. It's like the argument for the free market distilled into a single sentence. People would not just rather have the good or service than the money; people have no use for money. Money isn't a real thing. It's an artificial construct designed to allow us to exchange goods and services freely and to avoid loss. Exchanging money has not…

>Exchanging money has nothing to do with a benefit for the consumer. It is simply an exchange.

Why are you making the exchange if it doesn't benefit you?

>There is no law of nature that says all exchange is fair, or a benefit.

Fair has nothing to do with anything. I never used that word. Don't put it in to my mouth.

Sure there's no law that says an exchange has to be beneficial to you. Do what you want. But most people choose their actions based on self interest and make trades that are beneficial to them.

>if you sell me cancer drugs at $800 a bottle, it benefits me in that my cancer is staved off for a month. But then I have no more money, and can't buy the drugs, and die. Who did it really benefit?

You benefited by a month of life. How is that not incredibly obvious?

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

#103

Post by tluyben2 »

arjie wrote: post #93
nikcub wrote: post #35

Despite the "change the world.. break the rules, etc." rhetoric, Silicon Valley couldn't be more different today. I find it hard to imagine a Google employee releasing an ad blocker[0], or Popcorn Time raising a Series A round, or startups shipping crypto that breaks the law, or a startup selling offensive security software (there's a reason that business has been pushed overseas) Today, startups that push the bounda…

Well, the sort of irreverent crackpottery that made up life in the first dot com boom doesn't really fly right now. If you've read the "Life in the Boy's Dorm" series by Nancy Hauge, the power dynamic was very different then. Sun's engineers refused to stop smoking pot for the visit of the President (or Vice President, I don't remember which) of the United States. They promptly put on a protest against The Man when a…

>Cormack and Romero ghost shifted on computers at their daytime employer. Philippe Kahn started Borland while illegally in the United States. How much of this would you tolerate? Probably little. Probably neither of those actions.

Definitely fine with both those. And had that happen at a less exciting circumstances but they were comparible. I like to cultivate people that take stands and believe in something instead of berate them. As I know the latter will only end up in those people doing it anyway but then in secret.

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

#104

Post by fooza »

anjc wrote: post #88

I don't know if this is how Winamp was meant to be used (I suspect it wasn't) but its default behaviour from its launch - with all of your music in a big giant list which you could muddle around, and a randomize play-order button - almost invited me to explore music in a way that I haven't seen since. It seems like ever since then the UIs try their best to force you to dig down into a specific album. If a track's id3…

Zune? What year is this?

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

#105

Post by digi_owl »

watwut wrote: post #92
sametmax wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often read stuff like that. "Now you couldn't do it like they did it before". "You wouldn't be able to get away with the same jokes today." Or "You wouldn't be able to publish the same story today." I agree that time changes, but this is discarding the merits of those who did it then. Believe it or not, at that time it was not easy either. The people that did it had huge balls. Geeks were considered less that nothi…

"Geeks were considered less that nothing by society. The working world didn't trust them, believe in them or value them. They were basically rejected, as something annoying you had to have somewhere in your closet. My father actually told me in 2003 that he was disappointed I choose to work in such a boring field." Exaggerating a bit? By a bit I mean a lot? I know that some geeks had hard childhood and were bullied,…

Seems to me he is mixing geeks and nerds.

The impression i have is that the geek label came into effect during the dot-com era as a way to be a web guy without the "no social graces" stigma.

These days you get geeks appropriating nerd elements as a element of their self promotion, resulting in hipsters...

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

#107

Post by fauigerzigerk »

coldtea wrote: post #85
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before even talking about externalities like the environment it's worth noting that revenue isn't profit. So who benefits from revenue depends on profit margins. If a startup disrupts a high margin industry, especially if that industry is also inefficient (which often goes together) and replaces it with a more efficient lower margin business model, then consumers will benefit. If a startup disrupts an industry by fin…

> If a startup disrupts a high margin industry, especially if that industry is also inefficient (which often goes together) and replaces it with a more efficient lower margin business model, then consumers will benefit. If before you had independent smaller businesses or individuals, and now all that has been captured by a single company, then a job has just gone down the drain, and the road is open for monopoly.

That is always a danger. But I think history has shown that monopolies or oligopolies are often less stable than they appear.

The assumption, beginning with Marx I think, was that monopolies have a self reinforcing element. That's true, but there is also a self defeating element. The more a monopoly absuses its power, the more complacent it becomes and the greater the incentive to disrupt it.

The problem is that governments sometimes collude with monopolists instead of making sure that markets are actually functioning as they should.

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

#108

Post by peterwwillis »

Trundle wrote: post #102
peterwwillis wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Selling something to someone is benefitting them. This is so myopically capitalist. It's like the argument for the free market distilled into a single sentence. People would not just rather have the good or service than the money; people have no use for money. Money isn't a real thing. It's an artificial construct designed to allow us to exchange goods and services freely and to avoid loss. Exchanging money has not…

>Exchanging money has nothing to do with a benefit for the consumer. It is simply an exchange. Why are you making the exchange if it doesn't benefit you? >There is no law of nature that says all exchange is fair, or a benefit. Fair has nothing to do with anything. I never used that word. Don't put it in to my mouth. Sure there's no law that says an exchange has to be beneficial to you. Do what you want. But most peop…

... And then died due to the loss of money from the transaction. A transaction with a short term benefit that results in long term disaster is not really a benefit. It's like being sold slow poison.

A benefit is a profit or an advantage. People often have no choice in what they buy, or are forced to buy something. Like with the cancer drugs, if their only other option is to die, it really isn't a choice.

People can also be sold things that are bad for them that they need, like heroin. Buying heroin is not a benefit. Then there's buying things that are more unintentionally harmful, like blankets full of smallpox sold to American Indians, or overpriced half-faulty weapons sold to resistance fighters. Sometimes nations are forced to buy and sell goods at an inflated price only to later be accused of not supporting local goods more for political gain, making their transactions only beneficial to the banks that hold their money or the multinational corporations that provide the goods and services in the first place. At the far end, a grocer paying protection money to gangsters results in losing money, but no benefit.

In the real world, people do things for a variety of reasons, and not always good ones. I believe your argument is a facile generalization that completely ignores the reality of trade.

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

#109

Post by Trundle »

peterwwillis wrote: post #108
Trundle wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Exchanging money has nothing to do with a benefit for the consumer. It is simply an exchange. Why are you making the exchange if it doesn't benefit you? >There is no law of nature that says all exchange is fair, or a benefit. Fair has nothing to do with anything. I never used that word. Don't put it in to my mouth. Sure there's no law that says an exchange has to be beneficial to you. Do what you want. But most peop…

... And then died due to the loss of money from the transaction. A transaction with a short term benefit that results in long term disaster is not really a benefit. It's like being sold slow poison. A benefit is a profit or an advantage. People often have no choice in what they buy, or are forced to buy something. Like with the cancer drugs, if their only other option is to die, it really isn't a choice. People can a…

>... And then died due to the loss of money from the transaction. A transaction with a short term benefit that results in long term disaster is not really a benefit. It's like being sold slow poison.

Extending their life by a month doesn't result in the long term disaster though. They already have cancer. I don't follow extending life = slow poison at all.

>People often have no choice. Like with the cancer drugs, if their only other option is to die, it really isn't a choice.

So the benefit to performing the trade is so great that they wouldn't even consider not making it is somehow an argument against the trade being a benefit?

The rest of your argument appears to just boil down to "there are exceptions". Cool, checkmate on that one. You found exceptions. Bravo.

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

#110

Post by sametmax »

watwut wrote: post #92
sametmax wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often read stuff like that. "Now you couldn't do it like they did it before". "You wouldn't be able to get away with the same jokes today." Or "You wouldn't be able to publish the same story today." I agree that time changes, but this is discarding the merits of those who did it then. Believe it or not, at that time it was not easy either. The people that did it had huge balls. Geeks were considered less that nothi…

"Geeks were considered less that nothing by society. The working world didn't trust them, believe in them or value them. They were basically rejected, as something annoying you had to have somewhere in your closet. My father actually told me in 2003 that he was disappointed I choose to work in such a boring field." Exaggerating a bit? By a bit I mean a lot? I know that some geeks had hard childhood and were bullied,…

I'm not exaggerating by one bit.

At best you had an "ok" situation. Nothing like the "rock star" attitude you get today.

Not only geeks where the less popular in school, but the media mocked them. And this snowballed into the workplace where the only people threated like the IT department was the accounting one.

The pay was not nearly in the same area. Nobody would consider buying a dual screen for their IT dev a minimum requirement.

I can recall people dreading to call the sysadmin to deal with anything. Talking to them was considered a chore.

The best way to defend this is that before the ipod existed, noone would ever say "I'm such a geek". Today somebody playing too much on iphone would say that. We call girls with cute glasses "geeks".

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