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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)

#111

Post by sametmax »

digi_owl wrote: post #105
watwut wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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...

Nerds is what we call today the people we called geeks yesterday.

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

#112

Post by Keyframe »

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…

Was it ever like thag though? Considering the origins of SV are with military and intelligence requirements, you'd expect a bit of an 'oversight'.

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

#113

Post by snovv_crash »

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.

I found Winamp way too busy, and went with Billy. Faster, lighter and less wasted pixels.

These days I'm using Clementine though...

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

#114

Post by anjc »

fooza wrote: post #104
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?

I went through a whole heap of players on Windows 10 trying to get consistent playback from my Onedrive collection, and only Zune worked consistently for some reason. I don't know why.

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

#115

Post by xenithorb »

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…

Thankfully we now have a vibrant open source community to take the burden of pioneering, no startups necessary

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

#116

Post by Strom »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #27

I still use winamp as my mp3 player, one of the first things I install when I reinstall my Windows. It's everything that I need without the BS.

I've also been a happy user of WinAmp for 16+ years now. Milkdrop visualizations are awesome, I have a rated collection of 50k of them.

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

#117

Post by amelius »

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…

> Today, startups that push the boundaries on bad laws and regulations are more likely to be roundly criticized than praised.

Perhaps those companies should move to countries with less strict rules then, perhaps in Asia. For example, I know that many biotech companies are looking for Singapore because of less strict ethical rules. In the field of stem-cell research, see e.g. [1].

Another option is Mexico.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2744936/

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

#118

Post by xiaoma »

mdpopescu wrote: post #96
xiaoma wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia benefits just about everybody with an internet connection and they sure don't make a billion dollars a year. The same could be said of open source devs who contribute to core projects running our internet.

You're talking about the opposite of what I said. My implication was 1 billion USD revenue => benefiting everybody Yours is Benefiting everybody => 1 billion USD revenue I stand by the first but not by the second.

You said: "A is the definition of B"

I said: "Here are some Bs that are not A"

If you had said the definition of a kangaroo was "a big marsupial from Australia" and I pointed out many kangroos that weren't actually big marsupials from Australia, It would suggest that the definition was flawed.

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

#119

Post by raverbashing »

jojohack wrote: post #20

NSIS (created also by Nullsoft) was particularly awesome, made it a breeze to build a Windows installer. There was also a photo gallery script Justin created which I thought was ahead of its time back then.

Oh I had forgotten about that

I used this in a couple of projects, and it was one of the easiest to use (still, it had good scripting possibilities)

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

#120

Post by bluedino »

abecedarius wrote: post #37
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…

He was a regular in #c on IRC back in the 90s. Pleasant, fun guy. I kind of miss those days.

He used to come on #winprog - I think Winamp was his first windows app, he was always asking about GUI elements how he was planning on making it skinnable. Everyone was trading mp3's and I couldn't figure out why you would want to spend 15 minutes downloading a song...
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