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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)

#131

Post by nsgi »

1_2__3 wrote: post #128
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…

And yet back then we built the entire infrastructure of the internet and connected the world. Now we use it for Snapchat. I'm not just being nostalgic. Before quick money ruled over all a lot more actually beneficial innovation took place. Now that the Balkanization is in full swing and the battle lines are drawn we've regressed: realtime chat is fragmented, non-corporate online entities are sidelined everywhere and…

How is Snapchat not something that connects the world?

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

#132

Post by nsgi »

sametmax wrote: post #110
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,…

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 min…

> The pay was not nearly in the same area.

Because the dot-com bubble had recently burst...

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

#133

Post by watwut »

sametmax wrote: post #110
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,…

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 min…

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

Not being rock star is not an oppression. The ok treatment is what majority of people have. I mean, not being treated as something super special is not "considered less that nothing by society". It is being considered normal.

"And this snowballed into the workplace where the only people threated like the IT department was the accounting one."

There is nothing wrong with the accounting department. In pretty much all workplaces I have been at, they have been treated with respect. In any case, if that workplace treated accountants badly too, the workplace was shitty for more then one group.

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

I have seen such behavior towards admin, but then again I did not liked talking with that particular admin either. I dont doubt that there were groups of great admins that were not treated fairly despite acting all polite and all that. Bad workplaces happen.

However, admin I considered chore to talk with was condescending too often and it was hard to get what I needed from him. He was good in tech, but talking with him was a chore.

"The best way to defend this is that before the ipod existed, noone would ever say "I'm such a geek"."

Yeah, I find everybody is a geek culture annoying too.

"We call girls with cute glasses "geeks"."

Guys with pretty much zero technical skills used to be called geeks just for liking a tv show or play videogame.

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

#134

Post by arjie »

tluyben2 wrote: post #103
arjie wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, yes, of course there are individuals who would support that. But not everyone will, and given the breadth of exposure, those who don't will find out and they'll expend significant effort to drag violators down.

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

#135

Post by T-hawk »

cdelsolar wrote: post #25
Splines wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not just use a fast, minimal, and beautiful old version of Winamp? It still exists. I've been running v2.95 since 2003.

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

#136

Post by sigil »

dchest wrote: post #89
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.

It's still alive — latest release December 11, 2016! Two years ago I worked on an Electron-based app for Windows. I tested* it right on my dev machine in Electron for Linux _and_ the whole build process, including the NSIS-based installed also ran on Linux via makensis utility, so I didn't even have to touch Windows until the final QA phase. This was very nice.

NSIS is more than alive for Electron apps -- it's about to become the default windows installer in electron-builder! Squirrel.windows will be deprecated soon.

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

#137

Post by acidburnNSA »

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…

What a glorious time it was with that master playlist and the excellent keyboard shortcuts. I used to put it on shuffle and play a game where I'd press Next and then Pause immediately and try to impress friends by knowing what song it was within the first half-second.

You could also just conjure up any song with the "J" keyboard shortcut that would search the entire path as well as the ID3 tags. It was so good that one weekend night in high-school, my friend and I decided to put an old desktop in the back of my Jeep on foam and power it with an inverter. We ran aux wires to the stereo and I literally just had a full-on keyboard that I could pull up while driving and get any song in my library with a few slaps of one hand without looking down even once (I knew one-handed typing skills would be useful someday). (I even tried voice command with Dragon Naturally Speaking but it only worked when the engine was off.) To this day, I haven't had such an agile interface to my music. I just use a phone now but it has a fraction of my old library and searching for things while driving is dangerous, illegal, slow, and miserable.

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

#138

Post by anjc »

Ndymium wrote: post #125
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…

iTunes has had a list view of all tracks for as long as I have used it, and it is still they main way I play music: https://files.nytsoi.net/l5cR.png

If I'm not mistaken, you can't drag tracks around though. Whereas in Winamp I often found myself creating 'mini playlists' within the master list, which morphed as my tastes changed.

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

#139

Post by RodericDay »

Roritharr wrote: post #124
sametmax wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 min…

This is an interesting tidbit regarding pay. I have a feeling (no data) that the compensation for lots of professions mostly gravitate around some value that is connected to the perceived social status of said profession. Supply and Demand often really doesn't factor in as much as it should. But maybe it's just because compensation in Germany is weird in general.

it's because salaries aren't public. if you had public salaries you'd see a huge quick readjustment.

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

#140

Post by anjc »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #137
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…

What a glorious time it was with that master playlist and the excellent keyboard shortcuts. I used to put it on shuffle and play a game where I'd press Next and then Pause immediately and try to impress friends by knowing what song it was within the first half-second. You could also just conjure up any song with the "J" keyboard shortcut that would search the entire path as well as the ID3 tags. It was so good that o…

Ha wow, now that's dedication.

At least now your car can have bluetooth and Siri integration...which lets you play music from Spotify...when you have reception...or tracks from your $500 16gb iPhone which can store a few albums...ugh.

You could probably re-make that project pretty handy these days, with Raspberry Pi's and hard-drives being cheap and so on

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