41–50 of 68 posts
http://www.desototimes.com/articles/2012/12/18/news/doc50cfc...
The brightest of us are the hardest to reach and the most difficult to persuade, but they're also the most painful to lose.
To anyone reading this: if someone that you care about needs help, don't wait until tomorrow. Don't make excuses. Don't fuck around.
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> So now Phil Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One can only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie. > I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement: > "If you fail to abide by…
I'm honestly not sure how you can equivocate a haunted conscience with death.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So now Phil Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One can only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie. > I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement: > "If you fail to abide by…
Putting this in to context, at the time Thom had to basically go under the radar because of all the hate mail and threats he got because of the ARC / PKWare legal battle, supposedly these email threats were prompted in part by Phil himself. It definitely doesn't make it OK to say "this person deserved to die," but I think it's worth considering it in context, as these people weren't strangers to each other and their…
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I didn't care about the controversy I just remember re-packing all of my files in .zip to save more space on my BBS. Unfreezing...Melting....OOOO00000oooooo........
That reminds me of ARJ, I have no memory of why, but I was a much bigger fan of ARJ than zip.
I used ARJ mostly, until RAR came in, of course ;)
Reading this sounds like a hit piece. I don't doubt he drank himself to death. There is an embellishment of events and the author is writing from the perspective as though they/he/she were there. I am writing this after coming back from the bar with friends. I would actually consider myself someone who drinks too much. I have written code for years, tried and failed on over four startups. I have spent a week in a hos…
I agree whole heartedly and have been to some of the places you have. One thing I have noticed in some friends and acquaintances who've worked out of depression is that they can attain this loftiness to themselves. They feel superior to those who are where they once were. Once I saw that in real life, I began to extrapolate it to a lot of the comments on the internet that tear down the depressed. Somehow they lose th…
"A man falls down a hole..."
It speaks to the character of the person if they then think of themselves superior to a friend who is fighting a fight they have been through previously.
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This: "In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988. Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it. " is contradicted by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz "... settlement of the lawsuit…
I remember all three formats. You have to keep in mind the context of the times; there was no Linux yet, almost no one had heard of the internet, and certainly there were no things like the world wide web or wikipedia. No one really knew about open source or the legal fight between SEA and PKWARE. We all switched to PKZIP because it created the same size archive files as ARC and it uncompressed so much faster. In 198…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This: "In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988. Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it. " is contradicted by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz "... settlement of the lawsuit…
I didn't care about the controversy I just remember re-packing all of my files in .zip to save more space on my BBS. Unfreezing...Melting....OOOO00000oooooo........
http://www.esva.net/~thom/baker.html
The team that owned ARC was even smaller than Katz's, and PKARC was based directly on ARC.
This story might be a bit biased in favor of Katz. Read this take, too: http://www.esva.net/~thom/baker.html The team that owned ARC was even smaller than Katz's, and PKARC was based directly on ARC.
I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement:
"If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life."
(Apparently PKARC was blatantly ripped off of ARC and Phil refused to license ARC.)
Me: Why would I pay 40 dollars for zipping software I get for free? You guys are totally late to the game, winzip and winrar already exist.
Rep: ....... Yea, we started the industry, and our founder died from alcohol abuse...
Me: Good joke...
.......
It's a sad tale indeed.