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!
SoulSeek
Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)
81–90 of 172 posts
Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making a billion dollars a year revenue is pretty much the definition of "benefiting everyone", except when you're a part of regulatory capture (which AirBnB and Uber are not... yet).
> Making a billion dollars a year revenue is pretty much the definition of "benefiting everyone" This is by far the strangest thing I've ever heard.
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.
Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well you might be forgetting about Uber and AirBnB disregarding laws in their operations.
that's who I was referring to - they get criticized it's pretty hard to be innovative and not be illegal somewhere . Difference is many today see being illegal in China, Turkey, Iran, or wherever as a good thing while being illegal or borderline illegal in the USA is a bad thing The USA has regulatory capture that is just as bad as ideological or dogmatic religious capture is in those other nations. It just happens t…
>that's who I was referring to - they get criticized
Well, it's not like breaking laws is enough to make you both disruptive AND a good guy.
One, like Uber, can break laws and be a petty, exploiting, company.
Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the criticism lobbied against AirBnB and Uber is for a reason, and the reason isn't the same "up-yours" attitude of past maverick tech companies. It's a little easier to buy the maverick attitude of something like gnutella when the author isn't getting close to billion dollar revenue yearly. It may seem a little strange, but the ethos is a bit easier to believe when you stay outside the system and benefit eve…
Making a billion dollars a year revenue is pretty much the definition of "benefiting everyone", except when you're a part of regulatory capture (which AirBnB and Uber are not... yet).
Because that money are spread around to people?
Old companies needed 1000s of workers to make that money, so money were indeed somewhat distributed.
Automation and computing means a company can make that with 50-100 people even, and huge profit margins on that billion dollars.
And then with the right schemes, you can also avoid paying taxes.
Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Making a billion dollars a year revenue is pretty much the definition of "benefiting everyone", No, no it is not. One party making lots of money is not the same as something benefitting everyone. Companies ignoring environmental regulations could make more money, but it wouldn't benefit everyone, as an example.
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.
Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
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
But if you do, for the love of God make it as short as possible. When I'm browsing through the tickets using some stock web browser, and the anigif runs for five minutes before reaching the point, it is such a pain to have to grab the gif and either dig out a tool than can track through an anigif, or have to cast it into some other format and then track through that. Then, I'm stuck either doing that every time, or attaching another file to the ticket; the same animation, but in a format that we can track through so I don't have to watch the entire five minutes.
Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)
#87There's a really excellent long piece in Ars from 2012 about Nullsoft/Winamp that has the advantage of nearly a decade more perspective: https://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-greatest... The following year, AOL officially killed the Winamp product.
WinAmp is back. http://www.winamp.com/
It's been 'back' since... around 2013?
Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)
#88I 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 tags are incorrect then they're effectively lost in that UI because you don't know where to look for them.
Yeah you can randomize play in iTunes or Zune, but you have to make arbitrary playlists explicitly. You can drag tracks around in VLC but the UI isn't helpful.
I would say I knew 90% of the songs in my music collection then and probably know 10% now despite it being about the same size, purely because of a few 'helpful' UI constraints.
People sort of suggest that music changed when MP3s and Napster bloomed, but the 'end of an era' in my mind, the time when my experience of music definitely changed, is when I was obligated to stop using Winamp and start using iTunes etc in the mid 2000s.
Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)
#89NSIS (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.
Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)
#90Easter egg at http://www.winamp.com
Click the llama's ass.