sandee

Yes. It has been pointed our many times that, Publishing which involves averagely written news item targeting mass market is gone past the traditional model. That is where aggregators and social media platform triumps now.

However , the model of high-end journalism is already happening. Good research and analysis would always be in short supply and small focused teams who do that are already making gains. There is no reason why big companies cannot replicate this.

As faculty he was,

1. Interacting with people who are interested in commercial viability of his research ideas

2. Interacting with students, interested in pursuing research careers and seeking guidance

3. Teaching. Forming concepts in otherwise uninformed minds

4. Coaching grad students who mostly will get inspiration from him to pursue reasearch careers

5. Preparing for talks.

I think the author is under-estimating his contributions back in college.

While he laments the student whose minds are un-prepared, he likes to debug/test the code which too in the same analogy is going thorough curative process.

IMHO, if you compare the long term outputs (ROI), his work in college would far exceed that his does in private enterprise. Hope at some time, he could return back to campus re-invigorated.

Please do not do this

Zerohedge discussion here : http://www.zerohedge.com/article/here-your-chance-check-if-y...

To all those, who find RMS weird and eccentric :

PG > Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. ... We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

RMS was the first to venture into the new world of OpenSource , software freedom .. and so he has all the traits of early explorer.

Thanks. Good Post. This is great example that good application and complex systems can be written in perl as well.

On a side note, i saw the previous post on DDG, where discussion was about how DDG does not store any private information. It makes sense in the context, that since he leverages upon other search engines , his cost of running is low. So he can afford to ignore user information otherwise used for commercial purpose by others.

> As a developer, I just wish that I had started using linux earlier because I would have learned a lot more and it

Total agree.

After years of windows, i moved to Linux Desktop since last 2 years. How i wish, i had done that earlier.

33 years and going .. Congrats to all

Images from voyager : http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/212_fall2003.web.dir/Brian_Herol...

From Wikipedia : "It is possible that one or both craft may have enough RTG energy to last until 2025, but there is only a small probability of this"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program

Just as, it was quite simple you can choose not to buy windows PC.

People raised issues with Microsoft practises because as a dominant player they set the industry trend. Taking it lying down means accept this as a general trend.

Passion triumphs everything.

Just remember this all times.

I think, NYT and other publishers think Ipad as a possible revenue source for them. Quite different from PC ecosystem.

In future they may have their own custom app, and would like people to buy news straight from them, or they can group together the publishers to create a aggregator app, where the newspapers are making the money, instead of Tech-App Middle man.

It will take some time for them to figure out how to make this model work. Till then be prepared to get a legal assault from them on any news apps.

Being privately funded, they have much higher chance of satisfying obscure customer request. Once companies are loaded with VC funds, they generally focus towards 'big-picture' features etc to impress the board members, VC's.

.. and that is one more reason for corporates to move to Mac/Linux

170K is not just a funding for Diaspora, it is also a SOS to hackers all around for a decentralized social web.

Surely it got many people to read into it and its highly likely some other group will make a version which actually works.

> Same as Linux ... By the time the community effort got it together, most of the effort was obsolete

Care to explain, how all the effort in Linux was obsolute ? (And i am on Ubuntu Linux typing this reply)

I think is that Apple is doing something which no-one else may have done in recent past.

1. Apple is in software business where it has championed the model of fixed engineering cost and variable revenue streams.

2. They execute well and their products are neat. (That is a understatement)

3. They are market makers. There products are not just stealing customers but also creating new customer base for these products

4. Their marketing model is un-parrelled. And no-one in industry has any chance to replicate that in near future

Compare that to other companies. Most of them are not innovative but profitable because they are big, have low cost products. Some are in utility/F&B domain where its tough to increase the price. And others don't have much competative advantage.

Software is still the most profitable business (by a big margin), if done right. Apple is just demonstrating that.

Here’s Goldman Sachs’ pitch book for ABACUS, the synthetic collateralized debt obligation at the heart of the SEC charges. http://www.scribd.com/doc/30036962/Abacus-2007-Ac1-Flipbook-...

It seems that you have some knowledge in this area. Sometimes people who have know-how get bogged down by the limitation of current state of technology. It then requires an outsider to come in with a fresh perspective and fire in the belly. Yes, they may fail hundreds of time, but there is a chance that during the process they can do a breakthrough which the well funded gov labs had overlooked. If it has not worked for past 30 years (cheap space travel), i bet it is a good idea to stoke up these innovative companies and see the results.

Moved to ubuntu as my main workstation since past 6 months. No problems as yet. And its fun to tinker around the system. Finally librated !

Glanced the article and stopped reading when i read 'brochures'. Obviously this guy has no idea the reasons for which brochures exist.

When finance industry gets into trouble, the govt will step in to fix it. (It may be by bailing out big banks etc.). Indirectly all players in financial market benefit from it. (see the stock market gain from bottoms last year). In this context a financial startup is in a much better position when compared to startups from other domains.

It looks like FusionGarage was looking at initial funding (or acquisition) from techcrunch early in product development cycle. And techcrunch (i believe intentionally) avoided commiting anything earlier itself since they thought it as too risky. Techcrunch thought that they would bring in world class investors and team later around the product development ( few months before launch) and get a good stake in the product for that. And FusionGarage investors were frustrated that TC can come around later (when the risk is too low) and take a major bite of it.

In between, TC claims that they did initial marketing for the product. Technically it may be correct. But From risk factor, what was at stake here for TC ? Actually TC biz model works on buzz factor. More Buzz equals more readers and Revenue. So at worst (if product fails), they made some money out of the whole buzz. But for FusionGarage (and their investors), everything was at stake.

Arrington might be correct, they could have negotiated on the product stake. ( How about : 2% for initial idea discussion, 2% for initial marketing, and 2% bring in new investors and team .) I guess such a 5-6% offer would have still led to such a breakup. (But can u give a 30% stake just for blogging about a product ?)

To me, Arrington is a Bad (Scary) Startup-Investor here (keeping the startup in guessing game till end ..), and FusionGarage has a bad CEO who could not anticipate what was to come. And those investors are smart to bring the whole stuff out before the product is actually launched.

An easily understood proof of Cantor’s Theorem: http://www.mathacademy.com/pr/prime/articles/cantor_theorem/...

"Take a minute to ponder what this means. Cantor’s Theorem shows that given any set, there is another set which is 'larger' in the special sense of being a bigger kind of infinity. Hence, there can be no 'largest infinity' either! The kinds of infinity are therefore 'infinite!"