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ArsDigita Shut Down
Posted by
michael
on Fri Feb 08, 2002 08:25 AM
from the denouement dept.
from the denouement dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Looks like it's official. Philip Greenspun's ArsDigita has been closed, its assets sold to Red Hat. No word on what Red Hat is planning to do with the GPL'd ArsDigita Community System." You may remember ArsDigita from its grand plans during the dot-com boom.
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ArsDigita University? (Score:3, Interesting)
Did that ever take off to any extent?
Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:4, Interesting)
Their web site is still up at aduni.org [aduni.org].
thenerd
Parent
Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:5, Interesting)
It was a great experience and I hope that the idea will be picked up again someday by another corporation that feels guilty about its sudden wealth.
read about it at aduni.org [aduni.org] if you're curious. You can watch/download pretty much all the lectures on line, do the problem sets, etc.
In fact, if someone out there is interested in mirroring about 40 gigabytes worth of video content from this server I believe that there is still a need for additional storage space.
Parent
Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:2)
In fact, if someone out there is interested in mirroring about 40 gigabytes worth of video content from this server I believe that there is still a need for additional storage space.
Morpheus, dude.... Morpheus.
larger file size. (Score:3, Interesting)
Each lecture seems to come in at about half a gig, although YMMV. Not something to download lightly, at least not on a common cable modem line.
Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:2, Insightful)
What? Why should one feel "guilty" about achieving success by offering some product or service of higher quality or at a cheaper price than competitors and still making a profit?
Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:2)
try to do their job as best as they can.
Exactly. Unfortunately, their job is, at the bottomline, to maximize profit, no matter what. These days, the "no matter what" becomes stressed more and more, since short-term profits that kill the company in the long term (such as fraudulent business practices) still translate into nice gains for the stock owners, who can just sell their shares when the shit hits the fan.
Yeah, there's some assholes, but no more than there are in any
large group.
True, but a few assholes are all it takes. That's exactly the problem: big organizations remove the responsibility for large-scale actions from the majority of people. Five hundred employees are dutifully and and meticulously making sure than all regulations are met and the company's toxic waste all goes into the marked containers, and it takes just two or three to maximize profits by dumping it into the neares river instead of paying for proper disposal.
Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:5, Insightful)
The goal of ArsDigita University was to offer the world's best computer science education, at an undergraduate level, to people who were otherwise unable to obtain it. ADUni.org is now a site run by alumni of the school seeking to carry on that mission.
In 2000-2001, 34 talented and motivated college graduates attended a one-year, intensive, comprehensive undergraduate computer science program, for free. The program was an experiment in curriculum design, free education, and the effect of the Internet on the future of education. ArsDigita University was the brainchild of entrepreneur Philip Greenspun and the ArsDigita Foundation.
After one year, ArsDigita University lost funding and was forced to close its physical doors. Yet, we prefer to think of the program as dormant, not dead. As we redesign aduni.org, we will continue to host all of our course materials and will provide as much information as possible about the workings of this past year - who we are, what we did, how we did it, what worked, what didn't work, and what we're doing now.
Parent
MIT CS in one year (Score:4, Informative)
My guess is the MIT OpenCourseware initiative wil put a similar range on the web in upcoming years. The first installment will be this autumn according to the MIT site. (If bore through MIT's online course catalog, many syllabi are already on the web.)
The benefits of a MIT education, tempered by real-world experience, without the MIT prices, and without the MIT diploma.
Parent
Re:ArsDigita University? (Score:5, Informative)
We're still out here. The university itself closed its doors at the end of the academic year last July, and the alumni acted to save everything we could from the ashes. We run the aduni.org [aduni.org] site, as others have posted on this thread.
All of our content (80 GB worth) is available online -- about 275 hours of lectures, problem sets, exams, notes, and solutions -- with courses like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (the much-loved MIT Scheme intro to CS course), Discrete Math, Algorithms, Theory, AI, Databases, and a couple of courses in Software Engineering (one of which is taught by Greenspun).
But we're a shoestring alumni organization that can't afford the bandwidth to stream the videos very well, unfortunately. So as an alternative we'll ship an 80GB hard drive full of the stuff to anyone who wants one for $220. Everything's available under the Open Content License. E-mail me (chris@aduni.org [mailto]) for more details.
Thanks.
Chris
Parent
photo.net is still around! (Score:3)
Re:Another testament to Greenspun's "skills" (Score:2, Interesting)
"letting employees go" photo.net is hiring
so its still up and running totally separate from aD.
We just switched to running linux front end boxes combined with aolserver band arsdigita's oracle driver. we're having trouble with that combination. are there any other folks donig 8 million hits a day (with a lot of db hits) using linux combined with aolserver and the wonderful arsdigita oracle driveer. It seems like some pages keep on coming up blank. Maybe when we try solaris we'll have better luck.
We also have an exciting announcement soon with regard to retailers who are helping to support photo.net.
-raj
`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate (Score:2)
Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate (Score:2, Insightful)
Many people, not just Philip, were responsible for this growth. And much of that growth was in spite of (not because of) his leadership. Philip is no hero. Think Steve Jobs writ small.
Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate (Score:2)
Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate (Score:3, Informative)
Could the Slashdot posse please understand: you never met Phillip. He can't code (just READ the book and cut through the crap; analyze his 'facts'), and people who meet him instinctively dislike him. You can't run a company if everyone hates you.
If you are still taken in by Phillip and Alex, try and find an old Tcl ACS. Read the code and try to imagine trying to extend it to do useful work. Imagine trying to maintain it. To work with Phillip's code is to hate Phillip. You don't even have to meet him.
I met him and didn't dislike him (Score:2, Informative)
Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate (Score:2)
It's clear, even in his writings, that his way is the right way, period. It's also clear that his biggest concern is getting money, to keep up with his friends, and he expects that the reader is also mostly concerned with money, instead of learning or doing something useful.
Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate (Score:3, Insightful)
Greenspun may not have been the most pleasant boss (I have no experience of this personally) or the wisest possible businessman, but compared to the VCs and managers who took over the company he looks like Solomon. It's hard to credit the amount of sheer stupidity in the running of the company after the takeover. It must have taken some real effort to take a profitable, slow-growing company and turn it into a loss-making whale which didn't have any non-vapourware products.
I think that this is a software equivalent of the Edsel story: be very wary of changing product direction solely for marketing and not technical reasons, to give customers 'what they say they want' (in this case Java). And don't let the engineers get sidetracked into building something horribly overengineered and way too complex (second system syndrome).
I agree that Philip and co.'s code is crufty and difficult to maintain: but it's an absolute dream compared to the never-finished successor in Java. FWIW, the Tcl-based ACS is still being maintained as OpenACS [openacs.org], they have a port to Postgres (as well as Oracle) and the forthcoming version 4.0 is progressing nicely.
I never said the Slashdot code sucked! (Score:4, Interesting)
You must have caught one of my last one-day courses. I've stopped doing them because I think that enough people have heard what I have to say. The ideas are out there for anyone who needs them, either in a document I've written or in the heads of former students, users of photo.net, embodied in products such as Microsoft
I spend the rest of my time taking flying lessons (doing my primary training now, airplane arrives on March 1, starting instrument training in March, leaving for a 3-month Alaska trip on June 1). There is nothing quite so humbling as learning to fly. You show up at the airport and, with 60 hours of experience, are almost surely the most incompetent person on the property. If your instructor is "old-school" (mine is) there is an intermittent shouting in your headset ("more right rudder"; "what do you think you're doing?"; "don't you see where the nose is pointed?"). Everything is happening way too fast.
Anyway, flying sure makes arguments about the proper way to code up a Web script (which after all is simply merging the results of an SQL query with an HTML template) seem irrelevant. Every time you bring the airplane down in a crosswind you're putting your life and your passengers' lives on the line. Screw up a bit and you've got yourself a $228,000 pile of vaguely airplane-shaped scrap. Screw up more than a bit and you've dug yourself an airplane-shaped grave right on the runway.
Anyway I guess I should close by thanking the Slashdot guys once again for their great achievement in building this site. I often use it as an example to students of how one does not need or want too many collaboration areas on a site. Users need to be able to find the discussion. What I like about Slashdot is that one need only check the front page in order to see what is being discussed.
Parent
Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate (Score:5, Funny)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) [sethf.com]
Parent
What I'd like to know... (Score:5, Interesting)
Greenspun is right, he and some friends built the company up to be quite formidable. It could be argued that they did this at just the correct time. He personally had a lot of technical insight (as evidenced by his book Philip and Alex's guide to Web Publishing [arsdigita.com]) but was perhaps lacking in business acumen.My own suspicion is if they were still in charge and had *not* gone for funding, the company would still be around. It has been unfortunate watching the company stagnate, and the layman would certainly see the progression of success, funding, stagnation, winding up.
The VC's certainly didn't seem to understand the culture when they took on the company, which led to quite a few people leaving, and disquiet from the people who had previously supported the culture and ethos of the firm. Whether it was this that caused the problems, or the simple fact that the company, once obtaining approximately 30 million, would have to earn that back to be even back to 0, it is difficult to tell.
When Greenspun took on the VC's, which was a gutsy move which ended up in court as fully described here [unicast.org], he failed to take the company back, but it is conjectured that he got a nice settlement in the article.
What do people think? Was his culture a winner? He comes in for quite a bit of stick about his methods to get the best out of software engineers (work them extremely hard, don't give them a family life, but give them fishbowls, toys, and the hope of a ferrari). I personally don't think they should have gone to the VC's but I don't blame him. The idea of cashing out with millions personally would probably make me do the same thing. However, that's the one thing you've got to realise. If you go to VC's, you have got to read the contract, and try to imagine that the impossible could happen.
thenerd.
I do not know if it is skill...... (Score:5, Informative)
I used to work for an investment web site that used Arsdigita. I was an investment analyst and was closely involved in specifying the site.
Originally development was done by one of those web development company's that came out of nowhere to be worth billions at the height of the dotcom boom (I am sure every one knows the type). They failed to deliver anything that worked after months. The little that almost worked was overcomplicated (e.g. java applets to implement cascading drop down menus).
When we switched to Arsdigita we had some pages working within weeks. These used data extracted from several different financial data feeds (which are complex) which was stored in database (which they also implemented) and content from a content management system (which they also implemented).
I worked with them both to specify the site (what we wanted on what page, how to calcualte it, where to get the data from) and to debug it (they did the code, I did the financial maths) and I thought the process they used very efficient. Maybe be it is approach rather than, say skill at coding, that made them efficient the answer to the question may depend on how you define skill.
Parent
Re:What I'd like to know... (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree doing that is absolutely poor form (and kind of shows Godwin's law [tuxedo.org] to be true yet again), but Philip Greenspun is Jewish, so I guess he figured he wasn't going to be accused of being anti-semitic, given his stance on Israel, et al.
thenerd.
Careers... (Score:3, Funny)
ArsDigita is searching for energetic and accomplished individuals to join its expanding team. If you are:
Please surf our Web site to learn more about ArsDigita, its culture, and benefits. Then be sure to check out our opportunities.
speaks volumes of the quality and/or "ease-of-use" for their "Web Content Framework", doesn't it :-)
Links to more information (Score:2, Informative)
Twas a good thing - just remember, however greedy you get, never succomb to the temptation of VC
No Longer GPL'd (Score:3, Informative)
An unfortunate name (Score:5, Funny)
Feel bad... (Score:5, Informative)
My company, which grew over 2 years to 35 employees, raised 5 million dollars in venture capital, and was making over a million a year, slipped out of my control entirely earlier this year. We got an incompetent CEO put in place by our venture backers. Since we (the founders) had lost control of the board of directors there was nothing we could do about it. Of course, at the time, we needed the venture capital to fund development and attract good management, which we needed to close deals, etc. etc.
Looking back on it, at almost every stage I made lots of decisions, but most of them were the right decisions at the time. The decision to take VC funding was unavoidable at the time - we were coming into direct competition with companies that had already raised 30 to 40 million dollars. Ironically, those companies went out of business long before we did because their burn rates were outrageous.
Just my personal experiences anyway - I started out knowing a lot about technology and very little about business, and I know a lot more now. If your business if fundamentally sound without venture financing, then you don't need it. If your business is one that requires so much up front venture financing that you anticipate losing control (>50% of the shares of the company), before you get through the initial growth phase of the company, I would recommend rethinking starting that business, unless the returns seem outrageous. Use VC wisely, and only sell minority shares of the company during the early years. Once you get off the ground, you'll be in a much stronger position to negotiate for further funding anyway.
Re:Feel bad... (Score:5, Informative)
My experience at the parent poster's organization is a stark contrast to my experience at another employer, which was privately financed from the start. We didn't have the luxury of $5 million in the bank - our revenues had to support us. We didn't get fancy hardware, expensive chairs, catered lunches, or any of the other usual dotcom goodies. Most importantly, we weren't bloated with extra people sucking on our payroll. Instead, we busted our butts with what we had and got by on the bare minimum. We made our own decisions, and at the end of the day the company was sold to another one. VC's didn't get a dime, and the employees were very well compensated.
While it's much more difficult to survive without venture cap funding, it's worth it. You make your own decisions and don't have to kowtow to the whims of VC's - none of whom know your business as well as you do. Take as little funding as possible from the VC's. Dip into your savings, take a bank loan, hit up your friends + family. Don't hit up the VC's. You're the one taking a risk, shouldn't you be the one making the decisions and reaping the rewards?
Parent
Re:Feel bad... (Score:4, Informative)
Well, that was Greenspun's plan as well. The cofounders sold a small stake in the company to two VC firms in exchange for two seats on the board. Two board seats would not normally be enough to exercise control. However, there were several board positions left unfilled at the beginning, and appointment of new members had to be approved by the existing board members - so the two VC board members plus the chief exec. they appointed managed to get effective control with a minority stake. A 'shareholder agreement' and Delware's company laws (which I'm told favour management rather than shareholders) enforced this.
I guess the lesson is: be very very careful, check for loopholes, and be suspicious if you're asked to incorporate in Delaware rather than a state with more shareholder-friendly regulations.
Parent
Re:Feel bad... (Score:5, Informative)
We got an incompetent CEO put in place by our venture backers.
Word. I raised $4.5 million, later another $15 million, only to watch the company that I and my partner built slam into the ground with a huge crater. At the time, it seemed like a good idea to bring in a CEO "with experience", but the guy was utter, total fool. He bought into every dot com cliche you can think of, including "spend as much money as possible to create an illusion of a large company so we can go public".
It's a much longer story that this, but one of the lessons I learned is that I should have trusted my own business instincts and not assumed that some "gray hair" is more competent than me.
I agree with you: there are VERY few scenerios where you "need" big VC capital. In fact, I think it's almost a disadvantage. It's SO easy to get into a mode where you waste money just because you have it. As you saw, the money ended up being a curse to your competitors. I think that's true more often than it isn't. The only way to use money like that is to sock it away and pretend it doesn't exist until you REALLY need it. Frugality shouldn't end just because you have money in the bank.
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Re:Feel bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
The point is that if you think you can grow a business yourself, do so - if you don't absolutely need a large amount of outside financing, don't take it. I understand that the VCs want you to take it so they can control the company, but that's why you need to first demonstrate that you can make some money - once that's been proved, you are in a much stronger position to negotiate. You can effectively prove that their returns will be high, and they should give you money at a good valuation, and not try to take control of a product that they don't really understand (at a detailed level, etc.).
Parent
Not necessarily a bad thing... (Score:2, Interesting)
When the VCs got in, the management became greedy and Philip got out (or kicked out, whatever). The company's death, focussing on web tools, was more or less inevitable considering the sharp economic downturn and executives realising that they won't be raking in the profits with mere Internet presence (no matter what the technology behind it).
RedHat getting a number of experienced staff makes perfect sense since the web application services might complement their business with existing clients. And, it's all Open Source, in fact we might see more rapid integration of ACS with PostgreSQL, maybe it even becomes the development platform and won't have to be ported anymore (see http://openacs.org).
So, maybe it is a good thing after all, at least for web developers using the ACS.
Just my 2 Eurocents
Elaborate Shell Game? (Score:2, Redundant)
VC's (Score:2, Insightful)
Worth the lessons that can be learned.... (Score:2, Interesting)
That the VC culture eventually brought the company down is disillusioning (word?) but should provide a more useful object lesson than the big splash failures the press is usually so quick to jump on.
I am still optimistic, I think the web has space for start-ups who want to write good software, make good sites and provide good services...but it isn't easy and there are an awful lot of mistakes to be made out there....
So, advice from the slashdot community? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ironically we've done about six times more ACS work than ArsDigita has done this year, including beating them out for the Children's Hospital at Montefiore project, a really cool project which put our site, based on the ACS at every bed in the Children's Hospital, next to Plasma screens and wireless keyboards. We're stable, and growing, and have never had an employee leave the company since we started in 1998.
Also, we've been enhancing the ACS-Tcl steadily for the last year; it's a totally different project than what Ars Digita has for download -- more stable, faster, better features, etc. OpenACS is nice, but it's still all alpha code. And if you think their 4.X product works with Postgres, you haven't read very carefully. They've been releasing OpenACS 4.X sites on Oracle this year.
I'm the president of ybos, and yesterday felt like I was living a case study at HBS. "You own a growing boutique firm. Your major partner/sometime competitor was just bought out by a billion dollar company. What do you do?"
Phil Greenspun's version of the litigation story (Score:5, Informative)
Improved software engineering through genocide (Score:4, Interesting)
He didn't understand why this was not a 'good idea'. The VC's wanted him out because he was/is a loose canon. How would comments like this have been interpreted by the World Bank?
philg@mit.edu went on to justify this by stating:
There is almost nothing else that needs to be said.
Re:Improved software engineering through genocide (Score:3, Insightful)
So, if you are ever evaluating something this guy is running, make sure you don't let the SS guide you around. Ask for code examples that implement the documentation he tries to foist on you and reserve the right to do some random audits/unguided investigation...
It would be an interesting exercise to figure out how you would get around the "SS guides" if you were looking at a company and trying to evaluate its product.
A POV from an ex-employee (again, sorry) (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's see. I joined aD in the summer of 2000 and worked there for about a year. I think there are many many misconceptions about Arsdigita and Phil Greenspun that people get having not worked with Arsdigita. (Disclaimer: as an ex-employee I'm sure my views are biased too.). 1) Phil Greenspun was not a genius (as some people thought him to be). Don't get me wrong. He's extremely smart and he was good at writing books and giving seminars and that kinda crap that can get people excited about software. I met him personally and I, myself, was excited. In a nerd-to-nerd way he can be inspirational in making you want to be something more than you are. Part of Phil's problem is that he kind of has a chip on his shoulder. He's not a REAL MIT professor. All these claims of starting the business from $10,000 and other exaggerated claims are simply that: exaggerations. 2) Arsdigita is kinda like communism (as some might say). It's good on paper but doesn't work in real life. Sure there were the cars, (the hoes), the food, the money, the vacation houses, etc. I don't think anyone ever got hooked up with a ferrari. I don't think anyone really went to the vacation houses except for him and a select few. If anything, all these utopian ideas were part of the same gimick to hire more employees and give the illusion of his ability to run the "cool" internet company. He was using the same (dare i say) "marketing techniques" to promote ACS to show the "success" of arsdigita. Having been there a limited time, my view is that aD was f0cked froma little bit of everything. It wasn't really the board that put aD into the dump (they just took them there slightly quicker). If anything was to be a main factor to their failure it was the economy (look around). So it's not one persons fault but a lack of demand. No clients = no company. I'm glad to see Ybos is still up, though. Go Ybos! PhilG was, needless to say, not a people person. Simply put (as stated somewhere above) he wasn't a people person. He knew how to make people in the company f-ing pissed and a good number of engineers quit because of his being a "loose cannon". You can't have someone like that in control (you don't want nazi germany either despite the level of efficiency the achieved). So lets review: 1) (before my employment ( summer'00)), there were already incidents with philg alienating aD employees. some good ones left. aD still had life. 2) (during employment (next year or so)), aD had already begun to die. I think this is the same for most internet companies out there. Back then nobody thought it was a recession but basically the economy (and demand) was basically coming to a halt. So what was left was a bunch of "business consultants" scrambling to get whatever they could. 3) (post employment) philg gets the boot. he actually gets the better end of the deal. they pay him $$$$$ to leave and go away. this is what makes me laugh. the business people were just so stingy to grab control of the company that they were blind in seeng that they were fighting for a lost cause. they basically paid him $$$ so they could lose more money. fools. 4) aD FINALLY dies. (it should've been dead
Re:ArsDigita and ArsTechnica (Score:2)
(In other words, no.)
Re:more info on the secret settlement (Score:2, Funny)
Re:more info on the secret settlement (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure as shootin' OpenACS has much to do with the reason RH bought the company which made the original... not least because OpenACS is made to run with Postgresql (aka: Red Hat database).
But perhaps the client list was worth something, too, you think?
World Bank Global Development Gateway [developmentgateway.org] anyone?
Re:Bzt buzzwords everwhere (Score:3, Informative)
They made the ACS(ArsDigita Community System) and offered programming for it. It is currently written in java and runs under Aolserver. What is offers is:
That is just the short skinny on acs. It basically removes 3-5 months of programming an ecomm site. Kinda like Mason on steroids.
Luckally OpenACS [openacs.org] exists for future ACS incarnations that do NOT use oracle for its database.
So to answer no, it is not rsync and it is not for people that are "stupid." It is actually a lot of useful code. My guess is that RedHat is going to try and sell a website in a box.