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Only as to the year. Give it time. They have a lot of money to spend so the decline will be slow and they will not go down without making lots of noise and buying out lots of potential successors. But the decline is beginning. Sooner or later Facebook believers have to accept this.

I'm excited about the decline because it means the rise of something better. Continual improvement. When one door closes, another opens. But I recognise that many others do not share my optimism. Facebook represents something to them, I guess. I can't quite understand it.

Facebook is one step along the path. It was a fad that drew a remarkable amount of attention and participation. The internet just keeps growing. We are in its infancy.

Yes, diversification is smart. But you're trying to use this general idea to explain a specific decision that is clearly a matter of timing.

You could claim that everytime an insider at any company sells the majority of his stock he is diversifying. But that's not really looking at what the real reason is. There is a reason that "now" is the "time to diversify". And it's not just because diverisification is generally smart investing.

I guess Facebook represents something for a lot of HN commenters. When Facebook starts it's decline it signifies some larger problem.

It was a tremendous success, some people made many millions from Facebook. So what's the problem if the fad dies down and it all goes south eventually?

There is no quality control in the ICANN root. You grease some palms and you're in. .pw?

The situation will get much worse if the new gtld program is allowed to proceed.

Read up on the lawsuit that ICANN is in with Manwin, a porn company. The courts are getting closer to lifting the veil on ICANN, who has long claimed they cannot be sued as a commercial entity.

Considering they just banked over 350 million for giving people the right to be reviewed by ICANN (for what?), this idea of being a "non-profit" organization and immune from any commercial liability is becoming a bit of a farce, even to the most naive observer.

Is this some sort of extreme cognitive dissonance?

Why can't people just accept that Facebook is a fad?

It does not mean the world is going to end. It's a fad, not a solid company. We went through this before 12 years ago. Eventually the market figures it out. Move on. That's what Thiel is doing.

More fads are around the corner. Investors will keep falling for the same old tricks.

Gates and Ellison are very poor comparisons. Their software was not web-based (=ad-based), their main market was the enterprise and they went to great lengths to create long-term customer lock-in. They began in a different era, and are nothing like Facebook, which is a photo-sharing website that relies on display ads and game-playing "whales" to make money.

In the article he uses the example of compiling Firefox.

This is a lengthy affair on any of the BSD's.

The question is, is it even worth it? I mean, what does Firefox give me that is worth all that time compiling?

One has to have a big bloated browser to do online banking and similar things, but it is entirely unnecessary for lots of other things, like YouTube. To get content and play it, which are two separate tasks, you certainly do not need Firefox.

That makes kids upset. They have invested all their energy into learning the browser and how to manipulate it. 100% web everything. Client-server.

Anything that threatens these ideas is offensive.

Well, that's what's keeping back progress.

You will find not freedom and flexibility to explore the possibilities by trying to do everything through a browser, over the web, and solely within a client-server construct. Those are self-imposed limitations that today's developers readily accept.

As phk says, he's writing for people who can think for themselves. If you cannot think for yourself, if you're just good at repeating the same old things: "OSS is great!" "The web is amazing!" "Google!" "Facebook!" then his writing will not make sense to you and will probably e offensive.

If I'm not mistaken, he's implying we can do better. And the evidence to support that is that we have done better. But it was a long time ago, and bubble seeking programmers do not want to pay attention to history. Go figure. Tha sad truth is most programmers today are caught in the mediocre moment, thinking it's Nirvana.

Please don't wake me up. I'm enjoying this dream.

phk how dare you question autoconf, libtool and package collections. Simplicity? Are you kidding? Nothing is simple. Simlicity is HARD. You are a grumpy old man. Leave us kids alone, we're having fun.

End sarcasm.

I can compile my bloated BSD kernel loaded down with every available driver I'll never need in a fraction of the time it takes me to compile Firefox: that is, measured in _minutes_. On an underpowered computer it can take _days_ to compile Firefox with all its supposed dendencies. I say supposed because no one is really sure. It's too much work to check and really find out.

Anyway, negative coding has been outlawed. It's inconsiderate. Even if you found something that could be removed, you would sacrafice every ounce of your karma if you dared to remove it.

End more sarcasm.

The FreeBSD ports collection, like OpenBSD's or pkgsrc is black box.

Unfortunately, with that last line, I'm dead serious.

My solution to autoconf and libtool is to run make >log 2>log2 and then do some sed transformations on the logs to produce my own "compile script". Sometimes I even change libtool's script to make the "quiet" flag do what the "verbose" flag does, so it can't hide anything it's doing. I then save my "compile script" for the next time I need to compile the program on that type of system.

One of my todo projects is to analyse the sum total of *BSD patches, looking for patterns. One of my pet peeves is having to make patches just to compile a program on the each BSD. Silly little MI differences that totally defeat automation and require silly little patches even for the simplest of programs.

Anyway, you can't say that the youth has completely abandoned "traditions" from ye olde UNIX, no matter how much they seem to hate "old things". They stand by the old relics of autoconf and libtool year after year and even vigorously defend using them.

The reason they can't replace these crusty old things is because they refuse to put in the effort to learn how they work. If you want to build a better mousetrap, first you have to understand how the old ones work, and specifically how and where they could be improved.