DonHopkins on Jan 6, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Dwarf Fortress has sold half a million copies
It reminds me of Justin Hall's story about holding out and refusing to sell "bud.com" to Budweiser.
Instead he just hung onto it, and eventually used it for his own bud delivery company, once recreational cannabis was finally legalized.
He was much happier that great three-letter domain name be used for something he loves, strong kind bud, instead of something he hates, weak piss beer.
https://bud.com/history-of-bud-com/
>In 1999 I was contacted by a lawyer Steven M. Weinberg, representing Anheuser-Busch, makers of Bud beer.
>We chatted by phone: “So, you’re a college student!”
>Actually I graduated the year before.
>He continued: “Well, how does $50,000 sound for bud.com?”
>I replied that $50k should be the interest generated by the money someone pays for bud.com. This is a three letter, actual word, dot com domain, and if I’m going to see it on every beer can you make forever, I should at least be well compensated. I remember reading that the marketing budget for Budweiser beer that quarter was $16.1 million. BUD was the company’s stock symbol.
>I wasn’t going to sell lightly, and they weren’t going to bid against themselves, so we didn’t get anywhere.
The story about his fight to register the four-letter domain name fuck.com is also hilarious:
The same brand predicament must be true of whatever prospects milk.com has.
Now? I'm literally driving. I'll end up ploughing into the back of your lorry if I shop online now.
A bit of an overstatement but rings kind of true. I feel the number of different website we browse through decrease over time, it is all centered around giant walled gardens. You'd rather have lots of followers on Tiktok or Youtube for exposure rather than having a nice domain name
Domain ranking is more about reputation than exactly what the TLD is. Good TLD helps for sure, but is not the end all be all. Age, backlinks, content, etc. are the real ranking factors.
That's your goal as a service provider, not as a consumer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40417009
>Kaleida Labs (a joint venture of Apple and IBM) developed ScriptX, which was a cousin of Dylan: a lisp-like language with a "normal" syntax without all the parens, with a CLOS-like (without all the MOOP stuff) object system with generic dispatch, multiple inheritance, proxies, and a "Bento" persistence system (from OpenDoc), and container and multimedia libraries that leaned heavily into multiple inheritance. (You'd typically mix arrays or dicts into your collections of other kinds of objects. So you could directly loop over, filter, and collect your custom classes.)
>Its parser was a separate layer from its compiler, so Dan Bornstein (one of the ScriptX designers who later made Dalvik for Android) write a Scheme parser front end for it.
>ScriptX influenced MaxScript, the scripting language in 3D Studio Max, which was written by one of the ScriptX designers, John Wainwright. Other Kaleidan Lisp hackers include Shell Kaplan (Employee #1 at Amazon) and Eric Benson (who worked on Lucid Emacs), both went to Amazon and did a lot of Lisp and Lisp inspired stuff there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX
He scanned the letter about the "Bruce Font" -- The Artist Formerly Known as Prince's own font distributed around the "CDROM Industry" on a floppy disk in 1993 by his PR company "Graphix Zone":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821030
>Funny, I thought the symbol for The Artist Formerly Known As Prince was informally pronounced and spelled "BRUCE", which is less cumbersome to speak and spell than the official alternative (which is unspeakable unspellable silence). His PR company sent this memorandum around to the press and industry, including step-by-step downloading, installation, and usage instructions for Macintosh and PC, of a special [BRUCE] font with just one unpronounceable [BRUCE] symbol, to be used when referring to The Artist in print. I guess Weird Al didn't get the memo.
https://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bruce_font.html
>Why, the ``Bruce'' font? Because someone jokingly suggested that because it was way too cumbersome to say, ``that symbol guy'' or whatever, it'd be much easier to give the symbol a name, and that name should be ``Bruce.'' So there.
Somebody finally dug up a copy of the floppy:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/04/princes-legendary-fl...
https://web.archive.org/web/20160605114246/https://www.anild...
https://x.com/anildash/status/481211515630936067
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/23/cracking-open-the-prince-flo...