OS/2 my beloved.
In late September or early October 1996, Fry's Electronics places a full page promo ad on the back of the business section of the San Jose Mercury News for OS/2 4.0 "WRAP [sic]" in 256 pt font in multiple places. Oops!
Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
101–110 of 912 posts
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#102Apple’s scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked. It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread us…
Good riddance to a system that would have provided precedent for client-side scanning for arbitrary other things, as well as likely false positives. > I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. The…
I don’t think you can accurately describe it as client-side scanning and false positives were not likely. Depending upon how you view it, false positives were either extremely unlikely, or 100% guaranteed for practically everybody. And if you think the latter part is a problem, please read up on it!
> I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. They would never have changed their minds, so there's no grounds for a debate.
Right, well I wanted a debate. And Apple changed their minds. So how is it reminding you of that? Neither of those things apply here.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#103Was recently reading about Project Ara, the modular smartphone project by Google/Motorola [1]. Would have liked to see a few more iterations of the idea. Something more customizable than what we have today without having to take the phone apart.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#104Macromedia Flash. Its scope and security profile was too big. It gave way to HTML’s canvas. But man, the tooling is still no where near as good. Movieclips, my beloved. I loved it all.
I agree the tooling was great, .... for making apps/games for desktops with a mouse and keyboard and a landscape screen of at least a certain size.
Maybe they could have fixed all that for touch screens, small portrait screens, and more but they never did make it responsive AFAIK.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#105Google Wave. Edit: you asked why. I first saw it at SELF where Chris DiBona showed it to me and a close friend. It was awesome. Real time translation, integration of various types of messaging, tons of cool capabilities, and it was fully open source. What made it out of Google was a stripped down version of what I was shown, the market rejected it, and it was a sad day. Now, I am left with JIRA, Slack, and email. It…
Isn't Nextcloud (including Nextcloud Talk) a viable alternative? Certainly, something like Discord (centralized and closed source) isn't.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#106Apple’s scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked. It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread us…
There is no place for spyware of any kind on my phone. Saying that it is to "protect the children" and "to catch terrorists" does not make it any more acceptable.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#107Apple’s scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked. It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread us…
Good riddance to a system that would have provided precedent for client-side scanning for arbitrary other things, as well as likely false positives. > I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. The…
This. No matter how cool the engineering might have been, from the perspective of what surveillance policies it would have (and very possibly did) inspire/set precedent for… Apple was very much creating the Torment Nexus from “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.”
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wild that people would downvote your low stake personal opinion given as a direct ask from OP. I am 100% with you.
yea, crazy, I upvoted just now. google glass sucks though and glasses will never be a thing. google and meta and … can spend $8T and come up with the most insane tech etc but no one will be wearing f’ing glasses :)
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Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#109In the late 90s there was a website called fuckedcompany which was a place where people could spill the beans about startups (mainly in silicon valley). It was anonymous and a pretty good view into the real state of tech. Now there is twitter/x but it's not as focused on this niche.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#110Midori, Microsoft's capability-based security OS[1]. Rumor has it that it was getting to the point where it was able to run Windows code, so it was killed through internal politics, but who knows! It was the Fuchsia of its time... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_%28operating_system%29
The technical foundation seems interesting, but knowing Microsoft this would have just become yet another bloated mess with it's own new set of problems. And by now it would have equally become filled with spyware and AI "features" users don't want.