Windows Longhorn. It looked cool and had some promising features that never made it into Vista, like WinFS.
Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
211–220 of 912 posts
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#212RAM Disks. Basically extremely fast storage using RAM sticks slotted into a specially made board that fit in a PCIe slot. Not sure what happened to the project exactly but the website disappeared sometime in 2023. The idea that you could read and write data at RAM speeds was really exciting to me. At work it's very common to see microscope image sets anywhere from 20 to 200 GB and file transfer rates can be a big bot…
You can do this in software, I tried it a few times with games and just other stuff ~10 years ago. Why would it have to be a hardware solution?
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#213RethinkDB. Technically it still exists (under The Linux Foundation), but (IMO) the original company's widening scope (the Horizon BaaS) that eventually led to its demise killed its momentum.
Man I loves the original concept for demos but never build anything real with it. Curious if anyone did?
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#214XMMS
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#215Optane persistent memory had a fascinating value proposition: stop converting data structures for database storage and just persist the data directly. No more booting or application launch or data load: just pick up where you left off. Died because it was too expensive, but probably long after it should have. VM's persist memory snapshots (as do Apple's containers, for macOS at least), so there's still room for somet…
1+ for 3dxpoint.
The technology took decades to mature, but the business people didn’t have the patience to let the world catch up to this revolutionary technology.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#216https://maruos.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge
Connect your phone to a display, mouse, keyboard and get a full desktop experience.
At the time smartphones were not powerful enough, cables were fiddly (adapters, HDMI, USB A instead of a single USB c cable) and virtualization and containers not quite there.
Today, going via pkvm seems like promising approach. Seamless sharing of data, apps etc. will take some work, though.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#217Maemo/Meego. I know there is Sailfish still around, but things would had been very different today if Nokia had put all its weight on it back then.
In my ideal world, Maemo/Meego and Palm's WebOS (not LG's bastardization of it) would be today's Android and iOS.
Apple would have inevitably done their own thing, but it would have been really nice to have two widely used, mature and open mobile Linux platforms.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#218A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Go…
Why did you keep on using so many Google products if those products get cancelled? Why didn’t you quit Google after, say, the third product you used got canned?
I used Google Talk than Hangouts, but once they switched to Meet, I gave up on them. By then my family was all using Hangouts, and we never settled on a new service, because one of my siblings didn't want to support any chat services that don't freely give user information to the government, and the rest of us didn't want to use a chat platform that does freely give user information to the government.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#219ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation. It has been in existence in some form or another for nearly 30 years, but did not gain the traction it needed and as of writing it's still not in a usable state on real hardware. It's not abandoned, but progress on it is moving so slow that I doubt we'll ever see it be released in a state that's useful for real users. It's too bad, beca…
The easiest way to avoid patent liabilities is to always be 20 years behind.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#220VPRI, I was really hoping it would profoundly revolutionise desktop application development and maybe even lead to a new desktop model, and instead they wound up the project without having achieved the kind of impact I was dreaming of.