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Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

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Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#241

Post by sooheon »

sitkack wrote: post #125
rsync wrote: post #71

Altavista. I miss it every single day. Searching for technical (unix, programming, etc.) content is so much easier when you can use nested parens and proper boolean language. This is in contrast to google where searches return things that don't even contain your keywords. This is in contrast to google where the modifiers like allinsite: and '+' and "quotes" are not respected or change their behavior over time. Man I…

My favorite feature was 'near' queries. One could project n-dimensional spaces to any arbitrary lower dimension with the right semantic and spatial distances. With Altavista, the limiting factor was the searcher. And my nostalgia that over-estimates the size of their search database.

> One could project n-dimensional spaces to any arbitrary lower dimension with the right semantic and spatial distances.

I'm incredulous. Doing this well for unstructured text would be worth a lot in many industries today, let alone the entire web. If they did this well, they'd still be alive and well in another form.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#242

Post by wingerlang »

megous wrote: post #104
client4 wrote: post #13

Westwood Studios. I loved their games including their final game C&C Renegade, even though EA rushed Renegade out the door and shut the studio down.

Ahhh, the memories of spending after-school hours buying and selling silos for extra money (there was some thinko in the game logic - full silo was sold for more money than it cost to build, or something like that) in their first C&C game to build a massive army and crush the AI opponent. :)

    full silo was sold for more money than it cost to build
Seems like it makes sense though, since it would be full of money (ore)

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#244

Post by mikey_p »

pippolong wrote: post #215

Ambrosia software

They're actually still around and make iPad, iPhone games and have ported several of their utilities to OS X, but it's nothing like their late 90s heyday. Played the crap out of Escape Velocity, Avara, Barrack, etc. Learned to make website just to put a page up for my EV plugins (mods, addons? can't remember what they were called).

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#245

Post by pronoiac »

tempestn wrote: post #61

SageTV. You could hook up an HD cable box and record shows to a PC or server with a simple, intuitive interface for later viewing. Basically turned your PC or home server into an infinite PVR. It was wonderful. Google purchased and shuttered them a few years back. For a while I tried a regular pvr + Slingbox, but found it to be such garbage that I basically just stopped watching most sports rather than deal with the…

It looks like SageTV was open sourced: https://github.com/google/sagetv

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#246

Post by simooooo »

hashhar wrote: post #180

The Zune (media players) and Windows Phone (upto 8, not even 8.1). The fluid interface with focus on readability and content. The photos app was amazing. Live tiles are amazing. The music player and it's live tile was amazing. The performance was the same whether on a low end budget phone or the top of the line model. So many good ui and ux decisions like the lack of hamburger menus and placement of all menu items al…

Zine software was very nice looking. Had me excited for windows 10. Then we saw the UI monstrosity that was :(

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#247

Post by slmkbh »

numbsafari wrote: post #147
kevinmchugh wrote: post #103

Grooveshark had a better interface for managing "currently playing" than anything I've used before or since. Most apps don't even track what's currently playing in an intelligent fashion. Similarly, rockbox was really great mp3 player firmware, when I used to use one of those. It had a funny feature I've never seen elsewhere: multi-lingual article-ignoring sort. I had German band "Die Prinzen" on that mp3 player, and…

My wife still rues the loss of Grooveshark. She’s never recovered. I don’t blame her. All other streaming services suck horribly.

Their "radio" generation from a playlist of relatively few tracks was also out of this world, in contrast to spotifys ““daily"" which only gives me a new list every two years or so. Despite using the desktop application an hearting the living bejeezus out of it...
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