251–260 of 912 posts
Google Glass. Thanks society. People always fail to see something that is an inevitability. Humans lack foresight because they don't like change.
RAM 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…
I’m confused why this can’t be done in software? mount -t tmpfs ram /mnt/ramdisk
What to do with it, once it's there, is a concern of software, but specialized hardware is needed to get it there.
Optane 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…
We were about get rid of split between RAM and disk memory and use single stick for both!
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> The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked. But not very different to how it was actually going to work, as you say: > If you change parts of it, sure. Now try to reason your way out of the obvious "parts of it will definitely change" knee-jerk.
I’m not sure I’m understanding you. Apple designed a system. People guessed at what it did. Their guesses were way off the mark. This poisoned all rational discussion on the topic. If you imagine a system that works differently to Apple’s system, you can complain about that imaginary system all you want, but it won’t be meaningful, it’s just noise.
In 2011, before TypeScript, Next.js or even React, they had seamless server-client code, in a strongly typed functional language with support for features like JSX-like inline HTML, async/await, string interpolation, built-in MongoDB ORM, CSS-in-JS, and many syntax features that were added to ECMAScript since then.
I find it wild how this project was 90%+ correct on how we will build web apps 14 years later.
At its best, having IM, email, browser, games, keywords, chats, etc. was a beautiful idea IMO. That they were an ISP seemed secondary or even unrelated to the idea. But they chose to charge for access even in the age of broadband, and adopt gym level subscription tactics to boot, and people decided they'd rather not pay it which is to be expected. I often wonder if they'd have survived as a software company otherwise.
They were basically a better thought out Facebook before Facebook, in my opinion.
Elm programming language. Arguably not dead but somewhat incomplete and not actively worked on.
opa, along the same lines - really nice ML based language for isomorphic full stack web development.
- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…
Probably not, but what would be the benefit of having more pages fail to render? If xhtml had been coupled with some cool features which only worked in xhtml mode, it might have become successful, but on its own it does not provide much value.
Google 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…
It make it seem needlessly complicated, and effectively erased all the positives.
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Google Reader: I will forever be salty about how Google killed something that likely required very little maintenance in the long run. It could have stayed exactly the same for a decade and I wouldn't have cared because I use an RSS reader exactly the same way I do that I did back in 2015.
Yes. That was the single worst business decision in Google history , as somebody correctly noted. It burned an enormous amount of goodwill for no gain whatsoever. Killing Google Reader affected a relatively small number of users, but these users disporportionately happened to be founders, CTOs, VPs of engineering, social media luminaries, and people who eventually became founders, CTOs, etc. They had been painfully t…