Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#261

Post by fuball63 » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

michaelbrave wrote: post #164

fuball63 wrote: post #8

Lots of old video games come to mind, especially the online ones that had proprietary servers that were shut down (medal of Honor heroes 2, halo 3). I was going to say BlitzPlus but that's open source already.

In my wishful thinking daydreaming I imagine a service kind of like steam for dead MMO's call it the MMO graveyard or something. Pay a monthly fee but it works for all the games on the system, maybe an integrated friends list too if it's possible. Would be really cool for history and game design reasons. I want to say I heard that a law passed about not closing server based games anymore but I can't remember the deta…

I like this idea a lot. It would be cool with single sign on and a profile that shows what you've accomplished in each game. There are a few open source mmos to do a POC.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#262

Post by detaro » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

iscrewyou wrote: post #225

detaro wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of a modern reader which doesn't have a view like this. Just a few examples: The Old Reader, Inoreader, Feedly all do.

Inoreader looks like flipboard or Feedly. I didn’t know about The Old Reader and I will give it a try.

> Inoreader looks like flipboard

How is this (random screenshot found via image search) not basically the same as Google Reader?

http://kingofgng.com/media/20150116_inoreader.png

And that's not even the densest display option.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#263

Post by vax425 » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

Yahoo Pipes

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#264

Post by AsyncAwait » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

gus_massa wrote: post #59

alexis_fr wrote: post #3

After 5 years with no upgrade, software should become public domain.

Latest TeX (not LaTeX) update was in January 2014, and the change was in a quite obscure tiny corner case of an advanced feature. https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb35-1/tb109knut.pdf > The new version of TEX diﬀers from the old only with respect to the “null control sequence” \csname\endcsname, which has been a legal construct since version 0.8 (November 1982) although almost nobody uses it. Why must all software be constant…

> Why must all software be constantly updated and bloated with new buggy features including the capacity to send emails?

I think the point was not that updates are required, but that it is unlikely that they're a major source of revenue for the authors if they haven't been touched for so long.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#265

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:00 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #192

It would be cool if the UX designs of old software were archived somewhere.

https://guidebookgallery.org/

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#266

Post by blacksqr » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:00 PM UTC

mattkevan wrote: post #186

Magic Cap from General Magic. What a lovely, odd little operating system. I read an article saying there was an effort to get it open sourced after General Magic folded, but unfortunately all their IP fell into the Sarlacc-like maw of Intellectual Ventures. While we’re on the topic of failed, over-ambitious mobile OS’s, Newton OS would be great too.

Handwriting recognition on the last iteration of Newton was pretty fantastic. Is there anything comparable for phones today?

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#267

Post by zmix » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:01 PM UTC

cztomsik wrote: post #254

bhauer wrote: post #156

* Windows Phone. We need a third viable option in the mobile space. This week we are concerned about the loss of a browser engine, recognizing this is unhealthy for the market. Windows Phone was terrific in many ways and recent concepts by fans such as @boxnwhisker (Harry Dohyun Kim) [1] show how beautiful the Metro design could be today. * Microsoft Image Composer. A little known sprite-oriented graphic arts program…

electron eats so much cpu & memory simply because it's still a web browser, it has to support all those 20 years of HTML/CSS history and it was designed to do so for 10s of tabs, so it has a lot of caches and other things. and while javascript is certainly one of the worst choices if you care about performance, it's also one of the best choices if you need to iterate really quickly (which I believe is very important…

> electron eats so much cpu & memory simply because it's > still a web browser, it has to support all those 20 years > of HTML/CSS history and it was designed to do so for 10s > of tabs, so it has a lot of caches and other things.

XULRunner does the same thing, includes, in addition, a full XML GUI language and assorted technologies and the full runtime distribution, on my Windows10 system, including debugging, crash-reporter aids, VC libraries, D3D libraries, consumes 72MB.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#268

Post by nojvek » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

bhauer wrote: post #156

* Windows Phone. We need a third viable option in the mobile space. This week we are concerned about the loss of a browser engine, recognizing this is unhealthy for the market. Windows Phone was terrific in many ways and recent concepts by fans such as @boxnwhisker (Harry Dohyun Kim) [1] show how beautiful the Metro design could be today. * Microsoft Image Composer. A little known sprite-oriented graphic arts program…

JavaScript isn’t that slow and bloated, the browser rendering engine is a memory hog and cause of most pain. Electron is the big offender because it’s a copy of a new browser everytime.

We have TypedArrays, WebAssembly, very smart JITs. With Typescript, JavaScript is a very productive and sane language to work with.

I 100% agree with you that the current state of desktop apps are extremely bloated.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#269

Post by coolgoose » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

Windows Live Mail

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#270

Post by natalyarostova » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #124

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When getting directions, you could designate a number of areas on the map as “avoid area”. It's noteworthy, because I've only seen this feature in Rolls-Royce navigation in recent times.

It does seem somewhat paranoid. Might be useful to exclude certain routes with an easy interface, but tremendously harmful by seemingly legitimizing the myth of “no-go” areas that has recently become a favorite talking point of the alt-right in my (perfectly safe) country.

I work with many foreign women who have no idea the safe and dangerous areas of our city. You might consider from their point of view the value of such a service, rather than worrying about more meta-tribal political battles. Some areas of my city have higher harassment and crime rates, as a man this is less concerning for me, but it's something many women need to take much more seriously.