Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.
Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
281–290 of 912 posts
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#282LSR, the "Linux Screen Reader", an ambitiousy designed Python implementation of a GUI screen reader developed by IBM starting around 2006 or so. The project was ended 2008 when IBM ended all its Accessibility involvement in FLOSS.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#283- 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…
> Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly It would kill the approachability of the language. One of the joys of learning HTML when it tended to be hand-written was that if you made a mistake, you'd still see something just with distorted output. That was a lot more approachable for a lot of people who were put off "real" programming languages because they were overwhelmed by terrible error messages…
If you forget a closing quote on an attribute in html, all content until next quote is ignored and not rendered - even if it is the rest of the page. I dont think this is more helpful than an error message. It was just simpler to implement.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#284Optane 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…
Not only because of price. The 'ecosystem' infrastructure wasn't there, or at least not spread wide enough. The 'mindshare'/thinking of ways how to do, neither. This is more aligned with (live) 'image-based' working environments like early Lisp and Smalltalk systems. Look at where they are now...
A few more thoughts about that, since I happen to have some of the last systems who actually had systems level support for that in their firmware, and early low-capacity optanes designed for that sort of use. It's fascinating to play with these, but they are low capacity, and bound to obsolete operating systems.
Given enough RAM, you can emulate that with working suspend and resume to/and from RAM.
Another avenue are the ever faster and larger SSDs, in practice, with some models it makes almost no difference anymore, since random access times are so fast, and transfer speeds insane. Maybe total and/or daily TBW remains a concern.
Both of these can be combined.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#285Yahoo pipes. It was so great at creating rss feeds and custom workflows. There are replacements now like Zapier and n8n but loved that. Also google reader which is mentioned multiple times already.
Yahoo Pipes was what internet should have been. We're so many decades into computing and that kind of inter-tool linking has only barely been matched by unix pipes.
Many companies are working very hard to make that impossible unfortunately. For example you can't get posts from public Facebook groups automatically, although that would be a really good source candidate. They used to allow it, but... not anymore.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#286- 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…
> Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly? 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.
> but what would be the benefit of having more pages fail to render?
I think those benefits are quite similar to having more programs failing to run (due to static and strong typing, other static analysis, and/or elimination of undefined behavior, for instance), or more data failing to be read (due to integrity checks and simply strict parsing): as a user, you get documents closer to valid ones (at least in the rough format), if anything at all, and additionally that discourages developers from shipping a mess. Then parsers (not just those in viewers, but anything that does processing) have a better chance to read and interpret those documents consistently, so even more things work predictably.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#287The DEC Alpha processor. DEC as a whole, really.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#288Optane 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…
I have an optane drive with the kernel on it, instant boot!
How does that work? It loads kernel from drive to ram?
Isn't windows fast boot something like that (only slower, depending on ssd)? It semi-hibernates, stores kernel part of memory on disk for faster startup.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#289https://www.kite.com for python
i first learned about it when i was working in an university group and had the task to transform a windowing algorithm already working on matlab to python.
it felt like a modern linter and lsp with additional support through machine learning. i don't quite know why it got comparative small recognition, but perhaps enough to remain an avantgarde pioneering both python and machine learning support for further generations and wider applications.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#290Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.
Those tools were awesome. But as formats go, they were awful due to bad performance and more security holes than anything else.
I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.