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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?

#311

Post by wishinghand »

xeromal wrote: post #193
wishinghand wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was a live tile? On a side note I do wish there were strong 3rd or 4th choices for a phone OS. A shame Blackberry is now just an Android flavor.

A live tile in windows phone, 8, 10, etc is an app icon that contains realtime info like weather. I've never used the particular app mentioned, but live tiles are just a cool way to display info.

Just looked them up on Youtube. It looks like a very good UI/UX idea. Surprised Apple or Android hasn't copied it, except for the useless live clock icon on their clock app.

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

#312

Post by vmlinuz »

arthuryip wrote: post #64

Crashplan for home. Still haven't found another unlimited plan with linux client.

Came here to say this... had various family members using it, clients, etc.

Backblaze's "we don't support Linux desktops because they'll abuse it" policy is pretty annoying, in context.

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

#313

Post by markatkinson »

wishinghand wrote: post #202

The Macbook Pro chassis before the OLED touchstrip. I'm a web developer and learned on MBPs. The touchpad was the right size, the keys had the right amount of travel, the form factor and weight were perfect. Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder), VS Code, and ZSH. I c…

You should give Ubuntu an experimental try. I have only ever used Windows most my life, but for hobby projects I use Ubuntu/PopOS!.

If you are doing Web development I highly recommend that over Windows. Just last night I tried to setup a Phoenix project on a fresh install of windows and after 5 hours I was still installing C++ build tools, setting up path variables etc etc. It honestly is a world of pain.

I remember setting up the same project on Ubuntu in five minutes. Not to mention it is infinitely more responsive.

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

#314

Post by tatar »

dvlsg wrote: post #279
eksemplar wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are still pretty good at atmospheric and I don’t think they were ever really that great at writing. It was just easier to enjoy when you were young, but a lot of bad writing is. I do miss blizzard north though.

I don't know.. Diablo 2s storyline was quite a bit better than whatever happened in Diablo 3.

Oh man, this grinds my gears so much. It's not even the story itself, I thought the plot was pretty ok, even good for a generation of gamers that never met Diablo.

You know what was the real issue there? The dialogues, the screenplay, what the voice actors end up saying you know. The fucking dialogues in this game is so bad, the worst action flix of the 80s pale in comparison.

Especially the first demoness, Magda or whatever her name was. Holy fucking shit. I've never seen a character given that shitty dialogue in my entire life as an avid movies fan.

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

#316

Post by waterhouse »

ramses0 wrote: post #227
wishinghand wrote: post #202

The Macbook Pro chassis before the OLED touchstrip. I'm a web developer and learned on MBPs. The touchpad was the right size, the keys had the right amount of travel, the form factor and weight were perfect. Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder), VS Code, and ZSH. I c…

WSL is terrible. It's basically a tech demo (look up what happens if you `cp` a file from `C:\...` to `/home/user` versus `copy` or going the other direction. It's alright to boot up a linux "VM" using docker, but then you have to pay extra for windows pro or whatever so you can unlock hypervisor privileges. I recently bought an extra SSD to put into the windows desktop I bought and am happily running linux, don't mi…

I tried WSL briefly and discovered that the overhead of forking processes is annoyingly high, just like when I'd used cygwin in the past. (Maybe I should have expected that, but...) Try doing something like:

  time for i in $(seq 1 100); do /bin/pwd; done | wc
Compare on Linux (or even Mac OS) vs WSL. I was disappointed.

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

#318

Post by inyorgroove »

lenomad wrote: post #203

Widget Workshop [1] It was a electronics tinkering game where you had different components like timers, light bulbs, switches, gravity testers and what not, which you could connect with wires and build interesting things. They had several demos that you could check out, like poem generators, dog barking sound generator machine and other interesting stuff. As a kid, it really helped fuel my imagination to make new con…

I really loved the incredible machine[1] Apparently there was a version released in 2011.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine_(series...

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

#320

Post by wishinghand »

markatkinson wrote: post #313
wishinghand wrote: post #202

The Macbook Pro chassis before the OLED touchstrip. I'm a web developer and learned on MBPs. The touchpad was the right size, the keys had the right amount of travel, the form factor and weight were perfect. Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder), VS Code, and ZSH. I c…

You should give Ubuntu an experimental try. I have only ever used Windows most my life, but for hobby projects I use Ubuntu/PopOS!. If you are doing Web development I highly recommend that over Windows. Just last night I tried to setup a Phoenix project on a fresh install of windows and after 5 hours I was still installing C++ build tools, setting up path variables etc etc. It honestly is a world of pain. I remember…

I'm trying to eventually move to just a laptop with an eGPU as both my work and game machine. I'd love to ditch Windows for Linux now that Valve's Proton is a thing. However I've spent too much money on Propellerhead's Reason and its Rack Extensions to easily give it up. Bitwig and Ardour are of course 1st class choices for a digital audio workstation on Linux, but I just found out that VSTs are OS specific as well.

No matter what I end up doing, I'll miss texting from my computer through iMessage.

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