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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#631

Post by mixmastamyk »

JimDabell wrote: post #226
mixmastamyk wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgot about the concept of bugs have we? How about making Apple vulnerable to demands from every government where they do business? No thanks. I'll take a hammer to any device in my vicinity that implements police scanning.

> Forgot about the concept of bugs have we? No, but I have a hard time imagining a bug that would meaningfully compromise this kind of system. Can you give an example? > How about making Apple vulnerable to demands from every government where they do business? They already are. So are Google, Meta, Microsoft, and all the other giants we all use. And all those other companies are already scanning your stuff. Meta made…

Imagine harder. Apple has had several high profile security bugs in the last few years, and their OS is decried here as a buggy mess every release. QA teams went out of fashion.

The onus is on you to prove perfection before ruining lives on hardware they paid for.

100x worse on the vulnerability front, as the tech could be bent to any whim. Importantly, none of what you described is client-side scanning. Even I consider abiding rules on others’ property fair.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#632

Post by estebarb »

ajot wrote: post #39
gmuslera wrote: post #3

Maemo/Meego. I know there is Sailfish still around, but things would had been very different today if Nokia had put all its weight on it back then.

They should have partnered not only with Intel, but with Palm, RIM or whatever other then-giant to rival Android. Those two went their own ways with WebOS and buying QNX, so maybe they could have agreed to form a consortium for an open and interoperable mobile OS

WebOS died in HP, after they bought Palm. I'm genuinely impressed at HP: somehow they always have the future in their hands... and kill it.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#635

Post by big_toast »

acheron wrote: post #608
eloisant wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Flash would have died sooner. It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser. Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.

This. Flash was awful. I see people defending it and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

I dunno, a whole subtree of the internet died and I’m not sure it really came back. It was a beautiful Galápagos Islands.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#637

Post by mberning »

Animats wrote: post #230

- 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…

CICS and HATS are perhaps the most annoying pieces of technology I’ve ever encountered.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#638

Post by Minor49er »

eloisant wrote: post #539
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #281

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.

I wish Flash would have died sooner. It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser. Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.

Flash players had zoom built in. And I believe there were textareas that allowed people to copy and paste text if they wanted, though it wasn't very common

Flash was the last thing that got people excited for the Web generally

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#639

Post by Someone »

c0balt wrote: post #557
tjchear wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s stopping other Unix-like systems from adopting the everything is a file philosophy?

Probably that not everything can be cleanly abstracted as a file. One might want to, e. G., have fine control over a how a network connection is handled. You can abstract that as a file but it becomes increasingly complicated and can make API design painful.

> Probably that not everything can be cleanly abstracted as a file.

I would say almost nothing can be cleanly abstracted as a file. That’s why we got ioctl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioctl), which is a bad API (calls mean “do something with this file descriptor” with only conventions introducing some consistency)

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#640

Post by tclancy »

coreyhn wrote: post #74

Yahoo 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.

Ah, this would get my vote too. I've seen a few attempts since, but I think you needed that era of "throw lots of money at any idea" to get it off the ground again.
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