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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?

#651

Post by Y-bar »

masfuerte wrote: post #611
Y-bar wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default, and by far the most common, output from Flash had significantly slower click-to-response and for network latency and for rendering than HTML+CSS is today. You remembering a few optimised instances does not change the reality that Flash was bad.

You're still comparing Flash on twenty year old hardware to HTML+CSS on modern hardware.

I am not and have never compared them in the way you say I did. You literally wrote ”Or that it was worse than the performance of doing the same thing in modern HTML+CSS now.” so I had to somehow repsond to that strange claim.

Of course modern computers are orders of magnitude more powerful! But Flash was definitely generally worse compared on the same hardware and network stack compared to vanilla (non-plugin based) web tech.

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

#652

Post by Y-bar »

KaiserPro wrote: post #413
Y-bar wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> more security holes than anything else. yeah it wasn't secure but; > bad performance I don't think thats the case. For the longest while flash was faster than js at doing anything vaguely graphic based. The issue for apple was that the CPU in the iphone wasn't fast enough to do flash and anything else. Moreover Adobe didn't get on with jobs when they were talking about custom versions. You have to remember that "ap…

I remember well. I earned my living for a few years around 2010 porting slow Flash sites to regular web tech. It was hard to translate some functionality, but Flash was definitely slow compared to the equivalent regular website done without the plugin.

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

#653

Post by Marsymars »

silcoon wrote: post #386
kesor wrote: post #311

Skype ; Because my R.I.P. grandma was using it to talk to her relatives overseas just like she would use a phone, but it didn't cost an arm and a leg (unlike phone calls).

One of the best P2P software at the time. It was so simple and effective and allowed people to call real phones with Skype credit. A genius product ripped my Microsoft. Have you used Microsoft Teams recently? Bad UI, hard to configure external hardware and good level of incompatibility, missing the good old "Echo / Sound Test Service". At a point I even installed Skype of my old Android but was sucking up too much ba…

Not just "of the time" - if you need to call international numbers as of 2025, there's no good replacement for Skype from earlier this year.

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

#655

Post by goddaneel »

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.

When I saw the title, my first thought was also MeeGo. While I don't believe it would have been all that great had it not been abandoned, MeeGo absolutely should not have been discarded in such a disgraceful manner.

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

#656

Post by Zambyte »

cratermoon wrote: post #628
WD-42 wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have to an extent. The /proc file system on Linux is directly inspired by plan 9 IIRC. Other things like network sockets never got that far and are more related to their BSD kin.

There's also /dev/tcp in Linux exec 5 /dev/tcp/www.google.com/80 echo -e "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nhost: www.google.com\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n" >&5 cat

/dev/tcp does not exist in Linux.

    ls /dev/tcp
It is an abstraction in GNU Bash.

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

#657

Post by giobox »

troupo wrote: post #569
bsimpson wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Google already own Android when iOS was announced?

Yes, and they were going to position it against Windows Mobile. When iOS was announced, Google scrambled to re-do the entire concept

Not so much Windows Mobile, which never achieved serious market share. It was originally more planned to be a Blackberry competitor, and the early Android handset prototype concepts were all blackberry knockoffs with similar physical keyboard layouts.

It has always appeared though like you suggest, that the project quickly pivoted to candy bar touch phones following the release of the original iPhone. It's worthwhile to remember that the industry wasn't nearly as convinced that touching glass was the future of mobile typing in 2007 as it later became, and the sales volume of Blackberrys back then was often incorrectly cited as evidence to support the case against touch.

> https://www.bgr.com/tech/iphone-vs-android-original-google-b...

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

#658

Post by delduca »

BirAdam wrote: post #68

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…

Slack is the new Google Wave, Wave was too much ahead of time.

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

#659

Post by acidburnNSA »

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.

Did you ever try one of those Flash-based room escape games? It was really amazing to lose yourself in the challenges and puzzles.

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

#660

Post by kstrauser »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #629
kstrauser wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It accounts for half of all Google’s customer traffic. It’s not dead, not by a long shot. If you have a mobile phone, you’re almost certainly using IPv6 today.

The flat Internet is dead.

Ah, I see the part you’re emphasizing.

Yeah. That still stings. It didn’t have to be this way.

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