791–800 of 912 posts
Nokia Maps. There was a brief period in the early 2010s where Nokia had the best mapping product on the planet, and it was given away for free on Lumia phones at a time when TomTom and Garmin were still charging $60+ for navigation apps.
Google Stadia. They had built a solid streaming platform for low latency cloud gaming but failed hard on actually having interesting games to play on it. You just can't launch a gaming platform with a handful of games that have been available everywhere and expect it to succeed.
Sorta related, iPod car interface was a reliable way to play and control music, now replaced with CarPlay which has problems and also messes up your nav.
The Plan 9 operating system. It's the closest thing to a Unix successor we ever got, taking the "everything is a file" philosophy to another level and allowing to easily share those files over the network to build distributed systems. Accessing any remote resources is easy and robust on Plan9, meanwhile on other systems we need to install specialized software with bad interoperability for each individual use case. Pl…
UNIX is for dorks. We needed a Smalltalk style, "everything is an object and you can talk to all objects" but thankfully we got Java and, "object oriented" C++. The Alto operating system was leaps and bounds ahead of the Mac and Windows 3.1 system and it took Steve Jobs a decade to realize, "oh shit we could have just made everything an object." Then we get WebObjects and the lousy IPod and everything is fascist hist…
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> XHTML died because it was too hard for people to get stuff done. This is not true. The reason it died was because Internet Explorer 6 didn’t support it, and that hung around for about a decade and a half. There was no way for XHTML to succeed given that situation. The syntax errors that cause XHTML to stop parsing also cause JSX to stop parsing. If this kind of thing really were a problem, it would have killed Reac…
> The syntax errors that cause XHTML to stop parsing also cause JSX to stop parsing. If this kind of thing really were a problem, it would have killed React. JSX is processed during the build step, XHTML is processed at runtime, by the browser.
And the similarly named but completely separate OLE Automation, which let you script programs, across process boundaries. This is what let you write in VB(A): Set w = New Word.Application: Set e = new Excel.Application: Set doc = w.Open("foo.doc"); etc... - this was to Office (mostly) what shell scripting is to Linux, and enabled a lot of ad-hoc business process automation.
Heroku? I know it's still around, though IDK who uses it, but I miss those days when it was thriving. One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue. I often wonder, if AI had come 15 years earlier, would it have been a ton better because there weren't a billion different ways to do things? Would we have ever bothered to…
Was going to say, I still use Heroku, and it's been working ok, but I'm getting increasingly creepy vibes from it and fear that it could be abandoned. Starting of course with Salesforce acquisition.
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Probably the fact that it's a pretty terrible idea. It means you take a normal properly typed API and smush it down into some poorly specified text format that you now have to write probably-broken parsers for. I often find bugs in programs that interact with `/proc` on Linux because they don't expect some output (e.g. spaces in paths, or optional entries). The only reasons people think it's a good idea in the first…
I think you have to standardize a basic object system and then allow people to build opt-in interfaces on top, because any single-level abstraction will quickly be pulled in countless directions for as many users.
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The problem is that group (1) results in a nightmarish race-to-the-bottom. File creators have zero incentive to create spec-compliant files, because there's no penalty for creating corrupted files. In practice this means a large proportion of documents are going to end up corrupt. Does it open in Chrome? Great, ship it! The file format is no longer the specification, but it has now become a wild guess at whatever wei…
>File creators have zero incentive to create spec-compliant files, because there's no penalty for creating corrupted files This depends. If you are a small creator with a unique corruption then you're likely out of luck. The problem with big creators is 'fuck you' I do what I want. >"Chrome cannot guarantee the safety of your data on this website, as the website is malformed" warning message. This would appear on pre…
ZeroNet decentralized web platform: - Based on BitTorrent ideas - Completely decentralized websites' code and data - Either completely decentralized or controllable-decentralized authentication - Could be integrated into existing websites (!) It's not kind of dead, there's a supported fork, but it still feels like a revolution that did not happen. It works really well.