861–870 of 912 posts
wua.la … the original version. You share part of your storage to get the same amount back as resilient cloud storage from others. Was bought and killed by LaCie (now Seagate). They later provided paid-for cloud storage under the same name but it didn’t take off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala
Nowadays we have cryptocurrency-based Sia, Storj, which are kind of similar.
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The actual problem with Sandstorm wasn't the era in which it was released. It will probably have the same problems even if released today. The problem was its application isolation mechanism - especially the data isolation (I think they were called grains). The mechanism is technically brilliant. But it's a big departure from how apps are developed today. It means that you have to do non-trivial modifications to web…
Agreed. The best apps turned out to be the ones written for the platform. And many of those took people an afternoon to write, since the platform handled so much for you. Porting "normal" apps into Sandstorm felt like it defeated the purpose. If I did it again I wouldn't focus on portability of existing apps. Especially today given you could probably vibe code most things (and trust the sandbox to protect you from AI…
I'm not a big fan of the contemporary app hosting architecture, as it feels needlessly complicated. But if this entire discussion thread is any proof, it's that people rarely choose the most elegant ideas around. Instead, decisions are very often based on marketing clout.
Still, I hope that your concept finds its rightful purpose and mindshare in the future. It's encouraging to hear that it's a fantastic app framework. It would be such a shame to squander such a big advantage. Perhaps, that's the reason why your collaborators are so adamant about keeping it alive.
Kuro5hin https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin I was a hold out on smartphones for a while and I used to print out k5 articles to read while afk... Just such an amazing collection of people sharing ideas and communal moderation, editing and up voting. I learned about so many wierd and wonderful things from that site.
Are there any spiritual successors?
The signature function of the German ID card (“neuer Personalausweis”). Its 2025 and we still haven't solved secure online identification and we are still not using end-to-end encryption for e-mail, most e-mail is not even signed. Interaction with state agencies is still mostly via paper-based mail. The only successfully deployed online offer of the german state administration seems to be the online portal for tax fi…
S/MIME died because it is in many ways worse than CDOC and ASiC-E containers over email. People are reviving such approaches with EIDAS2 and from that ERDS (Electronic Registered Delivery Service). But there are no EU-wide implementations as of yet.
Those app-based approaches have also appeared, because well, they don't require a card reader. Though I'd rather see something NFC-based with a physical card. I personally find phone vendors' HSMs (and their equivalents) haven't seen enough scrutiny. Plus the apps are proprietary.
The demand is definitely there, but I predict it'll take at least a decade for the rest of the EU to catching up to Estonia, Finland and a few others. Just 25 years later.
Keybase <3
It might be _the_ fastest chat platform right now. Other things like Whatsapp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, Matrix/Element, Discord, Slack, Rocket Chat, Mattermost (and all the platforms that implement some kind of a chat by now), are all significantly slower. Sending messages takes longer, UI is slower, everything is slower somehow. The only exception that I know of being IRC.
It also allowed tree-shaped groups, you can nest as many as you like depending on your needs. It's so handy compared to the limited server/channel/thread logic elsewhere.
I will miss it dearly once they shut it down.
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Perhaps because their repeated bad behavior as a company outweighed anything good they put out.
how so?
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> The same reason Typescript exists TypeScript exists for the same reason things like mypy exists, and no one in their right mind claims that python's openness should be threatened just because static typing is convenient.
Though in principle they serve similar purposes there are some big differences though. Python with types is still just python. Typescript is a different language from JS (guess it a superset?) and it being controlled by a large company could be considered problematic. I suppose JS could go in the same direction and adopt the typing syntax from TS as a non-runtime thing. Then the typescript compiler would become somet…
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.
Macromedia Flash. Its scope and security profile was too big. It gave way to HTML’s canvas. But man, the tooling is still no where near as good. Movieclips, my beloved. I loved it all.