71–80 of 1001 posts
I thought this was going to be 'The VR Thread.' I still don't entirely understand why virtual reality didn't really catch on. I think there were some very poor business decisions by Facebook which were treating it as a success before it had even launched -- trying to ring-fence a platform, both hardware and software, whose early demographic is going to be entirely high information users seems a very questionable deci…
I bought a Vive and it's been... interesting. I actually haven't touched any games in months, but I still break it out every few weeks to prototype something in Unity/Unreal. Also, I've been using Google Blocks a ton to create lowpoly models for use in games.
I think the tech is way too compelling to go away anytime soon, but it's obviously not the splash hit that Facebook/etc predicted it would be.
I'm not sure I expected it to take the world "by storm", but I expected more from Google Wave. It was a great concept, by a major company, but it was too slow on release and the rollout killed it. In retrospect, it probably wouldn't have lasted anyways. Google was in the process of minimizing their federated communication services by that point, and that was another major selling point of Google Wave's initial propos…
In the '90s I was convinced that basically everything with a name attached to it was going to be built around PowerPC and MIPS processors. When StrongARM went to Intel, I figured ARM was basically dead outside of controller/coprocessor/offload applications and expected Pentium II/III to suffer a similar fate to Pentium Pro.
RISC-V is a derivative of MIPS heritage and there's still a chance it will take the world by storm...
Linked Data & "Open Data"
On the other hand, I really wasn't convinced about the web until I essentially missed the giant early opportunities, which I was well placed to capitalize on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious, aren't phones and tablets essentially just smaller personal computers?
As kobeya points out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15719171 they are not the same thing they do less; the software is restricted, especially on iOS, there are _rules_ set out by the manufacturer about what is acceptable in software on the platform, both thematically and functionally. An app generally can't interfere with other apps, it can't be a dope wars style game about drugs; there are a lot more caveats,…
Phones and tablets are great for consuming certain types of content, and having a portable camera with networking has enabled a lot of content creation. But a phone isn't a great device for doing something like long-form writing.
Kinect - such a human interface that doesn't require direct integration with hardware or technical knowledge or buttons, and a lot of fun in the games I played. But it failed.
Maybe the product failed, but the technology I'll argue it did not