I remember holding the ideas behind Jini (now practically defunct Apache River[0]) in very high regard. [0]: https://river.apache.org/
Thank you, I actually forgot about how excited I had once been about untrusted mobile code.
Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
91–100 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#92Virtual worlds. The "metaverse" of Snow Crash. "Snow Crash", the TV series, has been green-lighted by Amazon. That may drum up more interest.
Second Life comes close. They've had a working system for over a decade and have with adequate solutions to most of the problems. But it's hard to use, and not that many people are interested.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#93X3D - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3D Rationale: It was the 1990s, VRML flew but didn't quite make it. 3D hardware acceleration had arrived, gaming was exploding, Descent and Quake had proven complex worlds and freedom of movement were possible on commodity hardware, and talk of buffering 3D content in video streams seemed to make perfect sense for next generation passive entertainment. Product placements, architect…
X3D is VRML, just with XML delimiters.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
The bigger difference, to me, isn't so much that the walled-garden ecosystems restrict a phone/tablet's use as a general-purpose computer, than the form factors and interfaces of the device being appropriate for different forms of content creation, manipulation and consumption. Phones and tablets are great for consuming certain types of content, and having a portable camera with networking has enabled a lot of conten…
I don't know about you, but for most reviews and new articles it easier for me to put it on in the back-ground than having to deal with advertisement and pop-up windows on web-pages when reading text.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#95I 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…
Spend 10 minutes with an HTC Vibe or an Oculus Rift on your head, and you'll be impressed.
Now spend 4 hours. Most of those things end up in closets. Or on eBay.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#96The converse is possibly even more interesting: what tech were you convinced would fail but took the world by storm?
x86. Even Intel seemed bent on dismantling it with Itanium. And while they were distracted, AMD humiliated Goliath with the Opteron. It was EPIC - no wait, it wasn't!
I don’t recall the Opteron stealing anybody’s lunch. It was the Athlon that outshone contemporary Pentium III chips.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#97Virtual worlds. The "metaverse" of Snow Crash. "Snow Crash", the TV series, has been green-lighted by Amazon. That may drum up more interest. Second Life comes close. They've had a working system for over a decade and have with adequate solutions to most of the problems. But it's hard to use, and not that many people are interested.
Yeah, SL is probably closest but they can't seem to get their users interested in headsets. Kinda ironic in a way.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#98Virtual worlds. The "metaverse" of Snow Crash. "Snow Crash", the TV series, has been green-lighted by Amazon. That may drum up more interest. Second Life comes close. They've had a working system for over a decade and have with adequate solutions to most of the problems. But it's hard to use, and not that many people are interested.
Yeah, SL is probably closest but they can't seem to get their users interested in headsets. Kinda ironic in a way.
Who wants to wear a VR headset for hours on end?
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#99Smartwatches. I was convinced enough to bet two years of my life working on them.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#100Yahoo pipes. I am still holding out hope for this, especially AI pipelines.