NeWS (Network Extensible Window System).
Although, we now have web browsers + JavaScript (not exactly the same thing, but there are some similarities).
Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
341–350 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC You do have some merit to the argument, but your 1984 Mac didn't have half as "pretty" UI, and that matters to some people. It didn't do dynamic language processing to figure out if you've made a grammatical error. It did not have to continuously scan every data stream for malware. It did not have to use a significantly restricted…
So why have a full pretty UI at the cost of latency? If the latency begins to cross a threshold and begins to be inconvenient or distracting, it is time to step and think that may be the pretty UI is too ahead of its time, and we should stop making the UI prettier than it can be at this time.
I think you greatly underestimate the number of non-technical people who care more about gee-whiz coolness than responsiveness. Back in the aqua era of OS X with the super sluggish genie effects and so on, the general public loved it and it was mostly "power users" and professionals who went into the settings to tone down the animations.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, have you heard of SingularityNET? There are plenty of projects being made that have real, valuable uses for blockchain tech. Marketplaces are one of them. If you want an app store that isn't controlled by one corporation that can force you play by their arbitrary rules, blockchain can allow this to happen. A centralized front-end is necessary, but that's all it is, a front-end. They have pretty much zero incenti…
But what percentage of systems is actually ONLY implementable using a block-chain-based cryptocurrency? I love decentralisation as much as the next guy but it's not a feature. Apart from the obvious authority-circumvention (both positive and negative), what killer features do these systems have? All the interesting projects I've seen for ethereum rely on Intel SGX to bring ground truth about the real world onto the c…
When you have a need to establish some business procedure between different parties that do not trust each other, smart contracts might be very useful. No other database is able to provide guarantees/features comparable to the public blockchain in that respect. A trust model of most modern databases just do not comply with "everyone trusts noone" principle.
About relying on Intel SGX. Yes, blockchain oracle to be trusted needs to be run in some kind of protected environment. So what? It doesn't imply that technology is useless. I would say, we have a synergy of different security technologies to get really impressive results.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#344Genetic algorithms.
Only a matter of time
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#345NFC on the phone. I thought it would revolutionise lots of things. Turns out it took 10 years longer than I expected and is just a "fun" feature for now.
NFC & Android/Apple Pay is actually kinda amazing if you live in a country like Australia where tap to pay is universally supported. It's starting to get traction for transport smart cards as well.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#346BeOS . That was the best os at the time by far, stellar performance, fantastic C++ api usable by a newbie, i still haven’t found a GUI as responsive as this one. DVD-audio. Great multi channel, high rate, high resolution audio. But it required the whole production chain to upgrade as well as new consumer equipement, and they competed with sony own format ( which was also a failure)... But it would have given the reco…
I'm not surprised DVD-Audio and co failed. Their quality is indistinguishable from CDs despite what audiophiles would have you believe, and by the time they came out MP3 was clearly the future.
+1. Even if they could be distinguished, it would be only in top HiFi setups. Most people (me included) listened with shitty car stereos, portable players with terrible DACs and cheap headphones.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC You do have some merit to the argument, but your 1984 Mac didn't have half as "pretty" UI, and that matters to some people. It didn't do dynamic language processing to figure out if you've made a grammatical error. It did not have to continuously scan every data stream for malware. It did not have to use a significantly restricted…
You are repeating the same excuses the industry has pilfered to us for decades. "It didn't do dynamic language processing " Which could very well do it's stuff in a different thread and execution context given the actual payload such a system needs to transfer from a wordprocessor is trivially small. Then notify user. Don't rob the system of its low latency just because you want to run the analysis in the same thread…
> Which could very well do it's stuff in a different thread and execution context given the actual payload such a system needs to transfer from a wordprocessor is trivially small.
It's a blocking operation, so doing it in a different thread will not magically mean the requesting application can get it faster. Besides, this is already done in a different thread, but it increases the load of updating the UI.
> Which can be considered a one more defect of the system which I forgot to lambast. Sandbox my wordprocessor, let me operate in realtime in unsafe environment and once I'm moving something out of the sandbox, then do the analysis.
Which is already what is happening, but all data in and out needs to monitored. But regardless, it cannot operate in an unsafe unrestricted environment, because that implies full access to the memory.
> This argument is moot. Pretty UI:s are computationally a tenth or hundredth of the complexity of an AAA title. Unless one does it wrong. And if the system does not provide enough horsepower, provide a backup! Reduce the computational load! Cut the transparencies, freeze the animations, etc.
As I started to say, you have some merit to the argument, but I simply pointed out that modern UIs require multiple orders of magnitude more computational power to render. And providing a fallback is yet another cost of developing, and for the most part not something people/companies will pay for.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#348The Connection Machine.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
To use PayPal - you have to have your money in PayPal, or it will use an underlying credit card. So, it's really just like using a bank account to pay directly. Most people don't like having to keep a separate current amount in PayPal to buy stuff. Also - I'm not sure if the merchant fees that PayPal charges are any less, i.e. they didn't take the 'no fees' angle for the merchants. And of course there is the consumer…
You can connect PayPal to your bank without a credit or debit card, so yes, they can be out of the equation if the consumer wants to. I don't think PayPal or card fees are significant in this discussion of micropayments. The issue of micropayments is getting people to pay at all , either 0% or 100%. A 3% detail doesn't have a huge effect on why they aren't commonly used.
Yes. The jump from $0 to $0.05 is greater than from $0.05 to $1.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#350FORTH.