Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#521

Post by vortico »

icebraining wrote: post #450
vortico wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To avoid redundancy, here's why I don't think phones and tablets will take over the concept of a personal computer in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15719836 I believe the situation is even better. Desktops and laptops, no longer needing to support the layman on their phones and tablets, will actually become more oriented toward the needs of power users, although their total userbase may decrease. I…

Yeah, but I'm not sure if I would have become a programmer if "real" computers only targeted the professional market, while you had much cheaper appliances that solved the needs of my parent. Will a single mother be able to afford the difference just so her child can geek out? Turning computing into a privilege of the upper middle class doesn't appeal to me.

The "learning programming was much easier back in the day" rhetoric is exaggerated. Programming on any device is much easier than it was 10 years ago in VBScript, which was easier than 10 years before. Downloading some $1 app to write code on an iPad is way easier to dive into than learning BASIC on an IBM PC. There are even apps that actually specifically help kids learn instead of dumping a 200 page manual on you.

Also, phones and tablets will remain to be as expensive or more than the future "working man" desktop computer, so this isn't a matter of one wealth class vs. another.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#522

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

c22 wrote: post #358
wj wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used invites for the Gmail rollout as well but maybe those immediately created accounts. I seem to remember invites being sold on eBay.

The difference is once you got a Gmail account you could immediately start sending and receiving email from it rather than twiddling your thumbs till someone you know got invited.

This, and also that GMail solved a need you already knew you had, and could be explained in a few words: practically unlimited inbox space, no need to delete emails anymore! Everyone wanted that, but most people didn't know exactly why they should want Wave.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#523

Post by Jtsummers »

wj wrote: post #304
Jtsummers wrote: post #17

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…

They used invites for the Gmail rollout as well but maybe those immediately created accounts. I seem to remember invites being sold on eBay.

Gmail invites, by 2004 or 2005(?) when I got in were instant. If I sent the invite, the friend had a chance to sign up right then.

But email was already an existing protocol. So invites meant nothing. I could still communicate with my family even though they were still on their ISP account. Or my sister with her university account.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#524

Post by arethuza »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #462

Interactive digital TV. back when digital TV launched in the UK during late 1998, the major platofrm (Sky, ONdigital, Telewest and ntl) were all hyping up their interactive services. Sky's service was called Open.... ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open.... ) and you could order pizza, email, go shopping, dating, betting etc. Sky were so convinced it was going to be a money spinner they gave away all the boxes for fr…

I remember looking at some of this stuff when I worked at an interactive TV company in the early 2000s - I remember being deeply troubled looking at the MHEG spec:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHEG-5

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#525

Post by segmondy »

grahamburger wrote: post #134

3D printing. Turns out making little plastic shapes isn't all that useful. Seems obvious in hindsight.

Tesla and other companies are 3D printing metal engines and parts for rockets. 3D printing is amazing and in full effect. It just hasn't become available for the consumer to print whatever they want.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#526

Post by PeterisP »

captainmuon wrote: post #454

Peer-to-peer file sharing. There was a time when Napster, Kazaa, eMule were king. The content industry fought against it, but developers came up with decentralized solutions like DHTs or supernodes. I was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of you…

I believe that DC++ file sharing had a model like that, but the torrents outcompeted it for most purposes; most people don't want friend-of-a-friend filesharing, they either want the most effective way to get the latest goods from whoever has it, or the ability to upload stuff while remaining mostly anonymous.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#527

Post by scoggs »

captainmuon wrote: post #454

Peer-to-peer file sharing. There was a time when Napster, Kazaa, eMule were king. The content industry fought against it, but developers came up with decentralized solutions like DHTs or supernodes. I was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of you…

I, personally, felt that Audiogalaxy was the hallmark program from this era. It was the most surefire way to get the songs you were looking for and discover plenty more in the process.

You'd set the music folder you wanted to share (there was no opting out) and so long as you had the program open your files were available for download by other users. The program operated like an always on satellite torrent program with very low impact. You'd find a file to download and the file would come in many chunks from any available user who had the file on their client side. Downloads were fast and in the event you lost connection or closed Audiogalaxy the download would resume immediately on reload.

From my POV Audiogalaxy was extremely threatening to Copyright holders in a way that prior p2p programs weren't. Your comment about software being especially 'disruptive' and ruffling all of the right feathers is what reminded me of Audiogalaxy.

There was no indication of who you were receiving files from. There were no usernames or features outside of download and upload. In terms of creating a piece of software that picked a mission and executed it I'll always look at Audiogalaxy and think it achieved precisely what it set out to do, entirely.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#528

Post by tuomosipola »

lucozade wrote: post #381
tuomosipola wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling that the right timing of English-speaking political dominance in 19th and 20th century combined with global information technology boom has contributed a lot here. It could have been French (and in a sense was) if they had had movies and Internet earlier. To me English doesn't feel logical at times (maybe a subjective observation) but at least we all can agree that the ortography with its historical…

I think your point about cultural dominance, and specifically youth culture, is the key one. I travel a fair bit and it still surprises me how often I hear English, usually lyrics, regardless of the local language. English isn't particularly logical. This is partly because it is a hodge-podge of Germanic and Latin roots. I think its also because it's so widely used. It's accepted a ton of vocab from around the world…

Yes, German is perhaps a better recent example (late 19th, 20th century), having similar technology and science reasons that work for English today.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#529

Post by owebmaster »

muzani wrote: post #374
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #363

I don't know if this has a name, but... ICQ-like "searchable" instant messaging. Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For starters, its UI was leaps and bounds ahead of anything to be seen in the next decade, and it had functionality like bots or groups, that has again become widespread a few years ago. But what I'm talking about is the fact that I could look for "female, age bet…

I thought the same thing too. It's quite sad that talking to people is usually limited to dating, and dating has become a domain of Tinder. I remember an era when chat rooms like IRC had thousands of people online at a time. It didn't scale past this, but it was very exciting. Maybe there is a market for something like a real-time Reddit, but it's a lot harder to pull off because there needed to be many people on at…

I guess it is because we stay online 24 hours now but in the past connected time was a scarce commodity. I felt bad if whenever I found that I was online but wasn't connected to my IRC channels, losing all the history :(

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#530

Post by captainmuon »

saas_co_de wrote: post #518
captainmuon wrote: post #454

Peer-to-peer file sharing. There was a time when Napster, Kazaa, eMule were king. The content industry fought against it, but developers came up with decentralized solutions like DHTs or supernodes. I was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of you…

Bittorrent is good enough and there aren't really any law enforcement concerns any more. Pre 9/11 FBI and other agencies were actually doing prosecutions against people for unlicensed content distribution but after 9/11 they decided to focus on higher priorities so nobody really cares about security any more. A warning letter from the ISP is not quite the same threat as a few years in a fed pen.

In Germany, it is currently quite dangerous to use Bittorrent illegally. There is a high chance of getting an "Abmahnung", which costs around 600-900 euros.

Using sharehosters with for-pay premium accounts is popular, as is using VPNs with bittorrent. The alternative is low-quality streaming.

I think the content industry isn't pushing for eradicating illegal downloads, they just want it to be at least as expensive, or more inconvenient than the legal options. (Which are quite good by now, if the shows you want to watch are available from your provider.)

Post reply on HN