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

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

#611

Post by throwanem »

closeparen wrote: post #112
kobeya wrote: post #39

The general-purpose computer. It's a dinosaur on the verge of extinction at the hands of walled-garden app stores on phones and tablets. I never, ever expected that to happen.

Did people really think the arms race of heuristic malware detection in bolt-on security software would be be sustainable? Sandboxing applications and ending the free-for-all over the user’s entire file system were a long time coming. Then spammy software download websites and “Download Now” banner ads bigger than the official download buttons for popular software made it obvious that we needed a trustworthy distribu…

I'm not super a fan of typing on glass, especially when next-keystroke prediction is as poor as iOS has been lately managing. I am super a fan of having a device with the size of display that eliminating a physical input device achieves.

My old Palm TX did the same thing, showing the graffiti area when a text input had focus and otherwise giving applications the use of all but a status bar's worth of glorious 320x480 screen space. Granted that Palm OS did less to help applications really leverage the extra space than iOS does. But most of what I did on that device was reading anyway.

Of course, Graffiti via stylus suffers less from a soft UI than keyboard input via touch, so it's not quite apples to apples. Still, though, as annoying as a soft keyboard so frequently can be, I wouldn't give up half my phone's display for a hard one.

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

#612

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jabretti wrote: post #590
dandare wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is considered to be very difficult language and I find it to be a historical tragedy that English became the lingua franca of the world. I remember that as a child I could not wrap my head around the "spelling competitions" I saw in English cartoons. What is the deal with spelling words? If you can say it you just spelled it, if you can read it you just pronanceed it. And that is only one of many things that…

Spelling difficulties are are artefact of what makes English so powerful, though -- its ability to simply adopt foreign words any time it feels the need to do so. The base language was formed by crashing two major European language families into each other a thousand years ago, and we've been happily borrowing words from every other language on Earth ever since as we've needed them. If we want to make up a brand new…

When you say a thousand years ago presumably you mean the pre-French Norman language mixed with the Old English from 1066?

I'd go back to the Roman invasion, at least, and the mixing of Latin as the official language of Roman Britain with the Brytthonic language(s) [themselves already probably mixing with other earlier Celtic tongues].

Some of the Latin in English (and Cymraeg) was adopted via the Norman/French tongue but there's pretty clear evidence -- AFAICT, I'm not a linguist -- of Latin being retained and adopted from the occupation. That presumably gave us a Creole as a starting place to add in Germanic (Saxon, Frisian, Jutlandish), Celtic (Irish, Pictish?), and Nordic languages in the first millennium AD making the mixing of Norman French just more of the same??

So I'd say, "after two thousand years of this" ...

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

#613

Post by barbs »

bitwize wrote: post #599
baldfat wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC See how fast it felt. https://youtu.be/XwbrCYJcrKQ?t=4m34s No way and NO HOW! That statement is 100% false. The issue is you remember that it felt fast. My Amiga felt like lightening to me in 1985 and I still boot it up from time to time. The delays in everything is over the top and Mac 128k were horribly slow.

You're confusing throughput with latency. Those old systems were objectively more responsive because the keyboard and mouse were tied directly to high-priority IRQs which were serviced in the OS. Now we have USB keyboards and mice, which go on the same IRQ lines as every other USB device, and even if the OS could service them specially, it doesn't. So keyboard and mouse events go on a queue of things to do: disk acce…

Oh come on, there's no way you can tell the difference in latency between a mouse of that era and a USB mouse today. Surely there's enough demand in the e-sports scene to lower input latency as much as possible?

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

#614

Post by saas_co_de »

captainmuon wrote: post #530
saas_co_de wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, o…

Interesting. Wasn't aware of that. VPN is good option.

This brings up a good point though. Bittorrent is not free. People who use Bittorrent do pay to use it (bandwidth, setup costs, etc), and pay more to get good quality stuff, but Bittorrent offers better quality and better selection than any licensed service.

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

#617

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ufo wrote: post #603
jabretti wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spelling difficulties are are artefact of what makes English so powerful, though -- its ability to simply adopt foreign words any time it feels the need to do so. The base language was formed by crashing two major European language families into each other a thousand years ago, and we've been happily borrowing words from every other language on Earth ever since as we've needed them. If we want to make up a brand new…

I think the spelling difficulties have more to do with English not having phonetic spelling than with it having many loanwords, prefixes or suffixes. I speak Portuguese and we have lots of loanwords as well but after a while they are all spelled like the rest of the words are instead of copying the original spelling. And every once in a while there is a spelling reform to replace archaic spellings with more modern fo…

How words are spelt (!) in en-gb definitely owes a debt to the word origin, or sometimes the imagined origin ...

http://mentalfloss.com/article/59320/5-words-are-spelled-wei... has a couple of nice examples.

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

#618

Post by bambax »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #494

GWT. To create client-side web apps, rather than writing Javascript, write Java and have it transpiled to Javascript. Java has IDEs, isn't a new language to learn (like Dart), has static type checking, support for refactoring in the IDEs, etc. GWT could do tree shaking, obfuscation, etc. You could write your server code in Java, and "call" remote server methods from your client code, "passing" Java objects transparen…

What I would really like to know is why Google didn't buy Sun. It seemed such an obvious match. Did they try and fail, or did they not try, and why???

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

#619

Post by smt88 »

ewjordan wrote: post #435
deepsun wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internally in Google it was really, really hard to get in the Wave team. So many people felt the opportunity to show what they can and get a career boost. So, presumably, they had best Google engineers working on that product. What I want to say is an obvious thing -- stellar team doesn't imply success.

The alternative facts: maybe the great team they had did maximize their chance of success, it was just one of those 90% of "startups" that don't hit the market.

That's a good excuse for a product that fails to profit. But a team definitely isn't "great" if it can't release a coherent, useful prototype to the market.

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

#620

Post by krapp »

dexterdexter wrote: post #573

Segway! I'm surprised no one else mentioned this. The hype equaled the excitement it triggered on people. Personally, it signaled the arrival of the future at the time. Fast forward to today and they are just niche transportation devices used by tourists and to a lesser degree by some security officials.

The hype with Segway was high as long as no one knew what it was... for a while people were seriously speculating that it was an anti-gravity hoverboard like from Back to the Future or something just as exotic - but as soon as everyone found out it was just a scooter (albeit a slightly clever one), the hype vanished.
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