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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?

#621

Post by throwanem »

baldfat wrote: post #559
IshKebab wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Their quality is indistinguishable from CDs despite what audiophiles would have you believe Well I blame the system. You needed upgraded headphones or speakers. I have $2000 studio monitors when I was an audio engineer and well I can 100% tell you in a blind test I can tell the difference. 95% of the reason why is people don't care about quality audio. It's something about human brains. MP3 sound horrible compared…

I use a Rowkin Mini for the same sort of stuff, most often while commuting. For spoken content it renders intelligibly, and it is tiny and comfortable to use. It also lasts a few hours on a charge and lives on my keyring. Devices like this exist in a local optimum of convenience, as long as they and their audio sources both do Bluetooth right. (I tried a bunch of the cheap ones off Amazon before settling on the Rowkin. It really is a lot better!)

For at-rest listening, God made Sennheiser.

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

#622

Post by rodolphoarruda »

Wearables. I was expecting much better sensors and services to be consumed, specially in the Healthcare field.

What I see now is extreme attention to design and looks of smartwatches, but little talk on the type of value the could be adding to people's lives when connected to online services, phones or what have you.

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

#623

Post by dsschnau »

virtualized wrote: post #615

Solid State Drives. In 2012 I did not expect that you could still buy $2000 laptops with spinning rust in 2017.

yeah but that's just because spinning platters are still cheaper by the byte - if you don't care much about performance you buy that. But any computer worth using (imo) has a ssd in it, and that's been the case since 2012.

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

#624

Post by pbhjpbhj »

zerostar07 wrote: post #459
danmaz74 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. If only we could fix the non-phonetic spelling...

there are 2 ways for that. I would go for changing the pronounciation rather than the writing

What's your linguistic background (eg mother tongue)?

I, naytiv British, wud go for speling reform in preference to pronouncing "wo-uh-ld" or "deb-t'", et cetera.

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

#625

Post by throwanem »

nl wrote: post #535
bsaul wrote: post #263

BeOS . 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…

In an alternate universe, Apple bought Be. Inc. instead of NeXT. It nearly happened too - they got down to talking price[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History

In that alternate universe, what happened next?

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

#626

Post by herbst »

nl wrote: post #531
herbst wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook Graph search was like this (and creepier as people didnt always know _how_ they are searchable) nur Facebook heavily crippled this in the Last years.

Graph search still works surprisingly well if you know what you can search for. Try http://graph.tips/

It respects privacy setting now tho or?

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

#627

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

platinumrad wrote: post #342
secura wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I think you greatly underestimate the number of non-technical people who care more about gee-whiz coolness than responsiveness.

I think you've built a strawman. People who use computers to get shit done might pay lip service to things looking good, but at the end of the day they want a tool that does the job without a lot of bullshit. To the extent that the kind of person you're talking about exists, they are consumers who live in tablet land and should be ignored for desktop/workstation use cases.

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

#628

Post by krapp »

hobofan wrote: post #468
barrkel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube - it didn't look profitable and I thought they'd go out of business

From official statements here and there, and especially the "Adpocalypse" happening this year, I doesn't look like they are profitable even now. Sometimes I think the only thing keeping Youtube alive as a Google product is that the internet would rip them to shreds if they were to shut it down.

I think Google was expecting Youtube to no longer exist as an entity in its own right, but just be a part of Google+ after they integrated all of their properties into a massive Facebook killer social media app, but that was a colossal failure.

Now, I think they want to use the infrastructure to build something that competes against Netflix and Amazon, but to do that they have to destroy the existing economic incentives for content creators and drive off as many content derivative users as they can (anyone incorporating or using licensed content, even as covered by fair use), and basically rebuild Youtube from the inside out.

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

#629

Post by maffydub »

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…

I think the cause of a lot of the bizarre spelling in English is the "Great Vowel Shift" - basically, sometime between 1350 and 1700, most uses of most long vowels changed their pronunciation.

Obviously (because this is English), the change didn't apply universally, but it applied widely enough to move our pronunciation out of sync with the European languages it was derived from.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift for more detail.

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

#630

Post by virtualized »

Email.

I work at a software development shop and most of our internal Email-like communication happens face-to-face or via phone.

"Will you be available for a meeting two weeks from now?"

"I just wanted to tell you that I checked in my code."

"Please answer my trivially Google-able programming question right now."

"Tell person X that I want to talk to them later."

"The boss just told me [important news that concerns several people who are not at work today]."

I have to assume that most of the world works like that and Open Source communities are the great exception to this rule.

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