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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?

#741

Post by kazagistar »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #511
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s basically 80% doll’s house, 20% brothel, where everyone pays rent. The idea isn’t terrible, but the implementation had some horrific flaws, and Linden Labs became notorious for infuriating users. SL might have taken off if both servers and clients were fully open-sourced, and LL had concentrated on building a global system for connecting open servers together. I strongly suspect someone will rediscover the idea…

> I strongly suspect someone will rediscover the idea 5-10 years from now, do it properly Very likely, also happening in VR. > and replace today’s web. Not likely. It's just not going to happen. Pretty sure there have been multiple attempts at a 3d internet, but, nope.

In already annoyed by the shift of data from text to video. It's so much harder to absorb and skim quickly. 3d internet is harder for content creators, and harder for users to access what they need.

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

#742

Post by jetti »

Raphmedia wrote: post #683

Pokemon Go. It did take the world by storm but promptly died due to incompetence from Niantic. One can only hope that they didn't set enthusiasm for AR games too far back.

I don't think Niantic was responsible for the decline but just the game itself was. It only garnered the attention it did because of the Pokemon name but at the end of the day the game was a grind. I saw a lot of people lose interest because there was nothing really unique about it. Everybody that I knew that played it turned the AR off as well, so it became just another game.

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

#743

Post by CodeCube »

Raphmedia wrote: post #683

Pokemon Go. It did take the world by storm but promptly died due to incompetence from Niantic. One can only hope that they didn't set enthusiasm for AR games too far back.

I still can't believe that trading pokemon between friends wasn't a day 1 feature.

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

#744

Post by greggman »

indubitable wrote: post #58

I 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…

I'm still mixed on VR. I don't believe it will be a mass market consumer item anytime soon

On the other hand I expect it to revolutionize 3D design (architecture, 3d art for movies, 3d art for games (non-vr games). Manipulating stuff with your hands in VR is 10x-100x faster than using a mouse in Maya/3DSMax/ZBrush etc. We just need someone to bring the pro tools into VR.

As for games I loved both Farpoint (PSV4, bad game great experience) and Lone Echo (Oculus). Also loved Vanishing Realms though it feel more prototype than full game. To a certain degree VR has spoiled my enjoyment of certain non VR games (not all). Something is now just missing if I can't "be there". Like many who have done VR it's the difference between a picture of the Grand Canyon and being at the Grand Canyon. Farpoint is not that great of a game but actually feeling like I'm on another planet with 3 mile high volcanos and 15 mile high plumbs of smoke is a feeling I can't get from a non VR game.

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

#745

Post by deegles »

bane wrote: post #631

I thought (and still think) the phone as single computing device is going to replace desktops and laptops via some kind of dock of some sort. There's been a few attempts at it by Dell and Microsoft and a few others, but none really satisfactory. I think the most successful to date is the Nintendo Switch.

I bought into the Kickstarter for the Ubuntu phone and was honestly kind of relieved it didn’t go through.

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

#746

Post by baldfat »

teddyh wrote: post #662
barbs wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It’s not that mouse pointers today are normally laggy; they aren’t, as you correctly say. But when a modern system is very busy, it’s normal for the keyboard and mouse input to lag too , but that wasn’t normally the case with older systems, since human input peripherals were typically given their own special higher priority interrupts or whatever. This was of course done because the systems back then were so slow tha…

Anything that is above a netbook or a sub $500 laptop doesn't lag and today's computers and phone are spoiling us. I have a 8 year old netbook and I run a minimal Linux install with a tiled window manager and it is quick. I also have an i5 Sandy-bridge desktop and I also work with a tiled window manager because I prefer it, but my wife has Windows 10 on the same computer and it is spot on and that is 6 years old. My video work station is blazing fast and it never lags on anything except chugging through 4K/8K video renders.

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

#747

Post by abritinthebay »

antjanus wrote: post #648

Adobe Air. HTML/CSS/JS in a native executible with access to native methods? It sounded like a dream. ANd yeah, you can do Adobe Air without Flash. You could build desktop apps and phone apps with the same tools on top of it. I really liked the desktop stuff. I made a couple of apps and used a ton of Adobe Air apps (non-Flash) back in the day. Thought it was the future. It failed, for some reason. ^^^^ this is the re…

It was slow as hell, that was the main issue.

It’s still around however.

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

#748

Post by edkennedy »

pryelluw wrote: post #572
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 met my wife on ICQ after using the same search method you described. :)

I lost my virginity through ICQ!

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

#749

Post by jetti »

zwischenzug wrote: post #235

erlang. As a programmer it was a revelatory thing of beauty. When we tried to spread it within our org we found that the 'typical' (even relatively strong) programmer resisted its concepts and found it hard to learn. Therefore it didn't scale for us.

To me, Erlang syntax is odd and a put off. However, I am digging Elixir and diving into Erlang when need be for OTP functionality not yet wrapped by Elixir.

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

#750

Post by geophile »

madenine wrote: post #721
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…

Unforunately, the rise of streaming content services has kinda killed off the need for file sharing for most people. Back in the day of mytunes on a school network, I had HDs full of mp3s. I actively browsed friends (and complete strangers) libraries to find new things, complete an artists discography... etc. Now? Spotify Premium is probably the best value/$ of any purchase I make in a month. Even if I wanted to go b…

> the rise of streaming content services has kinda killed off the need for file sharing for most people.

The history is a bit different. Napster was sued out of existence. As I recall, this was done by the record labels, but the argument was that file sharing was unfair to artists. Which it was. But that was obviously not the real point. Streaming services are notoriously stingy when it comes to paying artists for their work. So access to music is still easy, and the net change is that new middlemen are profiting wildly.

(Streaming vs. file sharing is a different issue. I want to own the music I listen to. I don't want to be dependent on an internet connection, a server, a revokable license, etc. )

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