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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?

#851

Post by astura »

jd3 wrote: post #813
tmerr wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add that DC is alive and well on my college campus. Beyond speed, it's less likely to get you in trouble with the college + ISP than torrenting, and has some textbooks and other locally relevant content.

Are you serious? Most people on my college campus did not even realize that they could drop their files in the public_html folder to share them online, let alone setup an ADC file sharing program as esoteric as DC++

Depends...

Public school? Probably not. Tech school? Absolutely.

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

#852

Post by ilkan »

I expected Remote Desktop to be on every system... it's really frustrating that I can't remotely see and configure my elderly mom's iPhone screen when she needs tech support. "Do you see an x? Or is there something that looks like a backwards arrow? No? A less-than symbol? Or the word Back? No? Cancel? Maybe at the bottom?"

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

#853

Post by antjanus »

shove wrote: post #661
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 soooooo slow though. But yeah, the comparison to Electron et al is spot on.

not for smaller apps. I mean, can't imagine running VS Code on it.

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

#854

Post by ddlatham »

grumblestumble wrote: post #108

E-Ink. It is the "correct" choice for display technology, and with enough research money put into it, it could replace these abominable light-emitting displays. But what we already have is "good enough", despite all of the hidden costs, and so we're stuck with it.

I wish I could get a programmable e-ink display at a reasonable price, that I could mount on the wall or desk. To show quotes, photos, weather, calendar, anything that is nice to have passively updated in the environment, using low power, and not emitting its own light.

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

#855

Post by MarkMMullin »

The original idea of the internet as a highly distributed fault tolerant system that could route around localized failures. I will admit that part of that philosophy emerged when leaving arpanet and trying to get stupid bang email addys and netnews flowing over dialup :-)

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

#856

Post by DannyB2 »

Ten years ago I was debating with a friend that GPUs would gradually change into massive general purpose processors. Instead they have remained special purpose and difficult to program.

My thinking was that with a large number of cores of processors that are more general in nature, you could still do great graphics. But you could do many other things as well. There are plenty of problems that are embarrassingly parallel if done right. There are also plenty of applications for adding significant amounts of computational power at the cost of a good graphics card. Computer vision. Speech recognition. Speech synthesis. Photo and video editing filters and processes. Even amazing scream savers.

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

#857

Post by doctorsher »

astura wrote: post #848
doctorsher wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citibank still has this feature as well.

Doh! When I said Chase I actually meant Citibank. Chase doesn't to my knowledge. In my defense both start with C....

Haha no defense necessary! Carry on :]

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

#858

Post by culot »

shove wrote: post #606

WebGL. I spent ~10 years doing Flash / ActionScript and when Jobs nixed the mobile Flash plugin, I figured everything would shift to HTML5 / WebGL. Nope. The era of fancy, interactive websites faded into the rearview mirror. I'm sure most of you don't miss it, but there was so much amazing work. Rather than the budgets shifting to Three.js etc, it went to apps or dried up completely.

Back in like 1994 I was certain that RoboBoard BBS software was the future of the online world. But no.

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

#859

Post by j45 »

dizzystar wrote: post #52
j45 wrote: post #23

Palm/HP/LG WebOS - JavaScript based os a few years ahead of it's time in mobile form.

I was rooting for them back then. Web OS was truly second to none at that time. Really too bad.

It is interesting to imagine what WebOS would look like now with WebAssembly and the ability to load binaries into a browser interface. At this point, it might have to sit on top of for Android.

No sooner did I type that sentence than I decided to google it, WebOS has been rebranded to LuneOS, which sits on top of Android.

https://pivotce.com/tag/luneos/

Other interesting reads: http://www.openwebosproject.org/ https://www.cnet.com/news/open-webos-reborn-as-luneos-for-mo...

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

#860

Post by alexasmyths »

vortico wrote: post #267
alexasmyths wrote: post #249

Earlier 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.

"A 3% detail doesn't have a huge effect on why they aren't commonly used."

At brick and mortars, where they are operating on 5% margins in many cases, a 3% skim off the top is massive.

A 3% arbitrary fee for every electronic payment in north America is really, really quite a huge thing.

It's quite massive form of rent extraction, given that there is no real IP, and the actual cost is almost nothing.

It's one of the biggest and juiciest forms of obvious oligarchy/monopoly that there is.

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