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Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
101–110 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#102Mary Janes, the candy.
These are still around. You just have to shop for them a bit.
https://www.amazon.com/Mary-Janes-Old-Fashioned-Candy/dp/B01...
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#103Grooveshark had a better interface for managing "currently playing" than anything I've used before or since. Most apps don't even track what's currently playing in an intelligent fashion.
Similarly, rockbox was really great mp3 player firmware, when I used to use one of those. It had a funny feature I've never seen elsewhere: multi-lingual article-ignoring sort. I had German band "Die Prinzen" on that mp3 player, and that sorted under P, just like all it sorted the Beatles under B.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#104Westwood Studios. I loved their games including their final game C&C Renegade, even though EA rushed Renegade out the door and shut the studio down.
Ahhh, the memories of spending after-school hours buying and selling silos for extra money (there was some thinko in the game logic - full silo was sold for more money than it cost to build, or something like that) in their first C&C game to build a massive army and crush the AI opponent. :)
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#105Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#106Old school Radio Shack.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#107Ensemble Studios, makers of Age of Empires, Age of Empires 2, and Age of Mythology, some of the best RTSs ever made. There are other great RTSs, but they're all great in different ways from the Age series, which nothing else resembles. Microsoft bought them, and shut them down not long after for insufficient profits. Sigh. Age of Empires IV is being made now since they noticed there's demand, but the studio they chos…
I thought it was being made because some redditor asked Bill Gates for it in an AMA? https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/49jkhn/im_bill_gates_c... Maybe they choose a random studio because were was just trying to appease Gates' whims? How bad is this "clown collective"?
No, that game was under development long before the AMA.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#108DEC Alpha
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#109Creature House's "Expression". It was a natural-media vector art program, with amazingly snappy performance on early-2000 era machines. They got eaten by Microsoft right around the time I stopped being a broke college student and could actually buy a copy, so I ended up learning Illustrator inside out instead.
I still miss its "freeze layer" feature. Got a complex vector layer? Freeze it: the program would cache a bitmap copy of the whole layer with whatever complex transparency you had, lock the layer for editing, and use that cached image for the preview render as you worked.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#110Crashplan for home. Still haven't found another unlimited plan with linux client.
Yeah, same boat here. Currently using the discounted small business version. Not sure what I'm going to do once that expires. I haven't decide whether it's worth the time investment to use something open source like https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy with eg Backblaze B2, or if I'll just bite the bullet and pay the full $10/month for Crashplan SB.
I moved to Duplicacy with paid Google Drive backing store. Very very happy. Unlimited storage with Linux client, and doesn't have the horrible resource consumption of Crashplan.
(I paid for Crashplan SB for a while but dropped it when it was unable to restore my data. Test your restores!)