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Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

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Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#281

Post by fishtoaster »

wishinghand wrote: post #202

The Macbook Pro chassis before the OLED touchstrip. I'm a web developer and learned on MBPs. The touchpad was the right size, the keys had the right amount of travel, the form factor and weight were perfect. Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder), VS Code, and ZSH. I c…

I hear ya. I just payed $600 to get the top case replaced on my mid-2014 mbp. With any luck that'll buy me another year or two of good use out of this thing because there's very little compelling about the new models. I wouldn't mind 32gb of faster ram and a slight CPU boost, but not at the cost of a worse, more error-prone keyboard with no hardware escape button and an awkwardly large trackpad.

I'm sure I could get used to all of those things eventually, but ideally there are more things in a new laptop that I want than things I have to get used to.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#283

Post by geuis »

Bolo by Stuart Cheshire. Originally release for MacOS in the early 90s. Ended up playing that game for a decade before switching to the good WinBolo Clone. Honestly one of most fun multiplayer games I’ve ever seen that has somehow faded into history.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#286

Post by aninteger »

A diverse CPU collection.

For a while we had some good alternatives to Intel x86. Alpha, Sparc, Motorola 68k, PowerPC, MIPS. Now we just have 32 and 64 variants of x86 and ARM. I guess powerpc is technically not dead yet (which is good!) although the new 64 bit powerpc is little endian I think...

As for companies, Sun Microsystems. I'd like to think that Sun, if they were still around, would be handling Java better than Oracle is today. I'd like to believe that they'd operate similar to Microsoft on the open source front.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#287

Post by btrettel »

I used to use an old Linux file manager called DFM back in 2002 to 2006 or so. Doesn't seem to be online any longer, but this looks like a copy of the original website sans graphics: http://distro.ibiblio.org/amigolinux/download/DeskTop/IconMg...

I have the source code saved somewhere.

This file manager had one nice feature that I haven't seen again: the use of a plain text config file to set which commands are used to open particular files. It might have used regex. You could also override the configuration manually by file too in the properties dialog box. If I recall correctly the icons were also set in the same file and also could be manually set.

The file manager is obsolete otherwise, but from time to time I have wanted to have the same feature again. You could easily get very precise this way. I use Thunar now, but maybe there's another file manager that can be configured more to my liking.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#288

Post by dogecoinbase »

sooheon wrote: post #241
sitkack wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite feature was 'near' queries. One could project n-dimensional spaces to any arbitrary lower dimension with the right semantic and spatial distances. With Altavista, the limiting factor was the searcher. And my nostalgia that over-estimates the size of their search database.

> One could project n-dimensional spaces to any arbitrary lower dimension with the right semantic and spatial distances. I'm incredulous. Doing this well for unstructured text would be worth a lot in many industries today, let alone the entire web. If they did this well, they'd still be alive and well in another form.

Maybe a smaller search corpus made it feasible, but this is an accurate description of AV's functionality. From http://jkorpela.fi/altavista/ , which is worth reading in its entirety: The operator NEAR ensures that both are within ten words of each other in the resulting documents. The operator NEAR binds less tightly than the operator NOT and associates to the left.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#290

Post by panic »

jcdreads wrote: post #48

I miss DabbleDB greatly. I once made a real meals-and-visits schedule signup sheet app for a sick relative (dozens of folks signing up for slots over days, etc.) in about 20 minutes, including learning a bunch about the tool. Ultimately it "just" made CRUD apps, but it made the process amazingly fast. The equivalent of updating a Django model and view was usually a click or two with no waiting, and the only typing wa…

The demo is worth a watch if you haven't heard of DabbleDB before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY
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