Commodore (brilliant makers of Amiga and C64)
Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#562I miss a functional democratically elected government. Too bad it was discontinued years ago :’-(
Direct Democracy.
We had that 2500 years ago and it lead to the most amazing flourishing of culture, science, arts etc ...
It has not honestly been tried since then. Maybe it became impractical because states grew too big. Now with the internet it could become practical again.
Unfortunately it was opposed and subverted in the Pirate Party. I was shocked how many people are opposed to true democracy. They seem to confuse individual ignorance with the wisdom of crowds.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#563If we can consider discontinued features as part of 'discontinued products', examples that come to mind are things like boolean operators on eBay (also coinciding with a time when eBay search results weren't filled with irrelevant junk). And index dates on Google search results.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#564Squaresoft, the company that made Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics, Xenogears. After merging with Enix, their games just lost that magical touch they had. Firefly TV series. Comme des Garcons Kyoto perfume. And, of course, I second the MacBook '14-15 revival! Touchbar begone!
Try playing Octopath Traveler, it gave me that classic Squaresoft feeling.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
the thing i loved with winamp was at one peak where it was fast and simple. You wanted to queue songs? middle click the heck out of your playlist. want to stop on end of queue? that was an option you want to add to queue on spotify it's like 2 cumbersome clicks, you can't just go gattling-gun i want "this this this to play next" jump to song was fantastic - with a global hotkey. audacious with the winamp skin gets cl…
If there are specific ways you can pick out to improve Audacious, open some issues: https://redmine.audacious-media-player.org/projects/audaciou... Hotkeys and mouse bindings should be fairly easy to update.
I got close to contributing once (but ended up somehow clobbering my installed copy of audacious (edit: this is likely through my own incompetence - not saying the dev env sucks or anything)) - i think i should try again cos i do use it as my non-spotify player.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#566One discontinued product that comes to mind - and is missed almost daily - is Evernote's Clearly. Nothing else comes close for simplified reading in the browser. Pocket does the reading experience well, but items have to be added to its archive in order to be read, and its ability to consistently capture articles in full lets it down (in contrast to Clearly and Evernote's 'simplified article' view, which lets users easily adjust the scope of page elements to 'capture'). It was also Clearly's styling that gave it an edge over other on-screen readers (light-on-black styling shouldn't be a competitive advantage for something so simple, but it is for simplified reading plugins).
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#567Old-school Winamp. I use Spotify these days, but man it was fun to customise skins and play with the awesome visualisers. Half-Life 3 would also be nice, but I guess it was never "around" to begin with.
I don't know if it works anymore, or were to get it, but Spotiamp was a Winamp clone for Spotify.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/22/5235456/spotify-debuts-s...
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#568Google Reader. Now I have a mix of HN, Reddit and GMail, and none of them work really how I like.
Came here to say the same. Although, Feedly has taken over well.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#569The Palm Pre (and WebOS)
When it first came out I thought it was kinda cute so I got it for my gf but I ended up loving it.
The slider mechanism was solid, the OS was a breeze to use, and it was years before Android and iOS fully caught up with the "cards" concept.
It revolutionized the mobile experience in many ways for me.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#570the older models of the the ThinkPad X line by Lenovo. The current model is just a fancy ultrabook instead of a working machine. Althoght they have a similiar product (the X1 line) they decided to make the current line useless with less battery power, no Ethernet jack (in corp environment this is essential) and with almost zero options for upgradability and fixability.
Really miss the older models like the X240, X200 and even before which was just sturdier.