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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?

#731

Post by H1Supreme »

owenwil wrote: post #433
ramses0 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL is terrible. It's basically a tech demo (look up what happens if you `cp` a file from `C:\...` to `/home/user` versus `copy` or going the other direction. It's alright to boot up a linux "VM" using docker, but then you have to pay extra for windows pro or whatever so you can unlock hypervisor privileges. I recently bought an extra SSD to put into the windows desktop I bought and am happily running linux, don't mi…

I use it daily with zero issues. I don't know why people keep perpetuating this, but it works great, as if it were native.

Same. I've found it to be really great overall. The default colors are basically unusable (looking at you, blue), but the functionality leaves little to be desired.

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

#732

Post by Twirrim »

akoster wrote: post #599

Sun Microsystems, especially after hearing more about the company, it’s culture and products from this [0] talk posted in this [1] comment in this [1] thread. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18217952 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18217762

Good products, engineering. Badly managed.

One of the crazier things Oracle found when they were buying them was that the sales staff were given commission based on the total value of the sale, with no requirement for a profit to be made. People in the sales team would merrily sell stuff that cost $200,000 for $100,000, and earn a tidy commission, even though it meant the company was hemorrhaging.

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

#733

Post by Twirrim »

benjiweber wrote: post #243

Nokia n900. Portable linux box, real keyboard. http://neo900.org/ doesn't seem to have gained much traction. https://www.planetcom.co.uk/ seems to be the closest thing we have now.

An N810 was the first thing I bought when I got my on-call bonus money (first job I had that had On-Call responsibilities, paid extra money for our on-call week.) My cell phone had bluetooth, and I could tether from it. Meant I could do all my on-call stuff without having to lug a laptop around or be stuck in the house.

That thing was awesome. Maemo, the linux OS on it, wasn't.

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

#735

Post by theandrewbailey »

doh wrote: post #213
chrisparton1991 wrote: post #206

Old-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.

Be careful what you wish for :) https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/winamp-returns-in-2019-to-...

Wow, that's great. I'm looking forward to it!

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

#736

Post by DamnInteresting »

function_seven wrote: post #296
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…

Apple has ditched so many cool things in the MacBook line. 1) MagSafe. I know they really want to go all in on USB-C, but the original MagSafe connector was awesome. Even the weaker 2.0 version was nice. There were two instances where that connector saved my laptop. 2) The laser-drilled power indicator. That was so cool. It looked like the light magically appeared through the aluminum. Now there's no indication whats…

I could have written this ^^^ comment myself; I've been very disappointed with my 2017 MacBook Pro. They keyboard keys feel unpleasant, and now my H key has become unreliable (about 50% of the time it works, about 25% of the time it fails to register, and 25% of the time it types 2 characters). Dealing with dongles is not worth the headache. The touchbar is a step back in UI. The new trackpad is so large I bump it all the time. MagSafe was beloved for a reason.

Yesterday the last straw landed and I started setting up my 2012 MacBook again, at least for my writing, where I need a reliable built-in keyboard. I know Apple has a repair program for the 2017 MacBook keyboard[1], but it's my work machine, it's really hard to part with it for 1-3 days of repairs.

Edit to add: Moments after posting I run across this link: https://theoutline.com/post/6409/the-new-and-improved-macboo...

[1] https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-m...

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

#737

Post by bluGill »

sengork wrote: post #112

Irix and SGI computers 90s era design in general.

I miss pretty computers. Everything is black and has been for years. Well once in a while you see white or grey, but that is about it.

The imac did some neat colors, but they SGI/Irix colors were pretty without screaming toy.

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

#738

Post by HoppyHaus »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #699
kevinmchugh wrote: post #103

Grooveshark 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…

I have a ~5 year old Sandisk Sansa Clip with Rockbox. I use it almost every day. I remember the first time I tried Rockbox on it; when it didn't take 5 minutes to boot because it was scanning every file (like the stock firmware did), I loved it immediately. When 3.14 came out last year, I got excited when I discovered that I could play Opus files on it. (Before, it crashed hard every time I tried.) I got one for my d…

Same! I threw a 128gb microsd into mine, and it works perfectly. It a very solid mp3 player overall, and the Opus support is fantastic for podcasts. Also Doom support.

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

#739

Post by megous »

wingerlang wrote: post #242
megous wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

full silo was sold for more money than it cost to build Seems like it makes sense though, since it would be full of money (ore)

The trouble was that if you had many silos, when you built a new one, it got filled with tiberium from other silos and I think that when you sold the tiberium would get redistributed back to the other silos. Anyway, all I remember is that you could generate free money just by buying and selling silos in a loop (if you already had many silos and they were full).

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

#740

Post by leisureforce »

singularity2001 wrote: post #562
bottled_poe wrote: post #546

I 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 conf…

I think direct democracy in the States would be fatal
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