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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#171

Post by zyklonix »

Microsoft Songsmith is another one that deserved a second life. It let you hum or sing a melody and would auto-generate full backing tracks, guitar, bass, drums, chords, in any style you chose.

It looked a bit goofy in the promo videos, but under the hood it was doing real-time chord detection and accompaniment generation. Basically a prototype of what AI music tools like Suno, Udio, or Mubert are doing today, fifteen years too early.

If Microsoft had kept iterating on it with modern ML models, it could’ve become the "GarageBand for ideas that start as a hum."

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#172

Post by w10-1 »

Optane persistent memory had a fascinating value proposition: stop converting data structures for database storage and just persist the data directly. No more booting or application launch or data load: just pick up where you left off. Died because it was too expensive, but probably long after it should have.

VM's persist memory snapshots (as do Apple's containers, for macOS at least), so there's still room for something like that workflow.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#173

Post by Rohansi »

Jordan-117 wrote: post #144

Developer Ryan Flaherty's "Via" project, a novel approach to streaming large games in real time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5wAn-4e5hQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWsNFVvblLw Summary: >This presentation introduces Via, a virtual file system designed to address the challenges of large game downloads and storage. Unlike cloud gaming, which suffers from poor image quality, input latency, and high hosting costs…

Wait until you hear that almost all Unity games don't really have asset streaming because the engine loads things eagerly by default.

I don't see how this could take off. Internet speeds are getting quicker, disk space is getting cheaper, and this will slow down load times. And what's worse is the more you need this tech the worse experience you have.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#174

Post by motorest »

Rohansi wrote: post #129
drnick1 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am happy this one died. It was just another attempt by Microsoft to sidestep open web standards in favor of a proprietary platform. The other notorious example is Flash, and both should be considered malware.

Open web standards are great but consider where we could have been if competition drove them a different way? We're still stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it). Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if that came sooner?

> Open web standards are great but consider where we could have been if competition drove them a different way? We're still stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it). Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if that came sooner?

Why do you think JavaScript is a problem? And a big enough problem to risk destroying open web standards.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#175

Post by bitwize »

snovymgodym wrote: post #2

ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation. It has been in existence in some form or another for nearly 30 years, but did not gain the traction it needed and as of writing it's still not in a usable state on real hardware. It's not abandoned, but progress on it is moving so slow that I doubt we'll ever see it be released in a state that's useful for real users. It's too bad, beca…

> ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation.

Some projects creep along slowly until something triggers an interest and suddenly they leap ahead.

MAME's Tandy 2000 implementation was unusable, until someone found a copy of Windows 1.0 for the Tandy 2000, then the emulation caught up until Windows ran.

Maybe ReactOS will get a big influx of activity after Windows 10 support goes offline in a couple days, or even shortly after when you can't turn AI spying off, not even three times a year.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#176

Post by AnonC »

Sandstorm: it seemed quite nice with a lot of possibilities when it launched in 2014, but it didn’t really take off and then it moved to sandstorm.org.

The creator, kentonv (on HN), commented about it recently here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44848099

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#177

Post by bitwize »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #98
gmuslera wrote: post #3

Maemo/Meego. I know there is Sailfish still around, but things would had been very different today if Nokia had put all its weight on it back then.

I loved my N900, and my N800 before that, and I would have loved to have seen successors. Ultimately, I ended up switching to Android because I was tired of things only available as apps. Since then, web technologies have gotten better, and it's become much more feasible to use almost exclusively websites.

> it's become much more feasible to use almost exclusively websites.

And that's precisely why companies nerf their web sites and put a little popup that says " works better on the app".

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#178

Post by bitwize »

bapak wrote: post #152
cr125rider wrote: post #8

Macromedia Flash. Its scope and security profile was too big. It gave way to HTML’s canvas. But man, the tooling is still no where near as good. Movieclips, my beloved. I loved it all.

It's incredible to me that they killed the whole tool instead of making a JS/Canvas port. Even without "full flash websites", there's still need for vectorial animations on the web.

Adobe Animate (new name for Macromedia/Adobe Flash) can output to JS/Canvas now.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#179

Post by huhkerrf »

bxparks wrote: post #37

A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Go…

> Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again.

You can argue whether it's as good as GPM or not, but it's false to imply that your uploaded music disappeared when Google moved to YouTube Music. I made the transition, and all of my music moved without a new upload.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#180

Post by thequux »

ggm wrote: post #65

X.400 we're approaching it by stepwise refinement. It had X.500 which lives on as X.509 certificates and LDAP. ISO/OSI had session layer. ie much of what QUIC does regarding underlying multiple transports. Speaking of X.509 the s-expressions certificate format was more interesting in many ways.

OSI's session layer did very little more than TCP/UDP port numbers; in the OSI model you would open a connection to a machine, then use that connection to open a session to a particular application.

X.400 was a nice idea, but the ideal of having a single global directory predates security. I can understand why it never happened

On X.509, the spec spends two chapters on attribute certificates, which I've never seen used in the wild. It's a shame; identity certificates do a terrible job at authentication

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