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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?

#531

Post by justinclift »

cardanome wrote: post #486
ranma42 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC ReactOs forbids you from contributing if you had access to the windows source code in some way shape or form.

They need to train an LLM with the windows source code and ask it to write an windows clone. Apparently copyright law only applies for humans, generative AI gets away with stealing because there is too much monetary interest involved in looking the other way.

Wow, so you're saying "Windows but with even less reliability and more security problems plus tech debt"?

I don't think the world really needs that. :)

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

#532

Post by evgen »

myself248 wrote: post #407

The Ricochet network. A packet mesh network providing ISDN speeds in the dialup era, wirelessly. They burned through $5B of 1999 dollars, building out a network in 23 cities, and had effectively zero customers. Finally shut down in 2001. All their marketing was focused on "mobile professionals", whoever those were, while ignoring home users who were clamoring for faster internet where other ISPs dragged their feet. T…

I loved my Ricochet modems so damn much. Sitting in a coffeeshop in Palo Alto with an Apple Powerbook and a second generation Ricochet modem rocking web browsing and ssh sessions at 56k when wifi was unknown to the general public. I still have a couple in a box somewhere and I am tempted to see if I can get them into star mode.

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

#533

Post by bsimpson »

crote wrote: post #405
jasode wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- XHTML. [...] Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly? XHTML appeals to the intuition that there should be a Strict Right Way To Do Things ... but you can't use that unforgiving framework for web documents that are widely shared. The "real world" has 2 types of file formats: (1) file types where consumers cannot contact/control/punish the authors (open-loop) : HTML, pdf, zip, csv, etc. The common…

The problem is that group (1) results in a nightmarish race-to-the-bottom. File creators have zero incentive to create spec-compliant files, because there's no penalty for creating corrupted files. In practice this means a large proportion of documents are going to end up corrupt. Does it open in Chrome? Great, ship it! The file format is no longer the specification, but it has now become a wild guess at whatever wei…

That would break decades of the web with no incentive for Google to do so. Plus, any change of that scale that they make is going to draw antitrust consideration from _somebody_.

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

#534

Post by bsimpson »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #247
Animats wrote: post #230

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

Nice list. Some thoughts: - I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone. iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It doesn't have a command line,…

Didn't Google already own Android when iOS was announced?

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

#536

Post by Fluorescence »

jasode wrote: post #367
Animats wrote: post #230

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

>- XHTML. [...] Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly? XHTML appeals to the intuition that there should be a Strict Right Way To Do Things ... but you can't use that unforgiving framework for web documents that are widely shared. The "real world" has 2 types of file formats: (1) file types where consumers cannot contact/control/punish the authors (open-loop) : HTML, pdf, zip, csv, etc. The common…

This is an argument for a repair function that transforms a broken document into a well-formed one without loss but keeps the spec small, simple and consistent. It's not an argument for baking malformations into a complex messy spec.

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

#538

Post by eloisant »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #247
Animats wrote: post #230

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

Nice list. Some thoughts: - I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone. iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It doesn't have a command line,…

They would have gotten another modern OS instead of Next as the base for MacOSX (then iOS).

Another possibility they were exploring was buying BeOS, which would have been pretty interesting because it was an OS built from scratch in the 90's without any of the cruft from the 70's.

Also, the only thing specific to Next that survived in MacOSX and iOS was ObjectiveC and the whole NextStep APIs, which honestly I don't think it a great thing. It was pretty cool in the 90's but when the iPhone was released it was already kinda obsolete. For the kernel, Linux or FreeBSD would have worked just the same.

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

#539

Post by eloisant »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #281

Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.

I wish Flash would have died sooner.

It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser.

Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.

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

#540

Post by eloisant »

nine_k wrote: post #141
brandonb927 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Reader: I will forever be salty about how Google killed something that likely required very little maintenance in the long run. It could have stayed exactly the same for a decade and I wouldn't have cared because I use an RSS reader exactly the same way I do that I did back in 2015.

Yes. That was the single worst business decision in Google history , as somebody correctly noted. It burned an enormous amount of goodwill for no gain whatsoever. Killing Google Reader affected a relatively small number of users, but these users disporportionately happened to be founders, CTOs, VPs of engineering, social media luminaries, and people who eventually became founders, CTOs, etc. They had been painfully t…

Yes, Google killing Reader was probably the first time they killed a popular product and what started the idea that any Google product could be killed at any time.
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