Google Stadia. I want to try games, but don't want to own a tv, desktop, or windows anything.
Xbox cloud gaming works on Linux via a supported browser
Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
541–550 of 912 posts
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#542A 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 Chromecast: Wait, they killed Chromecast? I did not know that until I started writing this..
They have something called Google TV Streamer now, so for me it's more of a rebrand than really killing a product.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#543Heroku? I know it's still around, though IDK who uses it, but I miss those days when it was thriving. One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue. I often wonder, if AI had come 15 years earlier, would it have been a ton better because there weren't a billion different ways to do things? Would we have ever bothered to…
I use the core product for my SaaS apps. Great platform, does what it needs to do. Haven’t felt the need to switch. Sometimes tempted to move to a single VPS with Coolify or Dokku, but not interested in taking on the server admin burden.
What are the reasons that make you want to migrate away? Cost, flexibility, support..?
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#544The Atom code editor. It was good to have a mainstream alternative to VS Code, it's a pity it reached end-of-life.
iirc Atom was the original Electron project. Eventually VS Code came along and took all the good ideas - the modularity through extensions, and Electron / web based cross platform, but made it really fast and added IDE like language support through LSP.
Atom may be dead now, but the idea lives on in VS Code and the new project by the original developers of Atom: Zed
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#545The 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…
Ricochet was super cool. Way ahead of its time. There's even a Joel blog post about it:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/12/20/the-ricochet-wirel...
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#546Microsoft Silverlight. Full C# instead of god forbidden js. Full vector dpi aware UI, with grid, complex animation, and all other stuff that html5/css didn’t have in 2018 but silverlight had even in 2010 (probable even earlier). MVVM pattern, two-way bindings. Expression Blend (basically figma) that allowed designers create UI that was XAML, had sample data, and could be used be devs as is with maybe some cleanup. Ex…
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.
Flash & Silverlight were both ahead of the current open web standards at the time. They also didn't suffer as much from the browser wars.
Flash's ActionScript helped influence changes to modern JS that we all enjoy.
You sometimes need alternative ideas to promote & improve ideas for open web standards.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#547All my ideas :')
Also, I did not experience them personally, but I love watching computing history videos on YouTube, and a lot of the computers and operating systems from the 1980s and early 1990s got buried too soon, mostly because of their owners being short-sighted idiots in not realizing the full potential of what computers and video games could become, and having wildly successful hits on their hands with legions of faithful fans but not knowing how to build on that success or what the fans actually wanted to see in updated hardware.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s totally valid XHTML, just not recognized. XHTML allows you to use XML and are just XML nodes with no schema. The correct form has been and will always be and . Since the beginning.
The problem there is the order of tags not their names.
Ooooo… now we’re talking. Sloppy HTML that closes a tag out of order or just declared out of order? Or rendering bugs when bold is before italic? It’s why XHTML should have been standard. Just dump, error out, make the developer fix it.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#549- 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…
I was all gung ho on XHTML back in the day until I realized that a single unclosed tag in an ad or another portion of our app that I had no control over would cause the entire page to fail. The user would see nothing except a giant ugly error. And your solution of rendering the rest of the page in Times New Roman isn’t an option. Do you try to maintain any of the HTML semantics or just render plain text? If it’s plain text, that’s useless. If you’re rendering anything with any semantics, then you need to know how to parse it. You’re back where you started.
Granted, I could ensure that my code was valid XHTML, but I’m a hypermeticulous autistic weirdo, and most other people aren’t. As much as XHTML “made sense”, it was completely unworkable in reality, because most people are slobs. Sometimes, worse really is better.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#550Heroku? I know it's still around, though IDK who uses it, but I miss those days when it was thriving. One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue. I often wonder, if AI had come 15 years earlier, would it have been a ton better because there weren't a billion different ways to do things? Would we have ever bothered to…
> One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue.
I feel like this also describes something like Vercel. Having never personally used Heroku, is Vercel all that different except Ruby vs JS as the chosen language?