Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
344 points by ofalkaed 2 days ago
Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
344 points by ofalkaed 2 days ago
Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
OS/2 had the best API that I’ve worked with. We did major banking apps in the early 90s. OS/2 was vastly superior to Windows NT and Windows.
I'm booting and running Haiku on my Thinkpad. It's a from-scratch workalike of BeOS, and able to run Be software. Though, frankly, Be software is totally 1990s, so a lot of Linux software written for Qt has been ported to Haiku.
In the end I wound up with basically the same application software as on my Debian desktop, except running on Haiku instead of Linux. Haiku is noticeably snappier and more responsive than Linux+X+Qt+KDE, though.
In late September or early October 1996, Fry's Electronics places a full page promo ad on the back of the business section of the San Jose Mercury News for OS/2 4.0 "WRAP [sic]" in 256 pt font in multiple places. Oops!
wua.la … the original version. You share part of your storage to get the same amount back as resilient cloud storage from others. Was bought and killed by LaCie (now Seagate). They later provided paid-for cloud storage under the same name but it didn’t take off.
https://www.kite.com for python i first learned about it when i was working in an university group and had the task to transform a windowing algorithm already working on matlab to python. it felt like a modern linter and lsp with additional support through machine learning. i don't quite know why it got comparative small recognition, but perhaps enough to remain an avantgarde pioneering both python and machine learning support for further generations and wider applications.
In the late 90s there was a website called fuckedcompany which was a place where people could spill the beans about startups (mainly in silicon valley). It was anonymous and a pretty good view into the real state of tech. Now there is twitter/x but it's not as focused on this niche.
creator now makes wild, bespoke headphones https://www.reddit.com/user/pudjam667/submitted/
The closest sites I've found are Web3 is Going Just Great and Pivot to AI, which are newsfeeds of various car crashes in their respective hype arenas, although without any insider scoops/gossip.
fuckedcompany was awesome but very much a product of the early stages of the .com bubble poppage
I kind of expect we might see something similar if the AI bubble pops
I wonder who owns the domain now
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
I've argued this for years on this site...but AOL.
At its best, having IM, email, browser, games, keywords, chats, etc. was a beautiful idea IMO. That they were an ISP seemed secondary or even unrelated to the idea. But they chose to charge for access even in the age of broadband, and adopt gym level subscription tactics to boot, and people decided they'd rather not pay it which is to be expected. I often wonder if they'd have survived as a software company otherwise.
They were basically a better thought out Facebook before Facebook, in my opinion.
Everpix: Looked like good execution but they were probably ahead of time.
Also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6676494
Redmart (Singapore): Best web based online store to this date (obviously personal view). No one even tries now that mobile apps have won.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/01/alibaba-lazada-redmart-con...
choojs
All of the upside and none of the downside of react
No JSX and no compiler, all native js
The main dev is paid by microsoft to do oss rust nowadays
I use choo for my personal projects and have used it twice professionally
https://github.com/choojs/choo#example
The example is like 25 lines and introduces all the concepts
Less moving parts than svelte
You can get the same thing with lit-html and any of the add on libraries that flesh it out.
For example, Haunted is a react hooks implementation for lit: https://github.com/matthewp/haunted
Choo suffered from not having an ecosystem, same with mithtil and other "like react but not" also-rans.
SMIL. Nothing comparable for seamless media stream composition, 20 years later.
False. The Metro design was abandoned long ago. No live tiles, no typography-first minimal UIs in windows 10/11. I pin an email app to taskbar/start, I don't see the unread count.
From Windows 10, there is a switch between desktop and touch mode.
They stopped supporting small tablets some years ago though, and made it worse with every Windows update. I can only surmise that it was to make people stop using them. Slow GUI, low contrast, killed apps.
SGI Irix, and SGI hardware in general, should be revived and return to the scene.
I'd love to have an SGI laptop.
Or an SGI cell phone or VR headset.
Peep (The Network Auralizer).
> replaces visual monitoring with a sonic `ecology' of natural sounds, where each kind of sound represents a specific kind of network event.
https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa-2000/peep-network-aur...
The concept is that we are wired to notice sounds that are out of the ordinary, but “ordinary” sounds are not distracting.
I had forgotten about this project for a number of years until I read Peter Watts’s Blindsight.
- Apple AirPort. Took a long time for advanced wifi solutions that "just work" to fill its place, and those are the Nest/Google things that have bs attached like mic+assistant. Unifi is too hard for consumers.
- Gnome2 dropped from Ubuntu in favor of Unity
- Ford Crown Victoria
> Took a long time for advanced wifi solutions that "just work" to fill its place
What is the modern-day successor? You only mentioned what isn't good.
I loved the AirPort routers. I found it odd that Apple exited the market just as everyone else entered.
I ended up getting a Linksys as a troubleshooting step when I was having internet issues. I don't think the AirPort was the issue, but after migrating, it didn't seem worth going back to a router that was effectively end of life.
I still remember many years ago having a Sonos system and calling support due to some issues I was having. When they asked what type of router I had and I mentioned it was an AirPort, they immediately moved on to something else being the issue. The reputation was so solid that support wouldn't even bother troubleshooting it.
Wish I had an answer. I never ended up buying an easy replacement. When I was in college years back, I set up Unifi for my parents, which did work well but had a weird setup that they had 0 chance of handling if I wasn't visiting home.
Now I just have a single basic wifi+router, no mesh. It doesn't really cover my whole house, but one more AP would do. My parents' house needs more APs to the point where management is a concern.
> - Ford Crown Victoria
You can't just drop that and not say why...
Haha true. Well I've got an ex-cop one and love how it drives. There was probably a legit reason for ending it, just too bad they never refreshed such a cool, iconic, reliable car with a better powertrain. By 2010, an old NA V8 with 4-speed slushbox was no longer viable whether it was meant for performance or efficiency. Needed ESC by law too. I don't care if it'd be turbo-4 or EV, it'd be awesome.
Some people claim that EPA standards killed large sedans because of how SUVs have a lower bar. I don't know, maybe people want the room. But maybe an updated Vic would've sold well to fleets based on reputation. Dodge kept selling the Charger to civilians and police.
Also, insert usual spiel about new cars having overcomplicated controls and hard to replace parts. Hot/cold knob doesn't take my eyes off the road.
Firefox panorama: showed a view all your tabs as thumbnails and let you organize them into groups visually.
Sourcetrail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourcetrail
People talk so much about how you need to write code that fits well within the rest of the codebase, but what tools do we have to explore codebases and see what is connected to what? Clicking through files feels kind of stupid because if you have to work with changes that involve 40 files, good luck keeping any of that in your working memory. In my experience, the JetBrains dependency graphs also aren't good enough.
Sourcetrail was a code visualization tool that allowed you to visualize those dependencies and click around the codebase that way, see what methods are connected to what and so on, thanks to a lovely UI. I don't think it was enough alone, but I absolutely think we need something like this: https://www.dbvis.com/features/database-management/#explore-... but for your code, especially for codebases with hundreds of thousands or like above a million SLoC.
Example: https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail/blob/master/doc...
Another example: https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail/blob/master/doc...
I yearn to some day view entire codebases as graphs with similarly approachable visualization, where all the dependencies are highlighted when I click an element. This could also go so, so much further - you could have a debugger breakpoint set and see the variables at each place, alongside being able to visually see how code is called throughout the codebase, or hell, maybe even visualize every possible route that could be taken.
There's a commercial tool that has been available for a long time called Source Insight[1]. It isn't exactly cheap but I've used it in the past for both code splunking and editing and it's was a pretty useful tool.
I vaguely wondered if FreeHand would make an appearance in this thread. :)
Two features that come to mind as IIRC being unique (as compared to Illustrator) were multi-page documents and multiple page size multi-page documents. Ideal for the complete standard set of company branded print documents: business card, "With Compliments" slip, and letterhead. :D
Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia and subsequent killing of (the IMO superior) FreeHand contributed directly to my subsequent decision to avoid closed source application software--especially for creative tools--even if alternatives were "technically inferior".
(And, indeed, "creative tool killed/hampered for business reasons" is a story which has been repeated elsewhere multiple times in the quarter century[0] since.)
While Inkscape is still missing features compared to FreeHand it is however also still here many years later and is what I've used ever since when I need 2D vector design software. (Although I've also been keeping an eye on Graphite: https://graphite.rs)
----
[0] Oh, weird, apparently it's actually less than 25 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FreeHand#Adobe_FreeHand Seems I've been holding the grudge for less time than I thought. :D
Warnier Orr Diagrams. Too early for the internet and adoption into UML.
Think flowcharts crossed with pseudocode but following Structured Programming principles.
Very useful for mocking up, designing and testing code logic before you write it.
10/GUI did some deep thinking about the limitations and potential of the (then-fairly new) multi touch input method. I wished something more had come out of it, instead it stayed a niche concept art video that is mostly forgotten now.
I’m not arguing the solutions it outlined are good, but I think some more discussion around how we interact with touch screens would be needed. Instead, we are still typing on a layout that was invented for mechanical typewriters - in 2025, on our touch screens.
There was a virtual platform through which to learn Chinese called ‘Zon’. Someone obviously put years of work into it but no one ever joined and it turned into this great looking ghost town.
I could think of many examples, but I'll talk about the top four that I have in mind, that I'd like to see re-evaluated for today's times.
1. When Windows Vista was being developed, there were plans to replace the file system with a database, allowing users to organize and search for files using database queries. This was known as WinFS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS). I was looking forward to this in the mid-2000s. Unfortunately Vista was famously delayed, and in an attempt to get Vista released, Microsoft pared back features, and one of these features was WinFS. Instead of WinFS, we ended up getting improved file search capabilities. It's unfortunate that there's been no proposals for database file systems for desktop operating systems since.
2. OpenDoc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc) was an Apple technology from the mid-1990s that promoted component-based software. Instead of large, monolithic applications such as Microsoft Excel and Adobe Photoshop, functionality would be offered in the form of components, and users and developers can combine these components to form larger solutions. For example, as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop, there would be a component for the drawing canvas, and there would be separate components for each editing feature. Components can be bought and sold on an open marketplace. It reminds me of Unix pipes, but for GUIs. There's a nice promotional video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E.
OpenDoc was a radically different paradigm for software development and distribution, and I think this was could have been an interesting contender against the dominance that Microsoft and Adobe enjoys in their markets. OpenDoc actually did ship, and there were some products made using OpenDoc, most notably Apple's Cyberdog browser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog).
Unfortunately, Apple was in dire straits in the mid-1990s. Windows 95 was a formidable challenger to Mac OS, and cheaper x86 PCs were viable alternatives to Macintosh hardware. Apple was an acquisition target; IBM and Apple almost merged, and there was also an attempt to merge Apple with Sun. Additionally, the Macintosh platform depended on the availability of software products like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, the very types of products that OpenDoc directly challenged. When Apple purchased NeXT in December 1996, Steve Jobs returned to Apple, and all work on OpenDoc ended not too long afterward, leading to this now-famous exchange during WWDC 1997 between Steve Jobs and an upset developer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o).
I don't believe that OpenDoc fits in with Apple's business strategy, even today, and while Microsoft offers component-based technologies that are similar to OpenDoc (OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, .NET), the Windows ecosystem is still dominated by monolithic applications.
I think it would have been cool had the FOSS community pursued component-based software. It would have been really cool to apt-get components from remote repositories and link them together, either using GUI tools, command-line tools, or programmatically to build custom solutions. Instead, we ended up with large, monolithic applications like LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, etc.
3. I am particularly intrigued by Symbolics Genera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)), an operating system designed for Symbolics Lisp machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics). In Genera, everything is a Lisp object. The interface is an interesting hybrid of early GUIs and the command line. To me, Genera could have been a very interesting substrate for building component-based software; in fact, it would have been far easier building OpenDoc on top of Common Lisp than on top of C or C++. Sadly, Symbolics' fortunes soured after the AI winter of the late 1980s/early 1990s, and while Genera was ported to other platforms such as the DEC Alpha and later the x86-64 via the creation of a Lisp machine emulator, it's extremely difficult for people to obtain a legal copy, and it was never made open source. The closest things to Genera we have are Xerox Interlisp, a competing operating system that was recently made open source, and open-source descendants of Smalltalk-80: Squeak, Pharo, and Cuis-Smalltalk.
4. Apple's "interregnum" years between 1985 and 1996 were filled with many intriguing projects that were either never commercialized, were cancelled before release, or did not make a splash in the marketplace. One of the most interesting projects during the era was Bauhaus, a Lisp operating system developed for the Newton platform. Mikel Evins, a regular poster here, describes it here (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-ba...). It would have been really cool to have a mass-market Lisp operating system, especially if it had the same support for ubiquitous dynamic objects like Symbolic Genera.
> It's unfortunate that there's been no proposals for database file systems for desktop operating systems since.
You can have one today if you want, although nobody knows about it.
Step 1. Install a local Oracle DB https://hub.docker.com/r/gvenzl/oracle-free#quick-start
Step 2. Set up DBFS https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2...
Step 3. Mount it via FUSE or NFS.
Step 4. Also access the underlying tables via SQL.
OpenDoc was mostly given to Taligent (the Apple and IBM joint venture) to develop. It was full-on OO: about 35 files for a minimal application, which meant that Erich Gamma had to build a whole new type of IDE which was unusable. He likely learned his lesson: it's pretty hard to define interfaces between unknown components without forcing each one to know about all the others.
MIME types for mail addressed much of the demand for pluggable data types.
> OpenDoc
For anyone interested in the Apple future that could have been, check out Jim Miller's articles, e.g. on LiveDoc (https://www.miramontes.com/writing/livedoc/index.php)
Re: obtaining a legal copy of Genera, as of 2023 Symbolics still existed as a corporate entity and they continued to sell x86-64 laptops with "Portable Genera 2.0". I bought one from them then, and occasionally see them listing some on Ebay. (This isn't intended as an advertisement or endorsement, just a statement. I think it's quite unfortunate that Symbolics's software hasn't been made freely available, since it's now really only of historical interest.)
I'm intrigued by Symbolics Genera too. It would have been interesting seeing further development of Lisp OS, especially when they would have had internet connection. Rewriting part of your OS and see the changes in real time? Maybe web apps could have been just software written in Lisp, downloaded on the machine and directly being executed in a safe environment on top of the Genera image. Big stuff.
Ceylon, JVM language, developed by Red Hat, now abandoned at Eclipse. Lost the race with Kotlin but proposed more than just syntax sugar over Java. Anonymous union types, comprehensions, proper module system...
I really liked Ceylon. It was competing against Groovy, Kotlin, and Scala which all seemed to come out around the same time.
https://www.kite.com for python
i first learned about it when i was working in an university group and had the task to transform a windowing algorithm already working on matlab to python. it felt like a modern linter and lsp with additional support through machine learning. i don't quite know why it got comparative small recognition, but perhaps enough to remain an avantgarde pioneering both python and machine learning support for further generations and wider applications.
Tiny Thief [0]. My kids loved that game.
Funny thing is, I still use it.
It might be _the_ fastest chat platform right now. Other things like Whatsapp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, Matrix/Element, Discord, Slack, Rocket Chat, Mattermost (and all the platforms that implement some kind of a chat by now), are all significantly slower. Sending messages takes longer, UI is slower, everything is slower somehow. The only exception that I know of being IRC.
It also allowed tree-shaped groups, you can nest as many as you like depending on your needs. It's so handy compared to the limited server/channel/thread logic elsewhere.
I will miss it dearly once they shut it down.
Take a look at FOKS. Made by the people who made Keybase.
Visix Vibe. It was a "WYSIWYG"-type visual programming environment for .. Java.
It had its own cross platform UI and other frameworks too, so you could "write once in Java, and ship on all the things" .. well theoretically.
It got abandoned too soon. But it was quite fun to build apps with it for a while, almost Delphi- like. I always wonder if it went open source, if things would have been different vis a vis Flash, etc.
The TUNES [1] operating system and programming language project. The reason for its failure are described perfectly on the archival website:
> TUNES started in 1992-95 as an operating system project, but was never clearly defined, and it succumbed to design-by-committee syndrome and gradually failed. Compared to typical OS projects it had very ambitious goals, which you may find interesting.
I had seen it before and I did find it interesting, as well as some other ideas from other systems (including Amiga, TRON, capability-based systems, etc), and I had some of my own ideas. (I had also thought of some similar ideas independently, but not all of them.) I do not completely agree with all of the ideas. Also, I think that a new computer hardware design can be made to support the new operating system (although emulation is also possible). (My own operating system idea currently does not have a name, and has some similar ideas from TUNES (and TRON, etc) and many differences.)
XenClient. I would really love to have some minimal OS HyperVisor running, and then you slap multiple OSes on top of that w/ easy full GUI switching via some hotkeys like Ctrl+Shift+F1. Additionaly, special drivers to virtualize Gfx and Sfx devices so every VM have full desktop capabilities and low latency.
Unfortunately, it died because its very niche and also they couldnt keep up with development of drivers for desktops.. This is even worse today...
The prismatic news reader. It solved recommendations before the rest, but died because news died, and presumably made little money. Their attributed recommendations model is worth emulation. I don't remember if they supported both positive- and negative feedback, but Google news recommendation today do support attributed negative feedback.
netflix falcor. the graphql hype killed a much better alternative for many usecases. there were only a few missing pieces and improvements such as a proxy based adapter layer for popular frontend frameworks. Im now the lonely last user hoping to find a way to reboot development
Google Glass. Thanks society.
People always fail to see something that is an inevitability. Humans lack foresight because they don't like change.
At least with a smartphone it’s pretty clear when someone is filming you. Google Glass was too much of an enabler for creeps.
nah, glass was impressive for a such a big org like google, but smartphones are popular because people use them like portable televisions. glanceable info and walking directions are more like an apple watch sized market, without the fashion element. meta is about to find out.
Wild that people would downvote your low stake personal opinion given as a direct ask from OP. I am 100% with you.
systemd-fleet, by the original CoreOS folks. https://github.com/coreos/fleet
I used this when it was brand new for a bit and it was so incredibly smooth and worked so well. It solved the problem of controlling systemd units remotely so well. I'm pretty sure the only reason it never actually took off was kubernetes and coreos's acquisition, however it actively solves the 'other half' of the k8s problem which is managing the state of the host itself.
Windows Phone.
I felt like the OS hit a stride around 8.1, with some markets sporting somewhat impressive marketshare, and the corporate politics of the whole situation and Nokia merger screwed it up badly.
I really think if Microsoft had doubled down and focused on getting flagship devices to all 4 flagship carriers it would have gone somewhere.
But I remember at the time having a dead end of hardware where competitors were putting out new phones on all 4 carriers every year. With Windows Phone you were hopping between carrier exclusives or getting nothing because all the new Nokia/Microsoft phones were low end or mid-range at best.
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
Gentoo file manager.
(Not the Linux distribution with the same name)
I have used it for years.
A two pane manager, it makes defining file associations, applications invoked by extensions and short cut buttons easy convenient.
Sadly it is abandonware now.
Slowly migrating to Double Commander now...
Technology Connections would like a word.
I bought my Betamax in the store having compared VHS to Beta side by side. When I say that Beta was better the main thing I'm referring to is the clarity during fast forwarding or reversing. When scanning through a video VHS was full of staticky noise, but Beta was clean. I don't recall that the quality during regular playback was particularly different, but I like to be able to see what's happening when I move around a video.
It seems like a clear winner. Of course, this was comparing one particular beta machine to one particular VHS machine.
Lotus Agenda, Ecco Pro and Chandler. 1980s AI-like human organization.
CORBA, it got hopelessly complex but it's full potential was never reached as the greed heads took it over.
killed more like it: but I miss the old Sun/Solaris/Sparc days.
make hardware expensive again!
Humane AI Pin. I think they launched 2 years too early and were too greedy with device pricing and subscription. Also if they focused as accessory for Android/iPhone they could reduce power usage and cost as well.
Their execution was of course bad but I think today current LLM models are better and faster and there is much more OSS models to reduce costs. Hardware though looked nice and pico projector interesting concept even though not the best executed.
Wine predates ReactOS. It was basically a FOSS duplicate of Sun's WABI.
I wrote a bunch of software in Borland Delphi, which ran in Windows, Wine, and ReactOS with no problems. Well, except for ReactOS' lack of printing support.
As long as you stay within the ECMA or published Windows APIs, everything runs fine in Wine and ReactOS. But Microsoft products are full of undocumented functions, as well as checks to see if they're running on real Windows. That goes back to the Windows 3.1 days, when 3.1 developers regularly used OS/2 instead of DOS, and Microsoft started adding patches to fail under OS/2 and DR-DOS. So all that has to be accounted for by Wine and ReactOS. A lot of third-party software uses undocumented functions as well, especially stuff written back during the days when computer magazines were a thing, and regularly published that kind of information. A lot of programmers found the lure of undocumented calls to be irresistible, and they wound up in all kinds of commercial applications where they really shouldn't have been.
In my experience anything that will load under Wine will run with no problems. ReactOS has some stability problems, but then the developers specifically call it "alpha" software. Despite that, I've put customers on ReactOS systems after verifying all their software ran on it. It gets them off the Microsoft upgrade treadmill. Sometimes there are compatibility problems and I fall back to Wine on Linux. Occasionally nothing will do but real Windows.
Hard disagree. The Humane AI Pin ad was a classic silicon valley ad that screamed B2VC and demonstrated nothing actually useful that couldn't be done with an all-in-one phone app (or even the ChatGPT app) and bluetooth earbuds that you already have.
Which reduces its innovation level to nothing more than a chest-mounted camera.
You want real B2C products that people would actually buy? Look at the Superbowl ads instead. Then watch the Humane ad again. It's laughable.
Zenbe, a cute and practical webmail interface. Bought and killed by Facebook way too soon!
All 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.
It's not so much "before its time" as already had its time cut short, but Microsoft OLE. The premise was that you could insert any document into any other document. Worked with Office programs, mspaint, and some third-party programs. For example at school we had an electricity simulation program called Crocodile Physics, and you could embed a simulation in a PowerPoint slide.
And the similarly named but completely separate OLE Automation, which let you script programs, across process boundaries. This is what let you write in VB(A): Set w = New Word.Application: Set e = new Excel.Application: Set doc = w.Open("foo.doc"); etc... - this was to Office (mostly) what shell scripting is to Linux, and enabled a lot of ad-hoc business process automation.
Yes. At least Apple Silicon kinda did it, and it's RISC too.
ello.co - what a fun and pretty social media website that was.
Ubiquity for Firefox/Chrome.
Hit, "ctrl + spacebar to search for anything with simple typed parameters for search" was a killer product in 2005 and now Microsoft finally got wise to copy it in 2025.
IPv6 - Everything was supposed to be flat, devices with just one unique IP addr.
Nope.
Plone CMS. When it appeared in 2001, there was nothing comparable. I'm not sure there still is. It was very flexible, allowed to build complex websites from components. Many ideas were pretty novel, at least I've never seen them in any web framework/CMS before. It still exists but nowhere as popular as it was in 2000-2010s.
Knowing when to say "no" to a project is an important skill.
One always must define a one sentence goal or purpose, before teams think about how to build something.
Cell processors, because most coders can't do parallelism well
Altera consumer FPGA, as they chose behavioral rather than declarative best practices... then the Intel merger... metastability in complex systems is hard, and most engineers can't do parallelism well...
World Wide Web, because social-media and Marketers
Dozens of personal projects, because sometimes things stop being fun. =3
Have to agree. This whole procedure of booking an appointment with a GP who then books you an appointment with a lab who then takes your blood is a huge waste of time. The technology is largely there for people to continuously monitor their health in real time, you see this in smartwatches as feature by feature slowly trickles in.
So you think the 'prime time' for American democracy was not in the past, nor the present, but will eventually happen in the future?
Or are you claiming that it died a long, long, time ago, and now is when we really need it, but it wasn't needed before?
Is American democracy a 'project'?
I am generally not one to engage in online political discussion, especially when it stems from such a glib and self serving post as GP but it is my thread and I am running out of time in the year to hit my quota (1).
Project seems a fitting description of American democracy and the project aspect is part of what makes it American. We the people are working towards that more perfect Union even if at times it does not seem it, the system mostly works but there is no straight line between where we started and that more perfect Union and whatever that more perfect union is, is not a constant. We do get lost along the way, take round about paths, sidestep, go backwards, etc, it is a requirement of the shared aim and sometimes a step backwards is actually a step forward. We can't achieve that more perfect Union, all we can do is keep trying and hope we are more or less going in the correct general direction.
As long as American democracy keeps evolving it is alive and has held up better than one would expect. For at least a century the country has been run by parties that supposedly want to kill American democracy, strangle it with their ideology and defeat the enemies of American democracy which just happen to be their political rivals; we would live in a utopia if it was not for <political party>. But they keep failing and the project continues on.
Founder perspective: “avoid patents by staying 20 years behind” is the tragedy. I published a 2-page CC0 initiative that splits protection into two layers: • GLOBAL layer — fast, low-friction recognition for non-strategic inventions • LOCAL-STRATEGIC layer — conventional national control for sensitive tech Goal: cut admin drag/time-to-market while keeping sovereignty intact.
Brief (CC0): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17305774 Curious: would this structure have saved any of the projects mentioned here?
Apple’s scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked.
It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread use today and I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it instead of knee-jerk outrage. But congrats, I guess. All the cloud hosting systems scan what they want anyway, and the one that was actually designed with privacy in mind got screamed out of existence by people who didn’t care to learn the first thing about it.
Good riddance to a system that would have provided precedent for client-side scanning for arbitrary other things, as well as likely false positives.
> I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it
I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. They would never have changed their minds, so there's no grounds for a debate.
We need to just keep making it clear the answer is "no", and hopefully strengthen that to "no, and perhaps the massive smoking crater that used to be your political career will serve as a warning to the next person who tries".
> from the perspective of what surveillance policies it would have (and very possibly did) inspire/set precedent for…
I can’t think of a single thing that’s come along since that is even remotely similar. What are you thinking of?
I think it’s actually a horrible system to implement if you want to spy on people. That’s the point of it! If you wanted to spy on people, there are already loads of systems that exist which don’t intentionally make it difficult to do so. Why would you not use one of those models instead? Why would you take inspiration from this one in particular?
I don’t think you can accurately describe it as client-side scanning and false positives were not likely. Depending upon how you view it, false positives were either extremely unlikely, or 100% guaranteed for practically everybody. And if you think the latter part is a problem, please read up on it!
> I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. They would never have changed their minds, so there's no grounds for a debate.
Right, well I wanted a debate. And Apple changed their minds. So how is it reminding you of that? Neither of those things apply here.
Forgot about the concept of bugs have we? How about making Apple vulnerable to demands from every government where they do business?
No thanks. I'll take a hammer to any device in my vicinity that implements police scanning.
Do you have any phones without spyware?
I believe my retro Nokia phones s60/s90 does not have any spyware. I believe earlier Nokia models like s40 or monochrome does not even have an ability to spy on me (but RMS considers triangulation as spyware). I don't believe any products from the duopoly without even root access are free from all kinds of vendor's rootkits.
Was the backlash actually what ended this project? As much as I'd like to pat myself on the back, there must've been another reason.
> The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked.
But not very different to how it was actually going to work, as you say:
> If you change parts of it, sure.
Now try to reason your way out of the obvious "parts of it will definitely change" knee-jerk.
I’m not sure I’m understanding you.
Apple designed a system. People guessed at what it did. Their guesses were way off the mark. This poisoned all rational discussion on the topic. If you imagine a system that works differently to Apple’s system, you can complain about that imaginary system all you want, but it won’t be meaningful, it’s just noise.
OS/2 my beloved.