1,144 karma · joined December 28, 2012
Yes, this has been bugging me too. At work, I recently upgraded to a Dell Precision running Ubuntu 20.04 and this has been happening quite frequently (a bit less since a firmware upgrade). Strangely this was never an issue on my previous Dell Latitude running the same.
Didn't Firefox recently announce they're discontinuing PWA features?
I had friends of MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, GTalk and for a very limited time ICQ (Actually it was the same guys on all networks :) ). There weren't any network effort, people were willing to try out different IMs for their uniqueness.
Lots of companies were trying to produce integrated chat clients - Pidgin, Meebo, Trillian, Digsby and a whole lot of guys on Mobile targeting Symbian OS (could recollect only Nimbuzz though.) I loved Digsby because it acted as a POP client too.
I even worked for a company that forked Ignite Realtime Spark and tried adding Gtalk and MSN support. When I was freelancing one guy asked me to clone meebo for $500 .. and I accepted :facepalm.
Hopefully Beeper will survive.
Is there any open source project that one can study to understand how to code like this?
Yahoo was hugely popular when Google launched. Orkut and MySpace were very popular when Facebook launched. There were many popular messaging services when Whatsapp launched.
In fact I think just digging out something from the Google graveyard would be a good idea. 4-5 million users might be a pittance for Google but most of us would be more than happy to have even half of that customer base.
Say you want to start a lending library, you hire one person and stock 25 books. The stock is small and one person can easily remember all of them so the employee just piles them up in a corner. If a customer wants fiction or literature or whatever, the employee could easily look up the pile and pull it out.
Over time the books grows from 25 to 50, the stocks still small and there's just one employee so they are all just added to the pile.
50 grows to 150, you hire one more. The old guy feels that since there are two of them one can lookup the first 75 while the other can search the next 75 and organizing would a waste of time and space.
When you hit 500 books the debt starts to kick in but again you try to solve it by hiring more people. Some of the new hires want to categorize the books into proper racks but that would mean shutting shop for few days and not adding any new books. This is unacceptable to a non technical manager so things continue to be the old way.
By the time you hit 1000 books some of the employees are fed up with the time consuming work and quit, the replacements have no clue what is where. Most of the customers were served purely based on the muscle memory of the old employees and now that they have gone the business starts to crumble.
I worked as an offshore employee for E*Trade back in 2010 - 2012. Their desktop app for HFT was written in Java Swing and their web client too was running on the JVM but the 'services' layer the one that interacted with the database was written in C++.
Four years ago heard that they were re-writing the desktop app in JavaFX.
A $149 IntelliJ licence costs $176 including taxes + there is a 3.5% processing and currency conversion charges imposed by by credit card. Converting to INR I may have to shell out Rs. 3.5k to 4k extra which has dissuaded me going for an All Products Pack and settle for the Ultimate license.
And AFAIK Hathway (another ISP in India) too tried something like this but didn't succeed and they went back to traditional fibre.
I don't know anything about the tech but it seems like it is not so easy and I do hope Wifi Dabba succeeds.
I wonder what will happen to Google and Facebook in the next twenty years.