[HN Gopher] Museum of Failure
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Museum of Failure
Author : j0hax
Score : 124 points
Date : 2022-10-28 11:19 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (museumoffailure.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (museumoffailure.com)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Ironicaly, the museum of failure fails to load for me.
| memorable wrote:
| It loads for me, but it took like at least 20 seconds
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| They should add themselves to the catalogue.
| lsbehe wrote:
| I have to reload every page multiple times until it loads. Can we
| please stop having static websites rely on 65 (???) scripts.
| playingalong wrote:
| How do you demonstrate failure then?
| status200 wrote:
| I was thinking that this website should add itself to the list
| since it is so frustrating to use...
| anaganisk wrote:
| But how else can the bing tech can show you ads about,
| DeLorean, Coke II or google glass.
| fbn79 wrote:
| I dont think Google Glass can be seen as failure. The product is
| still on market, it only has changed the target audience.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| What is their market now?
| thih9 wrote:
| Why not both? It ended up being a success on the enterprise
| market while being a failure on the regular consumer market.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Wasn't it JPL at NASA that also kept some sort 'mistakes were
| made' database in order to prevent recidivating on the same
| failure?
| kabdib wrote:
| Proud to have worked on one of the failures in this exhibit :-)
|
| I also had a number of the products I've worked on land in the
| Weird Stuff warehouse (and, oddly, another surplus hardware
| warehouse near Seattle).
|
| Badge of honor :-)
| jvalencia wrote:
| I went to the link and it didn't load for me. I figured it was
| just a funny joke, but then I realized other people saw things.
| Missed opportunity :-D
| will5421 wrote:
| Is the joke that the page won't load?
| Steltek wrote:
| Oh man, the Nokia NGage! I still remember the "taco talking"
| mockery (back when people used phones to make calls). Symbian OS
| was so much better than the competition. Apps and games were
| feasible, compared to the j2me wasteland. I remember it for not
| being a too far fetched idea as I playing with the software on my
| S60 device more than making calls.
|
| https://museumoffailure.com/nokia/
| justintoon wrote:
| I believe the official term was "sidetalkin'"
| https://sidetalking.com
| Cyberdog wrote:
| I found a picture of myself on that site. I don't remember
| taking it and I don't remember sending it to this site, but
| apparently I did both of those things at one point in my
| life. How bizarre.
|
| https://sidetalking.com/page-1.html - In the red shirt with
| the game.com.
| impalallama wrote:
| Oh looks like this came to where I live last year. Shame I didn't
| hear about it then.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Maybe the site could add its own implementation into itself. It's
| totally broken for me.
| divbzero wrote:
| Along the same vein, several academic journals allow for the
| publication of negative results:
|
| 1. _Positively Negative_ (PLOS One)
|
| 2. _The Missing Pieces_ (PLOS One)
|
| 3. _The All Results Journals_
|
| 4. _ACS Omega_
|
| 5. _F1000Research_
|
| 6. _PeerJ_
|
| 7. _Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine_
|
| 8. _Journal of Negative Results in Ecology and Evolutionary
| Biology_
|
| 9. _Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis_
|
| 10. _Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results_
|
| https://www.enago.com/academy/top-10-journals-publish-negati...
| jjulius wrote:
| What are the years listed below the items on the home page
| supposed to denote? The DeLorean dates are "1989-1990", but it
| was sold, and production ended, in the early 80's.
|
| There are symbols next to each date, but I can't find their
| meanings anywhere on the website.
| mikestew wrote:
| That was about the point at which I found something else to do
| with my I-don't-want-to-work time: _Back to the Future_ (in
| which a DeLorean play a prominent role) was released in 1985.
| The car itself: 1981. Sooooo, what do those dates signify?
|
| Then the site claims New Coke/Coke II came out in 1981. Umm,
| try 1985. Olestra? Nope, try again (I'll leave the lookup as an
| exercise). I know all of these things are wrong at a glance
| because...well, I'm old, and for example I know that New Coke
| didn't come out when I was in high school because I was married
| to my ex-wife at the time, and she hated it. And I saw _Back to
| the Future_ at the cinema. I was _there_ , man.
|
| So I don't know what those dates are supposed to signify.
| [deleted]
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| I love the irony that the site displays a blank white screen for
| me. Well done!
| gw99 wrote:
| I would be happy to produce something that ended up in there. At
| least it would serve an educational purpose :)
| ch215 wrote:
| This reminds me of the 'Library of Mistakes' in Edinburgh, a free
| public library which promotes the study of financial history.
|
| https://www.libraryofmistakes.com/
| taneq wrote:
| I hope they have a red hot section on the last 20 years because
| wow.
| bullen wrote:
| I had an N-Gage, the first phone I talked on in stereo using
| headphones (obviously).
|
| It was probably the best portable device I ever had.
|
| Musicplayer, console, stereo phone!!!
|
| So much ahead of it's time it even makes a modern "smart" phones
| look wrong.
|
| You could change battery yourself without tools.
|
| Real buttons! How many misclicks do we count per day, probably a
| couple of billion?
| dorfsmay wrote:
| When you stereo, do you mean different sounds for each ear? Or
| just having the same sound on each ear?
|
| Wouldn't the former require two microphes?
| eCa wrote:
| Not an invention, but one of my favourite failures is
| Shackleton's antarctic expedition[1], which among the many trials
| includes what must be one of the greatest navigational feats in
| history: 1300km in an open boat across the Antarctic Ocean after
| a year being stuck in the ice.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Trans-
| Antarctic_Exped...
| doitLP wrote:
| Bligh's open boat voyage[1] after the mutiny on the Bounty has
| them beat at 6400km, but the Shackleton expedition certainly
| had to deal with much more adverse conditions.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty#Bligh's...
| thejackgoode wrote:
| My favorite place of this sort is Vasa museum in Stockholm
|
| It hosts a huge 70m warship that sank in 1628 on her maiden
| voyage 1.5 km into it. Highly recommended to visit.
|
| https://www.vasamuseet.se/en
| chmod775 wrote:
| I have a fond childhood memory of going to a place that looked
| much like that.
|
| After asking my parents it turns out we went there when I was
| 6.
|
| Since the memory stuck with me for almost twenty-two years, I
| can highly recommend it!
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Visited last weekend. Interesting for sure. Funny to see how many
| times and for how long we've been trying to do VR!
|
| Some of the "failures" were unfair IMO, like minitel and Block
| Buster: It's like saying using wind sails on ships was a failure
| because it was replaced by steam engines.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the case of Blockbuster, it's reasonable to argue that they
| should have at least taken advantage of their brand (and
| relationships) to get into the DVD rental by mail business
| which would have, relatively speaking, not been a big stretch.
| Though phasing _out_ retail would have been disruptive.
|
| Of course, streaming was a whole different game. (As would be
| original content.) And it's not like Netflix is looking
| especially robust at the moment.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Blockbuster had a chance to buy Netflix in the early 2000's
| for $50,000,000.
|
| I bet it spent a while regretting not making that purchase,
| but then again, if they had Netflix may have become a passing
| fad and never branched out into the online streaming market.
|
| https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/netflix-blockbuster-
| meeting...
| ghaff wrote:
| I had forgotten that. Yes. I suspect they'd have done the
| DVD by mail thing but then would have stagnated however
| many years later.
| sublinear wrote:
| I think it's highly unlikely Blockbuster was ever going to
| build and maintain a streaming service if they had
| purchased Netflix.
| msrenee wrote:
| I swear Blockbuster tried to do a DVD by mail thing. It just
| never got popular.
| ridgered4 wrote:
| Yeah, they definitely did something like this. I recall you
| could return the DVDs to their stores to speed up the
| turnaround. And they eventually started a short price war
| with Netflix. But IIRC they had a lot of debt to begin with
| and combined with much higher overheard from all the stores
| it ended predictably.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Would you trust them to get DVDs by mail? At least my model
| of them was that they would do anything to scam me out of
| late fees.
| esotericimpl wrote:
| beezlewax wrote:
| Pretty sure wind sails are going to be making a comeback soon.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Traditional sails are very labor intensive, I doubt they will
| ever make economic sense again. They also take a lot of space
| that most ships don't have.
|
| The two variations that might go somewhere are kites to save
| maybe 10% of fuel [1], or some variation of rotor sails [2]
| on tankers or bulk carriers that have the unobstructed deck
| space.
|
| 1: https://future.hamburg/index.php/en/artikel/skysails-
| marine-...
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship
| speed_spread wrote:
| It might happen when rich countries start imposing tariffs
| on cargo ships using bunker fuel. Burning that stuff is
| utterly terrible but it's cheap so hey.
| ridgered4 wrote:
| IIRC even after shipping went pretty much whole hog on fossil
| fuel transport there were some odd duck ships called
| windjammers, made with modern components like steel hulls and
| masts but still powered by sail. For awhile they filled a
| niche of transporting some types of non-time sensitive goods
| for a very low cost.
| mcculley wrote:
| I have been seeing this prediction for a while. What makes
| you so confident?
| manholio wrote:
| VR is just the most recent incarnation of the "3D vision"
| gimmick every generation will rediscovered and then abandon. We
| had multiple waves of this fad, starting with the stereoscopic
| novelty postcards of the 19th century, the many 3D cinema
| revivals (the Avatar craze even saw the rise of ludicrous 3D
| TVs), and now Metaverse and its ilk.
|
| It always fails because, once the novelty of the effect wears
| off, people realize it's basically pointless. The extra
| information 3D brings is not worth the logistic cost. So they
| revert to regular 2D cinema, classic virtual worlds like
| MMORPGs etc. which are much more comfortable to experience and
| deliver the same basic product.
| creeble wrote:
| I think this is a pretty good summary, but misses one key
| point: people don't like wearing something that blocks their
| natural vision for very long. Some can't even do it for a few
| minutes. It's not like any other form of technology in that
| way. Even 3D TVs didn't have this "feature".
|
| Gamers might be able to do it all day, and it will probably
| always have that market. But as a replacement for the flip-
| open or pull-out-of-your-pocket screen, never gonna happen.
| Sorry Zuck.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| You say "it always fails", but also it fails because "extra
| 3d information is not worth the logistic cost".
|
| Couldn't you conceive of a future where the "logistic cost"
| drops so incredibly low, that the cost is less than the
| benefit of the extra information?
| manholio wrote:
| As I said above, true holographic digital screens could
| make 3D seamless and ubiquitous. At current computing
| trends, that appears at least a number of decades away from
| consumer gear.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| For instance, if the soft-AI systems like KoboldAI and
| StableDiffusion were re-trained to handle the conversion of
| 2d media into 3d media and guided in the process by an
| appropriately talented director with a tech team and
| artists to support it, an entire mediacentric cottage
| industry could erupt just with managing the licenses to
| convert old movies into explorable 3d interactive
| adventures.
|
| How cool would it be to have a chat with Humphrey Bogart in
| Casablanca, or to make a mad dive to save Mufasa at the
| last second and see how The Lion King would play out
| without his death as a motivating factor? If you could do
| all of that and more in a VR Cineplex it would probably be
| more entertaining than Disneyland and available at every
| Mall in America.
|
| Honestly, that's probably a trillion+ dollar idea, but
| implementing it would need an insane amount of money, time,
| skill, processing, and resources plus dozens of large
| egotistical companies working together.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Alternatively, we try again and again because there's a lot
| of promise if we get it right, but so far the technology just
| isn't there for anything sustainable beyond the novelty
| factor.
|
| This round we got far enough that there are some industry use
| cases for AR, which shares 99% of its tech with VR. Maybe
| that will funnel enough money into development to break out
| of the hype cycle into something sustainable.
| manholio wrote:
| I think stereoscopic viewing is fundamentally a bad idea
| that holds little promise - it's not really 3D, but a
| parlor trick that gives confusing depth information, the
| eye must focus at the screen even if the scene is very
| close or very far. It's too annoying and tiring as a
| sustainable consumer technology; maybe tools only
| professionals are required to use, ex. remote surgery gear,
| with pros and cons well understood.
|
| This could change if holographic digital screens become
| practical, allowing, for example, multiple people in a room
| to see a real 3D scene, each from a different angle without
| any head gear.
| chowells wrote:
| There are some attempts at making light field displays.
| Those seem like they would address this, but it's a lot
| of engineering to get from where they are now to a useful
| head-mounted display.
| ahelwer wrote:
| >the eye must focus at the screen even if the scene is
| very close or very far
|
| This is just literally untrue. Your eyes focus "into" the
| VR scene, not at the screens one inch from your eye.
| neuralRiot wrote:
| But you cannot focus where you want, so it's not 3d but
| layered 2d. In a 3d emulated image you cannot focus on a
| background object and even if you could the
| interpupillary distance would be the same and so the
| focusing one. Our image processing in the brain uses such
| information to calculate, that's why you can approximate
| the dimension of an object and distances in real life but
| not in a picture even if it is a 3d one.
| salmo wrote:
| I love this idea. So many failures follow the "first is not
| best", then many failed business tales.
|
| But most of these are the expected and the analysis is shallow.
| Snark added is unnecessary.
|
| Many are fad products or acknowledged R&D experiments that I
| wouldn't necessarily call "failures."
|
| I expected more when having to give my email. A categorized page
| of bullets with Wikipedia links would be more useful. The details
| and references would be higher quality.
|
| Cool idea, just needs more development and research to provide
| real value.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Indeed. An entertaining idea in the abstract, perhaps, but this
| is just weak sensationalism and poor execution. I don't see
| anything substantive that explains how something failed.
| Instead of taking the right attitude of discovering where
| something ostensibly went wrong, it seems to relish in
| dismissive ridicule in the style of FailArmy.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| I think you nailed it.
|
| The hook is "failure is how you succeed" but they show dead
| end products with perfunctory blurbs and facile
| presentations.
|
| I'd've expected these, yes, but also more substantive "failed
| 'til I didn't" exhibits such as representations of the
| hundred+ prototypes that James Dyson purported to have made
| before finally figuring out the bagless vacuum.
|
| Or... photos of Abraham Lincoln and a long, long, long list
| of his failed attempts to progress before finding himself in
| the presidency.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| This reminds me of an amazing place I stumbled upon while
| traveling around Croatia: The Museum of Broken Relationships.
|
| https://brokenships.com/
|
| It's full of tokens and mementos, both happy and sad, along with
| stories of relationships that have ended for a variety of
| different reasons.
| bombolo wrote:
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(page generated 2022-10-28 23:01 UTC)