Google never made it easy to suck up data from the web and throw it on their spreadsheets.

Yahoo Pipes was much better, and other smaller software firms that went out of business.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

Google only does search & ads.

Even programming languages: they hired Rob Pike. The man couldn't get the first one right (C), and that's supposed to be cutting-edge?!

Menawhile, Facebook is using D internally, and Microsoft rolled out F#...Google is mentally broken. Too many Java programmers at the GOOG - that's what happens: a bunch of dead-ends.

Yeah, Maps works...Except that the Maps case is just like their online documents: someone made a better version

So, just like we use Evernote instead of Docs, Waze does a heck of a better job making me skip traffic jams to get home.

Yet ANOTHER thing Google doesn't do better than the competition...

I say cut out the sushi chefs out there on the GOOG's dependencies.

Make mutherfuckers eat pizza!

In between MacOS and Windows 8, I don't think the average user of 2014 wants a broken, lame OS. If they did, they'd all be cool using some Linux distro (as for the "linux is just the kernel blah-blah-blah" - shove it...)

ChromeOS...What a joke.

The point we're debating, and that you seem to miss, is: why make Docs if it's a lame ass piece of shit that does half of what OpenOffice does even though you stole their code?
Remember how they were gonna kill Microsoft Office.
Well, lo and behold, there's Office 365 for you.
What. The. Fuck. Google.

Yeah, what's the point? Just use Drive for storage. Or maybe not even that.
Right now, millions of XP machines are getting warnings that Real Soon Now Google is not gonna support their browsing experience. So, no Docs or Drive there...
So, what you see is Google not making the internet something that Just Works. Aren't they supposed to be the huge software giant that did things differently? Oh, wait, that's Apple. What Google is hellbent on doing is dominating the browser platform. We're back to 1997. Your browser may not work.
Wow, way to go for the GOOG.
Maybe they're so out there in the future, with their Google glasses, that I just don't care anymore.
Outside search, they haven't done a single thing right.

Exactly.
How the fuck can you be such a software giant, use Open Office internally, and *still* SUCK SO MUCH?
Is Google - it begs the question - seriously BROKE? Is it too big to fail - and yet fail it does...
Is Google just a huge fucking A/B testing experiment (outside search)? It sure looks like it sometimes.
In my mind, it has created a reputation of being unreliable. Any product you look at, outside search, looks like A/B testing in the wild. Just look at their Android approach. They've released really buggy shit out there. Users who can't afford Apple are in for some deep shit user experience.
Here's a story ripe for journalists specializing in IT... Does Google even know where they want to go?

Dear Google --

You are your worst enemy.
Please, just stop.
First, a purported Microsoft Office-killer. Then, you lost space to Evernote. Oh. My. God. How can it be that small software houses beat you to the online document race?
You periodically either shoot yourself on the foot, or you pull features and leave your user/programmers feeling you're not reliable. Because you're not.
You have a serious lack of direction. Reconsider your ways.
Nothing you do outside search works. Or barely works.
And nobody uses Google+. Face it.
Please, just stop.

Imagine a world free of public health. Imagine a world where the free asshole thinks that when the public health authority demands you take a vaccine, your liberty is being encroached upon. So imagine a world where no public health authority exists. Imagine a world where another free, unvaccinated asshole sneezes at your face, and imagine that in that free world, you simply died, because you were all free to do as you like, such as deciding not to spend your money on vaccination. Except, you're an ignorant fuck who knew diddly-shit about vaccines or epidemics, so you become a dead free man. That's real smart.

In general terms, there's no free lunch. When you mentioned "free", you probably meant "public health". And, just like the army knows best sometimes, the medical authority knows best sometimes because that's what they do: they study and take care of the health of large populations.

Fear not. The most cost effective model if the one based on general practice family medicine. It achieves an 85% resolution rate, with the other 15% of patients being referred to secondary and tertiary health centers. That is the most cost-effective model in the world and even private companies are slowly gearing towards that. All large effective public health systems in the world work like that. Slowly but surely the US will move towards something more like the British or Canadian systems (to give examples you can relate to).

It's either that, or systems brake due to increasing costs. It's cool to have a super-robot to perform surgery on you. Better yet, take preventive steps so you won't need the super-robot surgery. You will likely benefit from a better quality of life, too.

There will be some benefits in selection of oncology protocols in the short term, but knowing cancer genomics does not actually lead to new chemotherapeutic agents except in the long term

What about vaccines? Any informed physician that looks at the data can explain to you that bioinformatics has contributed close to nothing in terms of new vaccines. Why is that?

With regards to cancer genomics, there are a bunch of questions that arise from potential treatment that the pharmacogenomics peddlers never mention: how will you conduct trials? Will you promote small clinical trials, with chemo agents that represent small molecular variations? How will you manufacture such molecular variants? What would they cost? When you finally give them to humans, how will you monitor the clinical trials? Will you have a large enough sample (in the statistical sense)? What's the control? BTW, when I mentioned peddlers, I mention peddlers. I don't want to generalize.

The one area where whole exome sequencing and related technologies are likely to change care in a meaningful way is pediatrics and fetal medicine where there are tons of rare, fatal things due to rare point mutations.

I beg to disagree. When you have very rare diseases, you get extremely low frequencies. That means not one doctor will get to specialize or gain experience in such rare diseases. Every time the disease pops up, it will be a novelty for the doctor. What you need, what we need in Medicine is a way to keep extremely long term databases. In this way, data can be accumulated and sifted, and patterns that arise here and there throughout decades, that could be mined. The deployment of these databases would revolutionize the care of patients burdened with extremely rare diseases. It's of little use detecting the condition if you don't know how to care for the patient.

Have any of you read A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

In this book, the idea of databases spanning centuries is part of a central plot in the story.

If you're spending thousands of dollars for genetic testing for a $4 a month drug like warfarin, you're doing it way wrong. It's like the proverbial million dollar cure for the common cold.

Right on, brother, right on!

Do these guys even know the algorithms for warfarin dose adjustment real doctors use for their real patients?

When you think of a test, you think of them in terms of a large scale. This is thinking in terms of public health (a term unfamiliar to the large American public, but one whose meaning all doctors understand). It means you gotta factor in things like cost-effectiveness. I mean, for a test to cost thousands of dollars, when we have simple, tried-and-true algorithms for warfarin dose adjustment is insanely stupid.

This is a yet another prime example of stupid research, a prime example of not having a clue about what's relevant in clinical medicine!

As we know, science has a lot more to do with the sociology of research than we like to think (say hello to Alan Sokal). Bioinformatics has fallen short of its lofty initial goals because it became a prime example of what nefarious effects the struggle for publication can cause, and also of the alienation of a whole field of scientists by another field of...scientists (?)

The failures of Bioinformatics have to do with it becoming a gold mine for publication-hungry CS PhDs who - if you're familiar with some of the field's exploding literature in the early 00s (or "noughties" for some) - knew really close to nothing about the biology of what they were researching, and produced pile after pile of useless algorithms and "data driven discoveries" far removed from biological or clinical phenomena. A lot of these PhDs seemed to assume the medical and biological professionals had little to contribute, since they were utterly incapable of doing Math. That is how you got things like a room full of Mathematicians and Physicists discussing how to model viral activity, without a single real Biologist specialist in the room (I am not making this up).

So, the field quickly became inundated with research whose only sole purpose was carving out a name in the publication game for Physics and Computer Science majors who had failed to land a position in their original field. Naturally, real doctors and biologists looked at the sometimes infantile-minded simplifications (of Immunology, Metabolism, brain electric activity, genomic modelling, etc.) and sometimes downright asinine assumptions and just walked away. The literature become a huge pile of impenetrable research, to the delight of the graph algorithm researcher (to name one of these sub-fields), but completely alienated from bench biology. Since the clinical phenomena became an excuse for abstraction while the field exploded with new journals, I guess the real doctors and biologists continued on with their research, largely unimpressed with Bioinformatics. They could play their publication game all they liked, while doctors and biologist would continue doing their Real World research. It's a tale from the history of science that needs to be written, because it amounts to almost a decade of high hopes and lost expectations.

And all I mentioned can probably be researched, too. If you look at the papers and their impact, what do you see? How much of that is relevant for research that came later? What's the quantity of dead-end "data driven research"? I'm not thinking about the seminal algorithms, of course, but the spike of...noise that came later...

And to say nothing of the lack of real paradigmatic change in the way the Computer Science was done, with systems full of state, and the lack of theory for real concurrent biological systems. Which is nothing but a reflection of the poor state of the field of Computer Science for such systems. Likewise, the field seemed to approach things with brute force: throw more computing power at it, and metabolic networks will be solved, protein-folding will be solved. Seems like all that C++ and clock cycles weren't really cost-effective...ya think?

Yes, absolutely, let's take the "mystique" out of coding.

Right now, I have software (written in Forth - because it's the ultimate language for DSL, I found), deployed for 6.000 patients that we use everyday, to churn out patient's prescriptions. In our public health system, patients get their free medicines for diabetes, hypertension, depression, hypothyroidism, asthma, etc (whatever is the "continuous" medicines the municipality pays for). They have a legal right to get them renovated. Doctors used to go crazy with renovating them by hand. It's no fun when you care for, say, 900 people with hypertension. Of course, this is not the U.S. (it's Brazil).

Why did I write in in Forth? Because it was so fast to write a mini-DSL. I could not even believe it. I got that for *free*, in Forth - I got a free "readline", a free parser, strings whatever size they come (Forth strings are better and safer than C's), a database for free, etc. Concatenative stack-oriented programming is very restrictive. If your stack is wrong, the Forth compilers will bork right back at you. Since you' re doing concatenative programming, it's basically like a functional programming paradigm: you fit Lego blocks of code on other Lego blocks. Since you must do a lot of stack-testing, unit testing is immediate and obligatory, instead of a "practice" or "discipline" that you must incorporate to your workflow. If your stack ain't right, you break things now, so you know pretty soon if your code is ok or not. And keeping track of the stack might become burdensome, so you automatically start refactoring code (everybody's heard of Leo Brodie's refactoring masterpiece Thinking Forth, right?). You keep it simple. Basically, everything I read about how awesome Forth is, is true. As a matter of fact, I first got turned on to Forth when I saw a guy who'd written his very own CAD software (which blew my mind). When I asked him what language he'd written it in, he said: "Forth, because you can go from very low level (in his case - graphic primitives directly on the screen - no OpenGL, etc.) to a very abstract high level (Forth words that concatenate in a DSL)". I understand now that it wasn't so much that he was a genius (although he did have a degree from MIT...), but that he got the tools he needed (after all, you can get projective geometry "recipes" from a book).

Initially, the software was in C (C and Forth can be deployed to any old trashy piece of hardware around, right? - this might actually be relevant, if you're financially constrained - which I don't expect anyone form a rich country to really understand), but then pointer indirection, parsing, data structures, file I/O in C, etc., just bored me out of my mind. Obviously, I understand people feel smart when they can write C-oid code with pointers to pointers but I found that to be stupid. This has to do with the fact that I met better languages (Common Lisp, for instance), before I met C, so I stand largely nonplused whenever I see someone claiming to perform advanced magic in, say, Java. Really? Java is a broken Smalltalk semantics with a C-oid syntax.

Having no strings attached (meaning: no managers breathing down my neck, me being a physician), I decided to scratch the C code and just go all Forth (because I actually think that Forth, Smalltalk, ML(s) and Lisp(s) are the best languages out there). I used win32forth because it's public-domain, but the price for Forth compilers are very cheap (and just go look at the benchmarks...) and I might change to a proprietary Forth (better documentation would be the reason, and support). The code is ANS-Forth, 99% (and the part that isn't is easily changed) - by which I mean "portable".

Although we're already deploying it in Real Life, I keep perfecting it (addicted to Forth). Right now, I',m fiddling with the Forth black magic - turn the compiler on, or off, etc. Stuff you really can't do in C/C++/Java without a huge amount of tools. Only in Lisp. But Forth is kinda of easier than Lisp, actually, I found (the model is simpler - throw things on the stack, then consume the stack). As a matter of fact, I barely know Forth. I recommend reading the tutorials out there and the Forth books from Forth, Inc (Forth Application Techniques and the Forth Programmer's Reference).

Forth (and other "weird" languages) force you to re-think your problems. Do you really need object-orientation, string-based stuff, regexes, etc? Maybe not... Maybe you have a hammer, and you think everything is a nail...Maybe u r doin' it rong.

I taught the doctors to alter key files in Forth. Like "in the old days", they don't *exactly* know they're coding. It doesn't matter *at all*. All they care is that they can customize the software, and feed the database with the mini-language I developed that's so intuitive for them. Actually, I did it for me, but then other colleagues became interested. I had to do this, since the contract for the EMR hasn't come through yet ;-) When the purchased software finally arrives, it'll probably suck compared to my little Forthy thing - it'll probably have no DSL for prescriptions. Printing is delegated to more competent software, such as office packages.

Here's an example of the DSL we use. For doctors, it's very intuitive - as a matter of fact, I just show them snippets of code in the database, like the one bellow, and they immediately get it:

UC6
hctz25 30cp 1cpm
simva20 30cp 1cpn
L\D

This expands to (may seem strange, I don't know how doctors prescribe in the US):

[ Patient's name goes here]
Internal use - continuous - 6 months

Hydrochlorothiazide 25mg ----------- 30 pills
Take 1 (one) pill VO* 1x/morning

Simvastatin 20mg -------------------- 30 pills
Take 1 (one) pill VO* at night (before bed)

[ Town, date ]

*[VO = per oris. i.e, orally]

So, if I, a physician, can code in Forth to solve my problem, why shouldn'teveryone? I think everybody should learn to code, as it helps people with real problems. That's what computers are for: for coding .