We're talking about DYI enthusiasts assembling their own desktops from parts. If you're against enthusiasts building their own PCs, then I don't understand what you're doing on Slashdot.

I'm surprised no one mentioned the disgusting interface Facebook has. It really seems badly made and unsophisticated. There are virtues in simplicity, but Facebook's take on interface is pauperism.

I really think it's sloppy and it really is something that has not had much thought put into it *at all*. I guess some people remain non-plused.

Not to mentioned the other stuff commonly mentioned: walled garden, unethical (experimenting with user's mood? WTF?), huge time waster (do I *really* have to pay attention to what 200 people are doing?).

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!