dmbass

Yes and the chef should consider adding mangos during mango season.

Do you know how many things sucked until we had the knowledge and/or technology to make them better? A lot, I reckon.

It wouldn't be unreasonable to complain that cars sucked because there was no place to safely put hot coffee whether I knew a solution was to put 50 cup holders in the car or not.

Using the actual Wikipedia search involves an extra step where I google for "wikipedia". I can skip this step if I just google for the thing I want directly on Google.

I think that says more about how good Google is than how bad Wikipedia is (although I do agree that the Wikipedia results page needs work).

The headline for this article is wrong. The numbers include dumbphones as well as smartphones.

Can someone explain why they would choose a name like Putty which is already a well established and completely different software?

The image in that link appears to be broken.

I thought you were referring to the launcher style in general as "bad design," not in the context of an in-app sub-launcher which is why it made no sense to me.

If you scroll down, you will see links to iOS and Android apps.

"it's explicitly regarded as bad UI design by Apple"

I find that hard to believe considering that launcher concept is implemented by Apple in the iOS home screen.

I believe that would be someone who emails a lot of different people that they are not familiar with but wants to appear familiar with the recipient's activity on twitter while using the Gmail web client.

Maybe they filter apps by devices connected to your account that can install it?

Well it did mentioned that "'Design' is now at Google" and the designs are being unified. All Google products are being +ified.

In the new Gmail there is a huge amount of unused space, even in the "Dense" view. This results in less emails on the screen at one time in the Inbox (I use Priority Inbox so maybe it works great in regular mode, but it should work in both). The might have been trying to avoid information overload but they achieved information underload.

Now the compose and search buttons are enormous and the only colored elements on the page. Eyes are drawn to them in a way that each competes for attention and eventually you end up at the Gmail logo. Great for Google branding(? I already use Gmail), not so good for me because it hurts my eyes and distracts me.

Next, with everything being white with a few grey highlights, it is unclear where each section of the page begins and ends. Some things start to scroll while others stay static with no indication of what will change. The browser scrollbar takes up the whole size of the browser window but only part of the screen scrolls some of the time.

Just a few of the issues I had.

The design looks nice, clean and simple, but it isn't very functional. In that respect, I would consider it a failure. If a layman like me can find glaring weaknesses, why can't the people working on it do so? Budget, deadline or incompetence?

The only one I can remotely justify is deadline since the client is Google (infinite money, needs social bad, supposedly lots of smart people), but since a redesign is so much work, wouldn't you expect them want to get it right the first time?

Just because you can understand someone's line of thinking doesn't mean you think like that.

The poster was making a joke based on a period when women were not considered capable of playing sports (among other things). The fact that that is no longer true and thinking like that is anachronistic is why the joke is funny (or is a joke at all). I can laugh at a joke that puts someone or a group down and still not be a bigot.

I think people who don't adjust their definitions of words/idioms to reflect modern connotations should stop holding grudges (or whatever the appropriate term is) and move on. That's obviously too simple a solution to work since it causes words to be less offensive over time and thus some parts of what they represent may become acceptable. For example, the word rape might be a bad one to get desensitized to because it might also lead to desensitization to the act of rape.

I just want to point out that as we further diminish returns on advertising most internet business models die. The people who click on ads are subsidizing most of the internet for the rest of us. It's easier for me to pay with alleged personal information than with money.

Another classic one is Band-Aid.

Most people's social graphs are too small (130 people) to be useful. Well we will use an extended social-graph, you might say, but if you are extending the social-graph, why not include the entire internet? Why would my social-graph contain better (more accurate and relevant) information about doing a thing than doathing.com?

The social-graph is a reduced set of the internet. It is probably easier to search, but how will the results be better than Google?

Those two solve it by encouraging everyone to contribute to the public stream increasing the chance that you will find your gold by looking in the stream. G+ does exactly the opposite and encourages you to not contribute to the public stream.

The one problem I have with G+ is that sometimes there is gold in the junkstream. Sometimes someone does post something interesting and they would not normally share it with me.

How can we balance over-granulated sharing with under-granulated sharing?

I completely agree with you on that. I find it really annoying and frankly a bit simplistic to debate those types of things. It is one of the biggest turn-offs to being friends with a "geek" for me.

I see most of those as "revolutionary" applications of existing technologies/hardware. When I said hardware maybe I meant "technology"?

Those are pretty good examples but it basically means that there is no reason to get excited about this now since it is many years away from making any kind of impact.

So are we supposed to believe that incumbent tech companies have no investments in new tech?

Canon is not working (or already passed) on the same stuff as Lytro? Samsung is not working (or already passed) on the same stuff as Nanosys? Cisco (or whoever) is not working (or already passed) on this type of stuff?

Anybody have examples of modern (within 10 years) stealthy startups/incubators that invented new hardware that revolutionized something?

Digitizing an analog stream is probably considered recording.

The MBA proved that your netbook form-factor computer didn't have to suck. You didn't have to compromise (acceptable) performance for form-factor.

It's definitely going to be sooner than later, though.

You are suggesting that the superintelligence created by "Accelerating Change" does not operate with the same parameters as the superintelligence of the "Intelligence Explosion?"

The time when "Accelerating Change" no longer applies is the same time that the "Intelligence Explosion" and the "Event Horizon" occur or at least that's how it seems to me.

All three of those "major schools" are just different stages of the same theory. Accelerating change leads to the intelligence explosion which leads to the event horizon (the actual singularity).

Warm and cold are relative terms.

"It seems that conceptualizing AIs as human-like is the #1 top mistake that leads people to think AIs are impossible (or, alternatively, safe once they're built). It's more enlightening to think of an AI as a cold mathematical machine"

But really, even humans are just cold mathematical machines when you get below a certain layer.