Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator's Dilemma - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/steve_jobs_solved_the_innovato.html <comment><USER2> Apple is famously compartmentalised & secretive: People working on one product don't even get to go into the building where another product is being developed & the employees working on new products are pretty much forbidden from discussing them outside of their own development team as I understand things.

I would imagine that this makes it _very_ hard for managers of existing products to kill off internal competitors. So long as the board is happy to fund it, you can develop something new without having to play internal big company politics.

<comment><USER3> It's a slippery slope to have teams fire-walled and competing with each other. We hear stories from the Dropbox guys that One Apple team invited them over to ask how they hacked the finder, because they didn't have access to the functionality that dropbox reverse engineered. As a recent grad at Motorola, I once heard similar stories about Motorola's PCS and semiconductor groups 10 years ago.

<comment><USER2> As I recall from interviews with the DropBox crowd, that's more because what DropBox was doing wasn't even planned functionality in the first place; they hooked into the Finder code at a fairly low level in order to get it to do what they wanted. (Anyone got a link?)

Your general point is correct of course: the price of compartmentalisation is the inability to benefit from the experience of other groups in the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > It had 90 days working capital on hand when > he took over — in other words, > Apple was only > three months away from bankruptcy.

Sorry for my finance ignorance -- but is that description correct? I'd assume that having 90 days working capital means that you can run the company as-is for 90 days with no additional revenue. Given that Apple presumably had some stream of revenue at the time, that seems like a far cry from being "three months away from bankruptcy".

<comment><USER5> Working capital is short-term assets minus short-term debts. So yes, you are correct. A company could have a ton of long-term assets, but very low working- capital. It's too much of a simplification to say low working-capital means you are close to bankruptcy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> According to the article, Jobs' solution was to organize Apple around making great products. This is enough to make Christensen himself call them "freaks".

Caring first about great products makes you a freak? Something seems deeply wrong with that. (Edit: this was unclear. I agree that "freak" is accurate in the sense that this is rare. My point is that it says something staggering about our economy that it should be so rare.)

If Apple are the only ones who do this, I would sooner call everybody else the freaks.

<comment><USER7> The definition of 'freak' for most people is "people who don't have sensible regard to norms". The norm for almost all companies is that the bottom line is the overriding factor.

So Jobs priorities made Apple a freak in the eyes of most managers. Apple didn't get any respect from ordinary managers before the iPhone sales took off and made the bottom line became impressive.

I have yet to work at/for a company that cared about its products.

<comment><USER6> Sure, this is how most everyone does it. But sometimes a lightning bolt lights up the night sky for a second and lets you see that it is the "freak" who is right and everyone else who is the aberration. I think we should be grateful to Steve Jobs for providing so spectacular a counterexample. He didn't just not follow convention, he built the most valuable company in the world doing it - something that, if the managerialists were right, ought to have been impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have some doubts that's that the case. why?

1\. The IPAD might did some cannibalization to the mac market but in general, it brought much more profits.It was a pretty good bet that this what it would do(esp. considering apple's supply chain strengths, expected prices for android and IPAD tablets, apple's marketing value and ecosystems, etc).

2\. The iPhone was launched when it was clear that mobile phone would integrate MP3 functions, and the iPod market would die. But it was more profitable than the iPod, so no dilemma here.

The real test for the innovator's dilemma is:you develop and sell a new product that might HURT your profits ,but is the future of the industry because it's better or cheaper, and you understand that having some some slice of the(smaller) future is better than nothing.

<comment><USER9> But you make these two arguments with hindsight.

1\. Creating the iPad was not a good bet that it would create profits. Microsoft had tried pushing tablet computing for a decade, and they lost a lot of money doing so. The iPad was a gamble. It was not obvious, people scoffed when it was announced. "No keyboard? No SD slot? Why would I need that when I have a laptop and an iphone?"

2\. Again, people scoffed when the iPhone was released. There were already phones with MP3 functionality. It wasn't clear that the phones would kill off the iPod as the iPod allowed you carry your entire music collection with you. Smartphones back then couldn't do that, nor could the iPhone for that matter. No one at the time wanted to use touch screens. The reaction was also a lot of scoffing. "You want me to pay how much for a cell phone that doesn't even have keys?!?". The iPhone was a huge gamble too.

<comment><USER8> There are two kinds of bets we're talking about.

You're talking about the bet: will our products would be successful? That's the kind of bet you have to take when you develop products, no way around it. And apple is pretty good at those gambles.

I'm talking about the bet: if this product would be successful, will we make more money , or less money(due to cannibalization) ?

Also , regarding MP3 phones. it was clear(due to moore's law), that mobile phones would have good enough MP3 players in the future.

<comment><USER10> I'm the author of the article, I'm working with Clay at the moment. Thanks for the comment.

It's subtle, but I think that most people outside of companies assume that decisions get made as you're describing above — separate questions of "will this product be successful", and "will we make money out of it". In part, the dilemma is borne out of the fact that for almost every company, those aren't separate questions at all. Think about it; you're the CEO, and someone comes along and says, "let's invest this money in new R&D for a product that may, or may not, work. if, by chance, it does work... it will take out our existing product, and we'll end up making less money on the new product than we do right now on the old one".

very few CEOs will put money down on that. they're using money from their cash cow to do what... to kill it?

the problem is one of perspective.

there's another famous example i love to quote when explaining: blockbuster and netflix. when netflix came along, blockbuster was this huge organization with massive margins and almost 100% name recognition. they looked at netflix, saw a new business emerging with a fraction of the margins that they had... why would they bother wasting their time on doing something like this? they could invest to create a netflix competitor, but if they did, it was going to cost them to do it, it may or may not be successful, and if it WAS successful, it would cannibalize their existing, high-margin business with one that was much less profitable. who would go for that?

the mistake that most companies make is that they assume that they're the only ones that are capable of challenging their existing business with a disruptive entrant. the problem is (and it sounds obvious, but so many successful companies have fallen into this trap): if they don't challenge themselves, then someone else will. from the perspective of blockbuster, with all these profitable stores dotted all around the country, the "DVD by-mail market" was not at all attractive. but to netflix, which was looking at the market from the perspective of "we don't have any business at all, so any business is great", the margins actually looked pretty good. blockbuster thought its choices were "stick with high margin business, or move to low margin business". but really, its choices were "move to low margin business, or go bankrupt".

that's the perspective thing i'm talking about; successful businesses have this tendency to view markets from the vantage point of where they stand right now. what's so noticeable about apple is that they __never __do that. they start from a fresh sheet of paper — what's best for the customer, not what's best from our bottom line. it's a mighty hard trick to pull off.

hope this helps. thanks to everyone for voting up the article.

cheers

\-- james

<comment><USER11> James, I really appreciated the article and the additional explanation.

I tried to figure out a way to word this question, so forgive me if it isn't clear but:

Did Steve Jobs even do the right thing? What I mean by that is that if you had 10 companies would you want all those CEOs making what seems to be illogical decisions in the off chance you get an Apple?

Take Blockbuster for example, sure they obviously did the wrong thing in hindsight, but no one, and I mean no one thought netflix was going to be as successful as it was when it first started. I remember thinking, gosh, that is a lot of mailing expense for $7/month.

How many ideas came along and went that were not worth replicating? I'm sure there are tons.

There is probably some new network being worked on right now that will displace facebook in 10 years. Should facebook radically change the way they do business to adopt to that new basically unknown threat?

<comment><USER12> That's what makes it a _dilemma_. :) The book is well worth reading, and this is what it talks about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> No, I do not believe Apple had reason to worry about market cannibalization.

The iPod was a new product. The line was segmented well, with each having clear differences in form factor, eg you wouldn't be confused between what a nano might be useful for vs Touch. This is in contrast to electronic manufacturers that flood the market with an entire spectrum of product capability.

The iPhone and Ipad are again entirely different product lines that share the same codebase. This is not very different to Windows everywhere espoused by Ballmer. The difference is in how capable the entire organisation was in execution. Although Apple is immensely profitable, it is because it focusses on creating highly desirable products in niches that are only profitable through vertical integration.

I recall Jobs lamenting the fact that they barely make any profit on their l Laserwriterswhile HP makes all the money off toners. Apple today judiciously avoids this type commodity computing markets.

The main take away is to sell clearly differentiated products. Give them different names and use cases so that consumers cannot be confused over what each product does.

</comment><comment><USER14> By the way it's important to recall that one of the first things that Jobs killed were the Apple clones -- an idea that HBR pushed in the 90s.

<comment><USER15> The irony now being that the Mac is from a hardware level, a PC clone...

<comment><USER16> It is now, but in 1995 it wasn't. Apple designed custom chipsets (apparently different ones for every model...) and then sold them to clone vendors at prices that didn't recoup their R&D.

<comment><USER15> Well that wasn't very clever was it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To certain extent this analysis is right, but there's also one other company that you must consider when thinking about this, and that's Google. They have also not focused on profits, and at least, in theory, have tried to create amazing products. Unfortunately, they neither have great products or great profits. You can be like Apple and focus on building great products but keep Google in mind and ask why their stock price is stagnant for last 5 years now.

Yes, Apple focuses on products but it also focuses on profits by optimizing operations and pricing products correctly. Unfortunately, at Google, they haven't done either well. They are still a search company which runs on the grace of AdWords.

Yes, Android is successful but compared to iPhone platform it is significantly behind in terms of profits - in fact, still loosing money considering Motorola acquisition was essentially to stave off patent attacks on Android.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a great take on it, although I might offer that Jobs never really solved the innovator's dilemma -- he just managed it. (Solve implies the problem goes away; not sure that applies here.)

Rather, what Jobs did was willingly accept potential cannibalization of some products in favor of others. Normally, in a large company, you have teams representing core products that morph into influential forces of nature inside their organization and spend a decent amount of time and resources protecting their turf. Jobs was the central decision-making authority, and he simply wouldn't tolerate that type of environment. So, territorial fiefdoms had no chance of surviving in Jobs's pressure cooker.

</comment><comment><USER19> _They can do it because Apple hasn't optimized its organization to maximize profit. Instead, it has made the creation of value for customers its priority._

Apple's market cap would suggest that this presents a false dichotomy.

<comment><USER20> The point of the article is that Apple's profits (and, indirectly, market cap) could be _even higher_ (at least in the short term) if they decided to focus only on this instead of great products. (That would be the wrong thing to do, of course, since a more innovative company would disrupt Apple.)

Apple's strategy, the strategy to solve the Innovator's Dilemma, shows that creating disruptive products leads to profits that are _large enough_ to be considered a successful company, even if profits are not your primary goal.

<comment><USER19> It's really just an abuse of language. When the financial press (or, worse, the general press) writes of "profits", they often implicitly mean "short-term profits", but that's not the same thing. In particular, Apple doesn't ignore profit; they just recognize that maximizing profit is not the same as maximizing short-term profit.

The market cap of a company reflects the market's opinion on the discounted value of future cashflow. This means that a company can't generally boost its market cap any way other than increasing its profits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm looking at Corning's Day of Glass video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38> and once again, I'm being reminded of Apple's biggest weakness. There's no cross-platform functionality and that's going to be Apple's biggest problem within a decade.

Any idea how Apple might handle a dilemma like that ?

<comment><USER22> I'm sorry, what does Corning make? Glass. And, apparently, expensive concept videos.

Check out this article about why Apple doesn't bother with expensive distracting public concept products.

<http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/>

Apple's products have a bit more cross-platform functionality than Corning's at this point in time. Unless you consider transparency a cross-platform feature.

<comment><USER21> I didn't mean to imply that Apple competes with Corning.

My question is how will Apple deal with the disruptive potential of cross- platform ? It's hard to believe Apple will not be challenged by it.

And somewhat related. What's the input language going to be? Or will it be a tool that converts to one language?

<comment><USER23> _My question is how will Apple deal with the disruptive potential of cross- platform ?_

The web. That's why Apple has been working to make sure that Safari was standards-compliant, if "cross-platform" is going to be the future, it will more than likely happen via the web. So long as Apple can maintain a standards-compliant browser, then can compete on the web and spend their energies making sure the other aspects of their products (design, battery life, etc) are competitive.

<comment><USER22> Funny thing.

Isn't that how iPhone development was supposed to happen? Then everyone whined and complained that they wanted a native development system. Now that they have it (and it's a pretty solid one), we're supposed to whine that it's not cross-platform?

I'm guessing HTML5 and etc will help solve that problem, correct?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> No. If in the future a new kind of printer can "print" (chip, shape, et al) iPhones, Samsungs, etc even if Apple can catch up with this new technology it's probable that the market size of the current hardware industry will go down.

Can we say that many times the dilemma is about shrink or perish?

<comment><USER25> The point of the article (and of solving e Innovators Dilema) is that Apple would be the company selling the printers because that's what it's customers want and how it can make them happy. They wouldn't prohibit entering the new printer market because it is bad for the iPhone's profits, which is what just about every other company would do.

 _Can we say that many times the dilemma is about shrink or perish?_

That's not what this article is about, so, while you can say it, it is pretty meaningless to TFA. If your company gets caught up in the middle of a war, it's not the innovator's dilema that could kill your company, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Remind me what companies Christiansen has run? He has been an academic/consultant his whole career.

<comment><USER27> He literally wrote _the_ book on disruption, which I expect, from your comment, you haven't read. [http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma- Revolutionary-Busin...](http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma- Revolutionary-Business-Essentials/dp/0060521996) He doesn't need to start a company to prove his point because it's not really about startups, it's about the problems big companies have. He wouldn't be the founder or employee number 1, he would be employee 10,000, the one they get when everything starts going wrong.

<comment><USER26> I didn't say start, I said _run_. The dilemma he speaks of (yes I have read the book) sounds good on paper but doesn't play out in the real world, there are plenty of examples, is Coca Cola afraid of launching a new soft drink, or does Tricorn worry KFC is eroding the market of Taco Bell? Like most economics or sociology it's an elegant model that has little basis in reality.

<comment><USER28> Go read it again. I don't think you're grasping the idea of disruption as Christensen defines it. The examples you give are not disruptive products - they're just new products.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inside a low-budget consumer hardware espionage implant - <AUTHOR> https://ha.cking.ch/s8_data_line_locator/ <comment><USER2> I wonder why they even bothered with such a high end processor like the MT6261. Get a bare die micro like the MSP430, and a bare die GSM chipset, and you're set. You'd have to dissolve your SIM card in acid and wire bond it to the PCB, but wire bonding machinery is pretty cheap.

Realistically, this is stupid easy for a state-level actor. A good hardware hacker worth their salt could probably set up a bug no bigger than 10mmx10mm in a couple of months for a few hundred, less if they already have a wire bonding machine and microscope.

For a state level actor, you can roll your own ASIC and just dump RF and microcontroller on one die. Package it up inside a USB flash drive controller IC, mark it with someone else's logo, and you've got a bug that you would only find by dissolving the chip in acid and looking at the die very carefully. It'll cost you a few million, but it's just not that much money when your R&D budget is 150M/y.

The weak part of all these systems is the constant GSM heartbeat, but even that is beatable.

<comment><USER3> > in a couple of months for a few hundred, less if they already have a wire > bonding machine and microscope.

How do I get my hands on a wirebond machine for a few hundred? The bottom end of "old and crusty but not actually broken" seems to start at a couple thousand on eBay. If my budget were a few hundred I'd probably spend a month just machining and grinding replacement microscope parts.

I suppose you could be referring to the marginal cost of an hour on a wirebond machine at the nearest NNIN facility, but last time I priced out training options the overhead to get started would have been $500-$1k.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, it's kinda tricky -- costs could be much higher. Wire bonders aren't exactly hot ticket items; very few people are using manual machines. A cheap Chinese made one from Taobao/Alibaba costs around $250, but add in shipping, and you're close to $500 already. Something made in the USA from eBay will be of similar price, just two decades older.

If you're lucky enough to already be in China, I can't imagine it would be to difficult to get a small run made for a much lower cost, although I've never done so. Lots of factories making high volume, low end products use wire bonders to attach bare die to a PCB -- think calculators, gift cards, etc.

The simple fact is there's no comparable level of electronics manufacturing in the US, making it hard to get the parts and machinery necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow: " This is probably not an elaborate scheme to harvest phone numbers and send them to China, but rather the way the default manufactured SIM code was implemented and it was never trimmed down to the needs of this device. Nevertheless, I found it interesting seeing how the device is accessing virtually everything on the SIM. " I agree, but it's rare to see someone not go fake ballistic claiming phone book capture for page views...

<comment><USER5> Ah, come on. It's not like consumers are going to insert their sims into this device anyway.

<comment><USER6> And it's not like in 2017 anybody stores their contacts in their SIM

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's especially creepy is that many devices (e.g. laptops) with USB ports continue sending power to those ports _even when the device is off_.

So someone bugged with something like this implant could fully power off their laptop when discussing sensitive information, and if they left a bugged USB drive plugged in, they could still be compromised.

<comment><USER8> Bug or feature?

<comment><USER9> Feature. It allows, among other things, for a computer to be woken up via the (USB-connected) keyboard.

<comment><USER10> Also a branding/design feature.

I've encountered extended color coding on multiple gaming oriented motherboards: Black for USB 2, Blue for USB 3.1 (so far so standard), Red for persistently powered.

That way you can have your phone connected to that port and have it charge overnight, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This kind of thing would immediately stick out like a sore thumb to a lot of technical users. In the world of USB cables it's HUGE, even though technically I know it's very small for it's purpose. Very cool nevertheless!

<comment><USER12> How often do people look behind their desks at the usb cables plugged into their systems. Many do not.

<comment><USER13> As someone who was involved with redteaming: ~nobody does. It's very rare to get caught after bugging someone's equipment. Bugs like these blend in seamlessly with the massive amounts of cables behind most desks.

<comment><USER12> Found the picture of the ethernet bug. [https://twitter.com/nblr/status/928526534226391040](https://twitter.com/nblr/status/928526534226391040)

That I would never notice behind a desk

Also, in the usb cable with cell [https://twitter.com/nblr/status/929132160602296320](https://twitter.com/nblr/status/929132160602296320)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Off topic, but still: is that a price of almost 2 EUR per minute of call? (to that stranger's phone - 3333333) I thought calls inside EU are price-limited? Or is this some really old post?

<comment><USER15> I found that odd too. I live in Denmark and i pay a fixed amount and can call as much as i want.

<comment><USER16> How are remotely monitored sensors and devices, like weather stations and power meters, that need to send a small amount of data periodically, and that use the cellular network for that handled in Europe?

Those fixed price for unlimited calling plans that are great for human to human communication would suck for low data sensors and devices.

In the US these are handled by special plans that have zero or close to zero fixed monthly cost, but have a high per byte or per minute rate so that they are quite cheap for their intended use (e.g., power meter daily usage report) but are too expensive to use for high data applications.

If there are similar things in Europe, maybe that number was one of those?

<comment><USER17> [https://particle.io](https://particle.io) and [https://hologram.io](https://hologram.io) have almost worldwide availability for SIM's designed for this. There are probably older less-hip suppliers as well.

<comment><USER18> _> have almost worldwide availability for SIM's designed for this._

They are great if you have sensors travelling to different countries or your volume isn't large enough to negotiate with a local telco.

If you are deploying many devices in one country it will be far cheaper to talk to a local telco about getting a custoomized data package for your SIM cards.

[https://eseye.com](https://eseye.com) is another company supplying these roaming SIM cards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've seen these before on eBay and really wondered what they were all about. Thanks to the person who took the time to write this up! It's crazy how cheap and small these devices are.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder what voltage is required to kill the Mediatek chip? Maybe a simple jig that put -24v through it could fry it?

Of course, if you're expecting it, this device should be relatively simple to stop. I can imagine more stealthy variants however.

<comment><USER21> or you could unplug it, take it home and keep it as a pet

<comment><USER22> Or even better, take out the SIM and find to whom the number is registered to. In many countries numbers require registration, ie. you can't get one without showing personal papers. Of course intel agencies aren't required to do that, so that if you can't get a real name for that SIM then you're 100% sure you're being watched by people a bit more powerful and dangerous than your suspicious wife (unless your wife works for them :^). Using cellphones or anything related to them, especially if you don't plan to recover the device, is not good for spying because you're leaving behind tracks almost as important as DNA. Nice article though. If some of you want to experiment with these devices, you can get a SIM800 or A6 GSM modules then pair it with a small uC for a lot less than €10.

[https://github.com/carrascoacd/ArduinoSIM800L](https://github.com/carrascoacd/ArduinoSIM800L)

[http://simcom.ee/documents/SIM800/SIM800_Hardware%20Design_V...](http://simcom.ee/documents/SIM800/SIM800_Hardware%20Design_V1.08.pdf)

[http://www.electrodragon.com/w/GSM_GPRS_A6_Module](http://www.electrodragon.com/w/GSM_GPRS_A6_Module)

[https://www.makerfabs.com/desfile/files/A6_A7_A6C_datasheet-...](https://www.makerfabs.com/desfile/files/A6_A7_A6C_datasheet- EN.pdf)

<comment><USER23> >If you can't get a real name for that SIM then you're 100% sure you're being watched by people a bit more powerful and dangerous than your suspicious wife

If you conveniently "forget" or show heavy reluctance to give your info and papers when buying a new phone, you can get an unregistered SIM. Just promise them you'll give the info "later". The salespeople don't like the hassle and just want to secure the sale.

You can also easily give fake info and "forget" your ID card, since it's not verified, but that's dangerous if you get caught.

Simple social engineering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is obviously not good, but I'm not sure it is particularly useful for something "important".

Any target of high value will be pursued and observed by trained humans with advanced tools. The amount of data collected, I suspect, would be less but more accurate.

A device like this just lowers the bar (really low) on tracking. However, it increases the noise/inaccuracy. If combined with some key logger and other devices, it could provide a very detailed picture of someone's communications and movements. But it would include a lot of noise as well, which would still require a lot of sifting and organizing to make sense of the data (and especially to filter out the noise).

If anything, I think these devices are more a money grab on the "spies" than a significant intrusion on the targets.

<comment><USER25> I think it would be pretty easy actually, to keep up with the data - you could just get a Bluetooth headset and set your phone to automatically accept calls from your spying device, then listen in while you go about your day.

<comment><USER26> Or hook it up to a Twilio and receive text notifications when a new recording is available. Optionally auto-transcribe and do topic modeling to extract only discussions of interest.

<comment><USER27> +1 for the thought -100 for the thought...

But at the end of the day, we dont want to encourage the deep surveillance state... but we techie always look at this sort of thing and then say "hmmm... wouldnt it be interesting if..."

<comment><USER25> I don't think products like this encourage the "deep surveillance state" \- if anything, they weaken it by loosening their monopoly on high-tech covert surveillance. These things can be used for good as well as evil - you could spy on a corrupt official or catch someone cheating just as easily as anything else.

<comment><USER28> Agreed. Anything that renders the previously invisible (state surveillance techniques) visible via consumer availability is anathema to state surveillance.

The majority of these techniques are allowed in the US because Congress doesn't know / care.

The more popular exploits of insecure technologies we get, the more security becomes an economically beneficial differentiator. And the more concerned calls your local Congressperson receives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ju-st The capacitor and power requirement are very small for a GSM device. My SIM800 experiments needed always a way beefier power supply.

</comment><comment><USER29> Looks like the site got killed.

</comment><comment><USER30> The antenna could be better.

</comment><comment><USER31> Judging by the screenshots, the author uses Silence SMS app and you should too

<comment><USER32> It's actually Signal, see bottom of the long image [1]

[1] [https://ha.cking.ch/s8_data_line_locator/images/10_01_cmds.j...](https://ha.cking.ch/s8_data_line_locator/images/10_01_cmds.jpg)</comment></comment>


Stop disrupting everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/disrupting_disruption_a_once_useful_concept_has_become_a_lame_catchphrase.html

<comment><USER2> "the term "disruptive innovation" comes to us from Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and his excellent 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma."</comment>


Fake leap seconds being announced by NTP servers, still causing linux crashes - <AUTHOR> http://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/questions/2012-August/033611.html

<comment><USER2> No need to panic; this event happend a few days ago, August 1. And no one's certain, but it seems just as likely this is a bug in NTP as it is a deliberate attempt to crash unpatched Linux servers. The way ntpd manages the leap second flag is pretty complex and error prone.

Link to thread view of NTP list discussion: [http://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/questions/2012-August/thread....](http://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/questions/2012-August/thread.html#33611)

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a need to worry, because AFAIK at least Debian hasn't provided patches yet, so come September servers might still be crashing.

<http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=679882>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> An idea: Setup a fake NTP server that inserts leap seconds randomly (for example, once a week) (forward and backward). It could be use with test servers to test if they are working correctly, before a real leap second crash the production server.

<comment><USER4> Leap seconds only occur at the end of a month, so an NTP client that accepted such leapseconds would be non-compliant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Exactly how incompetent are linux coders? After all, the "problem" is extremely trivial.

<comment><USER6> Feel free to patch it, I'm sure the world of linux coders would be happy to have someone who finds this sort of matter trivial in their midst.

<comment><USER5> Well, I'm not a linux coder, but I'll give it a try and report back if I'm successful.

<comment><USER7> I think it's already been patched. <https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/17/546> (navigation on the left of the page)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like a long, 11-part patch set. Would be interesting to hear back from 'bjork' after his try to see if it is still trivial ;)

<comment><USER7> <https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/1/25> Sounds like a race condition which is pretty awkward to avoid.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mpmath – Python library for arbitrary-precision floating-point arithmetic - <AUTHOR> http://mpmath.org/ <comment><USER2> This looks like a pure Python implementation. I wonder how the performance is like?

<comment><USER3> Author of mpmath here. It depends a lot on what you're doing.

A single floating-point arithmetic operation in mpmath at low precision involves something like 100 "Python cycles" (bytecode ops), each of which takes perhaps 100 machine cycles.

That makes it, roughly:

100 times slower than machine arithmetic in Python.

10000 times slower than machine arithmetic in C (or NumPy if you can vectorize your code fully).

100 times slower than arbitrary precision floating-point arithmetic implemented in C (~100 machine cycles).

These are obviously just order of magnitude estimates.

However, low precision is the worst case, relatively speaking. mpmath uses Python longs internally, and it can also use GMPY when available. At sufficiently high precision, the time is dominated the Python/GMP kernel for multiplying integers and performance is close to other bignum implementations.

Also, for computing transcendental functions, mpmath uses fixed-point arithmetic internally, which reduces overhead a lot.

The biggest problem with mpmath is that it doesn't implement algorithms that scale optimally for all operations, and a lot of the error analysis is completely nonrigorous.

Since 2012, I have been developing a C library ([https://github.com/fredrik- johansson/arb/](https://github.com/fredrik-johansson/arb/)) that solves many of the shortcomings of mpmath. It is obviously much faster at low precision (the factor 100 mentioned above), it generally uses much better algorithms, and it tracks error bounds automatically using interval arithmetic.

<comment><USER4> Why not use the "double-double" representation, in which one extends a regular double precision value with another double that estimates its error (and then maybe a third that estimates _its_ error, and so on...)? Double-double operations are fast in terms of floating-point operations, conversions to other floating types are free, and the precision (107.5 bits asymptotically) is nearly as good as 128-bit (112 bits).

<comment><USER3> Sure, but:

1) As soon as you wrap it in a Python class, much of that speed advantage goes away.

2) Double-double doesn't solve the problem with the limited exponent range of doubles.

3) When the goal is to allow setting the precision to any number of bits you like, having a separate implementation for X bits complicates things a lot, especially when the X-bit arithmetic doesn't quite behave like Y-bit arithmetic for X != Y (double-double behaves somewhat differently from 108-bit floating-point).

IMO, double-double would be most interesting as a NumPy extension.

<comment><USER4> Fair enough, although I've always (well, since 1980) been skeptical that an exponent range from 10E-307 to 10E+308 fails to suffice for any real problem. I mean, come on, there's only something like 10E+80 atoms in the universe.

<comment><USER3> Very large or small numbers are useful in combinatorics and number theory. It can also happen that they are needed for intermediate steps in an algorithm, even when the inputs and outputs are moderate (the same reason that 15 digits sometimes isn't enough even when you just want 3 digits of output). Granted, you can generally work around exponent range limitations using tricks (scaling values properly or introducing logarithms), but that can obviously be a hassle.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why The New Gmail Sucks - <AUTHOR> http://startupq8.com/2013/09/23/why-the-new-gmail-sucks/ <comment><USER3> I look at UI changes in a totally different way now. My saw me come online on Skype, so she called me. There's an ocean between us currently. She said she called me because she was writing an email to me, but couldn't find the Send button, so didn't know how to send it. Either it made her feel stupid or frustrated, or she felt so sad that she couldn't send an email to me that she had spent some time writing, or whatever, but she started crying. She was crying because she couldn't find the Send button in gmail. She's approaching 60 and isn't as technically adept as some of us, so that is admittedly a factor.

Seeing her cry about this made me change the way I think about what some users go through when they experience unexpected UI changes. I remember hearing people say they got confused by Windows 8 tiles, and didn't think it was such a big deal. After seeing my mom cry over a UI change, I think there are better ways to implement UI changes than simply shoving them down people's throat. Sure, if it must be done, it must be done (UI change), but don't shove it down people's throats unexpectedly and with no hand-holding at all.

<comment><USER4> On a similar but different note, there were stories of children getting upset at the new look of iOS 7. When I saw the headline I thought it odd, because I doubt the designers of iOS 7 ever thought they'd actually make someone _cry_ with the new design.

But what can be done about it? Good design is important, but sometimes things have to be changed, and ultimately a lot people just don't like change. Even if it's the best design in the world, somebody, somewhere will struggle with it being different. I think some "hand holding" as you suggest would be a good idea, but I'm not sure how that could be done in practice.

<comment><USER5> _sometimes things have to be changed_

Why? If a UI works for people, why does it _have_ to be changed? That seems to me to be at least part of the problem: software designers think things _have_ to be changed, when it's really just that they _want_ to change them, for whatever reason, and don't stop to think about the impact.

 _a lot people just don 't like change_

A lot of people have things that work perfectly well for them and don't like having to re-learn their workflow whenever some software designer has a bright idea. I'm one of them: I still run a KDE 3 desktop on Linux because it works for me and I don't like having my UI messed with just because somebody designed some new eye candy.

<comment><USER6> Because it's a web application. In the old days, you could use that old version of said software until your motherboard gave out 15 years later. However, today there is only ONE version of Gmail. Everyone has to use that version. Hence one person's "New Feature" will be another person's reason to cry. The cost of keeping X versions of Gmail in production is just too prohibitive.

<comment><USER5> If this is true, then to me it's a reason not to use web applications. (And I don't, for the most part; I still run KDE 3 on Linux, and use KMail to read email. The only web applications I use routinely are for things like paying bills, where I have no choice but to use the web UI for the bank or credit card company or whatever. And every so often those change and I have to re- learn things for no good reason.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This redesign of Gmail, like most of the Great Google Redesign happening in the last couple years, demonstrates to me that Google is constantly breaking one of the most basic rules about UI design: "Good Design" is _not_ about making it pretty. "Good Design" is about making it easy to use; If you can do both, great. If you can only do the latter, then it will just have to be less pretty.

The Old Google was the latter (very usable, not beautiful).

The New Google is the former (looks visually pleasing, very unintuitive to use).

I curse every time I compose an email now in Gmail. Why have they hidden all the controls? Why is EVERYTHING one click away? Is ANYTHING gained AT ALL by HIDING all those buttons that are there to be used?

Heck, I still can't tell you how to make a hyperlink. I think you have to mouse over the hidden buttons. Or do you click on the hidden buttons? I think if you click on the hidden buttons then you end up clicking a button that's _next to_ the "hyperlink* button, by mistake.

Come on, Google.

<comment><USER8> >"Good Design" is not about making it pretty. "Good Design" is about making it easy to use; If you can do both, great.

You're right but this is an anomaly to me. How is it that Google hires PHDs in HCI to design this stuff and they're still getting it wrong?

Perhaps I have misconceptions about the organizational structure of large companies but they do hire these people for a reason no?

<comment><USER5> _How is it that Google hires PHDs in HCI to design this stuff and they 're still getting it wrong?_

I don't think they're getting it wrong; I think they're just judging success by a different metric than you are. As other comments upthread have suggested, their success metric appears to be how many users they can keep within their walled garden. So the HCI experts aren't figuring out how to make Google's apps easier to use; they're figuring out how to make them harder to escape.

Case in point: a bunch of people in this thread have pointed out various things wrong with GMail's web UI, but nobody, as far as I can tell, has said "Screw this, I'm using a different email client." [Edit: I have now spotted one such person, but that's still effectively none in a thread with this many posters.] (For the record, I use KMail on Linux, the KDE 3 version, and I don't use GMail anyway, for reasons which go way beyond its UI.) To Google's HCI experts, that's success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672250/how-a-tiny-new- compose-w...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672250/how-a-tiny-new-compose- window-could-reinvent-gmail)

Reasons for redesign:

> "Google's actively trying to make email less fussy and formal--or, in other > words, to make it a little more like instant messaging."

> "email is just too much work"

> "Jason Cornwell, Gmail's lead designer, explains, one of the ways to do that > is simply to "give you permission to write shorter messages."

Why is gmail trying to compete against iMessage or Whatsapp or fb chat? Email IS for work and should be optimized for it. Email is a useful medium because you are allowed to write long messages and permitted to respond later during the week. A friend would not read your text if it was 500 words long.

<comment><USER10> Also recall reading a justification that less formatting should be used in emails and that was part of the UI decision. Don't recall whether that was from Gmail team or a writer editorializing but fact is I use formatting to make my emails more clear to people. This whole new idea of having quick conversations through email feels like trying to shove a square peg in a round hole to me.

<comment><USER9> I agree that formatting is important.

For users that like to use the pop out layout for compose, hiding the formatting may be needed to save space.

For users that opted for a full screen layout for compose, the full formatting options should be available as a default given that space is not a limitation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like the new interface. I find it easy to use and streamlined. Since we are all talking about our old parents, FWIW my mother (60) found it easier to use the new interface then the old interface.

There is really nothing objective that is pointed to as to why it "sucks". I get it you don't like it. I imagine most people do, here is an XKCD comic about the situation your in [http://xkcd.com/1172/](http://xkcd.com/1172/)

<comment><USER12> _There is really nothing objective that is pointed to as to why it "sucks"._

The post repeatedly mentions functionality that used to be one click away, but is now multiple clicks away. That is about as objective as measures come. You may not mind it, but you can't say it's just subjective.

The post also points out how UI controls shift relative positions based on the view being presented. One could define a metric that assesses the effect, and anybody calculating the metric would get the same result. Again, you may not mind controls jumping about as you work, but you can't say it's not objective.

<comment><USER13> It's not about control jumping. Google makes decisions based on data so they know these changes require more clicking. Why did they hide them? Probably because their data shows that most people do not use them (which I've noticed in most non-tech people), so not showing those buttons is actually less confusing for most people and thus offers a better UI to them. Objectively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google has moved all their UI towards "don't worry your pretty little head about it" mode.

It's incredibly insulting. But it is aimed at people who don't know they are being insulted so it works out perfectly for them.

What I do not understand is why it would be so hard to give us options.

Just give us the option of having the old compose box back, with all the controls visible, all the form fields visible, for the other 50% of people who know what they are doing.

<comment><USER15> Because it would mean a lot more work testing and fixing regressions whenever something changes, and nobody likes doing that kind of work.

<comment><USER14> Well they seem to maintain the old compose for IE8, perhaps until Windows XP expires next year.

And most of the rest of google works for me with javascript disabled, which is not a trivial thing to maintain.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi Damn. You just made me wish I had IE8 installed.

<comment><USER16> IE9 and IE10 can switch browser mode to IE8 and even IE11 can set a IE8 user agent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I imagine a big part of this is Android.

99% of emails don't include formatting. 99% of users never set anything but "TO" instead of the anachronistic BCC and CC thingies (how many emailers even know what a "Carbon Copy" even is?)

On a handheld where real-estate is at a premium? Those features are tucked away semi-hidden. And for the sake of consistency, that UI is mirrored onto the web form.

Also, changing the subject of a reply is hidden for _very_ good reasons - <USER2> applications use the subject of a reply for threading. Changing that subject line is going to break the user's expectations of how threading works. Even if Gmail handles the threading with grace, the e-mail client at the other end may not, and that can causes a mess of broken expectations. Better to leave this seldom-used feature (changing the subject of a _reply_ ) hidden to avoid the trouble.

The inability to fullscreen and the tiny composition window are, imho, unacceptable though.

<comment><USER18> Good points.

Also I do not see why even after deliberately setting a (B)CC this is collapsed back into a single TO-line (only visually - when you click CC again you see how it's actually configured to be sent under the hood, but this has confused me a few times already).

<comment><USER17> I think the idea is to conceal the confusing CC feature from those who don't understand it, since everyone involved in the email chain must see the box and not just the clever originator who threw the CCs in there. That is, Adam sends out an email with all the bells and whistles, but Barry has no idea what all those random abbreviations mean and they frighten him. Adam and Barry _both_ mostly just want to know who's going to receive this thing, so Gmail hides the CCs but shows the name. I think there's the unspoken belief that CC/BCC is a complete misfeature and Google wants it to die silently for the sake of clean UI.

It might not be the right approach, but I see why they did it.

<comment><USER19> The situation is actually a bit worse than that. As soon as Barry replies, Adam becomes the only person on the to line and everybody else is moved to cc despite all of Adam's hard work to distinguish recipient types up front. To vs CC is basically broken in threaded conversations. Moreover, unless you turn on some hidden options there is no visual indicator telling you who was on the to line vs the cc line in the Gmail inbox anyway. The distinction has become meaningless for the vast majority of cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nothing new in this article, but I will endlessly upvote anything that says loud and clear that the new Gmail sucks till they fix it.

<comment><USER21> That's my feeling. The new gmail is a piece of garbage and no matter what justifications are thrown at me all I can think is "Fix it."

The new interface is so poor that a legit suggestion now is to use a dedicated mail client so that you dont have to use an interface that was once useful. Terrible!

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady I actually really like the new Gmail design and it's helped improve my workflow. However I have a relative who uses computers only for work and rarely. I took the time to teach her Gmail and she finally got the hang of it. One day she called to ask me for help attaching something. It took me a few minutes to realise I couldn't help because she was still on the old UI and I couldn't walk her through it over the phone as I was on the new design. I mistakenly got her to update to the new UI (so I could more easily support her) and now she has constant issues trying to understand basic interactions. If she has an email open in the background + the compose window does she press send on the compose window or background email? Sounds simple but you'd be amazed and how complicated this is for some people and how stupid it makes them feel.

The problem seems to be communicating changes. Rather than the basic instructions given when a new design is introduced companies like Google should be producing detailed 30 minute walkthroughs of the new design and giving users the option to watch that.

<comment><USER22> > detailed 30 minute walkthroughs of the new design and giving users the > option to watch that.

That's the lazy way.

I even doubt that's a solution; the average user won't read one-liner warning/error boxes.

<comment> k-mcgrady The types of users who have real problems with designs changes to the point they can't send an email would watch that video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love the new Gmail and I think it makes a lot of sense if you embrace the idea of conversations/threads, and if you don't insist on having a 10 line signature. (Also, keyboard shortcuts help a lot though I agree not everyone has time to learn to use them.)

The new design makes email more lightweight and fluid; replying to a thread or composing a new message feels less like work and less ceremonious.

I agree the formatting options are a pain to use though...

<comment><USER24> When I write emails, they are _often_ lengthy. It's totally ridiculous to change the size of the reply box to such a small area.

<comment><USER25> Me too. But I write 10 short emails for every long email. Why? Because writing short emails is faster so I get more of them done!

I think Google is definitely on the right track here. I love to be able to compose emails while still clicking around for context in the background. I am perfectly fine shift-clicking to open a new compose window because that is the exception not the common case. Similarly, I don't often change the subject or use formatting in emails, so I don't mind clicking an extra icon to open up those options.

This whole movement about how unequivocally Terrible the new Gmail UI is is the biggest tsunami of nerdrage I've seen in quite some time. But here's the thing: there is a reason and justification for it, and it does work for some people, and there's no going back; so it's time to either adapt or move to some other client with a traditional UI.

<comment><USER24> With the whole privacy matter, it might not be so hard for me to switch :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I used to love Gmail because I thought it was fast, reliable, secure and had a great UI. Now I kinda hate the UI, it's not quite as fast as it once was, and I don't feel like it is a good place to store my email.

However, what all the posts about Gmail fail to do is point to a substitute. I need a web-based mail client which can provide mailboxes with my own domain, fetch mail from outside boxes and send through them, and filter and order my mail according to a set of rules I define. Also, it should not be hosted in the US or by a US based company, and should have at least a decent UI.

I would love to pay for such an alternative but, alas, I doesn't seem to exist today

<comment><USER27> I believe that other than the "hosted in the US or by a US company" requirement, Outlook.com fits the bill.

It's much cleaner and snappier than gmail and yahoo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> For me, GMail reached an optimum in terms of user experience some three or four years ago. Then it was a mixture of changes that were nice but of minor significance (the look of the main interface is prettier now than those few years ago) and of "reverse improvements" of usability like very confusing and ugly icons, hiding core functionalities, all the "social" crap etc. I guess this might partially be the result of UI people coming and going to the GMail team, new people arriving always want to prove they can do better and do things their own way, and if things are already good, they can only get worse this way.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hardly any valid points IMO.

1\. No Space to write

What? The text box expands as you type to fit the content. I would be very frustrated if it took up most of the screen space for no reason at all and I couldn't see the email I'm replying to.

2\. Edit subject (when replying)

When you reply and edit the subject you're starting a new conversation. It's what the big "compose" button is for, except now your conversation starting email contains junk from other emails. I'm happy if this UI change discourages people from doing this.

3\. Formatting (when replying)

First valid point, hiding this under a button makes no sense to those who use formatting. I'm just glad if I receive less HTML emails because of this change.

4\. Adding cc and bcc (when replying)

Second somewhat valid point. Although I think it's still intuitive while keeping the UI uncluttered.

5\. New email (compose)

You have several options to make the area larger. I love that I can look up other emails while composing a new one without the need to open a new window. In fact, I would like to see this while replying. The "feel there is no more space to write anything" is a ridiculous argument to hinder a useful feature.

edit: I would even make the point that if your emails are most often so long that they take up most of the screen you're doing _communication_ wrong.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's just my opinion but I would say that many Google products really suck from usability standpoint. I use computer all the time and I would say that I am pretty advanced user... and yet I think that sometimes it is really difficult to quickly find something in Google Analytics and I think it's UI is counterintuitive and user unfriendly as hell. And I have to admit that I hate Google Groups - when I am searching for a solution to some problem and I see something promising in Google search results I just continue searching when I notice that the result goes to some thread in Google Groups and I don't bother checking that out - if I were looking for the example how NOT to do this I would use Google Groups.

<comment><USER31> I've been working on a theory that they produce awful UIs as a disinformation campaign. Consider a scenario where an unmedicated paranoid dude thinks GOOG is sniffing his wireless, recording whereever he goes on the internet, and sharing it all to the NSA, CIA, DHS, and his local HOA zoning committee. Unfortunately this is all true, except for the HOA thing, but the dude is crazy so the point isn't if he's accidentally correct or not. Lets say he tries to spread the paranoid meme to an angry gmail user. The gmail user is going to respond "heck no, these guys can't operate some incredible elaborate spying program, they can't even write a simple email UI after email UIs have been in continuous development for about four decades". Thus the public impression of the "don't be evil" is maintained.

I think if the Mighty GOOG ever divorces itself from .gov / .mil then we'll see them release sane UIs.

Unfortunately I'm not sure how my theoretical model applies to .com with UI issues like APPL. Perhaps they're a mere manifestation of the Cthulhu Mythos. Or something else... it would hardly be the first time that totally different root causes leads to similar appearing results.

<comment><USER32> I struggle to take anybody seriously when they refer to companies by their stock market codes. Also, it's AAPL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> You can solve this by going back to old gmail via chrome ext

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fix-compose-for- gm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fix-compose-for-gmail%C2%AE- to/hpoidnelefpoofhdioielagfklahfcjg)

I love it.

<comment><USER34> How does this work? Why did they obfusicate their JS? Do I want to trust them?

<comment><USER35> chrome["webRequest"]["onBeforeSendHeaders"]["addListener"](function (a) { var b = a["requestHeaders"]; b[forEach](function (c, d) { if (c["name"]["toLowerCase"]() =="user-agent") { c["value"] = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)",; }; }); return { requestHeaders: _0xb56fx2 }; }, { urls: ["[http://mail.google.com/*"](http://mail.google.com/*"), "[https://mail.google.com/*"](https://mail.google.com/*"), types: ["main_frame", "sub_frame"] }, ["blocking", requestHeaders);

It actually really just swaps the user-agent for the ie8 header.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I will literally pay $100/year for an email service that was gmail pre-recent redesign. I cannot stand it and can't find a substitute.

<comment><USER37> Did you try fastmail.fm? It's very close to that.

<comment><USER36> I've looked at it. No mobile = no go.

<comment><USER38> It supports POP3 and IMAP, which is supported by iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and pretty much any other smartphone OS out there. What else do you need?

<comment><USER36> Sorry, no push/exchange is what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I totally agree with exactly those points. What's going to make me finally leave Gmail and migrate everything to... where is it I can migrate my stuff to?... well, I'll leave when they take away "Chat" and replace it with "Hangouts" like they did on Android where "Hangouts Replaces Chat". The LAST thing I want is Hangouts, chat is meant to be quick, private, light weight and how Hangouts "replaces" that I'll never understand. I'm unreasonably bitter over this, I know.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think what you fail to understand is that Google are building a tool for the masses and I would bet that they have analysed what features people _actually_ use and most of the time the majority of people don't change the subject or modify the recipients or format the email.

In short - they're catering for the typical user, and the typical user doesn't use all the features that the OP thinks they need.

<comment><USER41> Ever wonder how bland, feature barren, largely useless lowest common denominator shit that nobody really seems to like, or identify with can come to dominate design of software products?

My theory is that the assumption there is some kind of meaningful "Average user" which a product is then built for ultimately destroys utility in software.

If you have 50 features that on average 1% of people use, you can easily reach the false conclusion nobody cares about these features, when on aggregate 90% might use at least one of those features. Thus in aiming for the average, you haven't designed for anyone at all.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy)

<comment><USER30> I think this is what Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his TED talk about the best spaghetti sauce - [http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce...](http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> martin-adams My biggest gripe is trying to extract the email address of other people on the To or CC list of an email. It's excruciatingly hard.

</comment><comment><USER42> To be fair to Google, Gmail has always sucked...but it sucked many millions of times less than Hotmail or Yahoo mail, and still sucks many millions of times less than them even with the new revamp.

<comment><USER43> I use Yahoo and Gmail. Which is better is subjective depending on how you like to use email. I prefer Yahoo, mainly for the same reason the OP mentions about the size of compose. Yahoo compose gives you almost the full screen, in its own tab. It gives you space to think, copy and paste, vomit draft.

Also, objectively, from the time I hit the bookmark, to the time I see my inbox, Yahoo is faster than Gmail. Where Yahoo loses is the terrible ugly display ads that loaded in.

ps: you know what other site has an annoyingly small compose space? HN! :)

<comment><USER24> You can change the size of this :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Maybe it's just me, but I feel there is a trend that it is absolutely necessary to "fuck with" something that already works for the sake of [insert rationalization here]. It's like changing the semantics of how Unix pipes work. Don't do it. Go build something new. Leave the shit that already works Good Enough (tm) alone.

</comment><comment><USER45> I hate that Gmail took away Exchange support.

<comment><USER46> I spent almost 20 minutes trying to work out why a new Gmail account didn't work on my phone when an older one worked without issue. My mistake really, should have just assumed Google had cancelled a popular service.

<comment><USER45> I was furious to discover that a replacement iPad stopped working when it got replaced under warranty.

This was to an account that I have had for years. All that changed was a new device.

I would have paid $5 a month for an ad free experience and exchange support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Hiding the subject field is a massive pain in the ass.

</comment><comment><USER48> My personal gmail hate is that I can't select more than a screenful of text by dragging. If there is lots of text and I want to delete it, I click and drag to the bottom of the screen. But it's not able to scroll itself while I'm dragging, so I can only delete a screenful at a time.

<comment><USER49> Cant you place the cursor at the top of the screen, scroll to the bottom, press shift and click at the bottom to select the whole chunk? This works in Mac OS at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I like the new Gmail. It's more organized and I waste no time to read important mails. I think e-mail marketers won't like it.

</comment><comment><USER51> I've been programming and using computers for (too many) hours a day since I was 12 (11 years ago). When Windows 8 came out, I literally spent like 10 minutes looking for the shut down command. I guess it wasn't intuitive that you had to mouse down to the bottom right corner of the screen, click the icon usually reserved for "settings" and then click shut down?? Maybe I had an early release candidate or something weird, but I decided to give OS X a try at that point...

<comment><USER52> Yeah, you're not supposed to shut computers down anymore. You close the lid and it goes into hibernate. Or for a desktop, you walk away and it eventually goes into hibernate by itself. It's part of the commoditization of computing. You don't need to know how it works, you just use it to do what you want and it does everything else behind the scenes.

Drives me nuts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> It's the revenge of the weird taxonomic western culture.

If you hate your users and don't know anything, you think systems should be designed logically. Logical, to you, will mean that similar things are put together. Likewise, similar will be defined by occupying the same spot in some weird taxonomy of all things in your head [1]. This will result in putting change the font size, boldface, and indention in a little tray of "things that happen to text". This is either because you are crazy or think your users love playing the $25,000 pyramid. You will then compound your madness by labeling this tray with the not-an-icon of an italicized, underlined, bold letter A.

If you do not wish to be one of these bad people that turn their UI into some sort of Lovecraftian chest of drawers where the contents of each drawer is another chest of drawers, please investigate "task driven user interfaces". They are better. Things that use task driven UIs are illogical and messy and unbalanced and much, much, more pleasant for the people who have to use them.

[1]: This is culturally determined and possibly different for every individual. Nobody else will understand your taxonomy. There is no way to fix this. Sorry.

</comment><comment><USER54> I wish google would change their motto from "don't be evil" to "don't be assholes". I bet they would get a lot more mileage out of the second one.

Really, when has google ever cared about customer service? Heck, the BORG have better customer service than google. And no, I'm not still mad about google getting rid of my beloved Reader... Why do you ask?

</comment><comment><USER55> I think the basic new compose window is an advantage since I often want to reference previous emails while writing one email, and it lets me do that without creating a new gmail tab. (I always though Google should add this feature: [http://www.zappable.com/2011/07/things-gmail-should- fix/](http://www.zappable.com/2011/07/things-gmail-should-fix/) )

There is a separate issue that Gmail hid many options. I personally find this annoying since I don't want to click through things to change things like formatting. However, maybe the average Google user rarely uses the formatting. Also, keyboard shortcuts are faster than any clicking anyways. I assume Google has access to more data about this issue and decided it was worth it. I don't know why they don't provide more configuration options though.

</comment><comment><USER56> What I hate most about the new UI is the "Show trimmed content" feature. I have to click those three little dots every single time I reply to an email and they are awfully close to the send button. Gmail has tons of settings for everything, but I can't find a way to turn this completely useless and annoying feature off.

I think the broader trend behind this kind of stubbornness is a move toward opinionated software. The problem with opinionated software is that even in the best case it is more specialized for the needs of one particular group of users. It is not flexible enough to cater to different workflows.

I guess what this means is that consumer software and software for professionals is going to diverge again after converging for many years.

<comment><USER57> There's a labs feature which introduces a delay to sending emails, you have several seconds to press "undo" and stop it sending.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> As far as the small new compose window goes, just Shift-click and pop out the window. Problem solved.

<comment><USER7> OH GREAT! Because it's so obvious that you should ctrl-click to pop out an email.

I had to GOOGLE the solution for how to pop out an email. The irony is not lost on me :(

What on earth was wrong with the "pop out your email" button anyway?

<comment><USER58> Shift-click, not Ctrl-click.

<comment><USER7> hahaha! See what I mean?!?!?!?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> If you have a problem with the new Gmail, you can use the ancient gmail at [https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=h](https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=h) and set it as default. I honestly didn't even know that there was a new Gmail.

If you look at that basic html version and cry about all of the features you're missing, IMO you're really just being a backseat driver. You're not going to like every improvement that they make, but if you like enough of them to render how we used email in the very near past completely unusable, then they're doing a good job.

</comment><comment><USER60> While I get the resistance to change, a small UI change in software is something people should be able to deal with. Our world is ever changing, new roads and neighborhoods are constructed, stores come and go, and we need to be able to adapt.

And as far as frustrating changes go, recently they changed the layout of the grocery store across the street. What should have been a 5 minute shopping trip turned into a 30 minute long ordeal. So I don't have much sympathy for those who can't deal with buttons in new places on a computer screen.

</comment><comment><USER61> It took me a couple of days to get used to the new interface. Not really an improvement for me, but not annoying or terrible either.

I filed it under "meh" and moved on.

</comment><comment><USER62> What I can't stand is that they completely broke search for chats. Previously you could prepend your query with "is:chat" and get individual conversations returned as you would expect. These days you're given your entire "hangout" histories with various people and when you click them you have to frantically scroll to locate the relevant portion that matches your query.

</comment><comment><USER63> No mention of the fact that they are invading your privacy by reading your personal emails and selling that information to advertisers?

<comment><USER64> Haven't they done this since forever?

<comment><USER63> Yes, not limited to the "new" Gmail, though they only admitted to it recently.

<comment><USER65> Scanning email for content to target ads was a public controversy when gmail was introduced to the public in 2004.

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/apr/08/onlinesupp...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/apr/08/onlinesupplement.google)

[http://epic.org/privacy/gmail/faq.html](http://epic.org/privacy/gmail/faq.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I think the intension was to focus on the 80% of functionality that people use the most and consider the remaining 20$ as not-useful, which is generally ok by me. I think it's still better than the feature rich outlook. For me, the main annoyance is cc and bcc which I use quite often. Really, how often do you edit the subject?? more than once a week?

</comment><comment><USER67> These negative posts are so cliché. If people who were blogging wrote more in a positive light than whining or bashing on something that is purely their own opinion, I think reading top articles around here would be much more enjoyable.

For anyone else out there thinking of doing anything in Word then copying and pasting... you can break soooo many things on the web.

</comment><comment><USER68> Agreed. The new interface just doesn't work for me. Really need to find a new mail client. Kind of dislike GMail anyway since it searches ZIP files I attach and won't even let me send EXE builds to people I am working with in a ZIP. So I do all these stupid rename things and have to send the person instructions to rename the files.

</comment><comment><USER69> It's pretty atrocious, especially for a power-user.

The new "mini" compose windows are just insane. It's email, not IM chat.

<comment><USER15> Click on middle-button on top-right corner for full screen, use menu on the bottom to set as default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I'm most frustrated by the Android application. There are alphabetic icons left of each mail item, and I don't understand why. They have the first initial of the sender... ???. I also don't like the way mail loads, and it seems to take longer. And I can't get notifications to work properly, all on a Nexus 4.

</comment><comment><USER71> I used the Gmail web UI exclusively for about 7 years. Overall, it was great - simple, yet functional.

After this redesign, I have been pushed away. Despite my efforts, I failed to make any sense of it. So now I'm just using the Mac Mail app - certainly not as powerful, but much less frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER72> You can always use a desktop client. I've never seen the attraction of "webmail"

<comment><USER73> I've never seen the attracting of having a fat mail client chug through 20GB of email.

<comment><USER72> I've been using Mac Mail for years. I don't think I've ever even deleted a message. Still seems to work fine -- but I see your point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I like the new Gmail. It organizes my various categories of email nicely, and has a nice UI.

<comment><USER20> Nice try, Gmail UI team guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I'd like to remind of an alternative: [http://www.mailpile.is/](http://www.mailpile.is/)

Apart from a clean UI, it doesn't milk you for data and is not in collaboration with NSA :)

</comment><comment><USER75> The new Gmail was the final straw for me over an already constrained relationship with how Google apps was evolving.

I jumped ship, and took all my data with me. It felt extremely liberating and honestly, just damn good.

<comment> k-mcgrady Where did you jump ship to? I've wanted to do the same (and I have for personal email) but the ease of using my own domain with Google apps is unmatched anywhere I know of.

<comment><USER75> As lot of other people, I moved my email to fastmail. It just feels so much lighter and cleaner and _better_.

I moved my contacts and calendering to a owncloud-based setup, which literally takes 5 minutes to set up. That way this data is available to all things which can work with the CardDAV and CalDAV standards.

This can easily be done on any webhost, and getting it "under your domain" a no-brainer. As a bonus, you now have your own private Dropbox-like setup as well, with clients across most major platforms.

For Google Drive/Docs, I've yet to see any replacement worth jumping on to, so I've kept that around. I've seen a few candidates mentioned, but they aren't ready/released or mature enough yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Saw this Chrome extension mentioned on Twitter yesterday: [http://oldcompose.com](http://oldcompose.com)

I haven't tried it myself, but apparently it works well.

<comment><USER35> I just tried to get it. All alarmbells going off here.

First it wants your email address to install, then you have to 'pay with a tweet' or 'pay with a facebook post'

Thankfully it's shoddy programming, you can dismiss the facebook post page without publishing and click the download link:

[http://1.upld.to/Gd9](http://1.upld.to/Gd9)

Will verify this first though, could be something scary...

<comment><USER35> Update: It's safe. It just swaps the user-agent header on all web requests for the Internet Explorer 8.0 one.

My quick de-obfuscation effort:

chrome["webRequest"]["onBeforeSendHeaders"]["addListener"](function (a) { var b = a["requestHeaders"]; b[forEach](function (c, d) { if (c["name"]["toLowerCase"]() =="user-agent") { c["value"] = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)",; }; }); return { requestHeaders: b }; }, { urls: ["[http://mail.google.com/*"](http://mail.google.com/*"), "[https://mail.google.com/*"](https://mail.google.com/*"), types: ["main_frame", "sub_frame"] }, ["blocking", requestHeaders]);

Installed it, performs as advertised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> another reason to use Gmail only via IMAP in my Thunderbird...

<comment><USER78> Me too.

The web version is just when I am not at home or without my laptop.

This is a nice advantage of native applications. I get to control when I upgrade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Just as an FYI: For those that prefer a full screen experience when composing messages can hit 'd' instead of 'c' when using keyboard commands.

</comment><comment><USER80> Google is making baby steps toward irrelevance. Eventually, it will start running.

Just wait until the number of people that "hate it" will drop.

</comment><comment><USER81> As much as i hate this Gmail design, the reason I see for these changes are to make UX friendly in mobile devices mainly tablets

<comment><USER57> Don't they have an app for that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I wonder if it's easier for them to analyze and mine data from ten small emails vs. one large one.

<comment> T-hawk They certainly get more ad inventory to deliver when folks are zipping around ten small emails and clicking to read them.

I'm surprised people haven't figured this out. As we always say, if you're not paying, you're the product and not the customer. So of course Google wants to encourage lots of short emails. Google's incentive in designing the Gmail UI is to create lots of clicks and ad impressions. User satisfaction is secondary and held up mostly by "don't be evil". Google's only incentive is to keep it just tolerable enough that jumping ship isn't worthwhile.

I'm sure Google does have many designers legitimately dedicated to improving the service. But also sure that they're closely monitoring the business moneymaking end as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> I've gone back to Thunderbird and IMAP because of this.

Hide text formatting buttons???

Teeny-tiny reply windows?

I'm not sure what assumptions they were making, but it feels like they want me to use Gmail like it's Twitter.

What's next, a "make this conversation public" button? And it will show on my G+ profile?

</comment><comment><USER84> I don't like it also. But we will get use to it.

</comment><comment><USER85> I agree with many points, except the smaller compose window.

1) It's done so you can search your email _while_ typing a reply, maybe find some info and copy/paste it. It's extremely useful.

2) You don't tons of horizontal space to write an email (except for embedded photos). Vertical space scrolls.

3) I'd actually argue that short emails are better than long ones. Learn how to write succinctly, to the point, and there are more chances it will be read.

4) Get a high res display if you need more screen space. 1080p displays are dirt cheap.

<comment><USER86> I have to agree with point #1. I hated the small compose window until I realized I can minimize it, browse/search my Gmail and then return to finish.

I can't say I agree with your other points. Sometimes, you need to write a long email and there's no way around it. an email provider should not be trying to re-invent how people use email, they should embrace how people use email and make it better.

<comment><USER15> When you need to write a long email, you can just press the "full screen" button, or even shift-click to open a new window.

Doesn't seem that problematic to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> If you use the URL [https://mail.google.com/mail/h/](https://mail.google.com/mail/h/) you can use the old interface.

<comment><USER88> The HTML interface is more similar to the old interface than the new one, but it's also a lot worse in other respects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Google is able to test changes thousands of times every second, and since Larry Page became CEO the changes have all been done to create a consistent feel across Google's services, and have all been tested and refined. What are your credentials? Saying "I'm writing this post hoping that it will reach someone that works in Google and they are going to do something about it." is ambitious, the opinion of one person does not reflect the amount of data they have that likely implies that this change is an advantage.

<comment><USER65> _What are your credentials?_

Downvote for this. Questioning or criticizing the author's credentials is a poor substitute for questioning or criticizing his thesis.

<comment><USER90> I agree, 'what are your credentials?' is the wrong question - 'where is your data?' would be better. But I too question the author.

The author is posting a list of his personal gmail bugbears. We all understand the author doesn't care that you can see the email in the reply window, he'd rather a much bigger space to write.

I think we can safely say that Google test UX changes with actual users. Asking the parent for some data to back up that _most users_ don't like the change is reasonable.

Also making the compose full screen would result in a very wide compose area, which is widely though to slow down reading (eg, of what the gmail users has just written).

I've actually flagged the submission: evaluating UX based on opinionated users without data is simply poor.</comment></comment></comment>


I've watched the economy for 30 years. Now I'm truly scared - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/28/globaleconomy.creditcrunch <comment><USER2> In order to make this post a hacker-relevant discussion (I enjoyed the article, by the way) how about this quote:

"Everybody tries to 'game' the system on their route to vast personal fortunes - whether short-selling, packaging up dud mortgages as prime mortgages or telling lies about their financial viability - and the result is that the system is getting wise. The best course today in any financial transaction is to presume zero integrity. Credit is drying up and with it the very lifeblood of the economy."

When I read this, the first thing I thought of were the inevitable enhancements to the credit rating systems at personal and corporate levels which will arise in the next few years as a result of all of this.

If we're going to continue to abandon trust and integrity for their own sake and only include them as features of self-serving transactions, then it seems natural that we will have to push our current credit-rating systems much further to the (temporal and relational) edges than where they currently are.

<comment><USER3> I've been doing some thinking along the lines of using statistical mechanics and information theory to produce a self-consistent measure of risk (unlike the current rating systems). Does anyone know if there's been any work in the area?

<comment><USER4> What would it mean, in this context, for a measure of risk to be "self- consistent"?

<comment><USER3> At the first pass, it would mean that possibilities would add up correctly.

Here's one example: give every investment, stocks, bonds, cash, commodities, etc. a distribution of possible returns. Then, every holding company also has a distribution of possible returns, obtained by adding up and scaling the distributions of the stock respectively held. So long as the market changes at a rate substantially faster than the holdings change, this is a self- consistent model of stocks in that the total amount of expected stock value remains the same. One can then examine the distribution of possible returns of a given investment and assess one's own position of risk.

The problem with this is how limited it is. It does not, for example, account for hedge fund pricing well at all, since in hedge funds the holdings change nearly as fast as the market does. It doesn't account well for the wiles of any particular, fast trading investor. It does, however, lend itself to a fairly simple model for static futures, forwards, options, and swaps.

Why is this line of reasoning interesting? The credit systems we used to have couldn't handle the complexity of the derivatives that were being created. By one method or another, bad investments, especially mortgages, were being added up, and in the process the market found it difficult to track how risky the summed investments were. Credit rating agencies don't even make publicly known what their credit ratings represent! An investor is compelled to then blindly believe them, which, in this case, spectacularly failed.

<comment><USER5> How does this concept differ from the stochastic calculus based implementations of VaR?

<comment><USER3> I don't know. Maybe it doesn't differ from it at all. I'm not a domain expert by any means...

Thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am tired of hearing "we need more decency and trust, it was just the greed of a few people that got us into this mess". I'd prefer transparency to trust, because then we could actually see if somebody is behaving badly, and decide to distrust that somebody.

Apart from that, it was everybody's greed that is to blame, not just a few bad bosses. If you put your savings into an investment you don't understand, because you have been promised high interests, you and your greed are to blame.

Also, there is the possibility that things simply went wrong. Shit happens. Why does there always have to be a scapegoat?

What the state should do is prevent fraud, that would probably be sufficient.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, it isn't clear that even the people selling these mortgage- backed securities knew how risky they were.

<comment><USER6> One more reason not to blame "bad morals" for the crisis. I guess most "securities" had a long chain of other investments behind them, and one or more chain elements where risky. Of course the guy selling the thing ten steps down has no idea anymore how risky it is. But that is where transparency could help a bit, maybe?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the things that crept up in reddit as it went downhill was a propensity for "doom! gloom!" headlines. There's certainly a lot to worry about with the current crisis, but let's be careful.

<comment><USER9> Bankers don't create wealth they gather it from other people. There are a lot of people going nuts because their ability to do this is breaking down.

So, investment banks might fail, but as long as people don't pull money out of their checking or savings account I don't think the system is losing money. What I expect is happening is a lot of "fake" wealth is being destroyed but I don't think it's a good idea to buy up fake wealth with cash the government is borrowing. Because, as soon as we borrow money people will take money out of the system to buy our bonds which necessitates our buying assets to compensate.

<comment><USER10> _Bankers don't create wealth_

This is a common fallacy. Bankers manage risk in lending, reducing overall risk. This is valuable, i.e. it creates wealth.

If any given Bankers were _not_ performing risk-reduction service for society, they would be outcompeted in the market by their competitors. Therefore, to say that bankers do not create wealth, would be to imply that bankers are in conspiracy to distort the lending market.

<comment><USER11> But is that what happened here? Financial institutions lent money to borrowers who could not afford the loan they were given. The financial institutions packaged up those extremely risky loans to pass the buck on to another institution.

It seems that the institutions did not manage risk. In a very generic view, bankers may have value. But as far as this financial crisis goes, they failed miserably.

<comment><USER12> That's not the complete story. Financial institutions were "encouraged" by the US govt to make those loans.

The other organizations expected to make money buying these loan packages knowing what was in them, so it's hard to see why bankers are to blame.

<comment><USER11> I agree that the US government is not blameless, but I disagree that bankers should not be blamed for their role. If a banker's value is "managing risk in lending, reducing overall risk," then the banks still failed to supply this value add.

It may also be a fair statement that the institutions did not know the value of what they were buying because of the way they were packaged. I thought that was one of the obstacles facing the bailout--how to value some/most/all of the troubled financial instruments involved. This lack of clarity seems to add to the risk.

<comment><USER12> A banker's job is packaging risk, which they did.

> It may also be a fair statement that the institutions did not know the value > of what they were buying because of the way they were packaged.

Are you suggesting that banks lied or that the buyers assumed that the risk was acceptable? If the latter, why shouldn't they take the loss? After all, they were willing to take the gain.

The bailout is occurring under different assumptions - we're insisting on looking under the hood more.

<comment><USER7> > A banker's job is packaging risk, which they did.

It seems as if they hid the risk, and may even have increased it, along these lines: [http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2008/01/straigh...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2008/01/straightforward-explanation-of-present.html)

<comment><USER12> There's nothing at that link to suggest anything about what bankers in this universe did or didn't do.

Note that some of the slicing and dicing was intended to turn a pile of mortgages into two financial instruments, one with less risk than the original pile and the other with more risk. The two instruments would then sell for different prices.

And, are the buyers actually the financial illiterates that the "buyers didn't know" argument requires? I wouldn't call Merrill Lynch naive about money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While I agree with much of what he says (despite working in derivatives), and while I realise the message is what should be addressed, and not the messenger, I think it's worth noting that Will Hutton's wife profited very nicely from the debt explosion here in the UK, as part owner of a company called First Premise, a buy-to-let landlord, and that this may be why his increasingly shrill rants never place any blame on the greedy "man on the street" who was only too happy to sign up for a fraudulent loan and thereby contribute to this mess.

For the last ten or more years of my life (in Australia and the UK), I've been living in a strange world where every single social conversation eventually converges on property prices, property investment, buy to let, negative gearing, renovations, decking, auctions... I'm willing to suffer some hard times if it means all of that will disappear and we can go back to being normal humans again.

At least until the next bubble. :-(

<comment><USER14> >I've been living in a strange world where every single social conversation eventually converges on property prices

Its really tiring isn't it. well it is good that is over, its just the other crap I don't want. But if we can get back to doing stuff rather then speculating, then great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _[Hank Paulson's plan] made no demands that any financial executives sacrifice pay or bonuses despite having driven their firms and wider economy to the point of bankruptcy. He does not want the government to provide new bank capital to help recapitalise a bust banking system. Instead, he wants the government to buy their toxic debt and so leave the banks unreformed. On top he wanted complete discretion to act as he chose without any oversight._

And this is the man who originaly designed the bailout plan ? This guy obviously doesn't want to save the US & world economy, he wants to save Wall Street first and go on like nothing happened. Why him ?!

<comment><USER12> Since we're not going after the politicans who "encouraged" the no-money-down loans and took campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie, it's unclear why you're upset that the financial execs aren't taking a hit.

If you're renting because you couldn't afford to buy or you bought what you could afford, should you pay to keep people in houses that they can't afford?

<comment><USER16> They should be out of their houses. They are lucky to have lived in such houses in the first place. Also, those that acted improperly should be brought to justice. New rules should be in place to stop this from happening again. The greed and vice that led to this won't go away with the bail out. Power is all too abused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> good! good! everyone under forty should be cheering this on. if you finally want to be able to afford a house, you need people who currently own houses to go through some degree of hell. the "bailout" is about making sure those who had money yesterday have it tomorrow. i say let the power change hands. LET IT SHATTER. i will buy the pieces on sale.

<comment><USER18> I take it you aren't a homeowner, then?

<comment><USER17> yes, a home OWNER, as in i hold no mortgage. i have zero debt. i have cash to buy distressed assets. i just wish people would stop trying to "save" things.

<comment><USER14> I am in similar boat. But what worries me is if this means much more then that... what if you suddenly don't have cash, or its worth nothing. What does it matter if you own lots of houses and no one can rent them. Well, its unlikely it would ever be as bad as that ;) but heck, hard not to worry about unlikely events.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm so bored of listening to this! just let them go bankrupt! Is this capitalism or what???? Nationalize insurance industry, finance industry, automotive industry. Let the Market clean up the excesses as it has been doing for hundreds of years! This time is NO DIFFERENT.</comment>


Ask HN:Any good book recommendations for an advanced noob hacker - <AUTHOR>

Would love some good books for summer reading! <comment><USER2> You may need to be more specific about your technical experience and interests. There are many books out there! :)</comment>


Ask HN: Would you be interested in an Etherpad-like version control system? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
Recently Etherpad added the Timeline feature to their webapp, and while looking at it, I had thought maybe this could be applied as a version control method. There would be a timeline for each file in a project and all changes to that file would get recorded to the timeline. When you hit checkin, a bookmark appears in the timeline. This could probably only be implemented as a full fledged text editor.
The key idea behind this is that you don't really have to bother about version control at all, since the software automatically records everything to the timeline.
So would any of you be interested in such a software, if anybody were to develop it??? Depending on your answers, I may put some work into it. <comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be better to implement a git/subversion... plugin for Textmate/Emacs that does this instead of doing a vcs from scratch? or won't a traditional vcs work as a back-end for this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I initially thought of doing it as a plugin, but then I figured I'd have to write plugins for too many different text editors.

Also, I was thinking that when you hit checkin, a git/subversion repository could be created/updated.</comment></comment>


The Complete Guide to Mastery - <AUTHOR> https://doist.com/blog/mastery/ <comment><USER2> I loved the article, too bad it didn't get traction on HN. Thanks for sharing it Amir!</comment>