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Google X Display Boss: Smartphones, Tablets, Apps Are "Mind-Numbing"
curtwoodward writes "Stop drooling over that new iPhone. Put away the fancy tablet. Because the real hardcore nerds find that stuff 'boring' and 'mind-numbing,' says Mary Lou Jepsen, head of the display division at secretive R&D lab Google X. At MIT's EmTech conference, Jepsen said the next generation of 'moonshot' tech is much more exciting and interesting. That includes Google X projects like the driverless car, Project Loon, a stratospheric balloon-based wireless network, and Google Glass."
You had me until Google Glass. Until talking to yourself without a cell phone to your ear is socially acceptable, it's a niche gadget.
Another manager says their product is really exciting and interesting and everything else boring.
She's right about everyone else, but Google Glass is also boring.
I looked at cnet.com a couple weeks ago and the whole site, almost every image on every story, was just a column of rectangle slabs, "mobile," "mobile," "mobile," and nothing else. All minor variations on the same thing. I'm sick of it.
It looks like she might have overlooked the glaringly obvious fact that the entire reason why Google X and her job position exist is because of "mind numbing" technologies that serve as ad serving platforms that get in revenue for Google. Ask her to get driverless cars, balloons and a headpiece to start generating income!
Are they cloning Sergei Brin?
I'm sure glad, as a nerd, that Ms. Jepsen took the time to inform me there are projects in the works that I can get really excited about without actually telling me what they are, just after making condescending remarks aimed at consumer electronics and just before extolling the genius of Google's new cell phone that holds itself up to your face. Because I am a nerd these things really appeal to me. Thank you Ms. Jepsen and Mr. Woodward, you guys are really nerds like me.
She seems to be telling us that when technology finally becomes useful enough to be mainstream, it's boring. OK, fine, I can accept that, somewhat. But the point of developing something new and "exciting" is so that someday it will be mundane and boring. And when Google spends all their time on the new, that makes more room for others to innovate with the "old".
She has a point that it may be boring for intelligent engineers to work on yet another new, incrementally better iteration of a smartphone, tablet or laptop. Many consumerss, me included are not that in awe anymore of a somewhat better new generation of iphone, galaxy, ipad, thin laptop etc. They were very good before and are now a bit better. Hence her research might be interesting, but I am not sure that Google Glass will be the answer. Now I am not as cynical as many on /. - I think that moving towards near-invisible wearable computing is a very exciting next step and I am curious what she and companies like Apple will eventually come up with.
A laptop is a TOOL. A cellphone is a TOOL. When you need them to be the entertainment in themselves you have issues.
“I interviewed a month ago a recent college graduate from Stanford—a mechanical engineering degree. She was already on her third cellphone or laptop and bored out of her mind,” Jepsen said. “She graduated in 2010. I think it gets depressing. It was so exciting three years ago.”
Three years ago your cellphone and laptop were "exciting", but now they are "boring"? If you are talking about building them - maybe. But using them? If the form factor of your computers and communication devices are boring you "out of your mind", maybe that's your problem more than the devices'.
Yeah, tablets and apps are not as impressive as people think. That said, google has given birth to some absolute duds.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
All that other stuff is bullshit. Once you combine teledildonics with direct brain stimulation, it's game over man.
What utter bull sack! I'll have you know I hand craft the kerning of my fonts with painstaking attention to detail, and sculpt those myriad of pixel perfect displays and animations a single frame at a time. When it all comes together right in some yuppie's eye, IT IS Exhilarating!
The only thing more exciting than building those big, beautiful, almost intuitive, displays is making the tools one uses to make them:
A P fucking I's!!!
Why, I once met a guy who helped standardize IEEE 1364...
That's Verilog to you philistines.
He was a veritable volcano of vivacity whose smile beamed with the brilliance of a billion bacon breakfasts.
The further down you go the more excited the turtles are!
Maybe not so much excitement. Our vehicles have already learned to maintain speed, enhance braking, honk-and-flash when the door is opened from the inside after the key's been out of the ignition too long, detect road obstacles and now can take over parking.
It's all incremental improvement, like the cinder-block-to-pocket-slate cell phone evolution.
There are already vehicle "autopilot" systems good enough to allow the driver to stop looking at the road some of the time. Radar-controlled cruise control plus lane keeping is enough to allow that. But it's not enough to prevent accidents caused by even slightly difficult situations. Several car companies have shipped "driving assist" systems which can do that, but they've deliberately kept them from operating with no driver input. Ford, Mercedes, BMW, and Audi have all stopped just before hands-off driving.
The auto industry recognizes that there is a "deadly valley" that begins when a vehicle "autopilot" is good enough to allow the driver to stop looking at the road some of the time. On the other side of the deadly valley is fully hands-off autonomous driving, which Google almost has now. We will see commercilaly successful systems on the other side of the deadly valley within the next decade.
Systems that operate in the "deadly valley" will make things worse, for obvious reasons.
Visicalc was invented in 1979.
It was written by two hard-working geniuses who busted ass for months and months to get it to work. Visicalc changed the world.
The reason they were able to write this software is because the Apple II had the tools to do so. If you had an Apple II, you had everything you needed to develop new software for it. Same goes for the PC.
Mobile phones and tablets have no such tools. They are locked, proprietary devices forbidden to developers. They use locked, proprietary programming languages, obscure, flabby and inconsistent APIs and cannot communicate with anything but the "cloud."
They also suck ass as computing platforms. Their operating systems are shit packed on top of shit, and their hardware is flimsy plastic shit to go with it.
Mobile phones and tablets are fiddly little distraction machines that function as brightly colored noisy little pets. They are nothing more than over-engineered tamogatchis. They are useless for real work, especially compared to open platforms like the PC. At best, they are a good place to store phone numbers. They also give teenage girls a way to drain their parents' wallets by sending nonsense to each other 24 hours a day for $1500 a megabyte.
The "post-PC world" is a marketing slogan designed to get you back on the upgrade treadmill and wanting the next version of the device you bought last month.
The difference is mobile devices cannot replace or even occasionally substitute for the PC, because there is no mobile device software that even remotely compares to the world-changing technology the PC made possible.
What was the last "visicalc-level" software title developed from scratch? I'm going to say the last of them debuted in the mid 1990s. With the exception of FOSS, there hasn't been shit developed for any platform since. It's like the fucking software industry was unplugged in the late 90s. (Gee, I wonder why?)
The worst part is, anyone in their teens or early 20s right now is so distracted by Unity and HTML5 and Haskell and all the other flavors of proprietary dumbfuckery that they will never learn why things work on a computer.
And that's a fucking shame.
Google glass is possibly the worst version of a heads up display i have seen. I love the idea of a hud but i wouldn't buy glass if it was $50. Give me a proper set of glasses that fold, with 2 screens for 3d, display in the middle of each eye for better augmented reality/comfort and clear and see through (we have this technology), oh and if you can squeeze it in, some kind of 'leap motion' like control input, so you can touch/gesture control the virtual image.
Rocket Surgeon.
Autonomous solar power airships are a much better idea. Navigation would be easier and you end a lot of other driving problems on the way.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Instead of working on mind-numbing and boring smartphones and pads, I'll work for balloon-based wireless transponders for those mind-numbing and boring gadgets.
Hurray!
It doesn't much appeal to me, no, but then I'm not exactly the target market for any of this stuff. It is clear to me though, that the ergonomics of the hand-helds that everyone is so excited about really suck: I see people on the train holding their phones up in front of their face, bracing their hand with their other hand, just so they can keep their heads upright for awhile.
On the other hand, I already hate the fact that I'm out riding a bicycle, sharing the road with people who keep looking down to check their messages. Google Glass is only going to make this kind of behavior worse, as people tell themselves they can keep their eye on the road and text at the same time. Maybe they're holding up the rollout of Glass until the robot cars are ready...