Slashdot Mirror
Top Inventions of 2007
Gibbs-Duhem writes "Time Magazine is reporting on the best inventions of the year. The top invention is the somewhat well-known iPhone, but there are some extremely cool projects included that I had certainly never heard of, including a device for capturing waste heat from car engines to increase efficiency up to 40%, a novel car designed to run entirely on compressed air claiming to have a range of 2000km with zero pollution, a James Bond style GPS tracking device that police can use to avoid high-speed chases, a small-scale printing press capable of printing and binding a paperback book in 3 minutes for under $3/book (and $50k per machine), a microbe-based technology for turning soft sand into sandstone, a water-based display which uses computer controlled nozzles to produce coherent gaps in the water, and a way to convert type A, B, and AB-negative blood into type O."
This has gone too far. There is no way you can place the iPhone as the top "Invention". It is a phone just like any other but with a lot of features you would expect on a phone removed. No novelty or ingenuity. The only thing that it has going for it is that it looks nice. If looking nice is a quality of a great invention then I proclaim the Mona Lisa as the greatest invention of Leonardo da Vinci. I will be hearing next that the iPhone gets the Nobel peace prize as well.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Such a great device with so much potential, it's just a shame. And I really don't even blame Apple. It's this country's telecomm industry that's broken.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
How is the IPhone even classed as an invention? IT is something that already existed (cell-phone) that someone else added some gee-gaws to.
That's like saying the 2008 Chevy Malibu is the top invention for 2008 because it is so cool and hip!
How sad...
It's still a heat engine, which means, maybe 30% efficiency under ideal conditions. Then there's the problem with getting heat into the cylinder fast enough as the air expands so it won't even come close to the ideal.
Compare with an electric motor where 95% efficiency is not uncommon. An air car just doesn't make any sense, particularly when you're using electricity to charge the tanks.
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The fact that the iPhone placed as "top invention" speaks more to the ubiquitousness of cell phones in our society and how irritated people are with the current state of affairs with respect to the cell carriers. Most of the Time article about the iPhone spoke about how poor current phones were (the iPhone is "pretty" because "Most high-tech companies don't take design seriously") and how it will encourage carriers to open up their sandboxes ("It's not a phone, it's a platform") than it did about how cool an "invention" the iPhone is.
It's also interesting because many of the complaints about the iPhone revolve around the fact that Apple somehow didn't go far enough to crack the cell carrier hegemony (the iPhone is locked to a single carrier, the iPhone contract is two years) than it goes towards actual design flaws in the physical unit.
In fact, I've never seen people get so worked up before over a single cell phone--and I suggest it's because we all hate the cell carriers and are hoping someone--either a powerful government or a powerful company (either Apple's iPhone or Google's Android OS) will force the cell carriers to improve.
Look, I'm an iPhone owner, and I love the damn thing, no question about it.
It was worth every penny, and then some; the SDK should only make it better.
However, that said, labeling it as "Invention of the Year" is a pretty sad state of affairs for the country. I'm pretty medical, environmental, and social breakthroughs deserve FAR more attention.
I'd hate to tell the guy with cancer that the really cool virus that eats cancer cells could've had a ton more funding for R & D if only it had one Time's Invention of the Year.
The iPhone is cool, no question, but it is the height of frivolity, and can't possibly compare with all the other wonderful things mankind is dreaming up and making a reality that deserve far more press coverage than the iPhone has already gotten.
Not that I'm complaining too loudly, my Apple stock just keeps on truckin'
The Lucky Camera for astronomy technique has been used by amateurs for years. The Elasitc space suit was a concept going back to the 60's. Injectying water into engines is a technique that's been used for decades. These guys should edit slashdot.
Apple is doing NOTHING to break the hegemony. Apple released a phone which does barely nothing more than other phones on the market (and indeed a lot less than some), tied to a single network (which was THEIR choice), and then charged massive amounts of money for the phones. And what happened? People who either don't use phones a lot, or people who love marketing spiel, or people who love apple, bought the flying shit out of them. Apple is one of the bad guys! This article is saying that a product that isn't better than any others, but which costs more and is locked more and runs less software is somehow better than, say, any other mobile out there? That's what's truly horrifying about this. The only thing Apple is changing is how much people will pay for a mediocre phone. And currently that's $400, with a contract. Jesus.
The bookbinding machine? That was mentioned on Slashdot previously. It's not that novel. Many of the bigger copiers/printers have a binder option. Larger Kinkos outlets can crank out perfect-bound books. The price and cost figures are vaporware; the bookbinding machine isn't actually in production. The Internet Archive has a printing and binding operation in a van (the "Internet Bookmobile"), and has for years. Uses a semi-auto binder.
The programmable water display is one of those cute one-off things. I've seen some similar gadgets, including a projection screen made of mist. That showed up at a venture capital conference in Silicon Valley a few months ago. Modulated water displays were done in Japan in the 1980s, and they've been tried in some US retail locations.
The "air car" has some grand claims. "For various reasons, one of which is industrial secrecy, we havent published all technical details on this site." Right. The thing is actually supposed to be a gasoline-powered hybrid - "The Series 34 CATs engines can be equipped with and run on dual energies - fossil fuels and compressed air". Plus, there's an electric motor and battery in there. "Parking manoeuvres are powered by the electric motor." It's not clear why they need both electrical and compressed air energy storage. The actual range they've achieved running on compressed air is only 7.2Km. All they actually have on the road is one prototype car made of welded tubes, with steel compressed air tanks driving an ordinary reciprocating compressor as an air motor. None of their claimed technology (the carbon fibre tanks, the wierd crankshaft linkage, the low-friction seals) is in use. They have a good Monster Garage project, but not a major invention.
The "40% more efficient gasoline engine" thing isn't new. See this 1979 article in Mother Earth News. Wikipedia has a good article on water injection, and there's a link to Crowder's engine. The general consensus today seems to be that turbos and intercoolers have made water injection obsolete. If you use water injection, you have to carry either a water tank about as big as the gas tank, or a condenser and oil/water separation system.
I'm not impressed with Time's selections. There must have been some better work this year, or we're in real trouble in technology.
I don't see the issue, an invention is a technological development, it doesn't have to be feasible to be an invention. It doesn't even have to be cost effective, a lot of inventions and discoveries don't reach the mainstream until they've been improved to the point where they become cost effective.
The white city exposition saw the debut of the ferris wheel and the electric light, but neither of those things saw widespread use until later. It just wasn't realistic to within even one year wire every home in America for electricity.
The telephone and the telegraph likewise were invented, and then later put into use. It wasn't possible at the time to get them up to a useful state in only 1 year, it took a while to string up all those wires.
Even ice cream was difficult to push out until there were better means of refrigeration than were available at the time.
You do realize that Audubon New York, the state's largest bird conservation organization, has gotten behind wind power 100%, right? The effect of wind turbines on birds is generally so ridiculously overstated it's embarassing. Here is the data from New York on bird kills from turbines: Madison site, 7 turbines, one year, 4 bird deaths. Copenhagen, 2 turbines, two migration seasons, zero bird deaths. That's it. The Madison site was the only site in the entire northeastern US with any reported bird deaths.
Want to save birds? Protest glass windows (especially on skyscrapers), housecats, habitat destruction, excessive pesticide use, climate change, and coal power plants. You know, the things that we do that *actually* kill large numbers of birds.
Don't like the look of wind turbines? Don't live near them; there are plenty of people willing to take your place. I, for one, find them quite attractive. You can go live near a nice pretty coal power plant instead (that is, after all, what those turbines are displacing).
I have the memory of an elephant. I remember going to the zoo and seeing an elephant.
If they can remove it without stopping and giving the police a chance to converge on them from all sides, power to them.
I have the memory of an elephant. I remember going to the zoo and seeing an elephant.
Next time you are sitting on a tort or product-liability jury, remember that feeling.
The world has changed because we, as a society, via our juries, have switched from "buyer beware" to "seller beware". Only now are we seeing the mass casualties washing ashore. And everything is padded, roped off, banned, covered in uselessly vague warning labels, and painted bright yellow.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
can't disagree on the fact that the year is over.
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... what exactly ... no really, what exactly did the iphone give you ? nokias and sony-ericssons had all these features punched into a phone in the beginning of 2006, some models had partial features from these even before. what the heck ? burn the time magazine, it's just a freaking commercial. a phone with all the features of the iphone was on the market already in 2006.
... but i don't really care. the phone may be "ok" for apple fans, for me it looks like a heavy rip off (locked software, locket networks ...) , some of us just don't want to admit it.
but my question is, where is the invention part of the iphone ? seriously, where is it ? can someone give me 1 example that's actually useful in the phone and that apple introduced as first ?
[x] we did have music playing phones before
[x] we did have videos playing phones before
[x] we did have web browsing phones before
[x] we did have locked down phones before
[x] we did have quite nice looking phones before
[x] we did have overhyped phones before
[x] we did have uncomfortable keyboards before
[x] we did have unstable calling quality phones before
so
i'll probably get heavily modded down by "true iPhone fans"
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.