Top Inventions of 2007 293
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."
Zero emmision car? (Score:1, Interesting)
If you're looking at emissions you have look from source to sink. Picking an arbitrary starting point and saying "look - zero emissions" is pure crap.
Re:The air car (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hey! (Score:3, Interesting)
Frank (Score:5, Interesting)
Regardless of whether or not that is true, it underscores the critical thing about design and function-- it's a delicate balance, and designers must be careful not to trade too much functionality for aesthetics and vice versa. Everyone's tastes differ, but Apple frequently makes design choices that I find detrimental to function with no benefit beyond aesthetics. (lack of tacticle keyboard on iPhone, gorgeous all-in-one PCs that make your monitor a disposable item, elegant slim notebooks that offer inadequate cooling for the GPU and necessitate factory underclocking, iTunes' ignorance of audio organized by folder rather than tags, no handy screws for battery replacement on the clean, mirror-finished backs of iPods, etc...)
FRAUD ALERT -- Slashdot sucked in again! (Score:3, Interesting)
This has been known for decades. The problem is that the extremely hot steam corrodes the extremely hot steel.
Slashdot editors apparently spend all their time playing video games, and learn nothing about the world.
Re:I'm sorry but no (Score:1, Interesting)
Most [mindless fanboys] don't understand [communication with other people], and in fact disregard [communication] considerations as nothing more than [time-wasting drivel since they're right anyway]. This is foolish. [Communication]is about taking the human into consideration. Frank Lloyd Wright is a good example: while his structures were beautiful, a large part of their elegance was due to the consideration he gave to his users. He never once forgot that he was creating something that would be used by people.
And I didn't even need to touch the bit about Wright.
P.S. Wright once designed a house for a client with a large glass roof section. Some of the glass sections met at inverted 'V's with the point sticking up into the air. At the time Wright designed the house this was nearly impossible to make watertight and elegant but Wright insisted that his design be followed. One night it leaked and the client called Wright to complain. Wright told his client to complain to the builder since the builder installed the glass and not Wright. Wright was a great artist but in some of his designs he was driven by design alone and not by any overwhelming consideration for his clients. Occasionally it was just about the money, too.
Re:The air car (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Frank (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm so, so sorry. I tried to be clear, but was not. "No benefit TO ME beyond aesthetics" would have been better. I was just trying to illustrate the difficulty in finding the balance between aesthetics and function. I like Apple. I like Apple's designs. Which is why I thought they made a good case to point out a few examples of how hard it is to balance everybody's functionality needs with aesthetics.
Or... it could insert ID3 tags based on folders and then use that instead, and then you would complain that iTunes is modifying your music.
I wouldn't have complained. I'm a geek. Any music file I have is probably already meticulously tagged, with a filename that contains all the same info as in the tags, and in folders on top of that. I highly doubt my wife would have complained, either-- that solution does almost exactly what the perl script I had to write for her does, and would have been brilliant. Without automated retagging of all her files, though, the iPod and iTunes were utterly useless to her. If Steve Jobs himself had flown in by helicopter with a free iMac for her that day, she probably would have split his head open with it.
Quality isnt Apple's domain, that's Sun/IBM. (Score:3, Interesting)
For Apple to commit to this kind of error repeatedly over multiple products (even as early as the PM 8500) seems to have them insist on looks over function. Even if the design ends up being a problem on the inside, it's usually "glossed over"(e.g. iPod battery compartment issue, the entire lack of a headless iMac despite demand).
For what "UNIX-like" qualities are in there, the hardware seems to come up looking like a knockoff Sun or IBM pSeries (before the Intel switchover) product.