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."
I'm sorry but no (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I'm sorry but no (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm sorry but no (Score:5, Insightful)
I happen to disagree with them as well, for many of the same reasons as you. However, they do (to a certain extent) try to address exactly what you're saying.
Of course, I believe that they picked the iPhone because it'll drive traffic, not because it's truly the #1 invention in their minds. I simply can't see how the iPhone is a better invention than a device/method to strip blood of its AB antigens.
Oh, and PS:Meh. She's ugly. Plus, that's a painting, not an invention. I proclaim daVinci's wire tensile strength tester as his greatest invention (since it was actually put to use, unlike his helicopter plans).
Re:I'm sorry but no (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is reason enough to not RTFA, as it is designed to generate traffic, not provide any useful information. Of course, the editors here at
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Re:I'm sorry but no (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's all in the name recognition. Ask Bush. And he doesn't even look nice!
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The iPhone is a brilliant piece of product design and marketing; there's nothing earth-shattering about it on the technological front, even when you include the interface.
Its inclusion in the list seems like a cheap shot to get the article Slashdotted and FPed on Digg.
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That's only because those bastards are skirting my patented two cup method, were two paper cups are stacked together in such a way as to leave a small air gap which provides modest thermal protection for the holder of the hot beverage.
If you have any conscious you'll join me in my boycott of all coffee establishments using the inferior cardboard s
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Re:I'm sorry but no (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that there's some sort of distinction to be made there, but it's fuzzy at best. Look deeply enough into the most novel of inventions, and you'll find that's it's basically cobbled together from already-existing inventions and well-known principles. That's just how these things work.
But I agree that I don't think of the iPhone as an "invention". Even though I think it's cool and innovative, it just doesn't do anything that hasn't been done elsewhere. I might consider the whole multi-touch thing an invention, but it's only part of the iPhone, and it existed elsewhere first.
Re:I'm sorry but no (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
RTFA.
The reason they chose to give it to the iPhone wasn't based upon a checklist of features, but because of how well it was designed and the impact it has had. Apple knows how to make products that people enjoy using. That is a difficult thing to do.
The only thing that it has going for it is that it looks nice.
Looks nice and behaves nice.
Most geeks don't understand design, and in fact disregard design considerations as nothing more than eye candy. This is foolish. Design 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.
Apple understands that strong design makes for strong products. The mistake people like you make is that you think design is about looks: skins for Winamp, etc. It's not. Design is about the whole experience, of which elegance and beauty is a part, but only a part.
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...)
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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
Yes. But the broader point remains: Apple is the only electronics company who values design and seems to understand that there is more to good de
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A physical keyboard on the iPhone would either increase its size or decrease the screen's size.
"All-in-one" is not for everybody, but it's value is not purely aesthetic. Less stuff to plug in, easier to move around, takes less space, etc.
You do realize that the size of a notebook computer is an important
Re:Frank (Score:4, Informative)
The cheapest iMac is $1200 for a 20", cheapest Gateway All-in-one is $1500, cheapest Sony Vaio All-in-one is $1800. A 22" Dell is $300. So you can save $400 the first year and $700 every 2-3 years you decide to keep the monitor and upgrade, AND get a bigger monitor.
You fail at math... though maybe you succeed at meth.
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 (
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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
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Let's call it what it is... putting the iPhone on the list is just hit-whoring.
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The reason they chose to give it to the iPhone wasn't based upon a checklist of features, but because of how well it was designed and the impact it has had. Apple knows how to make products that people enjoy using. That is a difficult thing to do.
Ok, so the iPhone is a nice product. It might even be an innovation. It's still not an invention.
A new product of a kind that has existed before (the iPhone is a mobile-phone of the variety smart-phone) isn't an invention no matter how much nicer it is than the other product of similar kinds.
Innovations != Inventions
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Re:I'm sorry but no (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of the iPhone today and the computer of 10 years from now.
Time is probably thinking the iPhone, today, is like the original Mac or Lisa 25 years ago. In that sense, the iPhone is likely to dictate how all computing will occur in 10 years.
If they are right, then it does qualify as invention of the year.
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The iPhone is an incredibly useful device. You can argue that other, similar devices are also useful, or more useful, or whatever, but "toy" seems simply irrational and anti-fanboyish. Carrying an iPhone around all the time, though, I find that I'm opening it up to get directions to somewhere, or look up some Web page with a tidbit of information that I need, or what have you, all the time.
I'm sure that owners of other convergence phones also have the same experience
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Which is the invention (Score:2)
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OK, you can hate the iPhone if you want, and the fact that it was picked for this honor. And you can bitch and moan about whatever feature you feel it's lacking. But you can't tell me it lacks novelty and ingenuity. It's a phone, an iPod, and a REAL web browser packed into a single device, with no physical buttons, and it WORKS GREAT. That is definitely novel and ingenious.
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The mobile-phone is an invention. A mobile-phone isn't an invention.
Obligatory car-analogy:
The car is an invention.
A Nissan Micra isn't.
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still, the mainstream press seems to be in love with apple products overall...
its the only tech products i can recall that get front page coverage by newspapers, for one thing...
imo, apple have been marketing over tech from the day the woz walked out the door, with the walking reality distortion field at its core.
hell, i watched the commercial video for the phone/"pod touch" and it was just a asian guy in a turtle neck t
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Sorry, but it ain't. That honor still falls to the full size touchtone pad developed by AT&T (the original one) back in the 1960s. (Couple that with a good wireless headset and you've reached telephone nirvana.)
Now, if you're talking about UIs for all the other electronic gadgets that aren't a phone that are also rolled into the iPhone, you might have a point. But for making calls (especially all those conference calls where you have to input 8
Soft sand into sandstone... (Score:5, Funny)
The triple jump just got a lot more entertaining. :-D
not very inventive (Score:2)
hey, screw you guys! (Score:5, Funny)
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not 2000km! (Score:3, Informative)
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Of course, that's a hybrid compressed air / fuel car, but it quite clearly states 2000 km.
It's an exercise for the reader to determine if that's just a number pulled out of MDI's compressed-air spewing ass, or if it's for r
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e.g. http://www.theaircar.com/models.html [theaircar.com]
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Re:not 2000km! (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Re:not 2000km! (Score:5, Informative)
You've apparently never seen a fossil plant up close. It's not just "a railyard", but a whole coal depot [google.com] that they have near them. It's like a giant's sandpit; the machinery that moves the coal around looks like little ants. They have to spray it all the time to keep the risk of a fire down.
And that's not the problem.
The problem is the huge plume of pollution that comes off of the plants. Apparently you don't care about your lungs. I care about mine. How pretty do you find hospitals and dead trees?
How come we don't wind turbine farms on the tops of buildings in large cities
Because the building has to be built extra strong for that. You can't just add a turbine on top of a building like that. Extra strength means extra cost. Big cities build their turbines offshore. Like, for example, the London Array [londonarray.com].
or in Central Park
Apparently the term "high property values" means nothing to you. How much does an acre in rural New York cost? Now how much does an acre in Manhattan cost? Prices aren't irrelevant. In fact, they're the most relevant issue at hand.
Long Island Sound
There was one [treehugger.com]. It was going to cost too much compared to how much power it would have provided..
off Martha's Vineyard etc etc
You mean like Cape Wind [capewind.org]?
And yes, there are some people like you who've been protesting it. Apparently they'd rather breathe heavy metals from coal burning (like the unopposed Canal Electric plant) than have a barely visible turbine on the distant horizon.
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1) Lousy energy density (~17Wh/l; ~34 Wh/kg). This is about on par with regular old lead-acid batteries (~40Wh/l; ~25 Wh/kg). By comparison, lithium batteries are 250 Wh/
Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Corporation seeks to make profit. Film at eleven.
Seriously, what were they supposed to do? Release it untethered to appease the fraction of the population that actually cares about shit like this, i.e. freaks like yourself? Given that they have sold well in excess of a million of these phones, it is clear that most people don't care that the phone is locked (indeed, I am willing to bet that a significant number of th
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Release it untethered...?
Yes. Look at phones like the Razr, which you can get through multiple carriers, or directly through Motorola. I don't have the numbers, but I'd bet money that more Razrs have been sold than iPhones.
I don't understand your troll though. The OP stated it's closed off, but blamed AT&T for closing it off. Apple chooses to close it off presumably to stay compliant with their exclusivity contract with AT&T. Therefore it's Apple to blame. They had the opportunity to release it with less restrictions,
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Externally, the RAZR is a nice phone, but its interface is reminiscent of an unrefined turd. In usage, it is truly a horrible thing. The only thing worth debating is whether it is better or worse than S60 on Nokia phones. I hate them both equally (and have - alas - a Nokia). So to compare iPhones to RAZRs is a bit disingenuous - rather like comparing apples to oranges. Hohoho. One is the most rev
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That's Sad... (Score:2)
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And the iPhone being at the same level of awesomeness as the ability to turn *-type blood into O-type blood ?
Whatever.
Iphone? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's like saying the 2008 Chevy Malibu is the top invention for 2008 because it is so cool and hip!
How sad...
Some more enlightning stuff... (Score:2, Informative)
Can You Feel Me? Philips' SKIN Probes use biometric sensors and lighting to pick up on your feelings and make them visible. The Bubelle dress changes color depending on your mood. The Frisson bodysuit is covered with LEDs and fine copper hairs that light up when brushed or blown on.
Blinded by Light The hunt for better non-lethal weaponry gained new urgency when several people died in recent years after being shocked by a Taser. The LED Incapacitator, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, is a novel alternative. When officers shine the flashlight-like device in a person's eyes, high-intensity LEDs, pulsating at varying rates, will make the suspect temporarily blind and dizzy.
Making the Car Chase Obsolete High-speed chases may be money shots in Hollywood, but everywhere else they're just dangerous. The StarChase Pursuit Management System uses a laser-guided launcher mounted on the front grill of a cop car to tag fleeing vehicles with a GPS tracking device. Then the fuzz can hang back as real-time location data are sent to police headquarters.
Good Morning, Sunshine Embedded with a grid of LEDs, it [pillow] uses nothing but light to wake you up. About 40 min. before reveille, the programmable foam pillow starts glowing, gradually becoming brighter, to simulate a natural sunrise.
This helps set your circadian rhythm and ease you into the day.
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Making the Car Chase Obsolete
This will also open up about 22 hours a day of programming on the Fox network...
Prize money (Score:2, Funny)
The air car (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The air car (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:The air car (Score:5, Insightful)
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Let's pretend that the energy going into the car is from a clean source such as wind, solar or tidal (ok, I know at this point it would be diesel, or coal generated electricity), does it matter that you are wasting it? Yes, it's not the best use of resources, but ther
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Compressed air has been used to power locomotives in mines and tunnels, fork lifts and tractors in other hazardous environments, since the 19th century. But I have never understood its appeal as an alternative fuel for the open road.
Time passes sd in scientific cluelessness (Score:2)
Similarly anything powered by compressed air can't fail to have low efficiency.
And that's just the obvious Carnot-cycle defying impossible inventions. One wonders about the rest of them.
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That said, imagine an 8 cycle engine. The first 4 cycles you inject gasoline into the cylinders, the 2nd 4 cycles run on water. Assuming that you didn't have a radiator, the heat from the engine would produce steam that would power the pistons. You could even have a computer monitoring the temperature so that when the engine was too hot it would run on water alone, afte
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It's a way to harness the energy that's normally removed through the radiator. It works theoretically, and in tests. Problems are most likely due to materials.
The air powered cars will be grossly inefficient, though.
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No kidding. Cylinders and pistons and piston rings and valves are not designed to be hit with water while at operating temps.
A less catastrophic way to harness this wasted heat would be to fill the cooling system with plain water and let it boil, then use that steam to run a steam engine or turbine. Then the cylinders wouldn't be getting sh
The iPhone as a weapon against the cell carriers. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The iPhone as a weapon against the cell carrier (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then apple decided to build this hugely expensive gadget and unexpectely they actually sold some. That means others can now do the same - bigger screens, better features, faster processors.. the base phone will be a lot more ex
My Two Cents (Score:5, Insightful)
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'
Tabbed Browsing? (Score:2, Funny)
Ignore the iPhone (Score:5, Informative)
My first thought is about what this could mean for General Aviation - having the fuel burn rate cut by 40% WITHOUT needing any cooling gear (think: reduced weight) could be a real boon... already there are diesel aviation engines already that are significantly more efficient [flyingmag.com] ( but need radiators, and already have a high compression ratio) this could help out even more - imagine a diesel engine that reduces fuel consumption by 60%, maybe even 70%?!?!?
Pipe dream? Yes. But I sure do hope. And it would likely happen in cars before airplanes, thanks to the glacial pace of technology advancement in aviation. Everybody's so terrified of risk that innovation is radically reduced. The reality is simply that (Private Airplanes) == (Money) == (Lawyer Bait) == (an industry that is forever on the edge of shutdown).
If you want to see the crippling effect that excessive lawyering can cause to industry, you need look no further than private aviation.
-Ben
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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, hav
Many Of These Aren't New (Score:4, Insightful)
Star Trek VI (Score:2)
Um, hardly any of those would make my list... (Score:2)
Also known as actually knowing and using the right tool for the right job.
It's like introducing duct tape and WD40 to some one that has never encountered or previously needed them before. I need a list of the tools that I would be using if I properly knew about them. My best invention of the decade is cheap powerful PCs for less than $600. That's mor
Air-car bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
First, all they have is blurry cad-drawings, and still they claim it'll be on the market in 2008. That's not possible, if that where to actually be the case they'd have to ALREADY have several completed prototypes of the car at the minimum for safety-testing and similar.
Second, there's just not enough energy there.
If you believe the claims of the aircar-makers themselves, (which ain't a safe thing to do, because they assume near termic equilibrium, among other things, but nevermind) then, and I'm here quoting their website: 300 litres at 300 bars results in 46 MJ (Y 52.1 MJ with 340 litres at 300 bars ).
Okay, so a 340lite (90 gallon!) air-tank can hold the same amount of energy as 0.4 gallons of petrol. Really
So, after you've refilled this gargantuan 90 gallon tank with air, you'll have the equivalent of 0.4 gallons petrol worth of energy. Thereafter you have to refuel again. Who wants to refuel every 10 miles ? This think makes electric cars look EXCELLENT by comparison.
iPhone is not an "invention", IMO (Score:2)
But, if the design is patentable, I suppose it's an invention; I just don't hold with it.
Those are great inventions? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [theaircar.com] 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. [motherearthnews.com] Wikipedia has a good article on water injection [wikipedia.org], 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.
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.
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I doubt there will be manufacturing; I'm guessing it is still R&D. The cylinders that carry compressed a
Another expensive way to kill people, waste taxes. (Score:2)
Boeing is now in the violence for profit business.
Either fraud, or not explained well: (Score:2)
Microwaves don't "pull". They heat rock. Microwave heat costs money, since it is necessary to burn fuel to get electricity to make microwaves, and that process is not effici
Fraud again: Not new, too expensive. (Score:2)
This has been known for decades. Problem: Silver is expensive, and Silver Iodide is even more expensive.
What about that is FREE? (Score:2)
Thick wooden walls are expensive. Convection makes hot air rise, it does not "even out temperature extremes". There seems to be nothing ab
My vote (Score:3, Funny)
fossil fuels could prove to be the most important of our time. My vote is for this fellow:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rA-zhTJuFU [youtube.com]
Web design failure (Score:2)
Water injection. Crower's engine not new. (Score:4, Informative)
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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 A
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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
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'Yet another phone' is *not* an invention. (and I even *have* an iphone. It sucks as a phone.. OK as an mp3 player, but the touch is better as it's 16gb).