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Where Is The Innovation? 203

Posted by Cliff from the stuff-to-think-about dept.
Ripped_Edge asks: "In pondering the looming economic slowdown, I had an interesting discussion with some of my friends. The end result of our conversation was that, since the release of the web browser, there has been no innovation in any field of science or technology. Why? I'm not saying that there hasn't been a huge amount of distance covered over the last nine years (I don't want a 14kbs modem to be considered fast again) but it seems all the progress made has been simply incremental improvement. Could this fact be the cause of the slipping stock market? Was there really so much money floating around that people did not need a revolutionary idea to be financed?" Ah, it's another occurance of that new buzzword, recently co-opted by our friends in Redmond, but is there a grim truth in this query? In between the DMCA, the UCITA and the rampant cluelessness over at the US Patent and Trade office, maybe people are just afraid to innovate unless they are sure they can control what they create (or at the very least, can make a buck off of it...)? Or has the innovation been quietly happening in the background of our lives, and the changes are just too subtle for us to notice?

"In posing this question to the slashdot community I'm sure to receive some blistering flames claiming that I'm too narrow minded in my view of what innovation is. But think carefully, can you really name something developed in the last nine years that came out of left field, shook the world by its roots, gained acceptance and you can't live without it? I consider innovations to be things such as the wheel, fire, airplanes, mechanized warfare, the radio, television, PC, and the Internet.

In looking at research being done now, I again see only a path of incremental improvement. People simply take the next step, no one jumps. Quantum computing might have a chance, but it looks like it will fall the way of hot fusion, physically possible, but not commercial viable.

If the Internet is supposed to facilitate the exchange of information, why don't we see more innovation? Is it just that the innovation has become so complex and abstract that a simple-minded person like myself is blind to it? Or for the past nine years have we just been walking along thrilled at the way things were going? (If the latter is the case, a recession might be good to stoke the fires of original thinking)

Has there been innovation (not the Microsoft defintion, but real innovation) in the past nine years? Is it too much to ask for a ground breaking idea in nine short years? Why hasn't there been more inovation with the advent of the internet?"

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Where Is The Innovation? More

Where Is The Innovation?

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  • What tha?! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Phrases like "The end result of our conversation was that, since the release of the web browser, there has been no innovation in any field of science or technology." are so generalizing and simplistic that they reek of either trolling or unhealthy ignorance. And since, as programmers, we slashdot folk are all so very smart, I'm leaning towards the troll end of the spectrum...

  • Re:Your fortune for today... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Oy vey! Ok how about AFU then? The fortune file needs updating... From: bjacobs@painful.sdsu.edu (William Jacobs) Subject: Patent office UL Date: 25 Jun 1993 00:05:48 GMT At AFU West VI Bob O'Bob asked about the legend that an official of the U.S. Patent Office had resigned believing that everything had been invented. Another AFU'er (whom I don't recall) and I got into a match of dueling references. Here's mine: Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 13 Spring 1989. A Patently False Patent Myth by Samuel Sass "For more than a century there has periodically appeared in print the story about an official of the U.S. Patent Office who resigned his post because he believed that all possible inventions had already been invented. Some years ago, before I retired as librarian of a General Electric Company division, I was asked by a skeptical scientist to find out what there was to this recurring tale. My research proved to be easier than I had expected. I found that this matter had been investigated as a project of the D.C. Historical Records Survey under the Works Projects Administration. The investigator, Dr. Eber Jeffery, published his findings in the July 1940 Journal of the Patent Office Society. Jeffery found no evidence that any official or employee of the U.S. Patent Office had ever resigned because he thought there was nothing left to invent. However, Jeffery may have found a clue to the origin of the myth. In his 1843 report to Congress, the then commissioner of the Patent Office, Henry L. Ellsworth, included the following comment: "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." As Jeffery shows, it's evident from the rest of that report that Commissioner Ellsworth was simply using a bit of rhetorical flourish to emphasize that the number of patents was growing at a great rate. Far from considering inventions at an end, he outlined areas in which he expected patent activity to increase, and it is clear that he was making plans for the future." Sass mentions another atribution of the quote to Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office Charles H. Duell, who didn't say it either. Bill "All threads have already been created. There is nothing new to post" jacobs http://www.urbanlegends.com/misc/patent_office_ul. html
  • Posted by isopiagroove:

    In the past, inventions were always by a very few people with a huge market. One company could dominate an 'industry' until another huge company came along and decided to manufacture something similar. Today, if we take a look at the handheld manufacturing, there are so many more companies, producing very similar things, so it seems as though there is no innovation when you look at it overall. With everyone cooperating AND competing at the same time (alliance between IBM, Intel, Nortel etc to make various products and user intreface services) it's hard to make something "revolutionary". But, I believe there IS less innovation if you consider the technology available to us, compared to just 10 years ago. Mathematica lets you execute calculations faster than several human lifetimes needed if you were to do it by hand. So shouldn't there be a ton more and better inventions by now? Why is TB still around? And hand-footand mouth disease? But such tools aren't being used to create revolutionary things...they are used to optimize and improve by increments. All the tools we have now, the genome dissecting, deep-space telescopes, biomedical engineering, are not intended for revolutionary tools, but fact-gathering and confirming what we know so far is right. Lastly, there is also a trend in academic journals like Nature and Science that were previously mentioned for fact-gathering and focusing on a very small aspect of a system; one fold of a single protein for example. The results published today are considered science, whereas fifty years ago, they would be considered preliminary results upon which one could begin to do science. But that's just my opinion.

  • Snails Pace (Score:5)

    by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @10:08AM (#353808)
    I think part of the problem is that people don't like to think that innovation takes time.

    You talk about UNIX evolving slowly, but look at the Auto and the Airplane. All three are from the 20th Century...yes there were some earlier auto examples, but for the most part nothing really happened until 1898 on...so I'll say the 20th Century.

    The Auto - Very slow development until Ford, revolutionized the entire industral system. So a good 20 years with slow evolution.

    The Airplane - From 1903 until 1915 really very little was done with the airplane. Sure it could fly up to 150 miles per hour and cross the English Channel or the Alps, but it was still *very* dangerous and impractical. But between the wars airplanes started to evolve, by 1940 most of the world's airforces had mono-planes, although most still used biplanes till the end of the war (Germany, UK, USSR, Japan, US). But that's a full 37 years after the first flight. 37 years to go from Kitty Hawk to 400 miles an hour. Even during the war, US and British crews had to stop for fuel during Atlantic crossings, nearly 20 years after Lindberg flew non-stop.

    Technology has always evolved slowly, look at handguns, the best designed handgun in the history of firearms was designed before the first world war and "prefected" in 1911. Not much has happened with that in 90 years.

    The capitalization of Technology hasn't slown it down, it's always been slow.
  • The truly bizzarre thing is, I keep meeting people who are complaining about ulcers, and downing tons of antacid, at their doctor's recommendation, and facing surgery, and I'm like; "Dude! get a different fucking doctor! Ulcer's are curable, you just need a good strong course of antibiotics and you're done."

    "oh no, my doctor says that research is iffy."
  • Yes, and I was VERY disappointed to see his column disappear from the back of Scientific American (now SA).

    I've subscribed to that magazine for 10 years, and now they've turned "SA" over to a bunch of slick marketroids. What, do I go back to the Popular Science I read when I was 8?
  • I remember when I was young, and wanted to be an astronaut, and I studied space exploration. Alan Shepard was the man. The book said that the USSR also sent a man into space (unnamed), before that.

    I got books out of the library, and found out that Alan Shepard was not the first man in space, and didn't even really go into space - a suborbital flight. Now, I had been told that the USSR was evil, and that the commies wanted to nuke us all, but I made it a point to memorize that strange name, Yuri Gagarin, because HE was the first man in space. I don't think I trusted anything I was taught in school after that point in time.

    - - -
    what would the world be like today if the Russians hadn't stopped, and had the cash and the will to go to Mars (to REALLY make it the red planet)?

    The US Govt would have decided it would have been cheaper to nuke them rather than to beat them to Mars.

    - - -
    As a former member of the L5 society, beaming power back to Earth via microwaves has it's own rather nasty environmental problems. It may be the only sustainable industrial power source long-term if a fusion solution isn't found, though.
  • This is data from slide shows at meetings at the Chicago Adler Planetarium, like 20 years ago. (we were the Chicago Society for Space Settlement, then we kind of merged with L5) Haven't seen much on the technology since then.

    The plan was to establish a permanent moon base, mine silicon dioxide from the surface, use solar furnaces on the moon to forge photovoltaics, use a mass driver to launch the stuff back towards earth. Assemble huge arrays of solar panels in earth orbit (I think, geosynchronous). Beam energy back to earth using microwaves to huge areas of land purposed to home gigantic (multi square) mile receivers.

    They suggested the receivers could even be mounted on a mesh suspended above the ground on telephone poles, and that farming could take place underneath the receivers.
    Birds or aircraft flying through the beam would be "adversely affected". Bad weather would interfere with the beam, reducing efficiency of transmission, but not eliminating it altogether.

    Spread of the beam would mean surrounding countryside would be subject to lower amounts of microwave radiation, and it was unknown whether the microwaves would do anything to the atmosphere. (like HAARP).
  • I think the problem here, is the asker of the question is looking for something that, at the instance of conception, jumps out and totally changes society.

    Unfortunately, that generally doesn't happen.

    You see, there are thousands of innovative things that are conceived yearly. However, there's more to revolutionizing society than simply having a good idea. There are dozens of factors such as time, need, viability, cost, etc, that come into play to determine what kind of an impact this innovation will have.

    Additionally, it's almost impossible to look at something and say, "This here idea will change the face of the world." When you do that, you are almost always going to be wrong.

    Innovation is something that is recognized *after* it impacts society. For example, when the web browser was first released, do you think everyone and their mother jumped on board and said, "This will change the the world, the economy, our society, and more!"? No, they didn't. It was originally conceived as an academic tool for easier sharing of (mostly) textual information.

    It was only later, with the introduction of Mosaic and GUI web browsers that it showed it's true potential.

    Ask this question again in 5, or even 10 years, and *then* you'll be able to see what innovations appeared in the late 90's.

    As a last note, nearly every innovation is an evolutionary change. Sometimes, however, that incremental bit becomes enough to have repercussions to society. For example, the web browser is just an incremental improvement to gopher, but it was at that point that it had a truly major impact. Additionally, if you were to take a closer look at the sociences, I think you'd be pretty impressed with the creativity and innovation that is occuring there.
  • But there was an incremental development from finding naturally occurring fire, to finding it and keeping it in constantly tended firepots that needed another naturally occurring source to restart if they ever went out, to being able to start a fire with a lot of work and a bit of luck in good conditions by friction, to the firebow making that easier, to the flint and tinderbox, to the flint small enough and reliable enough for a flintlock gun, to the Zippo lighter.

    --


  • Things like steel and refridgerators are stable and dependable. Things like cell phone service are not.


    Odd. I see comments like that from ppl (probably from the USA) where cellphone service appears to be appalingly bad and I really find it strange.

    I've had a GSM cellphone here in the UK for several years and (with the exception of a prefix change) my telephone number is still the same as it was when I got it (although I've had many many handsets). Having a GSM phone in a good cellphone service environment like Europe has had a profound effect on society and me personally. I no longer need to arrange to meet people at place X at time Y, we simply call as the time approaches and meet wherever the rest of the ppl are.

    I've got a freind who is a bodyguard who by the nature of her job is out the country for months at a time, and yet even though we've both moved houses and jobs several times, we can stay in touch effortlessly simply becase I have her GSM phone number.

    My sister is in New Zeland yet I can send SMS messages without thinking about it. I'm standing in an airport in France with a UK handset speaking to a German who is in Italy with an Australian handset, and it all "just works".

    Perhaps, as other posters have suggested, the low quality of service of 'traditional' landline telephony avalable in the 80's (it really was bad) made it easier for GSM to penetrate the market here in the UK. Fair enough.

    One day, perhaps the USA will have a good cellphone service (You're screwed on 3G BTW, perhaps 4G, assuming you can get motorola + qualcomm to domainate it ;-) and you'll see what I mean.)

    Some say GSM phone are bad, dangerous, annoying, harmful to health etc. and they're probably right, but so are cars, PCs, aircraft etc. Acceptable levels of risk IMO.
  • I'm sure there are others. The biggest changes are the ones you don't notice until long after the fact. Changes that are immediately apparent as "radical" rarely take hold, and are seldom worth the effort. (Push technology anyone?)

    I think the main problem with the whole "push technology" idea is that it really ended up being pull-on-a-timer rather than push. I use push technology every day (email). It's nice that someone can just push a message out to me and be done with it. (Granted, I "timed pull" them down from my mailserver).

    If UPS could "push" a message out to me when my package is delivered, it'd be sweet. (a la instant messaging, rather than email).

  • Innovations do not need to be earth shattering and the little neat things is probably what makes technology pleasant and interesting. Look at the list over at Sv.com [mercurycenter.com]. This is what Eazel have done in a year that neither Mac nor Windows has. This was problably put together as arguments against MicroSoft latest OpenSource hinders innovation but quite interesting in its own right.

  • Everything that can be invented has been invented.

    -- Charles Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899


    God I wish they'd taken him seriously. They might have closed the damn place down then.
    --

  • If you're looking for new things in the last 30 years in the field of computer science (other then easier GUIs) you're going to have a hard time, becasue there just arent any, it's all incremental change. The web is only a GUI on top of FTP and RPC if you think about it, not a breaktrough in tech but in a social use of tech.

    All the innovation and revolution has been in other fields for quite a while. If you want new go into biotech or nanotech, those are the frontiers.

  • Not to mention the fact that ALL of those inventions, including the wheel and fire, started as "incremental improvement".

    So is radio, television, PC, and the Internet. If you follow it all back into history, you'll see all of this stuff is a combination of already existing stuff.
  • Anybody who reads /. on a regular basis?

    But thats just a guess ;-)

  • ...One-Click shopping!
  • "But" != "and".
  • You're exactly right. People may say Newton's Law of Gravitation was innovative, but he was following Kepler.

    ? He was following Kepler (and others). And he was innovative. Some increments are innovative. Some innovations are incremental.

  • Re:Jesus wept... (Score:3)

    by Bearpaw ( 13080 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @10:49AM (#353826)
    Most things that look like innovations from the outside look like the summation of increments from the inside. (As someone else pointed out re web browsers.)

    "Innovative" is only an opposite of "incremental" if one looks at advances with a pop science frame of mind. Most -- all? -- increments involve innovation.

    (And implying that anything without a currently existing application is by definition not innovative seems kinda short-sighted to me.)

  • Who is the umaine.edu to argue with the unix fortune file? Hmm?
  • The only way I will believe you is if your grandpa told you in a bar, thats the only valid reference for anything, really... ;)

  • Your fortune for today... (Score:4)

    by Aggrazel ( 13616 ) <aggrazel@gmail.com> on Monday March 19, 2001 @10:01AM (#353829) Journal
    Everything that can be invented has been invented.

    -- Charles Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899
  • Cell phones aren't really an innovation - they are just the progression of other parts... they are essentially just small two-way radios, and those have been around for quite some time.

    I'd disagree - the "cellular" idea - that many small transmitters could handle one call, and that a call could be handed from one transmitter to another without interrupting the call was a pretty innovative idea, and implementing it took some pretty innovative engineering.

    The way the original question is worded, I think the batteries would come under the heading "incremental improvements", though I don't know how big of a leap they made in terms of battery materials, etc., so maybe those are innovative. Even so, they're not nearly so big as the cell-phone idea.

  • Just an idea. Won't happen, though, especially now that Bush decided to let us go ahead and depend on coal plants for the next 4 years.

    The Americans knowingly voted in an idiot, so now they get the idiot decisions they asked for. I can't remember who said it, but there is a nice quote "Democracy is the process of making sure the people get what they want, and get it good and hard".

  • That sounds like a rather web-developer centric world view. As I use the web for little more than a reference tool and communications tool, let me assure you that the rest of the scientific and technical world is making leaps and bounds. Partly helped by the increase effeciency of tools like the web, partly by other advances (although I would find a web browser hard to term an advance as it is just a tool to standardize interfaces into one user "experience" :-)).
    The new technology in the semiconductor field alone has made the browser a usable tool. Do you remember using Mosaic in the early 90's? It was stripped down and still slow on anything short of a high end workstation.
    What you are seeing is that those improvments that require you to make a paradigm shift for greater effeciency are "breakthroughs" (the web, a car 100 years ago, etc). Really all technology is just improvments on other technology. Some require change onthe users part, others are hidden from them to make their life better. All in all, the web browser is not the biggest breakthrough in the last 9 years, it just has the biggest social footprint.
  • Nine years ago, who would have dreamt that the enemy of users and IT managers alike would be released upon the world by that nice little software company called Microsoft? This enemy, of course, is the f$%^# PAPER CLIP.

    We all had visions that by the year 2000, HAL-9000 would be talking us through even the most complex computing tasks.. but here in 2001, if you want your text to wrap around a picture in Microsoft Word, you need a freakin' PAPER CLIP to talk you through the grueling ordeal.

    If that isn't true innovation, well, I'm dumbfounded. It sure came out of left field, at least.

    --

  • Re:Hindsight 20/20 (Score:3)

    by dillon_rinker ( 17944 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @02:37PM (#353834) Homepage
    After all, think about the invention of calculus. This has made physics possible, thus making many things that we take for granted possible (computers, etc.). Now, one could say that calculus is just a logical progression from algebra. However, think about the thought processes and the jumps that had to be made just to make that logical progression possible.
    Get thee to at text on the history of mathematics. There was no singular point that was "the invention of calculus." Newton did not 'invent' calculus. Many of the important theorems of calculus were already in place, 'proved' by the standards of the day. What Newton did was an incremental step forward from previous work. Granted, in his lifetime, he was able to provide LOTS of incremental steps, and analysis (the branch of mathematics which includes calculus) was much improved by his work.

    Keep in mind, though, that there was for decades (centuries?) dispute over Newton's contributions vs. Leibniz's contributions. Both 'invented'/'discovered' calculus simultaneously. Furthermore, nearly everything that Newton accomplished, Archimedes already had. 2000 years earlier. Without centuries of analysis to build on. Without decent notation (don't underestimate its value - Einstein couldn't have done his work without the tensor calculus - in essence, a way to represent MANY equations with a single variable).

    Newton's brilliance was in pulling everything together, improving on it, developing better notation, and applying it to widely disparate fields of inquiry. In a single lifetime.

    There is no such thing as "an increment that changes everything." Each such increment is built on thousands of others, and provides a foundation for thousands more.
  • No innovation in any field of science or technology?!? Are you crazy? Maybe you meant to say there has been no significant innovation in the commercial world. Look at any of the thousands of journals on topics in science and technology and you will see innovation on almost every page.
  • If your definition of innovation is a radical change that is immediately and obviously apparent to every individual affected by it, then yeah it's all incremental.

    Some things that are pretty radical but aren't end-user-visible are:
    -XML: Changing how software communicates. Everything from simple publishing of headlines from one site to another -- RSS to distributed computing -- SOAP. Even HTML is being updated to fall in line with XML -- XHTML. As the percentage of data in XML increases, this will revolutionize how information is processed.)
    -PDAs: Ok, this is more user-visible. I can't live without my Palm V. It's just that useful. The same sentiment is held by a great many users of such devices. Add wireless Internet to the mix and you'll change how people communicate.
    -ASPs: The idea of outsourcing lesser components of your business isn't new. But when your business is a web site, being able to plug in components from other systems is pretty handy. My bank integrates with Quicken to download transaction data. Some web sites (Aint-it-cool-news.com for example) outsource things like their message boards or their web based e-mail to other companies who co-brand their own products and integrate them with the web site. AICN (for example) doesn't have to install updates, maintain server(s) for the message boards, or take care of any of those hassles. This lets them make a more useful, rich experience for their users while keeping costs low.

    I'm sure there are others. The biggest changes are the ones you don't notice until long after the fact. Changes that are immediately apparent as "radical" rarely take hold, and are seldom worth the effort. (Push technology anyone?)

    -JF
  • If UPS could "push" a message out to me when my package is delivered, it'd be sweet. (a la instant messaging, rather than email).

    Apparently Microsoft is doing just that with .Net and MSN Messenger... The demo they gave showed things like an alert from eBay popping up to notify you about auction outcomes and such...

    -JF
  • And, I'm willing to bet that the sun would still rise if you were to lose your PDA.

    The same can be said of any human invention. Your statement is antagonistic and entirely irrelevant.

    As for your main point: That you do not find any relevance in the information that is available online does not invalidate my point.

    XML isn't merely useful as a means of interchanging *pure data*. Consider SOAP. SOAP allows things like interoperability between disparate systems. I.E. improved functionality using open standards.

    For the transmission/storage of data XML is equally useful to a great many companies and individuals. If properly applied, the technology can save some companies a great deal of money and provide a better, more useful experience for end users.

    -JF

  • You don't say. (Score:3)

    by mkozlows ( 21830 ) <mlk@klio.org> on Monday March 19, 2001 @09:52AM (#353839) Homepage
    But think carefully, can you really name something developed in the last nine years that came out of left field, shook the world by its roots, gained acceptance and you can't live without it? I consider innovations to be things such as the wheel, fire, airplanes, mechanized warfare, the radio, television, PC, and the Internet.

    So, you can give eight examples of "innovation" that have occurred since the dawn of time -- and you're concerned that we haven't had one in the last decade? Boy, that's shocking!

  • You should read the biology literature more closely. The statement "Innovation of every page" is laughable. In every field, there is good and bad research. It does not follow More Journals --> more innovation and more than it follows more published articles --> smarter person. It may hold true that more GOOD articles --> smarter person. One really good published article should beat 5 really crappy ones.
  • Well, I think that you have insanely high standards for what counts as innovative, then. To suggest that the genome was just applied engineering ignores the tremendous developments in informatics that were necessary to make it possible. More importantly, the way that genomic data is used is qualitatively different from the way that genetic data was used before the concept of genomics. Furthermore, the genome is really only the leading edge of future biology; proteomics didn't even exist 10 years ago, and it depends absolutely on genomic data.

    True- but is was not surprising it was going to get done. It has been talked about, and been a goal since DNA sequencing was found. I guess I count it as engineering not innovation becuase no one was surprised that it got finished. There were (as we both mentioned) a lot of little steps along the way that in and of themselves are not that important, but overall massivly speeded up the final output (bioinformatics as an entire field). The fact that 2 groups were serious contenders, and that there were people all over the world contributing, and that in the end I think Celera won because they bought the faster more expensive machine and a different strategy make it more of an engineering feat than an innovation. Guess it is a matter of semantics, but I would say the bioinformatics advances were innovative, but the sequencing wasn't.

    I think this discussion points to the nature of the way science moves. Innovation rarely looks like innovation when it is being done, it is only later that anyone noticies (lag time to acceptance) and would say that revolutionary ideas in science behave a bit the same way (is there a difference between revolutionary scientific ideas and innovation????)...with slow grudging acceptance.
  • If the web browser was patented, we'd have had to wait 17 years after 1960 for Ted Nelson [keio.ac.jp]'s patent to expire. As that's only 1977, and the first commercial microcomputer had appeared only two years earlier, we'd not have had browsers in our homes immediately. And if we waited for Ted [wired.com]...well, we're still waiting for transpublishing [keio.ac.jp] and Project Xanadu [xanadu.com] to become popular. It took several more years for reasonable graphics to show up and make graphical web browsing practical. Commodore's Amiga and others had reasonable graphics, but it wasn't until VGA came out that graphics on most personal computers began to approach TV resolutions.
  • I can't remember the author but TIME had an article in the recent issue with Dale Earnhardt on the cover. The point of the article is that non of our wonderful technology really works all that wonderfully. People have come to realize that waiting for v2.0 to come is not a way to run things. Things like steel and refridgerators are stable and dependable. Things like cell phone service are not. An analogy used in the article was that if a 1" steel rod were priced like cell phones it would only really be a 1" steel rod on weekend nights and holidays but the rest of the time it would be only 1/3". And if you tried to use your steel rod outside your area it would cost 6 times as much!

    Yes, all the whiz bang technology is cool to play with but no one has been really able to do anything with it! The web doesn't provide significant advantage over brick and morter stores in most cases. Who wants to buy stuff online for less, make up the difference in shipping, and wait for it to arrive a week later when you can go to Target and get it today?

  • It seems as though there has been a fair amount of scientific discovery within the past ten years. We have cloning, we've slowed down light by a considerable margin, and we now know a lot more about deep-space objects and cosmology than ever before--much of it thanks to things like HST and COBE. We also now have blue gallium-nitride lasers, something thought impossible 15 years ago.

    In technology, it seems as if there's a breakthrough innovation/paradigm shift every 10-15 years, and everything else is incremental. For instance, we had the transistor in 1947, the IC in 1958, the microprocessor in 1971, and the GUI and Ethernet shortly thereafter (although these weren't commercially available until the '80s). As for paradigms, the '70s brought us personal computers, the '80s the networked graphical systems, and the '90s gave us the mainstream, widespread, ubiquitous Internet. We are probably due for another one, but the world is still adjusting to the Internet as an institution (see previous articles about COngressmen ignoring e-mail for an indication as to how long we still have to go for complete acceptance), and maybe isn't quite ready for a revolutionary new idea beyond the experimental stage.
  • I'd argue that the Internet is really the *only* reason PCs make the list - and one day, they'll be an interesting sidenote to history as embeded devices take over more and more of the PC's function. Like Scott McNealy said, "When was the last time you had to reboot your telephone?" (Remember that to more than 99% of computer users, a disconnected PC is not much more than a nice typewriter.)

    And of course, one could make the argument that the Internet itself, as revolutionary as it is in some ways, was to a significant degree built on the circuit switched backbone that only existed because of the telephone, so maybe only Alex Bell's invention deserves credit, here anyway...
  • You know, I'm not exactly dying to have a high power GSM phone next to my head using the only modulation method that *has* correlated to cancer in laboratory tests.

    GSM cancer-phones are a BAD idea - we certainly don't know for sure that they're dangerous, but it looks quite possible that they're far more dangerous than other systems (like CDMA) where the RF signal looks like low-power noise and doesn't have very sharp high-power square waves.

    If GSM is the way to change the world, leave me behind. (It pains me that the VisorPhone, possibly the coolest piece of technology integration of the past 10 years, is only available in warmware-hostile GSM form for now.)
  • Innovation is being stifled ... these days if you make a great invention, it'll either get stolen, or you'll get sued. No one except the major coporations want to take that risk anymore.

    Plus, with the USPO being as royally FUCKED UP as it is, even if you manage to create something you think is new, and no one holds rights to, someone will dredge up a ridiculous patent, and you lose all your months (years) of work.

  • I'm James Burke, and you're watching, Connections.

    Absolutely one of the best shows ever made.

  • Re:No innovation??? (Score:3)

    by Mignon ( 34109 ) <satan@programmer.net> on Monday March 19, 2001 @10:21AM (#353849)
    I find it disturbing that you went from talking about sheep to talking about Viagra. If I had kids (or sheep) I'd tell you to stay away from them.
  • Sure, I can name more than eight. Just let me break out my copy of Civ 2...
  • Cell phones aren't really an innovation - they are just the progression of other parts... they are essentially just small two-way radios, and those have been around for quite some time. The light, small, long-life batteries are more of an innovation than the cell phone itself, and that isn't really all that ground-breaking...

    Now magnetic storage, atomic-scale self assembly, quantum computing... that kind of stuff is innovative...

    --
  • The handoff between towers is a really neat idea, and I'll agree that is a pretty nifty feat... the original poster made the distinction on size, though ("not the fridge-sized things from the 80s"), and that's what provoked my comments. The cellular networks are far more of an innovation than the cellular phone itself - that's probably a more accurate statement.

    I'll agree, a lot of the battery stuff was a linear progression, but again, I had a narrower focus on the phone rather than the all-encompassing 'cell-phone idea'. They still haven't changed my life at all - I have yet to find a use for one in my life... unless the prices dramatically drop for service...

    --
  • Liberating mankind from needing a physical place of work has got to count as innovation.
    Sounds good...please let me know when it happens, so I can stop spending severals per week on the road just getting and and forth to my overcrowded office, ok?

    Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

  • I think the problem is not so much that there's no innovation going on, but that scientific fields are becoming so specialized that an outside observer can't TELL there's any innovation going on... These days, everyone's area of knowlege has to be pretty narrow in order to be knowlegeable enough to do any cutting-edge research, with the end result being that fields of research are generally pretty isolated.

    Also, it generally takes a lot of very expensive equipment to do cutting-edge research nowadays, which tends to restrict the field to academia and large corporations -- not that innovative ideas can't come out of either of these two areas, but they can be restrictive working environments for people wanting to research crazy, unprecedented ideas...

  • Incremental improvement... (Score:3)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @10:03AM (#353859)
    > In looking at research being done now, I again see only a path of incremental improvement.

    Unless your name is Einstein ("what happens as you get faster to the speed of light?") or Wright ("Hmm, if we stick static wings on this bicycle, maybe we can fly better than the guys trying to flap"), or Ford ("Hey, what if we made a machine to build a bunch of identical parts, and used humans to assemble the parts into lots of cars, instead of building carriages by hand?"), you're only likely to see incremental improvement.

    Incremental improvement isn't bad. The automobile, passenger air travel, and yes, 300-baud modems through 56K modems are all examples of incremental improvement.

    Some technologies which seem like breakthroughs (MP3 vs. uncompressed .WAV) are merely incremental -- I remember when you got "graphics" by downloading uncompressed memory dumps of video RAM. Then there was .GIF (lossless compression, quick to view on a '286). Then - when CPUs permitted it - .JPG (lossy compression that required a 386 or 486 to render in 2-3 seconds per image).

    But yes, evolution of technology does take years.

    I like games like CivII and Alpha Centauri, where the "waiting" of 10 years between breakthrough and application can be over in a night. Unfortunately, real life ain't like that - if it takes 10 years of "game time", it takes 10 years of "real time".

    As for comparisons between the airplane and the rocket for space exploration... well, until there's somewhere there worth going to, or something there worth bringing back, nobody's gonna build the technology to make it worthwhile. This is (IMHO) sad, verging on the tragic, but true.

  • I'll tell you why. sure this is a rant but just look at how the masses are pouring in from everywhere, dropping their existing majors so they can cash-in on the computer industry. It makes me sick. Sooner or later, sooner I hope they will realize this isnt something that can just be learned in school and you never have to learn again.

    This is more than a career this is a lifestyle.

    You will be learning for the REST OF YOUR LIFE.

    Alot of people joining this industry now dont realize this and its going to bite them in the ass later when they find out.

    You cant go out and take 1 unix course or get an MCSE and automatically youre some bigshot computer guy. If innovation is being stifled by anything its the infiltration by idiots.

    Oh and a correction: you should have said no innovation since napster came out because peer to peer filesharing is pretty revolutionary and innovative. I just want to see more programs piggyback on top of the huge existing networks now like some sort of packet based bbs with news that would exist over peer to peer.
  • I guess you're right it is an evolution. So my question remains, when are BBS's coming back? Smaller groups of people get more done more efficently than larger groups. Its inevitable, just as small tribes in south america split when the number reaches somewhere between 7 and 15.
  • Is it too much to ask for a ground breaking idea in nine short years?


    I hope you're not serious ... otherwise: Yes, it is! If you're not satisfied with innovation, go and develop something great and new yourself! What have you done in the last nine years?

    But what I actually wanted to say, is: There probably have been some great innovations in the last ten years or so, they just haven't made it to the market yet, or we haven't seen their impact. If you ask again in, say, five years, what innovations there were in the 1990s, we will be able to answer. But it's too early now, I think.

    Oh, and BTW: I would consider cloning quite an innovation. And the proof of Fermat's theorem. And cell phones - the ones we have now, not the fridge-sized things from the 80s ;-)
    • 2: genome
    Nah, KDE rulez!

    [ducks, runs for cover]

    Yeah, the human genome project is probably going to have had the biggest impact, when we look back in ten years time. Of course, not necessarily in a good way...

  • The biggest innovation of all is from Microsoft. Just ask them.

    It's Microsoft... err... ummm... uhh... Well, I know it's SOME Microsoft product!
  • Wasn't the most popular modern version promulgated by Santayana?
    Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
  • I think, above and beyond all other success stories on the Internet, one stands out above all others. Highly innovative, technically superior, ingeneous, furry, and misspelled.

    View the incarnation of true social innovation on the Internet. [hampsterdance2.com]

  • Hindsight 20/20 (Score:5)

    by GusherJizmac ( 80976 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @09:54AM (#353874) Homepage
    Only upon looking back does it appear that innovation just "happened". The reality is that things grew incrementally. Think of the web browser:
    • ftp
    • archie
    • gopher
    • lynx
    • Mosaic
    • Netscape
    • IE
    None of these in and of themselves are revolutionary or particularly "innovative". They build on previous work. That is how the human race advances; by building on previous work. Innovation just doesn't happen overnight, and innovative ideas don't always immediatly catch on.

    There's been enough significant enhancements in most of our lifetimes to realize this.

  • The internet information revolution was just that, a revolution. It completely changed how many things are done, like stock market trading for instance. These were revolutionary changes in that things changed fast and what came about was nothing like what was in place previously.

    Now it appears that the revolution is for the most part over, at least in the US. We are left to develop and improve on what we already have. This is an evolutionary process of gradual improvement. This will continue , in general, until the next big revolutionary change and the cycle will repeat itself.

    In short major innovations are uncommon, gradual improvement is the norm. Welcome back to normal.

  • Lets narrow it down to the last 115 years or so. Major "innovations" according to your definition would be: the Automobile, airplanes, radio, TV, Nuclear Power, Computer, PC, Internet.... can you think of anything else? No, and neither can I.

    Oh, wait, let's see here. Name something invented in the past hundred years which is now one of the things most taken for granted and yet is IMPOSSIBLE to live in this modern world without.

    Give up?

    Plastics.

    That's just the 20th century. Name the most revolutionary product of the 19th century.

    I would lay my money down on Steel.

    I can't believe that everyone here is trying to think about things that move, that work, that entertain us. Is that all anyone can think about nowdays? When I look at a great modern invention, I don't think about the computer. Heck, the computer was invented back in China around 800BC with the abacus. We've just improved it to suit our needs. Let's praise for a second the transistor (or vacuum tube if you like). Or silicon. Things we BUILD, not things we use.

    Just try to think for a second what we have built, not what we use daily. Someone who praises the microwave as a technological breakthrough has a pretty narrow mind. Don't think about current "technology." It's how it's built. You want major innovations? Well, if you want technological revelations, I'd say wait another hundred years. Most things we honor right now not going to be used in a hundred years. I'd lay my money down on the elmination of the radio and of the Microwave, and who knows how "safe" airplanes will be compared to other means of travel 100 years from now (or how efficient). I mean, Trains were a popular means of travel 100 years ago, and now Amtrack is struggling to stay alive. Ask someone 100 years ago about what they would think is a wonderful invention, and I'm sure many would say the train.

    We don't use the train much for personal travel anymore. But we still use it's steel.

  • Exactly... (Score:4)

    by the Man in Black ( 102634 ) <jasonrashaadNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday March 19, 2001 @09:54AM (#353890) Homepage
    ...I think that's spot on. The great technological achievements were not created with the idea of "Let's do this, so we can make a million bucks off of it.". In fact, the idea of applying a business model to technological ideas has done nothing but cripple the movement. Example: UNIX is born at Bell Labs. Ritchie and the crew didn't create UNIX to make money...they built it because they had the 'programmers itch'. Bell Labs took it over, seeing that they could make a wad of cash off of it, and UNIX has been evolving at a snails pace ever since.

    The great things [UNIX, the Web, e-mail...hell,e ven Slashdot] were created because some geek thought it would be cool, or as a tool to get something done more effectively. All capitilization of technology has done is sloooow it down.

    --Just Another Pimp A$$ Perl Hacker

  • Maybe so... but your argument is wrong (Score:3)

    by Mordred ( 104619 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @09:58AM (#353894) Homepage
    There has been tons of amazing innovation in the past 9 years, but you've got the total wrong idea. You seem to want an invention that will revolutionize the world... and you want one every 12 months. Doesn't that seem a little overly optomistic?

    "I consider innovations to be things such as the wheel, fire, airplanes, mechanized warfare, the radio, television, PC, and the Internet."
    First off, I'd argue with your definition of innovation a little, but I understand what you mean. Now, lets look at the timetable of the innovations you deem worthy enough to mention. Doesn't that stretch through the whole course of human history?

    Lets narrow it down to the last 115 years or so. Major "innovations" according to your definition would be: the Automobile, airplanes, radio, TV, Nuclear Power, Computer, PC, Internet.... can you think of anything else? No, and neither can I. Lets assume for the sake of argument there's two other world changing "innovations" I've forgotten. That gives us 10 innovations in 115 years. Wow. That's slightly slower than 1 every 10 years.

    Are you expecting these to come about overnight? The vast majority of things are just improvements and refinements of other ideas, and many of them do revolutionize the way we do things. You just can't set an alarm clock and expect a new one every other year. That's grossly optimistic at best and utterly naive at worst.

    Mordred
  • They still haven't changed my life at all - I have yet to find a use for one in my life... unless the prices dramatically drop for service...

    Move to Europe. There, everybody has cellphones (projected to reach ~125% saturation in the next couple of years) and they are becoming pretty indispensible. The lack of usefulness of cellphones in the US is a function of the marketing and service situation here rather than the utility cellphones provide.

    In the UK, I carried a cellphone everywhere I went. Here, I just keep one of those tracphone things in the car for emergencies.

    Two things need to happen for cellphone use to become ubiquitous in the US. First, drop charges for incoming calls. Secondly, improve coverage. You could really do with sumping analogue and going digital too (SMS is a killer app in the UK)

    Rich

  • When was the last time you had to reboot your telephone?

    A couple of months ago. A cordless I had began playing up, refusing to go on-hook when hung up. Had to pull the power on it to get it to behave again (until next time). It's since been replaced.

    I'd agree that PCs weren't revolutionary. I mean heck, they were built from stock parts after all. There were micros before that even, it's just IBMs clout and cluelessness that made it the one to emulate.

    And I'd say that the thing that makes the Internet innovative is not the protocol itself but the idea that "you have a network, I have a network, let's join them up". That really arises out of the environment of sharing (mostly) that the academic community provides (yes, I know the military invented it).

    Rich

  • Sounds good...please let me know when it happens, so I can stop spending severals per week on the road just getting and and forth to my overcrowded office, ok?

    I don't know what you mean. My morning commute consists of a trip to the bathroom to brush my teeth*. For some of us, it's already happening.

    It seems many people think that we're at the end of the information revolution. Well, from my viewpoint, it's really only just warming up. I'm expecting to see it continue for at least the next fifty years and I wouldn't be surprised to see it lasting into two or more centuries (well, not personally. But perhaps?)

    Rich

  • Oops, forgot to add the footnote:

    *I do usually have a shower as well.

    Rich

  • For all that I do, I can't see cell phones as "becoming pretty indispensible."

    I understand what you're saying. Having a cell phone is one of those things that you don't realise what you're missing unless you've had one. Of course, there's a certain amount of lifestyle choice to throw into the equation but, for example, not having to go out to the store again because your wife forgot to put something on the list and called you on your cellphone is pretty useful. Or when she says "get x" and x comes in three brands in four different sizes or you're meeting someone somewhere and when you get there, you find out that there's a hundred places they could be or you're caught in a jam and going to be late somewhere or you're going to meet your friends at a pub but they're moving on to a different one.

    Of course, none of these things is earth shatteringly important and certainly, it wouldn't be impossible to cope without a mobile but the convenience is there. I know that on at least one occasion, it's led to me having a good night out rather than having to give up, go home and watch TV.

    Rich

  • I think more accurate would be to say that the emphasis on monetization is what slows down innovation. Money itself is a neccessary prerequisite to innovation in many fields (just as one example, organic chemistry labs are incredibly expensive in terms of reagent costs and instrumentation (figure USD500K+ for a good NMR alone)). CS is one of a very few fields where fundamental revolutions can take place with just one person's thoughts in their head and minimal bucks for some computer hardware to realize the implementation (c.f. Berners-Lee and the web), mathematics would be another (there all you need is one brilliant person and some paper and pencils ;-) ).


    --
    News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org [geekaustin.org]

  • Sad to say, but for the most part people haven't ever developed cures for diseases. Antibiotics are the only cure that's ever really worked. Every other really significant development has been in prevention, either in vaccination or public health measures like water purification that prevent the spread of diseases. Everything else is pretty much giving the body help in doing its own job fighting off disease.

    If you want to know a new area of comparatively recent research, though, look at ulcers. Until very recently people thought that ulcers were an organic problem in which the body naturally produced too much stomach acid, so there was no cure- just long term treatment that happened to be very profitable for the drug companies. Then somebody discovered that the excess acid production was caused by a bacterial (Helicobacter pylori) infection that could be eliminated by a regimen of antibiotics, eliminating the need to be dependent on expensive drugs. Naturally the drug companies aren't happy with this. They've tried unsuccessfully to discredit the research, and they've also tried more successfully to keep it out of the public eye. The real reason that they're encouraging people to take Pepcid, Tagamet, etc. without consulting their doctors is so that they won't find out that their heartburn is caused by a curable ulcer. IMO it's disgusting.

  • Re:Jesus wept... (Score:3)

    by rgmoore ( 133276 ) <glandauer@charter.net> on Monday March 19, 2001 @10:50AM (#353920) Homepage

    Well, I think that you have insanely high standards for what counts as innovative, then. To suggest that the genome was just applied engineering ignores the tremendous developments in informatics that were necessary to make it possible. More importantly, the way that genomic data is used is qualitatively different from the way that genetic data was used before the concept of genomics. Furthermore, the genome is really only the leading edge of future biology; proteomics didn't even exist 10 years ago, and it depends absolutely on genomic data.

    There are a lot of exciting steps forward in biology, but and there are a lot of things that are changing the way we look at the world. but they aren't (I don't think) HUGE ideas. it is more on the order of little ideas changing little ideas. Granted, when you get enough of them together, that is big news, and may fundamentally change the way you view the world as a whole.

    And, fundamentally, I think that this is one of two really critically important things to realize. Most of the change that takes place in the world is incremental and evolutionary, rather than earthshattering and revolutionary. The other important thing to understand is that often innovations have a long lead time. The web took the better part of a decade to turn from a curiosity to a passtime to a lynchpin of the economy- and that's fast as these things go. Most really innovative concepts take decades to really change the world, and it's only with a long historical view that we realize how critically they impact our lives. Just because the innovations of the past ten years haven't turned the world upside down yet doesn't mean that they won't, and in many cases it won't be until after that happens that we'll be able to identify them.

  • Re:Jesus wept... (Score:3)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Monday March 19, 2001 @11:13AM (#353923) Homepage Journal
    You're exactly right. People may say Newton's Law of Gravitation was innovative, but he was following Kepler. Likewise, General Relativity followed Special Relativity, which followed Lorenz and others work on invariant transforms of the Maxwell equations. The axled wheel followed the solid wheel which followed moving things by placing them on logs.

    To my knowledge there has never been a major scientific discovery which can not be considered an incremental advance on something else.

  • Jesus wept... (Score:5)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Monday March 19, 2001 @09:53AM (#353924) Homepage Journal
    there has been no innovation in any field of science or technology.
    Man, thats an ignorant point of view. Just the list of biological advances (can you spell "genome") could fill this text box. Virology, stem cell research, gene splicing. Go pick up a copy of "Scientific American" [scientificamerican.com] or a "Nature" and stop asking such stupid questions.

  • That is how the human race advances; by building on previous work.

    It took me several years of grad school to realize this. Almost every research project is focused on making an incremental improvement on someone else's work. The best of these works seem to come from applying an idea from an unrelated field.

    There are still the very rare work that does actually break new ground. These often come from someone that knows very little about the existing work in the field, so they have a whole new point of view. If enough people reinvent the wheel, once in a while someone invents a better one.

  • Nice troll (Score:5)

    by f5426 ( 144654 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @10:03AM (#353927)
    Innovative products rarely take the world at a storm the few years after their creation, so it is a bit recent to see any technological breakthrought made in the last 10 years (but, if I had to name one, cell phones is probably the biggest one since civil airplane)

    > But think carefully, can you really name something developed in the last nine years that came out of left field, shook the world by its roots, gained acceptance and you can't live without it

    Fermat theorem proof, of course.

    Cheers,

    --fred
  • And you'll find thousands of years where NOTHING seemed to happen at all.

    We live in the time of anomylous speed of technological development and consider it "normal" and complain about "slow growth."

    Sheesh.

    KFG

  • Re:Snails Pace (Score:3)

    by kfg ( 145172 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @06:58PM (#353930)
    Evolving slowly? Autos and planes?

    I suppose that depends a bit on your conception of slow. Do you realize that there are people alive today, able to ride in the Concorde, who were born before the Wright Bros. flew at Kitty Hawk? Dosn't the speed of that technological development astound you? It does me.

    It was ONLY 37 years from Kitty Hawk to 400 mph from my perspective, and ONLY 53 years from Kitty Hawk to the U-2. Absolutely frikin' amazing! Technology has advanced in this century at a rate unprecedented in human history. Only 66 years from Kitty Hawk to the MOON Alice!

    Ford? Hell, the 1912 Pugeot GP car had an engine in it in most particulars indistinguishable from the engine in the latest Hot little sports car. Now THAT was fast development of technology. Ford just took the ideas developed by fabric mills and Sam Colt to make a lot of money. He didn't do a damn THING for the * technological * development of the * car * itself, nor did he have any interest in doing so. He made an assembly line. That's it. Do you know why you could get a model T in any color you wanted so long as it was black? Because black paint took less time to dry than any other color and sped up the line. THAT is the only sort of " inovation" that Ford was responsible for.

    In 1914 the French were able to move an entire ARMY overnight by rounding up all the * taxi cabs* from the streets of Paris. TAXI CABS for Christ's sake, when only a couple of decades before the auto hardly even existed.

    Technology has sped on the wings of Mercury.

    I'll have to give you the .45 Automatic. But there we are facing a slightly different situation and one that may well have relevance to the current topic directly. Sooner or later * every technology matures.* A gun is nothing more than a tube, a projectile object that fits in the tube, and a propelant. The idea is pretty damn simple and the .45 automatic is pretty much as far as you can take the technology of a tube, a rock, and a bang. It has not advanced much further because * there is simply no place left to go.*

    So, we have computers, we have the internet. We have spreadsheets, word processors, video games, all information encodable in digital form, the computer plays music, movies, receives radio and TV, makes phone calls, sends mail, let's you 'chat' with people all over the world singly or in groups, has replaced the printing press and the photo processor and drives the tools to make real world physical objects.

    Just what the hell else do people expect the damn things to DO? Wash the bloody car and walk the dog? Well, actually, they DO that in some places already, don't they? Heck, they even REPLACE the damn dog.

    Oh sure, we'll get bigger, better, faster, more, just as an Eclipse is a more refined piece of machinery than the 1912 GP car, but the Eclipse dosn't embody any startling new IDEAS compared to the Pugeot.

    You want an example of SLOW technological development? Tell me, how many tens of thousands of years did it take for mankind to go from taking advantage of a fire started by a lightning strike, to figuring out how to keep the fire GOING, to figuring out how to MAKE fire WITHOUT the lightning strike to start it?

    Now THAT was slow!

  • No innovation??? (Score:3)

    by Glowing Fish ( 155236 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @09:55AM (#353933) Homepage

    I wouldn't say that the web browser was the latest innovation in science and technology. I don't even know if I would even say that the web browser was so much an innovation in technology as it was a stylistic leap forward for computers. (I would probably say the same about the GUI).

    I would say, that, just off the top of my head, that cloning a sheep was a pretty innovative use of science\technology. I am sure that there is plenty of other things we can think up. Take pharmacology, Viagra to the side, I am sure that their has been dozens of new medications devised in the past decade. Gabapentin comes to mind. In other areas of technology, the research on hybrid cars comes to mind. I am sure that people out there can think of dozens of innovations.

    And of course, I can't forget to mention "Ginger"...

  • First of all, there are plenty of innovation (I know you're already getting flamed by them, so I won't name them). But I think that the reason that you feel the way you do is because we live in a world of products that are proven through word of mouth and reviews...

    Lemmie ask you, do you own a TiVo? Its a new innovation on TV (not quite a VCR... more of a convience in watching TV). Most people don't own one yet, but in a few years everyone will. It first needs to be fine tuned, and you have to hear good reviews of it before it is released.

    Didn't notive that innovation, did ya? It wasn't marketed the moment it came out, but it is once there was a following (and not marketed to death, because it isn't "mainstream" yet).

    The public doesn't want brand new innovations, they want a reliable product that is already proven. So companies downplay the breakthrough until it has a following and has proven to be a product worth having.

    On the non-product science side, you have to watch the news or read /. more often, cause the mapping of the genome, and the soon to be cracked sciences of nano-technology and quantum computing screams innovation...

    --

  • I know this was intended as a joke, but there is a kernal of truth. There have been innovations in the last decade in reproductive sciences that may have long term effects on our society.

    Viagra, 60 y.o women having babies, sextuplets, etc.

    Cloning (human clones are just around the corner)

    Geneticly-modified animals and plants (including the first known "escape" of a genetically modified seed into the wild)

    Population > 6 billion. Not really an innovation, but maybe a ominous milestone.

  • Gowen, whoever modded you down as "flamebait" was flat-out wrong.

    It's true that you accused the original poster of "asking stupid questions", but that's because he was.

    It's not flamebait to call this guy ignorant, it's insightful. Kudos to those who had the sense to mod you up.

  • There's one other reason why cell phones have caught on so quickly in Europe: economy of scale.

    You see, here in America, we pay a fairly low flat-rate bill for all local land-line calls... So low, that we tend to think of local calls as being "free".

    In Europe, people generally take it up the ass (sorry, "arse") with per-minute charges on every local call they make.

    As a result, the cell phone network charge is an expense which Europeans are used to accepting, so lots of Europeans decided to make the jump to wireless... might as well have the added convenience if you are paying a fortune just to make your calls anyway.

    Because of the quick adoption of cell phones in Europe, the economies of scale kick in... it becomes cheaper to serve somebody in the European market, so the service gets better while the US market is still only beginning to catch up.

    Of course, the local land-line charges are also one reason why Internet use is so much stronger in the US than in the UK, but that's another issue.

    By the way, that reminds me of an old joke:

    Why don't the English manufacture PC's?
    Because they haven't figured out how to make one leak oil yet!
    Bah-dum-bump.

  • Things such as the printing press, steam engine, telephone, computer, etc. have always come during certain special periods of enlightenment. They end up revolutionizing the world but not always so quickly. The computer is not finished at this point, so I'd say that we are still improving the extent of computers. We have mainframes, PCs, small embedded computers, and PDAs. The field is diversifying more than 20 years ago.

    I do think that things that are free can be better than patented, just because they catch on faster and easier. This is the problem, that current IP laws in the U.S. stifle innovation. Recently I read about a patent on the crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This only harms scientists and engineers that are fully intelligent and capable of making "the next big thing(TM)" but the (TM) is part of the problem that holds them back.

    I think there are a few ideas out there that are really great, but will not be useful enough and widespread for everyone to change society. ADSL is one such technology. GSM phones are another. I can name countless small advances like that, but for the next big thing, I'd say that it will probably not be in the computer or communications field. I'd put my bets on it being either mechanical (a cheap, environmental friendly engine or fuel) or in the health industry (finding a cure for diseases, or something to modify the genome in a way to eliminate problems.) Of course, this sort of thing is seemingly random. So unless I am the one that has the idea to invent that will change the world, I can't really guess what it will be.

  • GSM phone next to my head using the only modulation method that *has* correlated to cancer in laboratory tests.

    I've not heard anything about this. Do you have any links to articles or the research done about this? I currently use a GSM phone and it works well but if there is a real hazard, why is this technology spreading in the U.S.? We usually end up behind on trends like this if there is a potential health hazard.

  • Yeah but if you want to talk about bio innovations, when was the last time a cure was developed for any disease? That cure for cancer thats been promised since the 50's isn't here yet

    Promised by whom?

    Anyway, cancer is an umbrella term for hundreds of diseases which have some things in common, but are very different in other ways. To say "we haven't cured cancer" is like saying "we haven't cured infectious disease."

  • Everyone's too busy downloading pr0n.

    But think of the innovations in that industry ... profitability, for one!

  • Yeah but if you want to talk about bio innovations, when was the last time a cure was developed for any disease? That cure for cancer thats been promised since the 50's isn't here yet, and we've still got dozens of other diseases that rank as the top killers (not to mention the thousands of other more obscure diseases that are out ther) As Chris Rock says, we've got plenty of treatments but no cures. So I actually give innovation the bio and medical fields a big zero until I see some cures for common diseases.
  • As for comparisons between the airplane and the rocket for space exploration... well, until there's somewhere there worth going to, or something there worth bringing back, nobody's gonna build the technology to make it worthwhile. This is (IMHO) sad, verging on the tragic, but true.

    I've been thinking about that over the weekend. A few times in the last few days, I heard about Yuri Gugarin. He was the first man in space, and is still idolized by the Russians, but most Americans go "Huh?" when his name is mentioned. We remember the first folks on the moon, because they were "our" guys. Because that was the last "first", we claim we won the space race.

    What would the world be like if the Russian hadn't stopped, but had the cash and the will to go to Mars, or to put a base on the Moon? The space program would still be alive and kicking, with an established Moon base (perhaps small, but there), with a space station and a better launch vehicle.

    Ironically, if Sagan et. all wanted to go to the Moon to stay, they should have raised money for the Russians... Only the Cold War really drove the space program. Maybe the Chinese are looking for investors?

    We seem to have an excellent base in Antarctica, and a good foundation for a moon base. Maybe the new International Space Station will be a launching pad for the Moon, and a permanent moon base. The absence of an atmosphere means you could lay down a solar-collecting array an inch under the dust, for minimal cost with minimal protection. Solar farms could then beam it back to earth, via Sim-City's Microwave power plants.

    Just an idea. Won't happen, though, especially now that Bush decided to let us go ahead and depend on coal plants for the next 4 years.

  • As a former member of the L5 society, beaming power back to Earth via microwaves has it's own rather nasty environmental problems. It may be the only sustainable industrial power source long-term if a fusion solution isn't found, though.

    That's fairly interesting - any web sites on the subject?

    I read a bit on using microwaves to transmit power, in an article on technology that may come to pass in the next 100 years. The idea was to place solar energy plants on the moon (burying the wires just a little under the dust), then use orbiting mirrors to control the beam back to earth. It sounded interesting, and had some milestones to make it possible: a space station as a stepping stone to the moon, moon bases powered by solar energy, manufacturing on the moon, etc.

    I find it hard to imagine a future where we aren't in space, eventually. It's all that science fiction from the 60's, I guess. The hard part seems to be to figure out a reason to leave the planet in the first place.

  • What would have happened... (Score:3)

    by lwagner ( 230491 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @09:50AM (#353977)
    ...if the web browser was patented? Thank you, Tim Burners-Lee.
  • It all depends on scope of time and your depth of knowledge. The closer you are to any innovation the less it looks like revolution and the more like evolution. I mean, at your level of detail, the Wright Brothers didn't do anything extraordinary, just applied well-known and proven laws of nature to create more lift than the weight of a man. Yet, as any schoolchild knows, they invented the airplane.

    Couple this with the fact that research in the past half-century has been conducted more and more by large teams of scientists and engineers, where inter-communication is required, and it is even easier to see the path from Point A to Point B without having to acknowledge any individual as a genius. Thus, if you are close to the process, you don't get the "Wow!" slap in the face that you would get if you looked away for a month and then were presented with the final product.

    Final thought: We have become so accustomed to *constant* innovation that we tend to only notice when it has ceased! Moore's Law is not a law of stagnation, but rather one of assumed dramatic innovation! The mere fact that it remains largely assumed proves that there continues to be massive innovation!

    BTW, non-bio tech examples: Flash memory, IBM MicroDrive, cheap digital photography, GHz+ processor speeds (which according to many rags a few years ago were physically impossible even with die-shrinkage), home networking without wires, hybrid low-emmision vehicles, etc.

  • Re:Exactly... wrong (Score:3)

    by bay43270 ( 267213 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @10:37AM (#353992) Homepage
    The great technological achievements were not created with the idea of "Let's do this, so we can make a million bucks off of it.". The technological achievements cited by the original author (HTML, radio, television) were not technical achievements of any kind. They were all just a small step taken after the small step before them. The only thing made these achievements worthy of history: they were each accepted by the masses as a usable product. SGML existed years before HTML... no one made a big deal about it. Unix (as you pointed out) was invented long before it became a recognizable power. All of these types of technical achievements have happened in the past few years. Scientific advances in biology and nano technology as well as simple changes like the standardization of xml and the popularization of distributed applications and peer to peer file sharing. The only difference between these advancements and the ones the original author is looking for, is that none of the technologies I pointed out are done. They will each evolve before they are ready to be declared a landmark. It isn't until these technologies solve very large real world problems that they will be worthy of history books. Most likely it will be done for money.
  • The process of shattering DNA strands, sequencing them, and tacking the whole thing together with a computer is one hell of an innovation. We may not be able to live without it yet, but plenty of people say that about the web. Certainly doesn't mean there's no innovation going on. Or are we limiting our discussion to the internet world?
  • I agree with your assessment of our current economic and technological situation. The internet, more so than just a 'web browser' was the real innovation here. Just like Henry Ford first began mass production of the automobile, everyone wanted to be part of the revolution, devoloped all kinds of gadgets that went no where, and everything was a mess for awhile. Same thing with TV, and other 'revolutionary' technologies that have been invented over the ages. Lots of useless junk abounds early in a new tech's evolution.

    So sure, we're bound to have economic slowdown, and maybe some technological slowdown to a more consistent growth rate, but it's not going away. And I highly doubt the DMCA or other craziness aimed at controlling the new technology known as the internet will really do much to stifle its growth. P2P, digital copies of copyrighted material, and other sorts of current issues will not go away. The question is, which country/region/group will most effectively embrace the new technology and let it grow. You may remember that the printing press was bad for the Catholic church back in the old days, as it allowed the masses to have their own copies of the Bible which the Catholic church wished to have strict control of who had and didn't have such info. Obviously, that didn't work, and it ended up helping form the USA. So the more the RIAA and laws like the DMCA try to restrict all this new tech, the more they set our country up for failure.

    "Those who forget the past, are doomed to repeat it." - (I forget who said this first, but it's a famous quote.) -- Sorry if I went a little off topic, just my opinions on the state of this new technology.

  • Because... (Score:5)

    by pogen ( 303331 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @09:52AM (#353995) Homepage
    since the release of the web browser, there has been no innovation in any field of science or technology. Why?

    Everyone's too busy downloading pr0n.

  • Amen. I just like to add that economic factors can stimulate innovation. But stacks of money are usually less than helpful in spurring innovation.

    If a recession is coming (which is still a subject to debate) it may well be beneficial to the tech field. That's simply because in recession companies have to add real value to survive. VC money will be scarce and those competing will have to show something that really can change people's lives not yet another web outfit that sells socks online. Take the UK in the early eighties for instance. That was the time of a big recession there. Huge unemployment in the West Midlands pushed young people to found their own companies which resulted in a software boom of a kind. Most of them were game companies writing for eight bit home computers. Most of those companies no longer exist but when they did (some of them were around for more than 10 years) they produced some amazing games that I still play today.

  • Web browser takes the world by storm? (Score:3)

    by Tsar cr0bar ( 310803 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @09:57AM (#353999) Homepage
    When you ask for innovations that "came out of left field, shook the world by its roots, gained acceptance and you can't live without it", I think you'd be pretty narrow-minded to list PCs (which are still far from ubiquitous) and of all things web browsers? Give me a break.

    The last innovation that meets your criteria is probably the advent of a global telephone network, or maybe sattelite communication. Web browsers go into the same category of 'incremental improvement' which you say has stagnated recently. What percentage of people in the world do you think "can't live without" their copy of IE 5.5?

  • Re:You don't say. (Score:3)

    by Anne_Nonymous ( 313852 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @10:42AM (#354000) Homepage Journal
    In Stewart Brand's, The Clock of the Long Now, chapter 16, he argues that over the short term things appear to be getting worse, but over the long term they are really getting better.

    "Everything has been going to hell for as long as anyone can remember. Empires are always dying. Your friends are always dying. But in the long sweep of history, on average, life has been getting steadily better for as long as you care to look. Does anyone here really want to live in medieval times? Have rotten teath, eat turnips, and die at the age of twenty-seven of exhasustion?" (p 109)

    While Brand is talking here about the human condition, I think the same applies to technology. Oh, sure GenericWebBrowser 2.0 isn't really any better than GenericWebBrowser 1.0, but its better than data interchange via: oral tradition, writting on clay tablets, monks copying data by hand, printing on paper from at central location, the telgraph, the Xerox, fax machines, etc... And how we get to wherever we're going next is to take small steps forward, backward, and sideways, dawdling down the road of progress.
  • Thanks to recent innovation, we now have talking Vodka bottles [go.com]

  • Re:You are all missing his point! (Score:4)

    by Chakat ( 320875 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @10:20AM (#354006) Homepage
    Sure, to us in the tech field, the biotech revolution, to use your example, seems slow-paced, but that's because we're watching it happen. To the common man on the street, who doesn't hear about these advances very often, he's amazed that the scientists were able to do it that easily, simply because he didn't see the piles of rejected ideas that were unfeasable.

    If you go back far enough and read the right histories, you'll find few Archimedes type incedents and more of a lifetime of anonymous research finally reaching a payoff.

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