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America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

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Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#71

Post by rhc2104 »

thorwed123 wrote: post #37
shadowsun7 wrote: post #22

I don't get this meme. Innovation can happen anywhere - and in fact it often does regardless of how seemingly 'useless' the application is. Livejournal is 'boring', but out of it we got Memcached; Facebook is a 'PHP doodad' (actual news article called it that, I kid you not!); out of it we got HipHop and Cassandra and Thrift. Friendfeed is a 'frivolous social app', and out of it we got Tornado. “The best minds of my…

Hadoop rather mapreduce came from Google which is a great innovation. Cassandra came from Dynamo; And Dynamo is from Amazons R and D efforts. Btw Amazon is an innovation as it leads to large amount of savings in energy. Thrift,Tornado,HipHop -> not innovations useful programming tools but not gonna change anything. Rarely any innovations have come out of Web Applications. In fact the best innovation in data mining [T…

The Open Compute Project produced a data center with a PUE of 1.07, making it far more energy efficient.

Disclaimer: I work for Facebook.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#72

Post by colomon »

wiredfool wrote: post #33
c0riander wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reference: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes?qt0479105

Thanks. I was beginning to despair that no one was going to catch it.

Heh. I actually recognized it from "A Night at the Hip Hopera", but never knew where they had sampled it from. :)

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#73

Post by jowiar »

One question: What is meaning?

Making life longer? Making life better? Creating options? Creating experiences?

I think everyone here can agree on the basic idea that some things have meaning and some do not. Reaching consensus on what specifically has meaning, though, is impossible.

Finally, is it that far fetched to posit that technologies developed and refined to predict consumer desires or the financial markets can be repositioned to predict weather, disease (both on a world-wide level and a cellular level). That these predictions can be used to improve the quality of people's lives, the availability of food, and otherwise? These techniques are the byproduct of the current bubble, and targeting them at the physical world, scaling them up (planetary) or down (molecular) will be the focus of the next century.

Finally, in relation to my earlier point, 42... Discuss.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#74

Post by jimmyjazz14 »

lefstathiou wrote: post #43

I think there is a bias in where the author, and a lot of the people who have commented below, get their data points on innovation. If you're routinely reading tech blogs and forums, the usual suspects will appear and you'll naturally assume that the innovation taking place is all web-app related and social media related. If you're reading scientific journals on the other hand, you'll be overwhelmed with the amount o…

I just subscribed to Tech Review, haven't received my first issue yet but I have been reading the site a lot. Seems to feature a lot more interesting tech news and information then most sites/magazines including Wired.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#75

Post by mkramlich »

The big perhaps too obvious criticism of the OA is that it's making a broad generalization and is overlooking all the actual innovation and Big Ideas going on. I for one am also sickened or at least unexcited by all the unimaginative and incremental and "me too" startups and products out there. But rather than just complaining about it, I'm doing something about it. Innovation starts with you. If you want the world to be a certain way it's up to you to help make it that way. Start small, think big, act today but aim for the future.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#76

Post by KeithMajhor »

mkramlich wrote: post #75

The big perhaps too obvious criticism of the OA is that it's making a broad generalization and is overlooking all the actual innovation and Big Ideas going on. I for one am also sickened or at least unexcited by all the unimaginative and incremental and "me too" startups and products out there. But rather than just complaining about it, I'm doing something about it. Innovation starts with you. If you want the world t…

I agree with most of what you said so I'm sorry to nitpick.

The distinction between "complaining" and "doing" doesn't make any sense to me. The OA's intention is to change the way people innovate. This isn't something he can be "doing" in his basement by himself. If he wants the world to be a certain way he can't just _make_ it that way. At some point he's going to have to persuade other people and "complaining" on the internet is a fine place for it.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#77

Post by sdave »

jff wrote: post #59
SiVal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, boo-hoo. You've also apparently been raised to believe that someone (probably the government in some form) owed you the life of your dreams, and as it dawns that you might have to work for a living, you assume your "rights" are being violated, have a tantrum, and compose yet another leftist manifesto. I suspect there is something wrong with how you were educated by "the system," but it's not what you think.

Here I was thinking that everyone on the Internet had seen Fight Club, and you go and prove me wrong.

(from India), This is the first movie i am going to watch now. Thanks jff.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#78

Post by JWLong »

dxbydt wrote: post #13

If you want "fundamental" innovation, you simply aren't going to get it in a jiffy. Imagine if a person dead over a 100 years ago woke up today. What present day technologies would he have no trouble recognizing ? 1.Movie Projector. 2.Bulb. 3.Car. That's about it. We use pretty much the same 35mm format and film projector that was originally invented some 110 years ago( George Lucas's constant lament ). We drive arou…

They used to call lightbulbs, airplanes, and combustion engines "fluff". Don't make the mistake of assuming that you can see all ends... Even the wise cannot see all ends (keeping the movie references alive). As others have stated, what people are working on today as side projects and hobbies will pave the way for the breakthrough's of tomorrow.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#79

Post by ksolanki »

At the risk of unpopularity, let me be the devils advocate here.

Warning: I am going to support 41 M investment in Color and will point out some odd issues with the way Ph.D./University research is funded.

What is the ideal environment for innovation? Give some hard problems to smart people, give them enough time and money to solve them. At the end even if the effort fails one learns what does not work. I feel that the people at Color Inc. have this sort of freedom with a committed 41M funding. No? Do you think all they will do with this freedom is just photo sharing? I doubt.

On the other hand, innovation gets stiffed by short term targets/pressures. It gets stiffed when you need your research proposals to go through a large peer review committee (at NIH or NSF). Why? Most innovative but unproven ideas are killed right there. Feature prominent people as co-investigators or consultants and your chance of funding greatly increases. Of course, this system is still better than in many other countries, but there is some room for improvement.

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