Which invention of the third millennium is most important to you?

[Mæstro]

One could see the late thread on social values as having inspired this. I have been used to slower internet speeds from my childhood, and I still prefer to watch low resolution film; I dislike smartphones as I have said elsewhere; HTML 4·01 was developed in 1999, and XMPP in 1998; in most things, I believe I would be rather content living my life with my current tastes, yet the technology that existed in the early 00s. Nevertheless, I have tried to think of whether there are exceptions.

I think that the modern, statistical kind of machine translation is the most vital invention the last 21 years have brought me.
(The third millennium began with 2001, there being no year nought. The year 2000 belongs to the second, not third, millennium.) I recall the grammatical translators that were there when I was a boy. I like requesting pictures from Japanese artists sometimes, and I could never present my requests to them at all intelligibly with those. I am unsure how I would answer if I could speak Japanese.

Another friend (*2004) had said that torrents are most essential for him. (The BitTorrent protocol was formed in 2001, and we are ignorant of any earlier peer-to-peer file sharing that might have existed before and could have substituted.) What about you?

[somdcomputerguy]

I can't think of any inventions since 2001. Heck, I'm having difficulty trying to think of any inventions, and not discoveries, that have occurred in the last 30-50 or so years.. Anything of any importance to me or overall anyway..

[Nigaikaze]

I can think of my favorite inventions of the last couple of centuries (18th - modern flush toilet with S-trap; 19th - electric lights; 20th - modern antibiotics), but as far as the 21st century/third millennium goes ... nope, I got nothin'.

[RealityRipple]

Lithium Phosphate batteries. They were conceived of in the 90s, but it took until the last 5 or so years for them to actually be functioning, viable alternatives to Lead-Acid.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

I can't figure a real invention made after 2001 (and we had no space odissey ) ... actually I can think of rather few inventions or innovations since my childhood (born in 1955) which are drastically different (except in bulk quantity and pervasivity in electronics and communications), while I can think of many scientific discoveries, some of which I saw when I was a high school student, which make obsolete what I was exposed too (the genetic code, plate tectonics, the standard model for particles, cosmic inflation ...)

[vannilla]

Real-time digital motion capture.
Not sure if it counts as an invention but it was definitely not possible until computers were powerful enough.

[somdcomputerguy]

Real-time digital motion capture.

My grandparents had a device like that. They held it, pushed buttons, and flicked switches with their digits..

[vannilla]

My grandparents had a device like that. They held it, pushed buttons, and flicked switches with their digits..

But were they captured by the device?

[athenian200]

I would have to say graphene batteries and superconductors. They are already very far along and I'm sure they will be perfected before the end of this century.

Granted, I know graphene has had a lot of potential uses for years (I remember reading about it in the 1990s as a child), but there was nothing even close to a commercially viable graphene battery until this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj83ouhXTo

If the rumors about China having perfected the process of creating power through nuclear fusion (instead of conventional fission) are true, though, then that might wind up being the most impressive invention. I'm thinking that inventions related to power delivery will wind up being most important.

[Moonchild]

Ion-exchange batteries were my initial (and only) thing that immediately sprung to mind but those were invented in the 1970s somewhere. Variations on a theme like LiFePO4 and others that came after 2000 I don't think count as a new invention.
Superconductors as well as the properties of graphene are even older.
Motion capture? I remember that being used in e.g. Virtua Fighter and it was a revelation back then, and that's from the 90s.
Peer-to-peer file sharing before bittorrent? gnutella and gnutella-based networks were invented and developed just before the turn of the century and officially launched in 2000... so... Doesn't count either

I don't think practical applications for previous new ideas count as inventions, IOW. I'm just looking to find anything truly new in 2001+ and having a hard time doing so.

[jobbautista9]

LEDs were already a thing in the 60s, and LEDs for general lighting was done in the 90s. Fluticasone propionate was patented in the 80s. CDs were developed in the 80s as well, and DVDs in the 90s. Blu-ray was developed in 2006, but they're.. meh. Trackpads in laptops were already a thing in the 80s too. Man, it's really hard to see new inventions in the 2000s...

I guess if you ask me it would be USB 2.0 flash drives. They became a thing in 2002. Admittedly it's not entirely new (flash drives themselves were already a thing in the 90s), but tbf what's the latest invention that was entirely new anyway? If these flash drives weren't a thing we would still be stuck with floppies (or zip disks) and optical discs, which weren't ideal.

[mtosev]

No one mentioned self driving vehicles? Strange.
I'm curious has anyone here watched the TV series Knight rider? KITT was basically a computer on wheels.

[vannilla]

No one mentioned self driving vehicles? Strange.

Probably because nobody found them interesting.

Anyway "invention" as an original concept is going to be hard to find because not only we are not even a quarter in the century and thus there is still a lot of time to see something, but also because this kind of invention are actually rare in the grand scheme of things: most of the time it's really only about improving existing tools and make things more convenient, so it's perfectly normal to not be able to find anything to list in just 21 years and half.

[mr tribute]

I have to say Ubuntu. Yes, it's just another Linux distro. But the founder Mark Shuttleworth had an unique opportunity. He had $575 million in the bank in the early 00s.

He was an entrepreneur and also a Debian maintainer. He started Ubuntu in 2004 and it took off. There was a promise of a "Linux platform". I think we came closer to that in the late 00s than ever before and ever since. Ubuntu almost became Linux. The first 5 - 6 years were fueled by sane choices and innovation.

Ubuntu came up with Upstart, the init system that still powers every Chromebook in the world. However, there wasn't much money to be made creating a Linux desktop. It was the server space that was important and from a revenue perspective Ubuntu/Canonical was beaten by Red Hat which had most of the lucrative contracts with governments, defense industry and big corporations.

So Shuttleworth started chasing the mobile space with dreams of "convergence". Convergence is a nice way of saying "touch on the desktop". He burned a lot of money on this and eventually dropped his Unity 8 desktop before it was released. It was a "convergent" Qt version of the Unity 7 version Canonical used on the Ubuntu desktop at the time. Not everything was lost because Ubuntu Touch (a mobile OS that I think was closely related to Unity 8) is now in the hands of the community.

Anyway, after failing in the convergent/mobile space, Shuttleworth had burned too much energy/money/motivation. The desktop version of Ubuntu became just another dumping ground for Red Hat technology such as systemd, Gnome 3, Plymouth, Wayland etc. The only new big technology contribution from Canonical was the universally disliked Snap format.

I can't help but ask "what if". I'm not saying Shuttleworth has failed. He has contributed a lot. What I can say is that the Linux desktop needs a new Mark Shuttleworth that can build technology that takes desktop Linux into the next decade and beyond. Red Hat is clearly in the mobile camp with Gnome 3 (and more importantly gtk) and Wayland. The mess often labeled systemd isn't getting smaller. Google probably has less than one full time dev maintaining Upstart so Canonical could easily have done it themselves.

Mark Shuttleworth reflects on his legacy (good to see him happy):
Mark Shuttleworth - His Legacy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixam4j36CsA

[Moonchild]

No one mentioned self driving vehicles? Strange.
I'm curious has anyone here watched the TV series Knight rider? KITT was basically a computer on wheels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o ... iving_cars

Pretty sure that's not of this millennium

[Eduardo Lucas]

If we exclude technology which was definitely available in the market but too expensive in the 20st century yet available where i lived, i would say reliable broadband internet was the distinctive advance we coudn't have in my country, mostly because of severe infrastructure deficiencies. When it became available as they fixed those, back in 2004-2007, (albeit with usual downtimes) it was a life-changing event. 56k modem phone connections were ridiculously unreliable (and very expensive, as it was charged by electric pulses instead of minutes) here.

[Night Wing]

A piece of equipment used in a hospital or a well equipped clinic known as a lithotripsy machine.

Lithotripsy treats kidney stones by sending focused ultrasonic energy or shock waves directly to the stone first located with fluoroscopy (a type of X-ray “movie”) or ultrasound (high frequency sound waves). The shock waves break a large stone into smaller stones that will pass through the urinary system.

About 19 months ago I had a blockage which was caused by four large kidney stones which since they were so large in the tube leading from the left kidney to my bladder, they couldn't make it into the bladder. The stones were lined up like bowling bowls on a bowling rack, one behind the other. To make a long story short, this machine saved my life.

[Moonchild]

lithotripsy machine

I'm afraid that too belongs to the 2nd millennium.
Extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL) was first used in 1980, and I know it was a thing way before the 2000s because one of my extended family members had their kidney stones pulverized non-invasively that way when I was still fairly young.

[arkaland]

This is meant as a reply to "mr tribute" regarding his post of June 30th. Yes, I finally discovered this topic and I found most of the comments both timely and interesting. But mr tribute's tribute to Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu actually made me laugh. Yes, he admits that Ubuntu was (simply) another Linux distro, and I've never doubted that Shuttleworth was possibly a financial and even technological genius of sorts. But the idea that Ubuntu gave us the promise of a "Linux platform" is, to me, completely ludicrous. The biggest reason by far that Ubuntu became for several years the most popular Linux distro was not due to its technology nearly as much as it was that it was designed to be the EASIEST Linux distro for a Windows user to break into Linux with. There was never any need for a "Linux platform" -- it already existed. I started using Linux in 2006, and not on any Debian-based distro, and "never looked back", and I'm far from being some kind of technology whiz. The reasons people like me prefer and keep using Linux are too numerous to enumerate here, but technological innovation has never been a primary one. I'm on a Linux desktop and frankly I don't need anybody else telling me that it needs changes to take me into the next decade. That idea has never concerned me in the least.

[mr tribute]

@arkaland
I read you post. I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say. I'm tired so my ability to focus is diminished right now. My post you are referring to is simply a reply to the question in the title of this thread:
"Which invention of the third millennium is most important to you?"

For you Ubuntu might be insignificant, but you didn't give your answer to the question above.