DNS, 1983年，以及依赖的进步，如通过MX记录而不是刘海路径来解析电子邮件主机。*不寒而栗*

Zeroconf工作在DNS之上，2000年。我把我的打印机插入网络，我的笔记本电脑看到了它。我在网络上启动了一个web服务器，我的浏览器看到了它。(假设他们广播了他们的可用性。)

NTP(1985)基于Marzullo算法(1984)。精确的时间在紧张的网络。

鼠标滚轮，1995年。使用没有它的鼠标感觉太原始了。不，这不是恩格尔巴特团队想过却忘了提的东西。至少当我问当时团队里的人时没有。(那是1998年左右在恩格尔巴特的一次活动上。我要对付第一批老鼠中的一只。)

1987年的Unicode，以及它在不同类型的编码、规范化、双向文本等方面的相关进展。

是的，人们每天使用这5种方法是很常见的。

这些真的是“新想法”吗?毕竟，有了鼠标，有了字符编码，有了网络计时。告诉我如何区分“新”和“真正的新”，我会回答你的问题。我的直觉告诉我这些足够新了。

在较小的领域，很容易有更近期的进展。例如，在生物信息学领域，Smith-Waterman(1981)和BLAST(1990)有效地使该领域成为可能。但这听起来像是你在要求在整个计算领域中非常广泛的想法，而且容易摘到的水果会被先摘。在一个新的领域总是如此。

这是一个消极的结果，作为一个“基础创新”很奇怪，但我认为适用，因为它开辟了新的研究领域，关闭了无用的领域。

分配共识的不可能性:2001年PODC影响力论文奖

We assumed that the main value of our impossibility result was to close off unproductive lines of research on trying to find fault-tolerant consensus algorithms. But much to our surprise, it opened up entirely new lines of research. There has been analysis of exactly what assumptions about the distributed system model are needed for the impossibility proof. Many related distributed problems to which the proof also applies have been found, together with seemingly similar problems which do have solutions. Eventually a long line of research developed in which primitives were classified based on their ability to implement wait-free fault-tolerant consensus.

自1980年以来，关于社会计算的想法已经取得了进展。油井工程始于1985年。虽然我确信以前有在线社区，但我相信该领域的一些真正的见解发生在1980年之后。社会社区的不利动态方面及其在软件系统上的交互很像塔科马海峡大桥的灾难。

我认为Clay Shirky在该领域的工作阐明了这些影响以及如何减轻它们。我想说，社交软件洞察力的有趣的现实世界的例子包括reCAPTCHA和维基百科，其中重要的有价值的工作是由软件调解的参与者完成的。

(普遍)加密。没有加密，任何金融交易都不会发生。这仍然是一个需要更多创新和用户友好性的领域。

回答“为什么新思想会消亡”和“如何应对”这两个问题?

I suspect a lot of the lack of progress is due to the massive influx of capital and entrenched wealth in the industry. Sounds counterintuitive, but I think it's become conventional wisdom that any new idea gets one shot; if it doesn't make it at the first try, it can't come back. It gets bought by someone with entrenched interests, or just FAILs, and the energy is gone. A couple examples are tablet computers, and integrated office software. The Newton and several others had real potential, but ended up (through competitive attrition and bad judgment) squandering their birthrights, killing whole categories. (I was especially fond of Ashton Tate's Framework; but I'm still stuck with Word and Excel).

怎么办呢?首先想到的是Wm。莎士比亚的建议:“让我们杀了所有的律师。”但恐怕他们现在装备太精良了。实际上，我认为最好的选择是找到某种开源计划。它们似乎比其他选择更好地保持可访问性和增量改进。但是这个行业已经变得足够大了，所以某种有机的合作机制是必要的。

I also think that there's a dynamic that says that the entrenched interests (especially platforms) require a substantial amount of change - churn - to justify continuing revenue streams; and this absorbs a lot of creative energy that could have been spent in better ways. Look how much time we spend treading water with the newest iteration from Microsoft or Sun or Linux or Firefox, making changes to systems that for the most part work fine already. It's not because they are evil, it's just built into the industry. There's no such thing as Stable Equilibrium; all the feedback mechanisms are positive, favoring change over stability. (Did you ever see a feature withdrawn, or a change retracted?)

关于SO的另一个讨论线索是臭鼬工厂综合症(参考:Geoffrey Moore):在大型组织中，真正的创新几乎总是(90%以上)出现在自发出现的未经授权的项目中，这些项目完全由个人或小团队的主动性推动(通常会受到正式的管理等级的反对)。所以:质疑权威，反抗体制。

更好的用户界面。

今天的用户界面仍然很糟糕。我指的不是小的方面，而是大的、基本的方面。我不禁注意到，即使是最好的程序也仍然有一些接口，这些接口要么极其复杂，要么需要以其他方式进行大量的抽象思考，而且无法达到传统的非软件工具的易用性。

诚然，这是由于软件可以比传统工具做更多的事情。但这不是接受现状的理由。此外，大多数软件都做得不好。

In general, applications still lack a certain “just works” feeling are too much oriented by what can be done, rather than what should be done. One point that has been raised time and again, and that is still not solved, is the point of saving. Applications crash, destroying hours of work. I have the habit of pressing Ctrl+S every few seconds (of course, this no longer works in web applications). Why do I have to do this? It's mind-numbingly stupid. This is clearly a task for automation. Of course, the application also has to save a diff for every modification I make (basically an infinite undo list) in case I make an error.

解决这个问题其实并不难。在每个应用程序中都很难实现它，因为没有好的API可以做到这一点。编程工具和库必须显著改进，才能在所有平台和程序上轻松实现这些工作，适用于所有具有任意备份存储且不需要用户交互的文件格式。但在我们最终开始编写“好的”应用程序而不仅仅是足够的应用程序之前，这是必要的一步。

I believe that Apple currently approximates the “just works” feeling best in some regards. Take for example their newest version of iPhoto which features a face recognition that automatically groups photos by people appearing in them. That is a classical task that the user does not want to do manually and doesn't understand why the computer doesn't do it automatically. And even iPhoto is still a very long way from a good UI, since said feature still requires ultimate confirmation by the user (for each photo!), since the face recognition engine isn't perfect.