Yes -- the trick is doing it without keeping the high-speed oscillator running all the time. In these kinds of embedded applications, the oscillator can draw a significant amount of power. Implementations that have a high speed oscillator running all the time, but divide it down while in sleep mode, draw more power than the invention, which has a low speed oscillator running all the time, and only generates high frequencies when they are needed.
Patent 4,893,271, issued in 1990 and expired, covers an implementation of this idea in which the slow clock is a crystal oscillator, and the high-speed clock is synthesized, using the crystal oscillator as the reference of a phase-locked loop. It was used in tens of millions of Motorola radio pagers for exactly the reason stated in the article -- lower power consumption in sleep mode, while retaining the ability to process fast once a signal appears.
Don't feel bad. It's a natural law -- like the fact that no Grammar Nazi post can ever be written without some type of language error. It couldn't be helped.
TV signals go a long way because they are coming from 10,000 to 100,000 watt transmitters. ..
. . . which are, in turn, connected to transmit antennas having a gain of 10 to 15 dB, giving them an effective radiated power of hundreds of thousands to millions of watts.
[T]he following reduction factors are recommended for reducing flight-level winds in the inner core of a tropical cyclone to the surface (33 ft) level: for the 700 mb level, R = 0.90; for the 850 mb level (commonly flown in tropical storms), R = 0.80. For investigative flights at 1,000 ft, R = 0.85. As significant variations from these means have been noted in individual storms; these guidelines can be modified as conditions warrant. Storm-to-storm variability will primarily be influenced by wind speed, cyclone convective intensity, and sea-surface temperature.
In other words, for example, when the plane is flying at an altitude such that it measures an air pressure of 850 mb, the measured wind velocity is multiplied by 0.80 to produce the estimate of wind speed at the surface. (Note that all "surface" measurements are actually standardized to be 33 ft up.)
Bring loose stuff inside, keep a disaster kit, sure. But don't spread that old saw about taping your windows. Taping your windows does absolutely nothing except waste your time: The tape doesn't keep the window from breaking when the 100 mph flying debris hits it, and the broken glass quickly shreds the tape.
Use plywood, or aluminum hurricane shutters, instead.
All that matters is how hard it hits me. (That sounds mean, I know, but it's true. When it comes to damage to my home, it only matters how hard Irene hits... my home. Not whether or not it hits x00 miles away too.)
Err, no. You also care what happens to everyone else -- or, at least, you will. For just one trivial example, eventually you'll need to go out for supplies. How far will you have to go to find a gasoline station with gasoline -- and with electricity to pump it? When Hurricane Wilma hit south Florida in 2005, a metropolitan area of more than three million people was suddenly in that situation, and the social structure almost broke down as people discovered that the nearest gasoline was two or three counties away. So was fresh water, food, prescription medicines, roofing materials, replacement windows, cell phone coverage, and everything else people needed to get back on their feet.
In short, you care "whether or not it hits x00 miles away too," because you will depend on your neighbors outside the damage area to help you recover from the storm.
I don't expect this to be much worse to be honest.
You'd better hope you're right -- and away from the water. If you're wrong, you could end up five feet above sea level with a fifteen-foot storm surge, and need to swim in 100 mph winds and twenty-foot seas.
Don't forget, emergency services (police, ambulance, fire,...) suspend their services during these severe storms, so there's no help available (even if your phone service still works). The definition of pitiful is recordings of 911 calls made during the landfall of almost any major hurricane. People in fear for their lives, begging to be saved, and the 911 operator can do nothing. . . .
I was once reading the "letters to the editor" column in a major trade journal, and ran across a letter that said everything I always wanted to say about a particular subject. The letter was concise, insightful, and incredibly lucid, so I looked down to the end of it to see what genius wrote it -- and it was me!
A few weeks earlier I had had a case of shingles, and was given some pretty stiff prescriptions for Vicodin and Percocet to dull the pain. As it turns out, they also caused memory problems; I had the nervous pleasure over the ensuing weeks of finding several letters-to-the-editor over my name in journals to which I subscribe, none of which I remember writing.
Fortunately, none were defamatory or otherwise embarrassing -- or maybe the editors just deleted those.
The article indicates one of the under-appreciated values of printed circuit boards (and, later, integrated circuits): The ability, at one process step (lithography), to connect all circuit components in a system.
Whetter spent 18 months working alongside a volunteer on the wiring alone. “The wiring has to go between the sections, between where the rotor switches are, down to the patch panel and then to the relay control links at the bottom,” he explained. “You don’t just wire from A to B thousands of times. You have to plan it carefully and form what’s known as wiring looms.”
To do that, precise measurements are made of the path the wires take. That’s then mapped out on a large plank of wood, with the wires threaded around nails to create the right shape. “It all sounds rather crude,” Whetter admitted.
The 200 to 400 wires that make up each loom are laced together and then lashed to the main rack, where the soldering work starts. Whetter estimates there are 5,000 solder joints on the Tunny. “It sounds monotonous, but it’s quite an adventure, because you’re never sure if it’s going to work out,” he said. “Fortunately, we didn’t make any serious mistakes.”
Printed circuit board techniques were just being developed at the time the original Tunny was built, and it is interesting to speculate on just how much time could have been saved had that technology been just a few years more advanced, and available to the original designers. Of course, having components designed for PCB use, rather than point-to-point wiring, would have been required, but all that laborious, and error-prone, manual construction of wiring harnesses would have been avoided.
One of the four standards by which prospective Rhodes Scholars are judged is, "energy to use one’s talents to the full, as exemplified by fondness for, and success in, sports."
Sorry, but investing in education does not equal to throwing away billions and let it splashed into the ocean just like that.
Sure it does. The purpose of the program is education -- education of the scientists, engineers, and technicians trying to understand hypersonic flight. That's why the craft has no economic payload: It's crammed full of sensors and telemetry equipment to educate its designers and builders on its performance. And they're learning: Note that "It appears that the engineering changes put into place following the vehicle's first flight test in April 2010 were effective."
Look at it this way: Think of all the term papers, exam pages, and homework assignments generated by the billion grade school students around the world. Except for the occasional bit kept in a scrapbook, they're all turned in, graded, and go right to a landfill. Would you say that was "throwing away billions"? Probably not, because the students (we hope) learned something from doing the task, and the paper was just the investment needed to get that return. It's the same here -- except that Nature is the teacher.
The US military paid Motorola's initial hardware development costs, at absolutely no risk to Motorola. Motorola now sells the same components on the civilian market (as the restriction period has expired). They made a profit the first time around, the second time around they had zero development costs and they charged less for the hardware - on which they made a profit, now they're charging again. (Emphasis added.)
So I ask you again: What ten-year-old phone hardware components are being used today?
The US military paid Motorola's initial hardware development costs, at absolutely no risk to Motorola.
That's a pretty unusual idea. Care to cite where you got it? Motorola sold its government business back in 2001. What ten-year-old phone hardware components are being used today?
Yeah -- poor wording on my part. To infringe, one needs to perform all elements of a claim. What I was trying to emphasize is that to avoid infringement, one can do any four of the five elements of the claim, as long as one does not do the fifth: Infringement is a Boolean "and" operation. I was trying to point out that patent avoidance is usually easier than is thought, since one needs merely to find a claim element that one can do differently.
1. A method of providing notification of impending delivery of a shipment shipped by a shipper to a shipping address specified by a customer, comprising:
(a) periodically querying, by a broker computer system independent of the shipper and a merchant and which enabled the customer to purchase an item contained in the shipment from the merchant, a shipper computer system to obtain status information for the shipment with each query, wherein a periodic query of the shipment computer system comprises: --requesting status information from the shipper computer system by providing a shipment identifier of the shipment to the shipper computer system; and --receiving status information in response thereto;
(b) responsive to status information obtained with a periodic query indicating an estimated delivery date for the shipment, halting, by the broker computer system, the periodic queries and scheduling the restart of periodic queries of the shipper computer system a day prior to the estimated delivery date;
(c) restarting, by the broker computer system, periodic queries of the shipper computer system the day prior to the estimated delivery date to obtain updated status information with each query;
(d) responsive to updated status information obtained with a periodic query indicating that the shipment is out for delivery to the customer, halting, by the broker computer system, the periodic queries and calculating an estimated delivery time for the shipment based at least in part on the status information; and
(e) sending, by the broker computer system, an electronic message including the estimated delivery time to the customer.
If one does not do even one of these five elements, one doesn't infringe on the patent (well, there's the other independent claim 11 to review, too).
Before people get worked into a lather about the latest patent scandal, may I suggest that we all mentally add the phrases "A method of. .." or "An apparatus for. .." to the title of every patent we see? Because that's really what is meant.
You mean, sort of like the Space Shuttle did on every reentry?
Touché: I was considering the problem of steady-state gliding at hypersonic velocities -- something I guess even theoretically you can only do as you approach the Kármán line -- but you're right, in transient deceleration it's been done early and often.
Imagine -- just try to make something glide at hypersonic speeds!
On a more serious note, it's interesting that communication with the craft seems to be the most difficult part of the project (or at least the outer skin of the onion of problems involved with hypersonic flight). I would very much like to find technical papers written on this problem -- clearly, they thought they had it solved, but also just as clearly, they haven't. What's going wrong?
Slashdot Mirror
You can also switch the low speed osc off while the high speed one is running if you're obsessive.
Yes -- if you're willing to pay for two crystal oscillators. The advantage of that patent is that you get by with one crystal.
Yes -- the trick is doing it without keeping the high-speed oscillator running all the time. In these kinds of embedded applications, the oscillator can draw a significant amount of power. Implementations that have a high speed oscillator running all the time, but divide it down while in sleep mode, draw more power than the invention, which has a low speed oscillator running all the time, and only generates high frequencies when they are needed.
Patent 4,893,271, issued in 1990 and expired, covers an implementation of this idea in which the slow clock is a crystal oscillator, and the high-speed clock is synthesized, using the crystal oscillator as the reference of a phase-locked loop. It was used in tens of millions of Motorola radio pagers for exactly the reason stated in the article -- lower power consumption in sleep mode, while retaining the ability to process fast once a signal appears.
Don't feel bad. It's a natural law -- like the fact that no Grammar Nazi post can ever be written without some type of language error. It couldn't be helped.
. . . like Rockall.
TV signals go a long way because they are coming from 10,000 to 100,000 watt transmitters. . .
. . . which are, in turn, connected to transmit antennas having a gain of 10 to 15 dB, giving them an effective radiated power of hundreds of thousands to millions of watts.
Does it matter at what altitude the wind speeds are measured?
Yes, it does. From this NOAA paper:
[T]he following reduction factors are recommended for reducing flight-level winds in the inner core of a tropical cyclone to the surface (33 ft) level: for the 700 mb level, R = 0.90; for the 850 mb level (commonly flown in tropical storms), R = 0.80. For investigative flights at 1,000 ft, R = 0.85. As significant variations from these means have been noted in individual storms; these guidelines can be modified as conditions warrant. Storm-to-storm variability will primarily be influenced by wind speed, cyclone convective intensity, and sea-surface temperature.
In other words, for example, when the plane is flying at an altitude such that it measures an air pressure of 850 mb, the measured wind velocity is multiplied by 0.80 to produce the estimate of wind speed at the surface. (Note that all "surface" measurements are actually standardized to be 33 ft up.)
Bring loose stuff inside, keep a disaster kit, sure. But don't spread that old saw about taping your windows. Taping your windows does absolutely nothing except waste your time: The tape doesn't keep the window from breaking when the 100 mph flying debris hits it, and the broken glass quickly shreds the tape.
Use plywood, or aluminum hurricane shutters, instead.
All that matters is how hard it hits me. (That sounds mean, I know, but it's true. When it comes to damage to my home, it only matters how hard Irene hits... my home. Not whether or not it hits x00 miles away too.)
Err, no. You also care what happens to everyone else -- or, at least, you will. For just one trivial example, eventually you'll need to go out for supplies. How far will you have to go to find a gasoline station with gasoline -- and with electricity to pump it? When Hurricane Wilma hit south Florida in 2005, a metropolitan area of more than three million people was suddenly in that situation, and the social structure almost broke down as people discovered that the nearest gasoline was two or three counties away. So was fresh water, food, prescription medicines, roofing materials, replacement windows, cell phone coverage, and everything else people needed to get back on their feet.
In short, you care "whether or not it hits x00 miles away too," because you will depend on your neighbors outside the damage area to help you recover from the storm.
This work actually measured Total Electron Content, not electron density (a related, but different, phenomenon).
Maps of vertical and slant atmospheric electron density over the U.S. are here.
I don't expect this to be much worse to be honest.
You'd better hope you're right -- and away from the water. If you're wrong, you could end up five feet above sea level with a fifteen-foot storm surge, and need to swim in 100 mph winds and twenty-foot seas.
Don't forget, emergency services (police, ambulance, fire, ...) suspend their services during these severe storms, so there's no help available (even if your phone service still works). The definition of pitiful is recordings of 911 calls made during the landfall of almost any major hurricane. People in fear for their lives, begging to be saved, and the 911 operator can do nothing. . . .
No, the line forms to the left on that one. . . .
You're welcome, Kathleen.
I was once reading the "letters to the editor" column in a major trade journal, and ran across a letter that said everything I always wanted to say about a particular subject. The letter was concise, insightful, and incredibly lucid, so I looked down to the end of it to see what genius wrote it -- and it was me!
A few weeks earlier I had had a case of shingles, and was given some pretty stiff prescriptions for Vicodin and Percocet to dull the pain. As it turns out, they also caused memory problems; I had the nervous pleasure over the ensuing weeks of finding several letters-to-the-editor over my name in journals to which I subscribe, none of which I remember writing.
Fortunately, none were defamatory or otherwise embarrassing -- or maybe the editors just deleted those.
Look, a jobs program!
And paid for by someone else!
Which 18 patents are they? You'd think in a 23-paragraph article they would have found space to list them.
The article indicates one of the under-appreciated values of printed circuit boards (and, later, integrated circuits): The ability, at one process step (lithography), to connect all circuit components in a system.
Whetter spent 18 months working alongside a volunteer on the wiring alone. “The wiring has to go between the sections, between where the rotor switches are, down to the patch panel and then to the relay control links at the bottom,” he explained. “You don’t just wire from A to B thousands of times. You have to plan it carefully and form what’s known as wiring looms.”
To do that, precise measurements are made of the path the wires take. That’s then mapped out on a large plank of wood, with the wires threaded around nails to create the right shape. “It all sounds rather crude,” Whetter admitted.
The 200 to 400 wires that make up each loom are laced together and then lashed to the main rack, where the soldering work starts. Whetter estimates there are 5,000 solder joints on the Tunny. “It sounds monotonous, but it’s quite an adventure, because you’re never sure if it’s going to work out,” he said. “Fortunately, we didn’t make any serious mistakes.”
Printed circuit board techniques were just being developed at the time the original Tunny was built, and it is interesting to speculate on just how much time could have been saved had that technology been just a few years more advanced, and available to the original designers. Of course, having components designed for PCB use, rather than point-to-point wiring, would have been required, but all that laborious, and error-prone, manual construction of wiring harnesses would have been avoided.
One of the four standards by which prospective Rhodes Scholars are judged is, "energy to use one’s talents to the full, as exemplified by fondness for, and success in, sports."
Sorry, but investing in education does not equal to throwing away billions and let it splashed into the ocean just like that.
Sure it does. The purpose of the program is education -- education of the scientists, engineers, and technicians trying to understand hypersonic flight. That's why the craft has no economic payload: It's crammed full of sensors and telemetry equipment to educate its designers and builders on its performance. And they're learning: Note that "It appears that the engineering changes put into place following the vehicle's first flight test in April 2010 were effective."
Look at it this way: Think of all the term papers, exam pages, and homework assignments generated by the billion grade school students around the world. Except for the occasional bit kept in a scrapbook, they're all turned in, graded, and go right to a landfill. Would you say that was "throwing away billions"? Probably not, because the students (we hope) learned something from doing the task, and the paper was just the investment needed to get that return. It's the same here -- except that Nature is the teacher.
Are you being obtuse? Did I say it was hardware components?
Yes, you did:
The US military paid Motorola's initial hardware development costs, at absolutely no risk to Motorola. Motorola now sells the same components on the civilian market (as the restriction period has expired). They made a profit the first time around, the second time around they had zero development costs and they charged less for the hardware - on which they made a profit, now they're charging again. (Emphasis added.)
So I ask you again: What ten-year-old phone hardware components are being used today?
The US military paid Motorola's initial hardware development costs, at absolutely no risk to Motorola.
That's a pretty unusual idea. Care to cite where you got it? Motorola sold its government business back in 2001. What ten-year-old phone hardware components are being used today?
Correction. . .
Yeah -- poor wording on my part. To infringe, one needs to perform all elements of a claim. What I was trying to emphasize is that to avoid infringement, one can do any four of the five elements of the claim, as long as one does not do the fifth: Infringement is a Boolean "and" operation. I was trying to point out that patent avoidance is usually easier than is thought, since one needs merely to find a claim element that one can do differently.
Thanks for the edit.
This.
Claim 1 breaks down like this:
1. A method of providing notification of impending delivery of a shipment shipped by a shipper to a shipping address specified by a customer, comprising:
(a) periodically querying, by a broker computer system independent of the shipper and a merchant and which enabled the customer to purchase an item contained in the shipment from the merchant, a shipper computer system to obtain status information for the shipment with each query, wherein a periodic query of the shipment computer system comprises:
--requesting status information from the shipper computer system by providing a shipment identifier of the shipment to the shipper computer system; and
--receiving status information in response thereto;
(b) responsive to status information obtained with a periodic query indicating an estimated delivery date for the shipment, halting, by the broker computer system, the periodic queries and scheduling the restart of periodic queries of the shipper computer system a day prior to the estimated delivery date;
(c) restarting, by the broker computer system, periodic queries of the shipper computer system the day prior to the estimated delivery date to obtain updated status information with each query;
(d) responsive to updated status information obtained with a periodic query indicating that the shipment is out for delivery to the customer, halting, by the broker computer system, the periodic queries and calculating an estimated delivery time for the shipment based at least in part on the status information; and
(e) sending, by the broker computer system, an electronic message including the estimated delivery time to the customer.
If one does not do even one of these five elements, one doesn't infringe on the patent (well, there's the other independent claim 11 to review, too).
Before people get worked into a lather about the latest patent scandal, may I suggest that we all mentally add the phrases "A method of. . ." or "An apparatus for. . ." to the title of every patent we see? Because that's really what is meant.
You mean, sort of like the Space Shuttle did on every reentry?
Touché: I was considering the problem of steady-state gliding at hypersonic velocities -- something I guess even theoretically you can only do as you approach the Kármán line -- but you're right, in transient deceleration it's been done early and often.
Imagine -- just try to make something glide at hypersonic speeds!
On a more serious note, it's interesting that communication with the craft seems to be the most difficult part of the project (or at least the outer skin of the onion of problems involved with hypersonic flight). I would very much like to find technical papers written on this problem -- clearly, they thought they had it solved, but also just as clearly, they haven't. What's going wrong?