Motorola has a large plant in Plantation, Florida, a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale, where a lot of the engineering for portable products (including iDEN phones) is done and which also has a corporate IP office. It may be that they saw advantage in having the inventors and relevant attorneys in close proximity to the court.
The IEEE 802.15.6 task group on body area networks has been standardizing a communication protocol for similar sensor applications, but emphasizing long battery life rather than high data rates.
Be glad. My school district is facing a 30% decrease over the next 4 years, due to a reduction in tax revenue, so they will be laying mandatory-class teachers off (enlarging class size), and canceling elective classes like band (and extracurricular sports) outright. Like most school boards, the budget is mostly payroll, so there's nothing else to cut once you've stopped buying new textbooks and furniture, which they've already done. The only way they can legally enlarge class size is to get an amendment to the state constitution increasing the cap on class size, which is on the ballot for a vote next week.
The fact that we will be graduating a generation of illiterate and innumerate kids seems to bother the tax-phobic voters not at all. The last one to whom I spoke on the issue said he was fine with downsizing public schools, "since private schools perform so much better anyway." I tried to point out that having a bimodal distribution of citizen education, wherein the majority, educated in public schools, are are semi-literate and a minority, from wealthy families and educated in private schools, are literate, has been tried in other countries, and didn't work out very well, but he wasn't interested in anything that happened outside of the USA.
Cutting money to schools is like the guy who tells the plant, "Grow, dammit, or I won't water you!" Investing in schools, on the other hand, is about the wisest thing a society can do.
"Any runner shall be called out, on appeal, when -- (a) After a fly ball is caught, he fails to retouch his original base before he or his original base is tagged; Rule 7.10(a) Comment: "Retouch," in this rule, means to tag up and start from a contact with the base after the ball is caught. A runner is not permitted to take a flying start from a position in back of his base."
In case you're curious about the relevance of comments, there is this note in the Official Rules Foreword:
"The Playing Rules Committee, at its December 1977 meeting, voted to incorporate the Notes/Case Book/Comments section directly into the Official Baseball Rules at the appropriate places. Basically, the Case Book interprets or elaborates on the basic rules and in essence have the same effect as rules when applied to particular sections for which they are intended."
While GPS is a poor solution for most data centers (weak satellite signals), active wireless tracking systems (Awarepoint being but one example, but there are many others) often pay for themselves the first time one avoids the purchase of a capital item. Plus, being able to tell the PHB where all the XYZ units are at any instant, and why they can't be used for some new application you have in mind, is great evidence when you want to purchase something.
"PARC has often been criticized for its past failures to capitalize on some of its greatest inventions" How is that PARC's fault? More likely the short-sighted Xerox management that failed to see what they had?
My thought exactly. Blaming PARC for Xerox's inability to capitalize on its inventions is like blaming the cows when a milk truck is stolen. With the motor running and the door open.
This is a bogus story that wanders around every now and then. Cell phones require hundreds of milliwatts of transmit power, an amount of power far beyond what the human voice can achieve -- even at 100% conversion efficiency.
As TFA states, soldiers have used bioluminescent creatures in battle for centuries. One of the first military submarines, the Turtle, used foxfire (a bioluminescent fungus) to light the controls for the operator during the US revolutionary war.
But don't we have algorithms which let us calculate pi to an arbitrary number of digits?
Yes, we do. Mathematical algorithms, i.e., equations on paper.
Well-known series methods computed using algorithms which have been tuned and re-tuned to the point where it's not really possible to make further major computational optimizations?
Absolutely not. The algorithms have to run on practical, exists-on-the-Earth-today computers. Try to multiply two, million-digit numbers together on your laptop and you'll see what I mean. These achievements are all about computational optimizations. RTFA -- especially the sections entitled "Arithmetic Algorithms" and "Maximizing Scalability." Even the algorithm used for multiplication changes (dynamically!) during the program's execution, based on the size of the operands.
Therefore this isn't so much a new accomplishment as it is "hey look, I left my pi calculating program running longer than the last guy" modified by the occasional minor optimization tweak and running on faster hardware?
Not even close. The computations are so long, and so intense, that errors caused by hardware imperfections can be expected, so error detection and correction algorithms have to be added. If "I left my pi calculating program running longer than the last guy" it would not produce the correct result -- even if the data structures and algorithms it used were up to the task.
But is it really, really something that's newsworthy?
In a word, yes. Could you do it? It's a very, very difficult technical feat, one that required hardware powers and software abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Besides, you're worried about newsworthiness when the two previous/. articles are on wall-climbing robots and the popularity of video game arcades in New York?
And if hypothetical "needing pi to 5 trillion digits" guy needed it to that precision that badly - wouldn't he have already let the calculation run long enough to get it already if this particular calculation only took 90 days?
This isn't about needing pi to 5 trillion digits. This is about learning how to do large computations faster. Like, improving the state of the art.
The additional bit of good news (if you're a VHF amateur radio operator, or FM or TV broadcast DXer) is that there should be interesting propagation of VHF radio signalsrefracting off of the aurora, perhaps as far as 2000 km. The bad news is that the same ionization that refracts the VHF signals attenuates HF signals, so if you're an HF amateur radio operator or short-wave listener, the paths over the poles will be closed for a few days.
I guess the additional bad news if you're a VHF broadcaster (FM or over-the-air TV) is that you can expect a lot of calls from the public complaining about poor reception, as signals from far away interfere with yours.:-/
As this beating phenomenon is used by musicians the world over to tune their instruments, I now predict a great increase in high school band participation.
Eh? If you want to use ZigBee in your wireless gizmo, you buy a ZigBee module just like you buy a Bluetooth module, and put it in.
If you want to sell ZigBee modules that you make yourself, your company joins the ZigBee Alliance for $3500/year, a trivial amount if you're paying yourself a salary (and if you're serious about compliance to the specification and using the ZigBee logo in your advertising).
If you want to sell someone else's ZigBee modules, you don't pay anything.
These are all similar to Bluetooth, except that the lowest membership grade in the Bluetooth SIG is $7500/year.
"when your sipping" should be, "when you're sipping". I understand how a non-native speaker could make this mistake -- it's common among native speakers. I sometimes think that it's so common that corrections are futile, and I wonder how, with so many incorrect examples about, a non-native speaker could learn the language correctly at all. My compliments. (Not complements, by the way, which are something else entirely:-).)
Be thankful it is how it is. If commercial interests got access to the amateur bands, they'd push individual "amateurs" out. Just imagine if the bands were crowded with business traffic, with powerful stations paid for by commercial interests. The regular Joe would never be able to get through the din.
Historically, that's the reason the word "amateur" is in "amateur radio" -- to differentiate the service from "commercial radio", which is nearly everything else.
So how does Winlink 2000, a digital protocol (using a patented codec, too, I think) that supplies email service over the amateur shortwave bands, escape notice? It's a lot harder to communicate a significant distance at the VHF and UHF ranges typically used by D-Star than the HF bands used by Winlink systems.
If one reads them one discovers that, as Larry Summers' remarks put it,
The President’s plan has four parts:
First, identify and plan for the release of 500 MHz of spectrum.
In order to achieve this, we need a two-pronged strategy that focuses on the opportunities to use both Federal and commercial spectrum more efficiently and to free up spectrum for new uses such as wireless broadband. First, the government will examine how we are currently using spectrum and identify areas for improvement, consolidation, or sharing. To that end, we are pursuing a separate fast-track process to identify a down payment of specific bands of spectrum that could be freed up. Second, we will encourage commercial spectrum holders to avail themselves of opportunities to transition their uses if there are more efficient possible uses of their spectrum. While we go forward with this planning process, the Department of Commerce and the FCC are also conducting an inventory of spectrum use that will help inform potential end-users of the spectrum and improve transactions in secondary markets.
The second part of the President’s plan is to provide new tools and new incentives to free up spectrum.
[...]
Third, redeploy the spectrum to high-value uses.
[...]
Fourth and finally, use the auction proceeds to promote public safety and job-creating infrastructure investment.
It's clear from this that the frequencies have not yet been found -- this initiative is essentially a command to the FCC to go out and find 500 MHz. Somehow. Somewhere.
With the Prius (and other hybrids) that's taken care of for you. Even when the battery's capacity graphic says the battery is near empty (and the ICE starts up automatically to recharge it), the battery actually has more than half of its capacity remaining. Most of the capacity of the Prius battery is never used, just for this reason. No matter the habits of the previous owner, the battery is never deeply discharged (or otherwise abused -- the software controlling the state of charge of the battery is incredibly sophisticated).
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I'd be satisfied just with a vending machine that (a) was stocked with what I want, and (b) didn't steal my money when I tried to buy it.
Motorola has a large plant in Plantation, Florida, a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale, where a lot of the engineering for portable products (including iDEN phones) is done and which also has a corporate IP office. It may be that they saw advantage in having the inventors and relevant attorneys in close proximity to the court.
Liquid-cooled laptops with heat exchanger behind the display.
The IEEE 802.15.6 task group on body area networks has been standardizing a communication protocol for similar sensor applications, but emphasizing long battery life rather than high data rates.
Be glad. My school district is facing a 30% decrease over the next 4 years, due to a reduction in tax revenue, so they will be laying mandatory-class teachers off (enlarging class size), and canceling elective classes like band (and extracurricular sports) outright. Like most school boards, the budget is mostly payroll, so there's nothing else to cut once you've stopped buying new textbooks and furniture, which they've already done. The only way they can legally enlarge class size is to get an amendment to the state constitution increasing the cap on class size, which is on the ballot for a vote next week.
The fact that we will be graduating a generation of illiterate and innumerate kids seems to bother the tax-phobic voters not at all. The last one to whom I spoke on the issue said he was fine with downsizing public schools, "since private schools perform so much better anyway." I tried to point out that having a bimodal distribution of citizen education, wherein the majority, educated in public schools, are are semi-literate and a minority, from wealthy families and educated in private schools, are literate, has been tried in other countries, and didn't work out very well, but he wasn't interested in anything that happened outside of the USA.
Cutting money to schools is like the guy who tells the plant, "Grow, dammit, or I won't water you!" Investing in schools, on the other hand, is about the wisest thing a society can do.
Rule 7.10(a):
"Any runner shall be called out, on appeal, when --
(a) After a fly ball is caught, he fails to retouch his original base before he or his original base is tagged;
Rule 7.10(a) Comment: "Retouch," in this rule, means to tag up and start from a contact with the base after the ball is caught. A runner is not permitted to take a flying start from a position in back of his base."
In case you're curious about the relevance of comments, there is this note in the Official Rules Foreword:
"The Playing Rules Committee, at its December 1977 meeting, voted to incorporate the Notes/Case Book/Comments section directly into the Official Baseball Rules at the appropriate places. Basically, the Case Book interprets or elaborates on the basic rules and in essence have the same effect as rules when applied to particular sections for which they are intended."
While GPS is a poor solution for most data centers (weak satellite signals), active wireless tracking systems (Awarepoint being but one example, but there are many others) often pay for themselves the first time one avoids the purchase of a capital item. Plus, being able to tell the PHB where all the XYZ units are at any instant, and why they can't be used for some new application you have in mind, is great evidence when you want to purchase something.
My thought exactly. Blaming PARC for Xerox's inability to capitalize on its inventions is like blaming the cows when a milk truck is stolen. With the motor running and the door open.
It's 3.8 cm by 3.8 cm by 1.4 cm (second page, first column, second paragraph).
This is a bogus story that wanders around every now and then. Cell phones require hundreds of milliwatts of transmit power, an amount of power far beyond what the human voice can achieve -- even at 100% conversion efficiency.
As TFA states, soldiers have used bioluminescent creatures in battle for centuries. One of the first military submarines, the Turtle , used foxfire (a bioluminescent fungus) to light the controls for the operator during the US revolutionary war.
Indeed. "Off-chip L1 cache" seems like a self-contradiction.
Announcing a 5.2 GHz, 1.4 billion-transistor processor at "Hot Chips 2010" just makes sense. Strangely, no power numbers were given...
Yes, we do. Mathematical algorithms, i.e., equations on paper.
Absolutely not. The algorithms have to run on practical, exists-on-the-Earth-today computers. Try to multiply two, million-digit numbers together on your laptop and you'll see what I mean. These achievements are all about computational optimizations. RTFA -- especially the sections entitled "Arithmetic Algorithms" and "Maximizing Scalability." Even the algorithm used for multiplication changes (dynamically!) during the program's execution, based on the size of the operands.
Not even close. The computations are so long, and so intense, that errors caused by hardware imperfections can be expected, so error detection and correction algorithms have to be added. If "I left my pi calculating program running longer than the last guy" it would not produce the correct result -- even if the data structures and algorithms it used were up to the task.
In a word, yes. Could you do it? It's a very, very difficult technical feat, one that required hardware powers and software abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Besides, you're worried about newsworthiness when the two previous /. articles are on wall-climbing robots and the popularity of video game arcades in New York?
This isn't about needing pi to 5 trillion digits. This is about learning how to do large computations faster. Like, improving the state of the art.
A tour de force of math and computing hardware and software skills.
Makes me want to turn in my geek card.
On 16 December 1993, the National Cryptologic Museum (NCM) opened its doors to the public...
The additional bit of good news (if you're a VHF amateur radio operator, or FM or TV broadcast DXer) is that there should be interesting propagation of VHF radio signals refracting off of the aurora, perhaps as far as 2000 km. The bad news is that the same ionization that refracts the VHF signals attenuates HF signals, so if you're an HF amateur radio operator or short-wave listener, the paths over the poles will be closed for a few days.
I guess the additional bad news if you're a VHF broadcaster (FM or over-the-air TV) is that you can expect a lot of calls from the public complaining about poor reception, as signals from far away interfere with yours. :-/
As this beating phenomenon is used by musicians the world over to tune their instruments, I now predict a great increase in high school band participation.
Eh? If you want to use ZigBee in your wireless gizmo, you buy a ZigBee module just like you buy a Bluetooth module, and put it in.
If you want to sell ZigBee modules that you make yourself, your company joins the ZigBee Alliance for $3500/year, a trivial amount if you're paying yourself a salary (and if you're serious about compliance to the specification and using the ZigBee logo in your advertising).
If you want to sell someone else's ZigBee modules, you don't pay anything.
These are all similar to Bluetooth, except that the lowest membership grade in the Bluetooth SIG is $7500/year.
"when your sipping" should be, "when you're sipping". I understand how a non-native speaker could make this mistake -- it's common among native speakers. I sometimes think that it's so common that corrections are futile, and I wonder how, with so many incorrect examples about, a non-native speaker could learn the language correctly at all. My compliments. (Not complements, by the way, which are something else entirely :-).)
And yes, your English is better than my German.
As the submission says, keep in mind that these are patent applications, filed the last week of 2008, not issued patents.
Be thankful it is how it is. If commercial interests got access to the amateur bands, they'd push individual "amateurs" out. Just imagine if the bands were crowded with business traffic, with powerful stations paid for by commercial interests. The regular Joe would never be able to get through the din.
Historically, that's the reason the word "amateur" is in "amateur radio" -- to differentiate the service from "commercial radio", which is nearly everything else.
So how does Winlink 2000, a digital protocol (using a patented codec, too, I think) that supplies email service over the amateur shortwave bands, escape notice? It's a lot harder to communicate a significant distance at the VHF and UHF ranges typically used by D-Star than the HF bands used by Winlink systems.
The ways of bureaucracies are often mysterious.
There are three new papers on this subject on the Whitehouse.gov site today -- one is a fact sheet, one is the Presidential memorandum on the subject, and one is Larry Summers' prepared remarks to the New America Foundation.
If one reads them one discovers that, as Larry Summers' remarks put it,
It's clear from this that the frequencies have not yet been found -- this initiative is essentially a command to the FCC to go out and find 500 MHz. Somehow. Somewhere.
With the Prius (and other hybrids) that's taken care of for you. Even when the battery's capacity graphic says the battery is near empty (and the ICE starts up automatically to recharge it), the battery actually has more than half of its capacity remaining. Most of the capacity of the Prius battery is never used, just for this reason. No matter the habits of the previous owner, the battery is never deeply discharged (or otherwise abused -- the software controlling the state of charge of the battery is incredibly sophisticated).