Probably around the same time you realize the abstract is irrelevant and only the claims in the patent matter. The abstract will always be general and sound like something that exists. The specific implementation claimed in the patent may or may not actually be novel, and Twitter may or may not actually be infringing on it. Those are the questions that will be decided in court. It may be that no interpretation of the claims is both expansive enough to include what Twitter does and narrow enough to exclude prior art, but you can't tell that from the abstract.
Sony supposedly paid off Toshiba by making Toshiba pay $835 million for production facilities that Sony would still be able to use (as part of the joint venture)? I sure hope Sony never tries to pay me off for anything.
Oh, and the deal was made in October (just the price was made public now). And TFA (yes, I read it) never even suggested there was a tie between this and the death of HD-DVD. It mentioned it to provide some context for the companies' current positions but never implied that there was a link.
v/c ~ 1e-6, so the Doppler effect is about 1 ppm, or about 1 kHz (for cell phone frequencies ~1 GHz) [I may be off by a factor of 2, but that's not important here.]
By comparison, crystal oscillator tolerances are typ 30-100 ppm, and cell phones have to accomodate that, so the Doppler effect is negligible.
The (technical) problems are range (rural macrocells could reach 30000 ft, urban microcells probably won't) and the speed at which you switch between cells.
True story - I had a Word document that had somehow gotten corrupted. It was a large file but not huge - ~60 pages, a bunch of figures, ~3 MB in total and it took Word several minutes to open. I opened it in OpenOffice, resaved it as a Word doc, and whatever was broken got fixed - Word could now open it in seconds.
4. DC Power
I've wondered for some time why we don't have a standardized DC outlet for home use. Have 1 big efficient transformer instead of 50 little inefficient power bricks. The downside is that you are introducing a single point of failure but it's a well understood and pretty reliable technology. Every circuit board requires DC anyway so why not have a standard DC along side AC in the house or office? May require some government assistance and/or standards organizations to make it work but it's a good idea. I'm pretty sure we'll see this in data centers sooner rather than later if the power savings really are there.
DC in the home would still have to be high-voltage, so you would still need 50 power bricks to step it down to the low-voltage supplies the circuit boards need. If the in-home voltage was low, the losses in the wiring would be too high (due to the higher currents). The DC/DC conversion may be more efficient than AC/DC, but you can't eliminate the converters.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably around the same time you realize the abstract is irrelevant and only the claims in the patent matter. The abstract will always be general and sound like something that exists. The specific implementation claimed in the patent may or may not actually be novel, and Twitter may or may not actually be infringing on it. Those are the questions that will be decided in court. It may be that no interpretation of the claims is both expansive enough to include what Twitter does and narrow enough to exclude prior art, but you can't tell that from the abstract.
Sony supposedly paid off Toshiba by making Toshiba pay $835 million for production facilities that Sony would still be able to use (as part of the joint venture)? I sure hope Sony never tries to pay me off for anything. Oh, and the deal was made in October (just the price was made public now). And TFA (yes, I read it) never even suggested there was a tie between this and the death of HD-DVD. It mentioned it to provide some context for the companies' current positions but never implied that there was a link.
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." - Richard Feynman
"quite a Doppler effect" - not really
v ~ 300 m/s (actually less than this)
c = 3e8 m/s
v/c ~ 1e-6, so the Doppler effect is about 1 ppm, or about 1 kHz (for cell phone frequencies ~1 GHz) [I may be off by a factor of 2, but that's not important here.]
By comparison, crystal oscillator tolerances are typ 30-100 ppm, and cell phones have to accomodate that, so the Doppler effect is negligible.
The (technical) problems are range (rural macrocells could reach 30000 ft, urban microcells probably won't) and the speed at which you switch between cells.
True story - I had a Word document that had somehow gotten corrupted. It was a large file but not huge - ~60 pages, a bunch of figures, ~3 MB in total and it took Word several minutes to open. I opened it in OpenOffice, resaved it as a Word doc, and whatever was broken got fixed - Word could now open it in seconds.