weeny

This is old news now - but I'm really looking forward to when the federal decision is made, I'm sure it will make for comedy gold.

It's fundamentally a live recommendation system, and those votes make it work better than anything else (see Digg). I click on a subreddit and I get recommendations for related pages.

I'm talking about one focused idea. I dont want to do your homework for you guys but think "temporal social bookmarking" - social bookmarking and calendar app have a baby. Otherwise you're just rehashing Google Calendar and/or Digg.

have you ever seen this site: reddit.com

No, combine the two played ideas into one novel idea. It's called synthesis, thats what constitutes innovation...

Why not both?

I never said that TBL or Cerf were patent advocates. I am very familiar with their positions on the subject. Even though they released their work to the public with no restrictions, their work was built on top of a ton of prior art that was patented.

For example TCP IP was a derivative of prior communications protocols either developed for private for-profit enterprise or the defense industry (Xerox, Bell, IBM, etc). In nearly all cases they were patented and exploited, but not really for the public's use; TBL and the other forefathers did have access to (or even helped write) the published prior art though when they were inventing the internet.

So in this case it doesn't really matter whether they were for or against software patents; because without patented prior art they would have had nothing to build off of. The success of their invention did indeed come from their superior execution (releasing it to the public) but since then they have become more hypocritical than Steve Jobs in claiming that software patents would have been a hindrance to the internet.

Finally! They are a bit late to the gate and are doing this in reaction to Yahoo asserting themselves in the arena.

Highly misleading. You should look into some patents and how they work, before you start spouting psuedo authoritative bullshit.

You're being rather misleading. If someone solves a problem in a different way from an existing patent (avoids their claims), their new way is not covered by that patent. Patents definitively can't claim "problems"; instead, they can claim very specific solutions to problems. Any large patent portfolio or broad patent is simply a large house of cards and any good innovator can topple the house of cards by tipping one fundamental claim.

Further, the state of software patents in the U.S. and globally has been brought about not by laws, or by the establishment or the powers that be, but by inventors appealing the USPTO to get their inventions patented. Twenty years ago (the previous generation of tech nerds - the yahoo's even) these people that brought us the internet had to fight for their ability to join the technology landscape through patents.

Now, the common consensus among their descendants - at least the cheeky ones on the internet - is that that work must be destroyed for no other reason than vague opinion.

If startups / entrepreneurs who claim to be innovative would work with the patent landscape, rather than irrationally fearing and hating it, they would find that a huge patent portfolio or broad patent like those Yahoo owns are really just big houses of cards. A true innovator can topple it readily just using innovation; and then, voila, those innovations are now patentable.

I am reminded of star wars in this case: The more you tighten your grip, Admiral Tarkin, the more systems will slip through your fingers.

All that prior art will certainly bubble to the surface during the trial process. There is a cottage industry around finding it - kind of like bounty hunting. See articleonepartners.com, a service that lets researchers be rewarded for invalidating litigious patents.

I am aghast at the disastrous amount of disinformation about patents in this community. Patents are fundamentally and in the libertarian sense of the word, inalienable property rights, that have value, and that can be bought and sold.

Oh boy. This has proved true to me - but from dental surgeons, not physicians. I've gone through 3 dental surgeons who have opened up the gums above my canine teeth, excavated, charged my insurance $1000's and me $100's [the costs of successful operations], and then failed to fix the problem in my mouth. The problem is an extra tooth growing out of the root of my canine tooth, usually a simple extraction. But I'm convinced the dental surgeons are more interested in letting the tooth grow, destroying the rest of my mouth, so they can later put in more expensive dental implants. I'm highly fed up and am considering becoming a medical tourist to get the offending tooth out of my skull.

The Rebel LEDs can't be hand soldered or wave soldered. They are reflow soldered. You can do this with a toaster oven.

It is a plastic resin that has been blended to a precise dosage with YAG phosphor. You can buy YAG phosphor easily from wholesalers, for example, phosphortech, a Georgia company, sells a variety of colors of phosphor. However, the trick is to precisely and uniformly blend it in with the plastic resin - the reason that it takes so much time and development money to make a light bulb like this.

AFAIK the blue LEDs used in these remote phosphor applications is 550 nm "royal blue" monochromatic chip; you can buy these chips on their own, and they are some of the highest energy output chips available on the market.

Philips updates the technology in the Rebel LEDs several times a year. In fact, they have on several occasions demonstrated record-breaking output in this form factor up until earlier this year.

The reason that flashlights are updated so much more frequently than light bulbs is that flashlights don't require any consumer safety ratings. Where a company can release a battery-powered flashlight with no safety testing, a light bulb running on line voltage has to be brought through a rigorous UL, CSA and FCC standards compliance testing.

It's definitely not user serviceable. Indeed, the SMPS circuitry at the base of the bulb is going to fail before the LEDs do, and that stuff is all encapsulated in epoxy.

They aren't blue at all, they are 2700K - and this is a big part of the reason they are 57.8 lm/w. The remote phosphor, while creating a very uniform photometric distribution, reduces the overall light output by filtering the very monochromatic blue light into warm white light.

Incandescents don't have a "perfect" black-body spectrum, by far. Neither does the sun; both of which have 100 CRI. The CRI metric was also devised around the incandescent lamp to compare them against fluorescent lamps - thus the fact that an incandescent bulb has a 100 CRI has very little meaning in a broad context.

If you want to compare a light source to the black body spectrum you have to look at their locations on a color chart like the CIE charts - and compare their distance to the black body line. This is called Duv. With binned LEDs we can get a light source closer to black body color than fluorescents, and almost as close as incandescents.

Induction lamps are getting big - but most people want to get rid of the mercury vapor arc entirely and go for solid state, that's a big enough advantage that energy efficiency almost doesn't matter.

Unfortunately, Switch didn't figure out that the light is no longer "solid state" when they added liquid to it - and that a non-toxic liquid is probably worse in many situations than a toxic vapor.

The idea is that the yellow phosphor converts a short wavelength blue light from the LED into a longer wavelength yellowish light, called down-converting.

This is a special physical property of the phosphor material - not simply a function of its color.

Normally this yellow phosphor material is applied directly to the LED die - but they figured they would put it on a plastic shell outside the LEDs. It doesn't actually make any kind of performance improvement except that the light is more evenly distributed.

If you tried to paint the shell with the phosphor - you would most likely have blue light shining through it - that's why they need so much technology to accurately dope the plastic phosphor, so that the light output is an even and consistent color.

So the basic operating principle behind lighting LEDs is the correlation between light output and temperature. As the LED heats up, its light output decreases. If you want a single LED to produce more light, you have to pump more current through it - meaning more heat and a resulting higher temperature, shorter lifespan and reduced efficiency. Thus, you have a tradeoff between more LEDs and lower current (higher cost and more efficient) and less LEDs and higher current (lower cost but less efficient).

Switch tries to give you the cake and feed it to you - they give you lots of LEDs, running at high current, and they manage the heat by immersing the LEDs in a liquid [liquid water has a conductivity and capacity for heat ~5x greater than aluminum even with a lower density]. But this has its own problems that you can probably imagine - not least of which is that the liquid probably absorbs more light than it gives back by removing heat.

Based on my "in the know" status, I can tell that Switch will be losing big bucks trying to sell those lights at $20 but they are working hard to cement themselves in the market early. I'm very sceptical and look more towards smaller innovators like LEDNovation and LED Integration Technology.

The LEDs themselves work excellent at low temperature - but you may have problems with your electronic driver's properties changing at lower temperatures.

it's not exactly a yellow paint, it's a phosphor doping they embedded in the plastic and it's the reason the bulb costs so much. Theirs is very high tech but I don't think it can compete in the long run due to complexity and the costs associated with it.

They aren't usually purple, they are usually a sickly greenish.

another comparison to CFLs. the mercury arc in a CFL is struck between two electrodes, and every time the light is switched on the electrodes degrade. So if you are energy conscious and only have the light on a few hours at a time - you will burn through the CFL much faster. This isn't the case with LEDs - so if you have a light that you use 1 hour a day, you could definitely stretch it out to 30 years.