formatting linkthey do have much bigger snakes in the US, so Snake Oil is very
cheap:
"At the core of the Power Optimizer? energy saving device is our patented semiconductor chip. This chip utilizes specific wavelengths of infrared light to stabilize the vibration state of "spinning" electrons."
ROFL. One sucker born every minute seems to be a vast under estimate.
Be amusing to see their actual US patents - although it would not surprise me if USPTO had granted them patents for obvious garbage. USPTO's test is "are your dollars green and in sufficient quantity".
Xerox actually have a US patent on the mathematical identity X + (-X) = 0 as applied to JPEG decoding.
As apposed to spinning in its publicity context no doubt.
Where is my pyramid.
Brian
Ah! The original Dirac *spindizzy* :-)
regards
>
I always wondered where the drains went in those flying cities ...
I remember them.
Flying cities.
If X is floating point, that's trickier to achieve in a computer than you might imagine ;-).
Paul DS.
Rubbish. If X is floating point the result stands exactly as stated. At least for normalised values of X. Not sure about the result when X is NaN.
MBQ
well in floating point there is no such thing as an generally exact number.. so X-X is not determinate - at best you might say it 'is less than a very small number'
I totally agree. In fact since floating point numbers are most commonly represented as sign-and-magnitude it is even more certain, because +X and
-X will differ only in a single bit (the sign bit). Thus any possibility that the magnitudes might be slightly different is eliminated.
Richard.
This is untrue in the case of IEEE floating-point numbers anyway, because they use a sign-and-magnitude representation which guarantees that X-X is always exactly zero.
Richard.
No it doesn't.
Because the exact bit pattern will depend on how you arrived at each side of the X.
For exampe ((X * Y)/Y)/X will not always equal exactly one. For generalised values of X, Y.
USPTO would actually be daft enough to grant a patent for gibberish.
That's nonsense. But I suspect you know that perfectly well!
Completely irrelevant to the subject under discussion.
Richard.
Did you read the patent ?
Simon.
But Apple are suing for infringement.
Good Grief! I'll have two!
Does this mean that the spinning electrons act like a gyro? Do you get one of those little metal eifel towers with it so you can balance it on one end without it falling off?
Brian
Of course. The Pyramids weren't always that way up, you know.
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