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The other day my 5th mini-mouse in a year quit,
the left-click button went, all of them were cheapies
with parts from China. So instead to going up to
the store to spend another $20, I rumaged around
and found the pile of dead mice I hadn't got around
to tossing out yet and soldered out a switch and
put it in this mouse. Saved a few bucks and a trip
to the store. It also was kind of fun, so I figured
I'd go look up that project where a guy rigged the
mouse sensor to work as a camera, (they're sort of
low resolution at 18x18). Anyway, I was reading
the comments on the forum there and saw that
one guy had tried to get a mouse to work as a
barcode reader, which sounded (somewhat) handy.
So I googled looking to see if anyone had
actually managed to do that yet, and what pops up?
The Chineese mouse chip manufacturer has patented
the idea, how is that even legal? It wasn't their idea,
they didn't invent barcodes, it's just a camera, they
haven't even actually built a working one, and they're
looking to get over on some mouse maker putting a
barcode reader in a mouse.
What's with the Chineese (PRC) anyways? This
weekend they broke into the Pentagon's computers,
and now nukes are flying around without orders,
hope it's not related.
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> The other day my 5th mini-mouse in a year quit,
> the left-click button went, all of them were cheapies
> with parts from China.
Good luck in finding even an expensive mouse without parts from China :-)
> I'd go look up that project where a guy rigged the
> mouse sensor to work as a camera, (they're sort of
> low resolution at 18x18).
I was thinking the same about using the camera in my Wii remote to actually
look at stuff (it currently just detects the position of a bank of LEDs
above the TV). It must be higher resolution than 18x18 because there are 8
or 10 LEDs and it can detect position and orientation pretty accurately.
I'm sure someone has had the idea already...
> So I googled looking to see if anyone had
> actually managed to do that yet, and what pops up?
> The Chineese mouse chip manufacturer has patented
> the idea, how is that even legal? It wasn't their idea,
How do you know it wasn't their idea? If you have found someone else who
filed a patent before them, then I'll let you off :-)
> they didn't invent barcodes, it's just a camera, they
> haven't even actually built a working one, and they're
> looking to get over on some mouse maker putting a
> barcode reader in a mouse.
Well to be fair, it seems like they invented a cheap and efficient way of
detecting position on a surface using a (very) low resolution camera. If
they invent a way to adapt that to reading barcodes, then that seems like
something patentable to me... It's probably got some advantages over
traditional bar-code readers. I'm pretty sure the ones you see in
supermarkets are/were covered by a load of patents - it seems like quite a
profitable industry in the eyes of supermarkets etc.
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Tim Attwood <tim### [at] comcast net> wrote:
> So I googled looking to see if anyone had
> actually managed to do that yet, and what pops up?
> The Chineese mouse chip manufacturer has patented
> the idea
Does it really matter? Nobody stops you from doing it anyways, no
matter how many patents there are on it (as long as you don't start
selling it to others). In most countries it's not even illegal to do
so. (In the few braindead countries where it technically is, who is
going to catch you?)
--
- Warp
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"Tim Attwood" <tim### [at] comcastnet> wrote in message
news:46df8532$1@news.povray.org...
> What's with the Chineese (PRC) anyways? This
> weekend they broke into the Pentagon's computers,
> and now nukes are flying around without orders,
> hope it's not related.
>
>
I think the U.S. propoganda machine is busy at work trying to make the PRC
the bad guys (Not that they need much help! I'm not sticking up for the
PRC). All of the sudden you have bad food supplies from china? bad toy
imports? china hacking the DoD? I'm not saying these things are falsified,
but why are they happening now? Why the media attention now?
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>> The other day my 5th mini-mouse in a year quit,
>> the left-click button went, all of them were cheapies
>> with parts from China.
>
> Good luck in finding even an expensive mouse without parts from China :-)
I was going to say... aren't *all* manufactured goods from China?
(Certainly we don't manufacture anything in the UK any more. You see, we
have these pesky *laws* that say the process has to be *safe* for the
people employed to do it, and this makes it kind of *expensive*...)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
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Ross schrieb:
> "Tim Attwood" <tim### [at] comcastnet> wrote in message
> news:46df8532$1@news.povray.org...
>
>> What's with the Chineese (PRC) anyways? This
>> weekend they broke into the Pentagon's computers,
>> and now nukes are flying around without orders,
>> hope it's not related.
>>
>>
>
> I think the U.S. propoganda machine is busy at work trying to make the PRC
> the bad guys (Not that they need much help! I'm not sticking up for the
> PRC). All of the sudden you have bad food supplies from china? bad toy
> imports? china hacking the DoD? I'm not saying these things are falsified,
> but why are they happening now? Why the media attention now?
>
>
The same here. Although the Chinese tried very hard to get this kind of
reputation. There are many high tech tool companies here in Germany that
find every now and then very bad copies of their products on the
european market.
The funniest story had been about an elevator manufacturer from Germany
which had been called from a building owner in China who claimed that
their elevator was broken and asked, when the service team would show
up. In the end the experts found a copy of one of their elevators on
which even the tag with service numbers of the original manufacturer
could be found ... :-)
Marc
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> Does it really matter? Nobody stops you from doing it anyways, no
> matter how many patents there are on it (as long as you don't start
> selling it to others). In most countries it's not even illegal to do
> so. (In the few braindead countries where it technically is, who is
> going to catch you?)
What's wrong with wanting to sell a better gizmo?
If I went to the hassle of writing a complex piece of
software to do image enhancements enough to read a barcode
on a cruddy 18x18 64 level grayscale mouse image, I'd think the
right to sell it would be with the programmer who did all the work,
not with some company that says it was their idea.
Why should some company be able to patent a discovered
use of their product? It'd be like Arm and Hammer wanting
to patent baking soda toothpaste, or Kodak patenting family
photo albums, or Ford patenting electric headlights for cars.
And, sure, nothing keeps someone from doing it
for themselves as a home project, but the threat of
lawsuits will keep anyone from investing in it as
a commercial venture. At least without giving a cut to China.
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>> Good luck in finding even an expensive mouse without parts from China :-)
>
> I was going to say... aren't *all* manufactured goods from China?
>
> (Certainly we don't manufacture anything in the UK any more. You see, we
> have these pesky *laws* that say the process has to be *safe* for the
> people employed to do it, and this makes it kind of *expensive*...)
That really doesn't have anything to do with it, anything made in China that
is organised by a reputable company will have far stricter safety and
quality "rules" than you get in the UK. From the point of view of, say,
Nokia/BMW/Dell/whoever, they will have a set of guidelines that *all*
suppliers must follow, whether they are based in Finland, UK, Hungary Mexico
or China. It just so happens that the Chinese can follow those guidelines
and quality levels for far less money than most other countries. That is
because people are willing to work for orders of magnitude less money than
in other countries, and when you can go for a meal in a restaurant for
around $2 you realise why.
Take this article from the bbc:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6927156.stm
The key part is the manufacturer started doing something outside of the
guidelines (ie using a non-approved paint supplier) and Fisher Price failed
to notice this. How on Earth can you guarantee the quality of products you
are selling if you don't even know which companies are supplying the parts!
For any normal product that is manufactured you have a list of component
part details and the suppliers, a process plan that shows exactly each step
of the assembly and what parts are used, and then once mass production is
about to start you AUDIT the factory to make sure everything is as it should
be. If Fisher Price failed to do this then it is totally their fault.
Suppliers always try to cut corners to save money, it's not something
confined to China.
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> What's wrong with wanting to sell a better gizmo?
> If I went to the hassle of writing a complex piece of
> software to do image enhancements enough to read a barcode
> on a cruddy 18x18 64 level grayscale mouse image, I'd think the
> right to sell it would be with the programmer who did all the work,
> not with some company that says it was their idea.
But that company probably has lots of programmers working for them who have
likely already developed the core algorithm and software. I don't think
they could file the patent unless they had some description of the algorithm
they were going to use. Otherwise, like you say, it would be like Logitech
saying they were going to patent using a webcam to do face recognition.
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> But that company probably has lots of programmers working for them who
> have likely already developed the core algorithm and software. I don't
> think they could file the patent unless they had some description of the
> algorithm they were going to use. Otherwise, like you say, it would be
> like Logitech saying they were going to patent using a webcam to do face
> recognition.
Believe what you want, but it seems to me that trying to patent portions of
60 year old barcode patents combined with your own nearly expired
optical mouse patent is just combining two old ideas and getting a new
patent.
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> ... It just so happens that the Chinese can follow those guidelines and
> quality levels for far less money than most other countries.
No they can't, that's the problem, the quality suffers in order to
keep the price low.
> The key part is the manufacturer started doing something outside of the
> guidelines (ie using a non-approved paint supplier) and Fisher Price
> failed to notice this. How on Earth can you guarantee the quality of
> products you are selling if you don't even know which companies are
> supplying the parts!
This is SOP in China, they probably promised that they had good QA,
showed a few high quality toys, falsified tests, and then went back to
business as usual. The problem is that what shows up isn't the same
as what was ordered, the Chineese feel free to do this because it's
not their kids getting sick. If they sold these toys to Chineese kids
they'd be all looking at death sentences. This recall is after being on
notice from Mattel to stop using lead paint. It's on the verge of
being provably intentional.
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>> ... It just so happens that the Chinese can follow those guidelines and
>> quality levels for far less money than most other countries.
>
> No they can't, that's the problem, the quality suffers in order to
> keep the price low.
But only if the organising company allows it. Everyone who pushes suppliers
on cost (from any country) knows that they then have to monitor quality
levels closely to ensure that standards are met. If you suspect problems,
you *have* to step up quality checks, otherwise your end customers are just
going to get annoyed with low quality products.
> This is SOP in China, they probably promised that they had good QA,
> showed a few high quality toys, falsified tests, and then went back to
> business as usual. The problem is that what shows up isn't the same
> as what was ordered, the Chineese feel free to do this because it's
> not their kids getting sick. If they sold these toys to Chineese kids
> they'd be all looking at death sentences. This recall is after being on
> notice from Mattel to stop using lead paint. It's on the verge of
> being provably intentional.
So, Mattel already knew about the lead paint from this supplier, and yet
still carried on using this supplier *without* checking that their product
was up to the required standard? That is just poor, really really poor. If
we have a supplier who did something like that, we would probably stop using
them immediately, and if not we would stick one of our guys *in* their
factory to check everything was in order and staying in order, and it goes
without saying we'd check for lead in the products coming out at least once
a day, probably more often.
Still, I guess Mattel decided not to take this sort of action because they
knew it would cost them more money...
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> but it seems to me that trying to patent portions of
> 60 year old barcode patents combined with your own nearly expired
> optical mouse patent is just combining two old ideas and getting a new
> patent.
Perhaps there is no patent that covers decoding barcodes with an array-based
image sensor? I find it hard to believe there isn't, but then I also find
it hard to believe they would have been granted the patent if it already
existed.
From a purely Engineering point of view, it seems that using a few optical
mouse sensors would be a cheaper way of making a supermarket checkout than
using those rapidly moving red beam scanning thingies. There's definitely
commercial potential in it if it can be developed to work just as reliably
as the existing systems.
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Ever read Disclosure, by Michael Crichton? Poor film, but one of the
themes explored in some detail in the book was quality control in
far-eastern based manufacturing - CD-ROM drives, specifically. I'm not
joking; the sexual harassment story was just the more exciting of
several featured corporate themes!
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> Perhaps there is no patent that covers decoding barcodes with an
> array-based image sensor? I find it hard to believe there isn't, but then
> I also find it hard to believe they would have been granted the patent if
> it already existed.
>
> From a purely Engineering point of view, it seems that using a few optical
> mouse sensors would be a cheaper way of making a supermarket checkout than
> using those rapidly moving red beam scanning thingies. There's definitely
> commercial potential in it if it can be developed to work just as reliably
> as the existing systems.
Been done with OK cameras, that's part of why it seems so odd
to give out a patent to me.
http://en.barcodepedia.com
The hard part would be cleaning up a bad lo-res image, but it
might be doable. Of course, they could stick a better camera in
the mice.
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Tim Attwood <tim### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
> > Does it really matter? Nobody stops you from doing it anyways, no
> > matter how many patents there are on it (as long as you don't start
> > selling it to others). In most countries it's not even illegal to do
> > so. (In the few braindead countries where it technically is, who is
> > going to catch you?)
> What's wrong with wanting to sell a better gizmo?
Well, software patents do suck, which is why there aren't such things
in Europe.
As for device patents, the reason is to protect inventions for a limited
amount of time so that the inventor can benefit from it. (In theory this
gives an incentive to invent because you can be sure that you will benefit
from your own invention and thus all your work doesn't go to waste.)
> If I went to the hassle of writing a complex piece of
> software to do image enhancements enough to read a barcode
> on a cruddy 18x18 64 level grayscale mouse image, I'd think the
> right to sell it would be with the programmer who did all the work,
> not with some company that says it was their idea.
Patents grant inventors some rights to their invention, for a limited time.
They exist to protect inventors from other people stealing their ideas.
> Why should some company be able to patent a discovered
> use of their product?
It depends on whether it can be considered prior art or not. If it's
a completely new, innovative way of using that product, and this new
way was invented by the company itself, then why not?
However, if it's an existing invention, then they shouldn't be able
to patent it, and technically speaking they aren't. Sometimes, however,
patent offices grant some patents they shouldn't. In the US, especially,
they just leave it to the courts to decide.
> It'd be like Arm and Hammer wanting
> to patent baking soda toothpaste, or Kodak patenting family
> photo albums, or Ford patenting electric headlights for cars.
If Kodak had invented photo albums, and nobody had invented them
previously, I see no logical nor moral problem.
> And, sure, nothing keeps someone from doing it
> for themselves as a home project, but the threat of
> lawsuits will keep anyone from investing in it as
> a commercial venture.
The idea is that you can't steal someone else's invention and start
making money with it.
--
- Warp
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> The idea is that you can't steal someone else's invention and start
> making money with it.
I was using a version of an optical mouse in the late 80's.
I'm not sure how combining two old inventions equals a new
one is all. If someone invents something they deserve to
be able to make money off of it. It seems to me that
patents are being used to bully the small time competitors
in this case. HP and Agilent file thousands of patents and are
in court on a regular basis.
In 2002 HP and Agilent lost a lawsuit about how they falsely
certified to the US government that they had complied with
FDA requirements regarding medical equipment, when in
fact they were using cheap Chineese made components.
Earlier this year they won a lawsuit about one of their
employees threatening the life of someone and harassing
them, even though they knew about the employee's
behavior on their behalf.
In 2005 Finisar filed a suit for 1.2 billion in patent
infrigments againt Agilent after they repeatedly refused
to license "circuitry and methods for monitoring
optoelectronic devices, such as optical transceivers"
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Tim Attwood wrote:
> Why should some company be able to patent a discovered
> use of their product? It'd be like Arm and Hammer wanting
> to patent baking soda toothpaste, or Kodak patenting family
> photo albums, or Ford patenting electric headlights for cars.
And all they need to do is to find a judge who can be persuaded to see
things their way.
According to patent law, the way it used to be, the US patent office
would grant patents only for physical devices, if they worked, and only
the design of the device was covered by the patent. If someone else
found a different design that did the same thing, too bad.
Then the law was rewritten, and a judge issued a ruling interpreting
that law to mean that an idea could be patented, and not a physical
implementation of that idea.
Regards,
John
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And lo on Thu, 06 Sep 2007 16:27:18 +0100, Ross <rli### [at] speakeasynet>
did spake, saying:
> "Tim Attwood" <tim### [at] comcastnet> wrote in message
> news:46df8532$1@news.povray.org...
>
>> What's with the Chineese (PRC) anyways? This
>> weekend they broke into the Pentagon's computers,
>> and now nukes are flying around without orders,
>> hope it's not related.
>
> I think the U.S. propoganda machine is busy at work trying to make the
> PRC
> the bad guys (Not that they need much help! I'm not sticking up for the
> PRC). All of the sudden you have bad food supplies from china? bad toy
> imports? china hacking the DoD? I'm not saying these things are
> falsified,
> but why are they happening now? Why the media attention now?
So the public don't get so antsy when the US defaults on its debt? It's a
bit dumb actually if China starting selling the bonds it holds it could
really screw the US economy; you don't piss off the people who could dump
your currency into the toilet.
--
Phil Cook
--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com
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