Has Anyone Ever Stolen Your Idea?

[rootX]

Back in the early 80's, while in grad school, I proposed parallel processing (with mainframes) where one system would solve one part of a complex computational problem, while others would solve other parts. I was told that wouldn't work and was a silly idea that would not go anywhere. Parallel processing of complex problems is now done, not on mainframes, but as distributed processing on workstations, PC's or parallel microprocessors.

My other 'silly' idea was digital books - kind of like Amazon's Kindle. Pdf's on a notebook would be similar.

At the time, the problem was one of microprocessor power and storage. A lot of progress have been made in 2.5 decades.

Shortly out of school I was asked to design a temperature controller for a tank of hot wax (180 F). The problem was how to avoid over shooting the set temperature. Since the temp sensor was to be some distance from the heating element there would be a time delay between the heating element reaching the correct temperature and the sensor detecting it. I finally hit upon the idea of adding the rate of change of the temperature to the temperature and comparing that sum to the set point. This would shut off the heating element earlier when the temperature was rising faster.

I began to wonder what would happen if I also added in the integral of the temperature and discovered it not only increased the accuracy but since the integral and differential of a sine wave are out of phase, using both of them would tend to eliminate any oscillation. I worked out the math and it looked like a perfect solution but the project was canceled and I never built it.

Some years later I was looking for a job and my potential boss asked me if I new what a PID controller was. I answered no and he gave me a short explanation. I felt like telling him I had invented it (well reinvented it) it but realized that after having already told him no, he probably wouldn't believe me.

I don't want to make these mistakes :)

 

[gonegahgah]

This is one I came up with but I can just about guarantee that probably a million other people did as well.
That was to produce a table that had a touch screen as it top and that which you could interact with.
Such a basic idea but of course Microsoft now have the patents for something that any moron could think of (and this one did).
Of course they had to produce the idea too but again its not a rocket science idea!
Some things should not be patentable due to obviousness. (But which?)

I also had the idea of combining a standard hard drive with a SD hard drive with the directory structure in the SD part so as to speed up seek time and reduce head wear (though hard drives seem to last a long time now). Apparently this is already being done; and even includes programming to maximise the life of the SD drive part (apparently they have a limit on how many times the bits can be usefully changed).

I also designed a way to adapt classes in OOP programming which I provided my old code to a prospective OS company and which seems to have turned up in a later version of the code of a partner of theirs but named differently. I'm pretty sure I am the source of that idea. I'm working on something now that is hopefully so much better so it doesn't matter; though I am hoping to collaborate with the mentioned OS company or their partner at some future point if my product matures. I will be a bit more careful how I do that though.

 

[Proton Soup]

Back around 1985, I had a table-top demo of the Bose Headphones concept. In fact that one actually bothers me a bit. I had a friend and technical partner to whom I described the concept while on a pay phone at a busy restaurant. As I was hanging up, I noticed a very professional looking gentleman next to me who was staring at me with a strange intensity - LASER beam eyes if you will. At that moment, my instincts told me that I had just given away the farm, but of course the likelihood that he is connected to the Bose brand is astronomically small. Still, I have never been able to shake the feeling when I think about it. In any event, the idea had actually been around for a long time and it was just a matter of time until technology made it economically and physically [size] feasible. In my case, it was beyond my level of knowledge at the time to produce more than a crude working model.

there is something very similar used in Abrams tanks. i just assumed the idea came from there.

 

[Artman]

I came up with an idea to improve those retractable dog leashes by adding a flashlight to the handle. A few days after I thought of it, I saw one someone already mass produced.

At my job, I discovered a company that makes a system to simultaneously preheat outside air and cool solar panels improving the output of the solar panels by 50%. I liked the idea so much I told our company president, he told me to forward him the information so he could study it. A few months later he resigned to start his own company and he stole my idea to use for a job for which we are in direct competition, and his company got the job.

 

[billiards]

Back in the early 80's, while in grad school, I proposed parallel processing (with mainframes) where one system would solve one part of a complex computational problem, while others would solve other parts. I was told that wouldn't work and was a silly idea that would not go anywhere. Parallel processing of complex problems is now done, not on mainframes, but as distributed processing on workstations, PC's or parallel microprocessors.

I'm doing parallel processing right now, on an opteron quad core cluster (which I guess is a mainframe of sorts, although I'm doing all my processing on a single node). I can't believe you came up with the idea! Parallel processing on a quad core speeds me up 8 times, although it puts a bit more strain on my I/O.

 

[JasonRox]

http://goldismoney.info/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=65634&d=1236982919

[/URL]

That's not Bert.

 

[mcknia07]

I had an awesome idea, back in 5th grade... I could have made a lot of money on it. Then within the year, it had already been produced. It looked way crappier, than when I would have made it. I used to doodle all the time on my homework papers. My teacher probably stole it and sold it. It was for my writing class that I went into detail as to how to create this product. Ok, so I was young... it was a pen/pencil with some chap stick type product...that way you would never be without it What guy wants to kiss a girl that has chapped lips??

 

[Ghost803]

Memes. Granted, I didn't think it up when I was 10 or anything. Just, during my first A.P bio class. Then I read Dawkins already coined and wrote about it 20 something years ago :*(.

 

[russ_watters]

This is one I came up with but I can just about guarantee that probably a million other people did as well.
That was to produce a table that had a touch screen as it top and that which you could interact with.
Such a basic idea but of course Microsoft now have the patents for something that any moron could think of (and this one did).
Of course they had to produce the idea too but again its not a rocket science idea!
Some things should not be patentable due to obviousness. (But which?)

That basic idea has been a sci fi fixture for decades and the general concept is not patentable. IIRC, Microsoft's method of achieving it (which is patentable) is under-table optical tracking. But there are other ways of doing the same thing, such as embedding a touch-screen lcd or crt in the table. And you can do it with or without the screen, such as with an electronic white board.

I also had the idea of combining a standard hard drive with a SD hard drive with the directory structure in the SD part so as to speed up seek time and reduce head wear (though hard drives seem to last a long time now). Apparently this is already being done; and even includes programming to maximise the life of the SD drive part (apparently they have a limit on how many times the bits can be usefully changed).

I don't know if that's being done with flash memory, but most desktop hard drives today have 16 megs or more of RAM for such a buffer. The concept of buffer memory for a hard drive has been around for decades as well.

 

[russ_watters]

there is something very similar used in Abrams tanks. i just assumed the idea came from there.

Here's the wiki on the concept:

By the 1950s, systems were created to cancel the noise in helicopter and airplane cockpits including those patented by Lawrence J. Fogel in the 1950s and 1960s such as U.S. Patent 2,866,848 (filed in 1954), U.S. Patent 2,920,138, U.S. Patent 2,966,549 and Canadian patent 631,136. Dr. Amar Bose (founder of the Bose Corporation) began work on his noise-cancelling headphones[1] in 1978 on board an airplane. During the international flight, he was provided with a set of headphones from the airline and almost immediately realized how dissatisfied he was with their quality and the loud engine noise. After nearly a decade of research, Bose would release the first noise-cancelling headphones.

In 1986, Bose applied their noise-cancellation technology to develop headphones to protect the hearing of pilots participating in the first non-stop around-the-world flight.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise-cancelling_headphones

The third patent listed (from 1954) describes the exact operating principle of noise cancelling headphones (mixing-in an opposite phase signal), so the general concept had long been in the public domain before Bose started working on it. Certainly he would have patented certain specifics of his method, but the general ideas patent had come and gone.

 

[russ_watters]

At my job, I discovered a company that makes a system to simultaneously preheat outside air and cool solar panels improving the output of the solar panels by 50%. I liked the idea so much I told our company president, he told me to forward him the information so he could study it. A few months later he resigned to start his own company and he stole my idea to use for a job for which we are in direct competition, and his company got the job.

Your company could sue him for that if it can prove he was working on the idea before he quit (even if it can't prove he got the idea from you).

 

[gonegahgah]

I don't know if that's being done with flash memory, but most desktop hard drives today have 16 megs or more of RAM for such a buffer. The concept of buffer memory for a hard drive has been around for decades as well.

Not so much as a buffer but as a separate file table so that the storing and seeking a file address into the moving platters is done completely from flash ram. The file paths would be stored in the flash ram while only the data is stored on the platters.

In this way locating the file data would be super quick and once found then it could be streamed from the slower platters. Also, locating files could be done syncronously without moving the head back and forth between tables and data.

The paths take up little hard drive space and could be stored on the smaller, faster but more expensive flash drive while the bulkier data would be stored on the larger and cheaper platters. Combining both would be a good compromise between the two.

I'm told this is already being done. If not then maybe now it will be Or it might just get lost in this thread until someone else thinks it up on their own...

 

[Lisa!]

You've stolen my idea of strating such a thread!
PS someone might be in chage of stealing the dea of my post

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

You've stolen my idea of strating such a thread!

I am sorry Lisa!. You may have the thread. I gift it to you.

 

[Archosaur]

Last year, I "discovered" the shape of a string hanging from two points. I thought it was going to be a parabola. I set up a really awesome integral where I assumed that each tiny segment of string was both at static equilibrium and that all forces were directly along the string. The answer I came up with was nothing I'd ever seen before. Some weird thing, in terms of "e".

Then my calc prof kindly noted that this curve, known as the "caternary", was discovered in the 16th century.

Youch.

He did give me extra credit, though...

 

[Loren Booda]

In my 11th grade (1976) functions class, a classmate of mine - Dewey Allen - noticed a pattern with simple derivatives of a curve. Our teacher suggested that I, being his most accomplished student, try to prove the conjecture - and in a month, I did.

The proof helped me get into Yale, and years later I included it on my website (below, the "Booda Theorem"). It took me a few more years (~2005) to get around to giving Dewey credit for finding the pattern.