On Aug 8, 7:00 pm, Randy Yates <ya...@ieee.org> wrote:
> Steve Underwood <ste...@dis.org> writes:
> > That seems awfully naive. The whole purpose of a lawyer's life is to
> > split hairs, and the most subtle difference between the referenced
> > material and what is being claimed can discount the prior
> > art. Remember, that doing some well known applied to a new goal is
> > patentable. "A resistor charging a capacitor"

i didn't know that resistors could charge anything.  where is the
energy source inside the resistor that can move charges around?

> >  was a court proven solid
> > patented technique for the ultra low power oscillator timing circuit
> > in heart pacemakers. It was a road block in that industry, until it
> > expired.
>
> That's damn-near the electronic equivalent of addition.

it *is* the electronic equivalent to integration w.r.t. time.  and
integration definitely has something to do with addition.

r b-j

Steve Underwood <steveu@dis.org> writes:

> That seems awfully naive. The whole purpose of a lawyer's life is to
> split hairs, and the most subtle difference between the referenced
> material and what is being claimed can discount the prior
> art. Remember, that doing some well known applied to a new goal is
> patentable. "A resistor charging a capacitor" was a court proven solid
> patented technique for the ultra low power oscillator timing circuit
> in heart pacemakers. It was a road block in that industry, until it
> expired.

That's damn-near the electronic equivalent of addition. 
-- 
%  Randy Yates                  % "Midnight, on the water... 
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC            %  I saw...  the ocean's daughter." 
%%% 919-577-9882                % 'Can't Get It Out Of My Head' 
%%%% <yates@ieee.org>           % *El Dorado*, Electric Light Orchestra
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr

Clay wrote:
> On Aug 8, 11:17 am, Steve Underwood <ste...@dis.org> wrote:
>> Clay wrote:
>>>>>> said something about
>>>>>> like this when he was presenting stuff, long ago at some AES thingie,
>>>>>> about sigma-delta conversion and noise shaping.  i think he suggested
>>>>>> that one look in those old Bell System Technical Journals from the 50s
>>>>>> and 60s.  you'll almost always find that your "novel idea" was novel,
>>>>>> but about 40 years ago and the novelty wasn't original to you.
>>>>>> but that doesn't stop someone like IVL from patenting it.
>>> Hello Robert, et. al.,
>>> If the idea can be found in an old published journal (which predates
>>> the patent), then the patent is effectively null and void.
>>> A lot of application patents can be nullified if one does the right
>>> research. A big part of a patent's being valid is its being novel and
>>> not being obvious to someone skilled in the art. I don't know about
>>> IVL's patents - do they have any novel content?
>> This is the theory. The high cost of litigation, and the quirky outcome
>> of presenting even simple technical concepts to a court, makes the
>> reality a whole different story.
>>
>> Steve- Hide quoted text -
>>
>> - Show quoted text -
> 
> I agree that trying to show "obvious to one skilled in the art" takes
> some effort in court - but showing prior art is easy - just give the
> name of the publication and the appropriate page numbers. Although a
> bit of hair splitting occurs when the publication shows a general
> method or technique and the application patent shows the technique
> used in a particular case that the original publication didn't cover.
> But then again this leads to a "skilled in the art" thing. It all
> depends on how important the thing you want to use is.

That seems awfully naive. The whole purpose of a lawyer's life is to 
split hairs, and the most subtle difference between the referenced 
material and what is being claimed can discount the prior art. Remember, 
that doing some well known applied to a new goal is patentable. "A 
resistor charging a capacitor" was a court proven solid patented 
technique for the ultra low power oscillator timing circuit in heart 
pacemakers. It was a road block in that industry, until it expired.

Steve

On Aug 8, 11:17 am, Steve Underwood <ste...@dis.org> wrote:
> Clay wrote:
> >>>> said something about
> >>>> like this when he was presenting stuff, long ago at some AES thingie,
> >>>> about sigma-delta conversion and noise shaping.  i think he suggested
> >>>> that one look in those old Bell System Technical Journals from the 50s
> >>>> and 60s.  you'll almost always find that your "novel idea" was novel,
> >>>> but about 40 years ago and the novelty wasn't original to you.
> >>>> but that doesn't stop someone like IVL from patenting it.
>
> > Hello Robert, et. al.,
>
> > If the idea can be found in an old published journal (which predates
> > the patent), then the patent is effectively null and void.
> > A lot of application patents can be nullified if one does the right
> > research. A big part of a patent's being valid is its being novel and
> > not being obvious to someone skilled in the art. I don't know about
> > IVL's patents - do they have any novel content?
>
> This is the theory. The high cost of litigation, and the quirky outcome
> of presenting even simple technical concepts to a court, makes the
> reality a whole different story.
>
> Steve- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

I agree that trying to show "obvious to one skilled in the art" takes
some effort in court - but showing prior art is easy - just give the
name of the publication and the appropriate page numbers. Although a
bit of hair splitting occurs when the publication shows a general
method or technique and the application patent shows the technique
used in a particular case that the original publication didn't cover.
But then again this leads to a "skilled in the art" thing. It all
depends on how important the thing you want to use is.

Clay

Clay wrote:
>>>> said something about
>>>> like this when he was presenting stuff, long ago at some AES thingie,
>>>> about sigma-delta conversion and noise shaping.  i think he suggested
>>>> that one look in those old Bell System Technical Journals from the 50s
>>>> and 60s.  you'll almost always find that your "novel idea" was novel,
>>>> but about 40 years ago and the novelty wasn't original to you.
>>>> but that doesn't stop someone like IVL from patenting it.
> 
> Hello Robert, et. al.,
> 
> If the idea can be found in an old published journal (which predates
> the patent), then the patent is effectively null and void.
> A lot of application patents can be nullified if one does the right
> research. A big part of a patent's being valid is its being novel and
> not being obvious to someone skilled in the art. I don't know about
> IVL's patents - do they have any novel content?

This is the theory. The high cost of litigation, and the quirky outcome 
of presenting even simple technical concepts to a court, makes the 
reality a whole different story.

Steve

>
> > > said something about
> > > like this when he was presenting stuff, long ago at some AES thingie,
> > > about sigma-delta conversion and noise shaping.  i think he suggested
> > > that one look in those old Bell System Technical Journals from the 50s
> > > and 60s.  you'll almost always find that your "novel idea" was novel,
> > > but about 40 years ago and the novelty wasn't original to you.
>
> > > but that doesn't stop someone like IVL from patenting it.
>

Hello Robert, et. al.,

If the idea can be found in an old published journal (which predates
the patent), then the patent is effectively null and void.
A lot of application patents can be nullified if one does the right
research. A big part of a patent's being valid is its being novel and
not being obvious to someone skilled in the art. I don't know about
IVL's patents - do they have any novel content?

Clay

robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> On Aug 7, 2:57 am, Andor <andor.bari...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> r b-j wrote:
> ..
>>> Bob Adams (do you know him? or about him, Rick?)
>> Of course Rick knows him. Remember the discussion about Adams' method
>> to interpolate every M-th sample?
> 
> ooops.  to many dead brain cells.
> 
>>> said something about
>>> like this when he was presenting stuff, long ago at some AES thingie,
>>> about sigma-delta conversion and noise shaping.  i think he suggested
>>> that one look in those old Bell System Technical Journals from the 50s
>>> and 60s.  you'll almost always find that your "novel idea" was novel,
>>> but about 40 years ago and the novelty wasn't original to you.
>>> but that doesn't stop someone like IVL from patenting it.
>> Who is IVL?
> 
> http://www.ivl.com/
> 
> http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5301259.html
> http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5567901.html
> http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6336092.html

Those people are just plan evil. They are in the karaoke business. :-)

Steve

On Aug 7, 2:57 am, Andor <andor.bari...@gmail.com> wrote:
> r b-j wrote:
..
> > Bob Adams (do you know him? or about him, Rick?)
>
> Of course Rick knows him. Remember the discussion about Adams' method
> to interpolate every M-th sample?

ooops.  to many dead brain cells.

> > said something about
> > like this when he was presenting stuff, long ago at some AES thingie,
> > about sigma-delta conversion and noise shaping.  i think he suggested
> > that one look in those old Bell System Technical Journals from the 50s
> > and 60s.  you'll almost always find that your "novel idea" was novel,
> > but about 40 years ago and the novelty wasn't original to you.
>
> > but that doesn't stop someone like IVL from patenting it.
>
> Who is IVL?

http://www.ivl.com/

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5301259.html
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5567901.html
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6336092.html

r b-j

r b-j wrote:
> Rick Lyons wrote:
>
>
>
> > Hi Robert,
> >    I agree with *everything* that you wrote about
> > the DC-blocker scheme using a CIC filter.
>
> my goodness!
>
> but remember, i did not "recommend it".  it just was there to satisfy
> the 3 specs.  the delay (like any phase-linear filter that does some
> serious filtering) might kill you.

Instead of using spectral inversion on the boxcar averaging filter to
subtract DC, you could use Avins' approach to convert the boxcar
filter into a DC blocker with no delay.

The trick is to assume that DC is constant (is this really a trick?),
and therefore it doesn't matter when you subtract it. You estimate the
DC with the running average filter h = 1/N [1 1 ... 1] (N ones), and
then subtract this estimate from the _current_ input value, ie.

y[n] = x[n] - (h[n] * x[n])
= x[n] * (1 - h[n]).

In effect, one applies the FIR filter h'[n] = 1/N [ (N-1)/N -1 -1 ...
-1]. But an efficient implementation of course uses the recursive
computation of the boxcar averageing filter, ie.

z[n] = z[n-1] - 1/N (x[n-N] + x[n])
y[n] = x[n] - z[n].

This is a minimum-phase filter. In a fixed-point machine, with N=2^n
for some integer n, this can be computed in a breeze. All you need is
the delay.

>
> > Robert, know that most of the times I run across
> > some DSP technique that I've never seen before,
> > and I think is kinda clever, I later find out that
> > 18 tech papers have been published on the method.
> > Ha ha.
>
> Bob Adams (do you know him? or about him, Rick?)

Of course Rick knows him. Remember the discussion about Adams' method
to interpolate every M-th sample?

> said something about
> like this when he was presenting stuff, long ago at some AES thingie,
> about sigma-delta conversion and noise shaping.  i think he suggested
> that one look in those old Bell System Technical Journals from the 50s
> and 60s.  you'll almost always find that your "novel idea" was novel,
> but about 40 years ago and the novelty wasn't original to you.
>
> but that doesn't stop someone like IVL from patenting it.

Who is IVL?

Regards,
Andor

On Aug 5, 10:50 pm, R.Lyons@_BOGUS_ieee.org (Rick Lyons) wrote:
>
> Hi Robert,
>    I agree with *everything* that you wrote about
> the DC-blocker scheme using a CIC filter.

my goodness!

but remember, i did not "recommend it".  it just was there to satisfy
the 3 specs.  the delay (like any phase-linear filter that does some
serious filtering) might kill you.

> Robert, know that most of the times I run across
> some DSP technique that I've never seen before,
> and I think is kinda clever, I later find out that
> 18 tech papers have been published on the method.
> Ha ha.

Bob Adams (do you know him? or about him, Rick?) said something about
like this when he was presenting stuff, long ago at some AES thingie,
about sigma-delta conversion and noise shaping.  i think he suggested
that one look in those old Bell System Technical Journals from the 50s
and 60s.  you'll almost always find that your "novel idea" was novel,
but about 40 years ago and the novelty wasn't original to you.

but that doesn't stop someone like IVL from patenting it.

r b-j