[Arm-netbook] First laptop dock for Intel's card announced

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

---
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68


On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 7:50 PM, Julie Marchant <onpon4 at riseup.net> wrote:
> On 01/23/2017 02:23 PM, Allan Mwenda wrote:
>> You should patent all the things before Intel just i n case they REALLY
>> decide they thought of this first
>
> Intel doesn't have grounds to start patenting this design idea now.
>
> Though I do wonder, is there a clear case of prior art for this kind of
> thing that would invalidate any possible patents? Something technically
> designed as a fully functioning computer that plugs into the thing that
> gives it all its interfaces?

 there's an expired patent where someone dual-purposed PCMCIA.  the
drawing even has an LCD built-in to the Card.  basically the patent
was on detection of whether it was plugged into a PCMCIA socket (or
not), if yes, it behaved as a PCMCIA Card, if no, it behaved as a
modular computer.

 there's a patent from 18+ months ago by microsoft (saw it on
slashdot) for a totally-modular-computer-thing...

 then there's also the "Blade" Server concept, which has been around forever...

 ... basically it's not sufficiently innovative to warrant actually
bothering to patent.  anybody that tries is asking to have their
patent referred for invalidation.

l.