So what happened to all those MindStreams in the wild.

robbyg

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I talked to one user who said he put his in a box and stopped using it and then I talked to another user who is using it as a salinity monitor.
I am kind of surprised that not one unit has been put up for sale. Are the owners still using them for salinity and Temp or have people just boxed them up?
I was just wondering.
 
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robbyg

robbyg

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If I had one, I'd hold onto it, hoping someone bought up the intellectual property and will start producing the discs.

Curious, the people who paid and didn't get them... did they get their money back?
It's something we can hope for but who knows what will happen. It will probably get sold but we have no idea if the new owners would want to continue with the exact same design.

BTW I got back my money from SAI, they refunded it.
 
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robbyg

robbyg

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I don't have a mindstream but I followed the discussions and at this point I believe the only interest in the unit would be as a "collectors item".
I would not mind having one as a collectors item. It will probably go down in history as the pinnacle of SW water testing technology.
 
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robbyg

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Perhaps someone will scoop them up for reverse enginerding
They already have! I heard several of the first units sold never got activated.
I guess they thought that it was something you could just copy. The fact is that the Patents prevent anybody from ever making another unit like this. The only thing we will ever have is titration and Ion Probes unless someone buys the SAI IP.
 

Sisterlimonpot

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Perhaps someone will scoop them up for reverse enginerding
They can reverse engineer all they want, but there are patents which protect a company from just reverse engineering. If a company comes out with it, they will have to pay for it.
 
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I would not mind having one as a collectors item. It will probably go down in history as the pinnacle of SW water testing technology.

Did they ever get it reading accurately for the whole life of a disc? Last I recall is it had varied, incorrect readings for more than one parameter. I don't recall anyone who actually had one reporting that it worked well for a whole month at a time.
 
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robbyg

robbyg

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Did they ever get it reading accurately for the whole life of a disc? Last I recall is it had varied, incorrect readings for more than one parameter. I don't recall anyone who actually had one reporting that it worked well for a whole month at a time.
Yes they did have owners with all readings correct, including a well known forum member who was also a beta tester.
 

Silver14SS

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@ mention them to this thread, maybe they'll say what they did with the hardware.

@Thales is another MS user that comes to mind.
 

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They already have! I heard several of the first units sold never got activated.
I guess they thought that it was something you could just copy. The fact is that the Patents prevent anybody from ever making another unit like this. The only thing we will ever have is titration and Ion Probes unless someone buys the SAI IP.

They can reverse engineer all they want, but there are patents which protect a company from just reverse engineering. If a company comes out with it, they will have to pay for it.

There are plenty of things that are reverse engineered across the pacific and nobody thought twice about patents stopping them. Counterfeit market exists for every product out there, car parts, motherboards, video cards, fashion, pharma you name it. Often times things are sold stateside before an injunction is issued and even that hasnt stopped importation of it all. For injunction to happen the importer or manufacturer has to be sued and that costs money too - something mindstream ran out of.

There is more but that sums up that patents arent a 100% deterrent.

That said, I don't advocate above but as long as there are buyers things will be copied and sold.
 

BZOFIQ

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Case in point, a case of what I think is crap product that continues to be sold albeit not via official channels.

 

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robbyg

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There are plenty of things that are reverse engineered across the pacific and nobody thought twice about patents stopping them. Counterfeit market exists for every product out there, car parts, motherboards, video cards, fashion, pharma you name it. Often times things are sold stateside before an injunction is issued and even that hasnt stopped importation of it all. For injunction to happen the importer or manufacturer has to be sued and that costs money too - something mindstream ran out of.

There is more but that sums up that patents arent a 100% deterrent.

That said, I don't advocate above but as long as there are buyers things will be copied and sold.
This is one of those products that it won't work with. The major Distributor in the USA are not going to sell it once they get notified that they are breaking the law. Are you really going to buy a expensive water testing device off of eBay?

The Chinese can typically get away with this when the item is really cheap to produce and they have a huge revenue stream outside the USA/EU as a buffer in case they have shipments seized. For instance there is a huge counterfeit Tyre market, but even if the US cracks down on all of it the bootleg companies they can still move a ton of product by selling them to third world countries and countries that don't have good regs.

Yes Jebao pumps may be a knock off but those pumps are used in the global FW industry as well as for water fountains etc. So the market is pretty huge. Something like the Mindstream is a niche market device and will only sell in numbers to SW hobbyist in the USA, Canada and EU.
More importantly who would be supplying you with the disks? I have never known the Chinese to get into any product that requires long term support unless they are making the product legitimately.
 

BZOFIQ

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This is one of those products that it won't work with. The major Distributor in the USA are not going to sell it once they get notified that they are breaking the law. Are you really going to buy a expensive water testing device off of eBay?

The Chinese can typically get away with this when the item is really cheap to produce and they have a huge revenue stream outside the USA/EU as a buffer in case they have shipments seized. For instance there is a huge counterfeit Tyre market, but even if the US cracks down on all of it the bootleg companies they can still move a ton of product by selling them to third world countries and countries that don't have good regs.

Yes Jebao pumps may be a knock off but those pumps are used in the global FW industry as well as for water fountains etc. So the market is pretty huge. Something like the Mindstream is a niche market device and will only sell in numbers to SW hobbyist in the USA, Canada and EU.
More importantly who would be supplying you with the disks? I have never known the Chinese to get into any product that requires long term support unless they are making the product legitimately.

I'll keep it short - time will tell.
 

Daniel@R2R

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If I had one, I'd hold onto it, hoping someone bought up the intellectual property and will start producing the discs.
This is basically what I'm doing. No real hope that'll happen, but I figure maybe it's worth keeping just in case. Probably more a coping strategy than anything else. LOL
 
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robbyg

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This is basically what I'm doing. No real hope that'll happen, but I figure maybe it's worth keeping just in case. Probably more a coping strategy than anything else. LOL
Keep the faith who knows what may happen.
 

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