Slashdot Mirror

I've been using it for 8 years or so. I have run into the chunky click on occasion, but it's still going.

The chunky click problem has to do with the spring that's built around the microswitch and it getting gummed up simply from normal use(and oil/skin/hair/etc). You can buy replacement switches from allied electric(pretty sure those are the G400 switches might be a G500 though), or you can just pull the mouse apart clean it and put it all back together. I've been using a G300 for pretty much 8 years now, and a year or so back started running into the same problem.

Car technology is shit.

Just pull away any panel and look at the switches and connectors. They are the cheapest, nastiest bits of crap you own. It doesn't matter if it's a BMW or a Skoda. They use the same shite parts under the covers. Generally the radio or "Entertainment Center" puts the rest of the car to shame in terms of component quality.

I used to work on race cars and we used mil spec circular connectors. Those things didn't break for want of a little bit of plastic costing $0.00001.

The total added manufacturing cost to using half decent switches and connectors might be $200 for a normal car. So $1000 on the price. Would you pay an extra $1000 for a 'the electrics won't break in 4 years' guarantee?

this is my exact beef with the raspberry pi.... it's not really a $25/$35, it's a >$100 solution that is hard to obtain. Once the supply chain issues are fixed this may be more interesting. But at this point it's main attractive feature - price - .

I'm a software developer. I have 8 of them. I have so many of them I sell them to friends at cost instead of turning around and gouging on eBay like a prick. I have four of them in my room so I can do the cambridge distributed processing experiments.

How did I do it? Who's knob did I slobber? Nobody's. Remember back when orders were opened up on (assuming you're in the US) Newark and Allied? I put in three separate orders for each site for one each. It would be 3-4 months before the first arrived. They identified me as a repeat orderer so they simply reset my orders each time they shipped one. How much money did I have to front? $35 * 6 = $210 + S&H. Lotta money, right? Except, I looked at this just like I would some gaming console and it wasn't. Yes, it requires patience but put in an order and in 6 to 14 weeks you'll probably have a Raspberry Pi from either of the sites above. Totally worth the wait. If you're super American and can't wait a month to get something, go get gouged. Oh, just don't get upset when the 1GB models ship later this year -- it'll probably be good to have at least one 512MB to test for backwards compatibility.

How did I know to do this? Was it the hundreds of Slashdot posts by geeks saying "I don't want to hurt anybody but I would kill a dude in front of his own mother to get a Raspberry Pi" or perhaps the fact that learning institutions were putting money down for millions of them? It doesn't take an oracle to figure that out ...

renders it closer to vapourware than anything else

A product so successful it's Slashdotted into "vaporware?" Come on, there are many good criticisms of the Raspberry Pi -- this is not one of them.

They don't have a store, you can buy it from farnell, CPC(who are farnell but friendlier), RS, Allied electronics(whoever they are), NewIT(who i got mine from) and Maplin

If there isn't a single option there that offers it for less that 70 EUR with tax and shipping, i'll be a little surprised.
Charging 13 EUR for a pre-loaded SD card doesn't seem that awful, especially considering that they(the foundation, who aren't the ones selling the cards) provide you with all the tools and instructions to make your own bootable SD cards, no one's forcing you to do anything here.

Let me see... Yes.... RS won't ship to Canada, and when you select Canada in the list of countries it tells you: "For orders to United States or Canada please place your order with Allied Electronics".

Well. There's that.

Let's go now to Allied Electronics: http://www.alliedelec.com/lp/120626raso/ Note that you don't need to know the address, there is a nice link in the message displayed by the RS checkout page.

Guess what? They have it in stock and they ship to Canada. Isn't that wonderful? I liked my test drive, thank you very much. Frankly, it didn't take long.

I'm in about the same place. I ordered from Allied since I'm in the states. Their website now states:

*Please note that due to extreme demand and short supply, the estimated delivery time is uncertain and will likely take several months. We do regret the delay and inconvenience this may cause.

I e-mailed them last week and they never got back to me. Fucking useless.

US is via Allied.

They're trying to make it as cheap as possible. Even TFA mentions this.

And they've already raised the price to accommodate their resellers, so obviously price wasn't as fixed as they originally claimed anyway...

ORLY?

The potato battery, like the others, requires copper and zinc electrodes, which are expensive.

Quote: "... five to 50 folds cheaper than commercially available 1.5 Volt D cells and Energizer E91 cells..."

The Energizer brand is heavily advertised and is extremely expensive, about $1.89 per AA size battery. Normal alkaline cells cost about 6 1/4 cents, $0.0625., 30 times less expensive.

The rest of the difference may be due to manufacturing and sales cost.

What is the shelf life of a potato battery? Probably short.

It seems to be fraud.

Did you take into account that the you'd need to double the resistance of the two resistors to get the right resistance?

Rt = 1/(1/R1+1/R2)

Or you could use two half value units in series.

Either way, the price difference between 5% resisters and 10% resisters is generally NOT a factor of 2, so if you need the closer tolerance, just go with a better band. They come in 20%, 10%, 5%, 2%, and 1%.

On the plus size, the resisters on the whole would be able to withstand almost twice as many watts(the lower resistance one would fail first).

Hmmm...
http://www.alliedelec.com/Resistors

10 kohm, .25 W, 5% = $.05
10 kohm, .25 W, 1% = $.12

Last I looked, 20% margin resisters were hard to find. Now it looks like 10% are hard as well. Still, even at a bit over double the price at that cheap isn't going to gain you much. The extra soldering is going to be a pain.

Geeks churn, most normal-people don't.
( this referring to the frequency of replacing one's machines )

That the OPer is totally out-of-the-loop on modern sockets etc. indicates that they AREN'T going to replace the machine every 2 years,
therefore their making this machine an investment rather than a 2-year-lease-equivalent
( transposed from cars, where people are rationaller, to computers where people aren't ),
seems sane.

The OP began with "It's been a few years since I built my current system by. . .",
and I trusted that to be fact, not deliberately-manufactured red-herring, is all. . .
-shrug-

Sometimes "penny wise, and pound-foolish"
is true.
( translation for non-Brits: "cents-wise, dollars-stupid" )

Also, the OP didn't ask to tell them what was right for them ( and I didn't attempt to assume that ),
it asked if there was a guide, so I showed 'em how one person makes such choices, as an instance-of-guide,
and pointed out a couple of good, and trustworthy, information-sites, fully expecting others to give contradictory information,
so the OPer could then make-up their own mind more-informedly. . .

Others' total-reliance on Toms Hardware makes me shudder, as ThePabster's bias
( apparently induced by love of their bigger advertisers ) I gave-up arguing-with years-ago. . .
( remember Van Smith's site? the one that abused pay-by-the-byte netters by its force-refresh? but that cut through distortive BS with an integrity that was really worth fighting-for? they, IIRC, and others, cut through that fundamental-bias to show its distortion ). . .

"I don't know that a spike can't happen through cable or DSL, but in 7 years I've never seen it happen and your provider has much more expensive equipment than you do, so I would expect plenty of isolation. An oversize UPS would be a better use of the money."

Lightning Happens.
Lightning means wires between Your Home(tm) and Elsewhere(tm) pick-up energy.
Energy goes somewhere.
IF that somewhere happens to involve your computer, it's likely killed or damaged, unless protected.
( notice that MOST comuter-users only complain about malware when they are no-longer able to USE their computer due to it!
protection/proactive-defense ISN'T normal, so I'm trying to recommend action that gets committed protecting their machine, see )

It doesn't matter how well the other-end of the wire is protected, if
the easiest-path for the electricity to discharge is through your machine.
( and the energy in the nearest-mile finds that your-machine is the short-cut )

An oversize UPS is an investment I wish all computer-users made, but I'm trying to be realistic:
it's better to have protection against having one's machine killed than to have none.
OPer, GET a line-interactive UPS, and rely-on-it.
If you live among a power-nasty grid, then get a Zero Surge to protect ALL your expensive electronics, simply because they're the only ones who don't rely-on fade-in-use MOVs.
Allied Electronics sells 'em ( as do others, check http://froogle.google.com/ )

It is even-better to protect one's data from corruption or loss
( therefore both line-interactive UPS -- power-sags are the bigger data-loss means than are outright blackouts --
and backups are necessary if one REQUIRES one's work ), but I'm not holding my breath for that among normals. . .
I didn't bother recommending a DVD-RW burner, but that'd be a requirement if backups are needing to be archival, too
( just concerning meself with the core stuff, since that seemed to b

Let me state right up front that, technological and potential privacy issues aside, I don't think this is going to make passports any more secure. I further believe the arrogance shown by the U.S. towards other countries in this matter ("You WILL convert to this same standard if you want your citizens to be able to visit our country") is absolutely typical of our current administration.

In other words, I don't agree with it.

WITH THAT SAID: Allow me to point out a few facts, based on previously-published material and my own knowledge of RFID technology.

First and foremost: What no one seems to have noticed (it may not have been reported in TFA, which I've yet to read) is that the State Department is, reportedly, going to weave their idea of a Faraday Cage right into the covers of the new passports in the form of a metallic-filament weave. Bruce Schneier mentions this on his site already.

This should, in theory, effectively counteract any sort of attempt to read the thing remotely when the passport is closed. If you're really paranoid about it, you can place your passport into an ESD Shielding Bag, available from most electronic component distributors such as Allied Electronics, DigiKey, or Mouser.

On the subject of long-distance remote reading: I doubt very much we're going to see, as one other poster pointed out (paraphrasing), "criminals with laptops and a portable reader under their coat" any time soon. For starters, the return emission from most passive RFID chips of the low and mid-frequency ranges (125-148kHz and 13.56MHz) is very weak. The chip would require a significant amount of close-up RF energy to excite it, and a large antenna and high-quality receiver to pick up the return signal.

Going further along those lines: Remember that RF field strength decreases quickly, as you move away from the source, according to the Inverse Square Law. The main reason that the low and mid-freq chips are only readable up to about 3 feet away is because, in order to have them work from further away, you'd need a transceiver the size of a large HF ham radio setup, and equally large (and obvious) antennas (the lower the frequency, the physically larger the antenna has to be).

For a criminal to effectively read such chips with portable equipment, they'd have to be standing more than close enough to the security folk to attract unwanted attention.

While I have found some references to the State Dept. having been able to read the test passports from 30 feet away with "special equipment," I also recall that this equipment was hardly portable, and required direct connection to AC power to be operable at all. In other words, it needed a lot more power than an easily-portable battery source could provide, and it was hardly what I would call surreptitious. Based on that stated range, I have reason to believe that the DoS was using 915MHz RFID tags for their test. Such tags are, according to this list, very much readable from at least 25 feet away.

I've been unable to locate any references on which specific frequency or type of RFID chip will be used in US passports (anyone else have any references on that?) Despite that, I think it's premature to draw conclusions based solely on the news articles to date. News articles do not, after all, make for a technical white paper.

I would suggest that those who get the new passports, and that have the technical know-how, try to read them with an appropriate RFID reader. Try different distances and angles, see if you can actually read the thing with the cover closed and (if possible) try a variety of d

Check out SLOAN optoelectronics they have a .PDF outlining LED replacement for incadescent light INCANDESCENT REPLACEMENT LED LAMPS. I found these thru Allied Electronics catalogue, page 679. They retail for around $10
This is one example out of many, I don't work for Allied nor Sloan; Feel free to look this up in any electronic component shop like Future-Active etc...
---
Vote Inanimate Carbon Rod in 2000