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Taking Apart An Airport Extreme Base Station
Farley Mullet writes "As seen on MacSlash, here is a link to page documenting one man's dissection of an Airport Extreme Base Station. It's pretty neat to see what Apple crammed in there, including (gasp!) a chip from AMD!"
It says that the main processor is a mini-PCI card. Does that mean that it could resonably be put in a computer without the base station? My Dell Inspirion 8200 uses a mini-PCI card for wireless, and if I could possibly find drivers for it, i.e. for use in linux, that would be so cool. Imagine upgrading your laptop to 54 Mbps yourself (with no PCI card sticking out the side).
"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
That huge heat sink leads me to a good idea of why the 12" pBook is so hot.
And the AMD chips have been in the previous base stations as well. (or so I was told, when I posted this comment on macslash) But it does kind of clear up a great deal of speculation on what Apple and AMD were up to.
I posted this comment on macslash as an AC
I just took apart my Mac LC & LCII. The both had AMD chips in them, not the processor, but some other chip was labeled with an AMD logo on it.
Also, for more WiFi info, these are some good links...
http://melbourne.wireless.org.au/wiki/?Apple
http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/WirelessLin ks
http://www.gulker.com/2002/10/10.html
I believe that most wireless access points are just PCMCIA wireless cards with some extra software and hardware controlling it, that's why prices of these are coming down so much.
Apple is working with AMD on HyperX pci or some such
You're thinking of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. AMD, API NetWorks, Apple, Cisco, NVIDIA, PMC-Sierra, Sun, and Transmeta formed it in 2001 I believe to further the development and adoption of the HyperTransport I/O Link specification.
Well, kinda.
The project hasn't been updated in a couple of months, and it breaks Ethernet bridging, but the idea of running Linux on a sleek little gadget from Apple is still geeky enough to be interesting.
The Airport is great, but to configure it you need to be running OS 9 or X - horrid news for a high school that I was working at a few months ago. Every machine was running OS 8.6, including the one teacher-owned laptop. Every student-owned laptop was Windows-based.
I brought in my laptop (which runs Debian) and gave the Airport Base Station Configurator a try, but to no avail.
So - cool device, but it needs to be easier to configure or modify.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
Australian ones (actually New Zealand in my case, but we use the same plugs) are overpoweringly stupid. Not as bad as the US ones, but stupid all the same.
The two live pins are at the top of the socket. This means that when a toddler stands on the cable, as she tends to extremely often, the two live pins are exposed with a gap just the right size for an inquisitive toddler finger. Stupid fuckers, having me running round duct taping all the power plugs to the wall.
The UK sockets are the tits. Best designed in the world. For a start the "garage doors" onto the live pins don't even open until the earth pin is in. Then by the time the live pins are touching inside the socket, the only exposed bits are plastic. Totally toddler proof AND they don't fall out.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
That's not too surprising. Intel has been making memory chips longer than microprocessors. It's still a significant business for them. Can expect to find Intel memory in lots of places.
:-) (As it hardly indicates anything else, especially about Apple's CPU affairs and decisions...)
(IIRC, the Intel 4004 team sold the microprocessor concept to the Board by pointing out that manufacturing and selling CPU chips will increase the sales of their memory chips, Intel's then breadwinner.)
If your point was "AMD chips in there -- so what?", I agree
Reverse engineering a product (or software) in and of itself is not a violation of the DMCA. Only reverse engineering for the purpose of "circumventing a technological measure" in defeating copyright protection is in violation.
In other words, feel free to open up a base station yourself -- just don't try to decrypt anything meant to protect copyright (I don't think anything meets this criteria inside a base station).
Power plugs have always been one of my pet peaves. The Brits do seem to have the most 'feature rich' ones that I have seen but at the cost of bulk.
I always thought that the style used in North America was a reasonable compromise. If the device does not have a fuse itself, have a fuse in the plug itself. If the polarity does not matter, then have both prongs be of the same size, otherwise have the prongs of different sizes. If the device needs a ground then include a third ground prong. Another nice feature is that when a ground prong is used, it is longer than the +/- prongs so that it is first to make contact when inserted and last to lose contact when removed.
It is true that they tend to fall/pull out easily and it is annoying that (especially for bricks) both +/- prongs can be easily exposed at the top. But when we were having our new house built I made sure that the builders put in all of the wall sockets side ways with the hot prong at the bottom. This solves the problem of both +/- prongs being exposed at the top and the plugs should not fall out of the sockets as easily.
Some continental European sockets rile me up the most. Setting aside all of the minor differences that happen between some groups of countries that make them mostly compatible with each other but enough not so to pester me, the ones where the ground prong is in the socket itself are fundamentally flawed. You can easily plug a device that requires ground into a socket that has no ground prong! Also there is no way to differentiate polatity in a plug without ground and the sockets are too wide for no real reason that I can think of. There are some nice ideas there though. The sockets tend to be recessed and most plugs have prongs that are insulated a portion of their length. These two features do well to limit the exposure of the +/- prongs.
Who would have thought that there were so many details that can be though out carefully in the design of something so common place as a wall socket and plug.