Sometimes it's a matter of economics.. I can do all of the things you listed and recently I have.. However when things were good and I was billing 2000 hours a year, it was well worth the cost to pay someone else to do the work. Now that things are slow, I changed out the water heater myself, saved $300 in labor and markup and it's done right. Same goes for fixing the cars, did an inner tierod replacement and power steering pump replacement recently, it would have cost $1000 to have it done by a mechanic, but it cost me less than $300, and I fixed a few things screwed up by the last mechanic who worked on the car. (back when I was billing the big $$$)
The same for ink carts, I tried filling HP carts on my Paintjet, saved some $$, but what a mess, now I just buy Canon printers and replace the tanks. I could refill them, but so far the hassle outweighs the savings. But I do save the empties just in case the economy gets worse and it becomes worth my while to refill Canon ink tanks.
From the NASA web page: "After the last lunar landing, total funding for the Apollo program was about $19,408,134,000. The budget allocation was 34 percent of the NASA budget."
This was from 1963 to 1972, in 1969 the US population was 200 million. Divide cost of program by number of years and population and you get... $1/year*person , or about 0.295 cents a day
The Vietam War cost somewhere between 100 and 140 (1970's) Billion $, 50,000+ american lives, 200,000 South Vietnamese military lives, 500,000 civilian lives and accomplished nothing.
The Gulf War I and II and Afganistan cost over 100 billion already.
The US has spent over 5,000 billion (1996 dollars) on nuclear weapons over the 1940-1999 period.
And it takes you 15 minutes, then you are walking at a scale speed of.5C If you run it in 8 minutes, then you would be exceeding the (scale) speed of light.
Driving from the sun the Pluto in 1 hour would be an scale speed of 5C (Warp Factor 1.6?)
2 lb foam moving at 500mph... Kinetic Energy is Mass * Velocity ^2
so...
it's roughly equivalent to hitting a 200lb object at 50MPH. Think of what hitting a deer will do to your car. Then remember the shuttle wing is made out of aluminum covered with brittle refractory bricks. Of course a deer doesnt shatter when you hit it like the foam did, but the initial impact is still going to be pretty hard.
Atom-Age made a hardware box that produced 64K of random numbers with every character entered in the serial port. They spent a lot of time isolating each stage to ensure no noise got to the thermal noise generator/amplifier. There was no whitening or other tricks played to make the numbers 'more random' There were 3 sets of batteries, a 9V for the noise source, C Cells for the microprocessor, and D cells to run the serial interface. The whole thing was encased in a steel box with sheilding around the connector and indicator lights. Analysis of the numbers showed very good randomness.
Unfortunatly at $200 it never really sold well. They did release the code in the processor for inspection, I'm not sure about the schematics, probably not.
If that's the case, why even bother selling the systems, just sell replacement cases for Apple motherboards and avoid all the hassle. He'd sell more cases that way, and hopefully that's where the profit would be. You're not going to make much selling Apple service parts after Apple has marked them up.
Every time there is some sort of post about Apple clones, a whole bunch of people chime in 'I'd buy it to run linux' and I never under stand why. What possible advantage does a PPC have over x86 hardware in term of running Linux? They're not faster, not cheaper, less available, non-standard motherboard form-factor,,, What? it's 'cooler', well I guess.. but then just buy an old Mac and run it. There's no market for an ATX form factor PPC motherboard, not at the prices such a low volume board would cost (about $400) w/o CPU
If you really want one, it'd cost about 20K to design and 10K to layout and about 5K to build the first 10 protos, you could use the Apple AGP processor form factor, giving you MPX G4 bus and support for SMP, Articia makes a Northbridge for this. It really wouldnt be to hard to design, I just dont think there is any market for it.
Ever used them? I have, BGA sockets are OK for development, but for end-users they're not reliable enough. The solderballs develop oxides that create all sorts of nasty intermittant problems. BGA sockets are also quite expensive when compared to PGA-ZIF sockets.
Good luck trying to get controlled collapse of the solderballs in a toaster oven, and a heatgun is only useful for removing a BGA when you dont care what condition the chip is in after you remove it.
Plug in a BGA? nice trick.. The only source for the G4 is Motorola, and they only sell bare BGA parts, nothing a home user is going to install, unless you have a reflow oven at home. Your toaster oven isnt going to work for a BGA.
Since he's using a Gigabit AGP board, that limits you to buying an AGP CPU upgrade board from Powerlogix, Sonnet or Gigadesigns.
I really doubt that he'll be in the Apple motherboard repackaging business very long. Apple will cutoff any supplies to him or to anyone who sells him Apple repair boards. The last thing Apple wants is to have their repair stock used to build new machines to compete with their current Mirror-door systems.
Your real barrier to underclocking is the CPU PLL multiplier setting, if it's fixed, you can only go about 20% or less below the spec clock speed. You'll start having problems with the Frontside bus and PCI/AGP busses, also the refresh timing for the SDRAM may get out of spec if you go too slow and the system clocks are not independent. If you have a PowerPC or unlocked Athlon, you should be able to clock down to 100MHz if you want to.. Modern CMOS is fully static, you could go to DC, if the PLL could handle it, most wont go that slow. You can then start reducing the Core voltage to further reduce power consumption. Back in the day, I was able to underclock a PowerPC 603EV from 250Mhz to 66MHZ and reduce the Core voltage from 3.3V to 1.5V, and the machine still booted and ran MACOS, albiet slowly.:)
Actually, the trend is to run the switcher at a high enough frequency like 1MHz so that you can use smaller capacitors like ceramics which have even better reliability than Tantalums. You also can use smaller inductors. Of course you lose a bit more in the switching FETS, but modern parts are amazing, some have 4 milliOhms on-resistance and are in tiny little SO-8 surface mount packages.
Suppose thay had one. And it found damage. and then what? They cant fix the tiles in orbit. They cant divert to another orbit to dock with ISS. They cant launch another shuttle to pick them up. They cant rescue with 1 soyuz, it would take two. The shuttle only has consumables for a few days past the official end of mission.
A fix for any of these involves either a new space transportion system, ie Delta Clipper, adding excessive weight to the Shuttle, shortening missions or reducing payload to the point of uselesness, or doubling the existing Shuttle fleet to keep a 2nd stack on the pad whenever a mission is launched.
These would cost money that could be better spent building weapons to kill people. The US has spent Trillions of dollars building WMD, and other military programs. They make Americans feel safe, so there is no questioning the cost in terms of $$$ or progress or humanity. The cold war was a fraud perpetrated by the CIA overstating Soviet capabilities all the way until the collapse of the CCCP.
We may see manned space exploration left to the Chinese, at least they can think in the long term.
I would hope that the FBI gets a full address report on ANYONE trying to sell or scam off of this and busts them for a full no-tolerance sentence, Camp- X-ray seems like an appropriate place.
Treat it just like drugs, if you offer them for sale, real or not, you will be given the same sentence.
I think I'll gut out my Altair 8800 and convert it into a run-of-the-mill PC. Hell, I could drop a PowerComputing motherboard into it and turn it into a Mac!!
or maybe not.
(right now a NEC P90 laptop serves as a 'glass tty' for the Altair, I might have to get one of those 1100 disk format gadgets to read the old Altair 71K 5-1/4" hard sector floppy format)
I've got every ep of Enterprise in SVCD format.mpg's because the Austin TX UPN station has about 100W of transmit power and DirectTV wont carry them as a local channel.
Got all of Farscape and Firefly too.. Now if only I could upload them back into the Tivo..
It's pretty fast when you consider that the whole thing is cooled to about 2-4K .
Re:What about GPL?? Sources??
on
Xandros 1.0
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Hmm.. My time is $100/hr , so if it takes 10 minutes to open the letter, extract the name, mailing address and such, then another 10 to burn the CD and another 10 to drive to the Post office to mail it then add in the costs of packaging and postage and the CD + state tax, $75 would be a reasonable cost.
FTP servers arent free either, the machine, the admin time, the T1 all cost money. It's a little harder to determine costs there, If one person a year wants source, then its gonna cost about $10k, if 1000's want it, then $10, if millions, then I need a T3 and a rack of servers, so the cost may still be $10 or more..
Of course the GPL allows someone else to get a copy of the source and provide it for free, and that would be fine with me, saves me the time and money, and I can work(bill$$) on more interesting things.
The really fun part is when the bag blows up as you carry it out to the parking lot due to a static discharge inside it. O2 and acetylene are very dry, and opening a trash bag creates a lot of static charge in the inner surface. BOOM!
It works just like X once you install DarwinX.. I pull up apps using ssh -X on remote Solaris boxes all the time, either rootless to my Aqua desktop, or to a Alt-del switched fullscreen Xwindow desktop. If I want to run the apps on the Mac, I'll get them using Fink. All of this, I found on the Apple OSX website under UNIX tools. Sinple point and click, no edits or typing needed to set it all up other than >setenv DISPLAY -ip-.0:0 on the remote and >xhost -remoteip- on the mac..
I wonder if the packet shaper can throttle per MAC address, then you you divide by modulo 7 and allocate a weeks worth of bandwidth per MAC address. The mod 7 makes sure all the counters dont get reset on the same day. You want more data, pay for another MAC address worth... No port restrictions, you use your weekly allocation in whatever way you like, once it's gone, they drop you to 0.5Kb/sec so you can still get email and text services, slowly.
I can only hope that they dont try to shift the color balance to red to justify not replacing all the DVD's that were misprinted with the wrong color-balance..
Slashdot Mirror
Buy a Canon, the ink tanks that ship with the printer are full. They are transparent plastic and you see exactly how much ink is in them.
Sometimes it's a matter of economics..
I can do all of the things you listed and recently I have..
However when things were good and I was billing 2000 hours a year, it was well worth the cost to pay someone else to do the work. Now that things are slow, I changed out the water heater myself, saved $300 in labor and markup and it's done right. Same goes for fixing the cars, did an inner tierod replacement and power steering pump replacement recently, it would have cost $1000 to have it done by a mechanic, but it cost me less than $300, and I fixed a few things screwed up by the last mechanic who worked on the car. (back when I was billing the big $$$)
The same for ink carts, I tried filling HP carts on my Paintjet, saved some $$, but what a mess, now I just buy Canon printers and replace the tanks. I could refill them, but so far the hassle outweighs the savings. But I do save the empties just in case the economy gets worse and it becomes worth my while to refill Canon ink tanks.
I'd send a resume to the contracting company.
From the NASA web page:
/year*person , or about 0.295 cents a day
"After the last lunar landing, total funding for the Apollo program was about $19,408,134,000. The budget allocation was 34 percent of the NASA budget."
This was from 1963 to 1972, in 1969 the US population was 200 million. Divide cost of program by number of years and population and you get...
$1
The Vietam War cost somewhere between 100 and 140 (1970's) Billion $, 50,000+ american lives, 200,000 South Vietnamese military lives, 500,000 civilian lives and accomplished nothing.
The Gulf War I and II and Afganistan cost over 100 billion already.
The US has spent over 5,000 billion (1996 dollars) on nuclear weapons over the 1940-1999 period.
And it takes you 15 minutes, then you are walking .5C
at a scale speed of
If you run it in 8 minutes, then you would be exceeding the (scale) speed of light.
Driving from the sun the Pluto in 1 hour would
be an scale speed of 5C (Warp Factor 1.6?)
People lie under oath all the time, hell even the President of the USA does.
2 lb foam moving at 500mph...
Kinetic Energy is Mass * Velocity ^2
so...
it's roughly equivalent to hitting a 200lb object at 50MPH. Think of what hitting a deer will do to your car. Then remember the shuttle wing is made out of aluminum covered with brittle refractory bricks.
Of course a deer doesnt shatter when you hit it like the foam did, but the initial impact is still going to be pretty hard.
Atom-Age made a hardware box that produced 64K of random numbers with /amplifier. There was no whitening or other tricks played
every character entered in the serial port. They spent a lot of time
isolating each stage to ensure no noise got to the thermal noise
generator
to make the numbers 'more random' There were 3 sets of batteries,
a 9V for the noise source, C Cells for the microprocessor, and D cells
to run the serial interface. The whole thing was encased in a steel box
with sheilding around the connector and indicator lights. Analysis of
the numbers showed very good randomness.
Unfortunatly at $200 it never really sold well.
They did release the code in the processor for inspection,
I'm not sure about the schematics, probably not.
If that's the case, why even bother selling the systems, just sell replacement cases for Apple motherboards and avoid all the hassle.
He'd sell more cases that way, and hopefully that's where the profit would be. You're not going to make much selling Apple service parts after Apple has marked them up.
Every time there is some sort of post about Apple clones, a whole bunch of people chime in 'I'd buy it to run linux' and I never under stand why. What possible advantage does a PPC have over x86 hardware in term of running Linux? They're not faster, not cheaper, less available, non-standard motherboard form-factor,,,
What? it's 'cooler', well I guess.. but then just buy an old Mac and run it. There's no market for an ATX form factor PPC motherboard, not at the prices such a low volume board would cost (about $400) w/o CPU
If you really want one, it'd cost about 20K to design and 10K to layout and about 5K to build the first 10 protos, you could use the Apple AGP processor form factor, giving you MPX G4 bus and support for SMP, Articia makes a Northbridge for this. It really wouldnt be to hard to design, I just dont think there is any market for it.
Ever used them?
I have, BGA sockets are OK for development, but for end-users they're not reliable enough. The solderballs develop oxides that create all sorts of nasty intermittant problems. BGA sockets are also quite expensive when compared to PGA-ZIF sockets.
Good luck trying to get controlled collapse of the solderballs in a toaster oven, and a heatgun is only useful for removing a BGA when you dont care what condition the chip is in after you remove it.
Plug in a BGA? nice trick..
The only source for the G4 is Motorola, and they only sell bare BGA parts, nothing a home user is going to install, unless you have a reflow oven at home. Your toaster oven isnt going to work for a BGA.
Since he's using a Gigabit AGP board, that limits you to buying an AGP CPU upgrade board from Powerlogix, Sonnet or Gigadesigns.
I really doubt that he'll be in the Apple motherboard repackaging business very long. Apple will cutoff any supplies to him or to anyone who sells him Apple repair boards. The last thing Apple wants is to have their repair stock used to build new machines to compete with their current Mirror-door systems.
Look out!!
Here it comes!!
Your real barrier to underclocking is the CPU PLL multiplier setting, if it's fixed, you can only go about 20% or less below the spec clock speed. You'll start having problems with the Frontside bus and PCI/AGP busses, also the refresh timing for the SDRAM may get out of spec if you go too slow and the system clocks are not independent. :)
If you have a PowerPC or unlocked Athlon, you should be able to clock down to 100MHz if you want to..
Modern CMOS is fully static, you could go to DC, if the PLL could handle it, most wont go that slow.
You can then start reducing the Core voltage to further reduce power consumption.
Back in the day, I was able to underclock a PowerPC 603EV from 250Mhz to 66MHZ and reduce the Core voltage from 3.3V to 1.5V, and the machine still booted and ran MACOS, albiet slowly.
Actually, the trend is to run the switcher at a high enough frequency like 1MHz so that you can use smaller capacitors like ceramics which have even better reliability than Tantalums. You also can use smaller inductors. Of course you lose a bit more in the switching FETS, but modern parts are amazing, some have 4 milliOhms on-resistance and are in tiny little SO-8 surface mount packages.
Re Inspection Robot...
Suppose thay had one. And it found damage.
and then what?
They cant fix the tiles in orbit.
They cant divert to another orbit to dock with ISS.
They cant launch another shuttle to pick them up.
They cant rescue with 1 soyuz, it would take two.
The shuttle only has consumables for a few days past
the official end of mission.
A fix for any of these involves either a new space transportion system, ie Delta Clipper, adding excessive weight to the Shuttle, shortening missions or reducing payload to the point of uselesness, or doubling the existing Shuttle fleet to keep a 2nd stack on the pad whenever a mission is launched.
These would cost money that could be better spent building weapons to kill people. The US has spent Trillions of dollars building WMD, and other military programs. They make Americans feel safe, so there is no questioning the cost in terms of $$$ or progress or humanity. The cold war was a fraud perpetrated by the CIA overstating Soviet capabilities all the way until the collapse of the CCCP.
We may see manned space exploration left to the Chinese, at least they can think in the long term.
I would hope that the FBI gets a full address report on ANYONE trying to sell or scam off of this and busts them for a full no-tolerance sentence, Camp- X-ray seems like an appropriate place.
Treat it just like drugs, if you offer them for sale, real or not, you will be given the same sentence.
Hey what a great idea..
I think I'll gut out my Altair 8800 and convert it into a run-of-the-mill PC. Hell, I could drop a PowerComputing motherboard into it and turn it into a Mac!!
or maybe not.
(right now a NEC P90 laptop serves as a 'glass tty' for the Altair, I might have to get one of those 1100 disk format gadgets to read the old Altair 71K 5-1/4" hard sector floppy format)
There's always Kuro5hin...
For that there's broadband...
.mpg's
I've got every ep of Enterprise in SVCD format
because the Austin TX UPN station has about 100W of transmit power and DirectTV wont carry them as a local channel.
Got all of Farscape and Firefly too.. Now if only I could upload them back into the Tivo..
It's pretty fast when you consider that the whole thing is cooled to about 2-4K .
Hmm..
My time is $100/hr , so if it takes 10 minutes to open the letter, extract the name, mailing address and such, then another 10 to burn the CD and another 10 to drive to the Post office to mail it then add in the costs of packaging and postage and the CD + state tax, $75 would be a reasonable cost.
FTP servers arent free either, the machine, the admin time, the T1 all cost money. It's a little harder to determine costs there, If one person a year wants source, then its gonna cost about $10k,
if 1000's want it, then $10, if millions, then I need a T3 and a rack of servers, so the cost may still be $10 or more..
Of course the GPL allows someone else to get a copy of the source and provide it for free, and that would be fine with me, saves me the time and money, and I can work(bill$$) on more interesting things.
The really fun part is when the bag blows up as you carry it out to the parking lot due to a static discharge inside it. O2 and acetylene are very dry,
and opening a trash bag creates a lot of static charge in the inner surface. BOOM!
It works just like X once you install DarwinX..
I pull up apps using ssh -X on remote Solaris boxes
all the time, either rootless to my Aqua desktop,
or to a Alt-del switched fullscreen Xwindow desktop.
If I want to run the apps on the Mac, I'll get them using Fink. All of this, I found on the Apple OSX website under UNIX tools. Sinple point and click, no edits or typing needed to set it all up other than
>setenv DISPLAY -ip-.0:0 on the remote
and
>xhost -remoteip- on the mac..
I wonder if the packet shaper can throttle per MAC address, then you you divide by modulo 7 and allocate a weeks worth of bandwidth per MAC address. The mod 7 makes sure all the counters dont get reset on the same day. You want more data, pay for another MAC address worth...
No port restrictions, you use your weekly allocation in whatever way you like, once it's gone, they drop you to 0.5Kb/sec so you can still get email and text services, slowly.
I can only hope that they dont try to shift the color balance to red to justify not replacing all the DVD's that were misprinted with the wrong color-balance..