though there wasnt much detail in the article, I suspect it is simply going to be ie with an aol 'skin'. I suspect they dont have access to ie source code....
WARNING : All power supplies have capacitors in them. These components can hold an electrical charge for days even weeks. We do not recommend that anyone opens up their Power Supply unless they do know what they are doing and are willing to take responsibility for their actions.
DISCLAIMER : The author of this article and the owner of this page are not responsible or liable for any damage caused to any equipment or persons. In attempting what is detailed below you are taking full responsility for your actions.
A Brief Introduction
When I went about water-cooling my first PSU, I was learning as I went along so now I've had the experience, I'm in a better position to do a decent job. In this article I'll go through, step-by-step, showing you how to water-cool your PSU from scratch! I started off with a nice little QTec 550W PSU :
If you've read the first article I wrote on water-cooling your PSU (which was aimed more at inspiring people than being a step-by-step guide), you'll know that my basic plan is quite simple. Basically, it involves replacing the fans / heatsinks with plates of copper. Each plate has a copper pipe soldered to it which is where the water runs to remove the heat. We'll get to that later - for now lets look at taking this thing apart.
Disassembly
If you have any doubts, this is the time to think again. As with just about every mod on this site, the first thing to do is void your warranty:D While that little sticker's intact, you can go and whine at your supplier if/when it goes bang. In any case, I'm not afraid so lets get stuck in :
Four tiny screws later and the top should be loose. If you're doing this to a different PSU, you may find there's a fifth screw near the base - there was one on my old AOpen PSU. Here it is, guts exposed :
Now the whole point of water-cooling the thing was to make it quieter so lets go ahead and get rid of those pesky fans :
I found that Q-Tec had been very helpful and given each fan a little connector that can easily be removed. Here's what you should have after removing the noisy beasts :
Noisy though the fans are, your PSU isn't going to work for very long without some kind of cooling. At this point you should be able to see the two heatsinks we're going to replace. Attatched to the sinks, you'll see rows of components - these are the really hot bits in your PSU and it's these that we'll be cooling. Now if we're going to replace the heatsinks with our water-cooled plates we need access to said components. There's two steps to this. First we need to remove the four screws that hold the main board of the PSU :
Next we need to remove the little board that attatches to the connector where you plug your PSU into the wall. If you don't do this, you'll have to bend the back of the PSU to get the board out!
Okay, all being well, you should have a fully disassembled unit :
The next step is a little more tricky. We need to get those heatsinks off those components but unfortunately, you won't be able to get to the screws that hold them on. So what do we do? Un-solder them of course:) Look carefully at the bottom of the board and then double-check the top surface. You should be able to work out which joints on the base correspond to the components on the other side. All the components have three legs which makes life a little easier. I've found quite often that the heatsinks have an additional soldered connection or two to help keep them attatched to the board. Here's a couple of pics of the components and the base of the board :
Right, lets get the first heatsink off :
With a little more de-soldering, here's the second one removed as well :
Removing the components and attatching them to the new water-cooled plates is a doddle. Just remember two points when doing this :
1) Whatever you do, DON'T FORGET what order the components went in - it could be disastrous if you got them mixed up!
2) Be careful when re-attatching, not to leave out the Mica shims (the grey pads). These stop you getting mains voltages going through the heatsink or water-block so they're pretty goddamn important!
Here you can see them attatched to the water-block I made :
If you're wondering how to get the holes on your block in just the right place, do what I did and use the heatsink you took off earlier as a template:D
Re-assembling the beast
The next step is to re-attatch the components to the board :
Now I run an XP in my machine and I have no intention of moving to Intel so the P4 connector's just taking up space in my machine. The same is true of the old ATX connector so I got rid of 'em :
Next it's time to implement a very handy bit of kit which makes water-cooling a little safer and easier. When you turn on your machine you don't want to have to remember to turn your pump on - if you forget, your liable to burn your chip! So what can you do to get around this? The answers simple - a 12v relay. Basically, when the computer starts, the 12v line coming out of the PC goes from 0 to 12v which closes the relay, starting the pump. I also find it useful to have an overide switch so you can pulse the pump on and off (to get rid of any trapped air in the system). Here's a quick diagram of the way my circuit works :
Apologies for my poor photochop skillz:/ Having soldered the above into the PSU, I quickly re-assembled the thing and here's the results (photos taken just before I replaced the outer casing) :
And finally, here you can see it installed as I wait for the system to bleed :
Time for some tea and biccies! Well, I tentatively flicked the switch and as I cringed, waiting for a loud bang followed by fireworks, my machine quietly booted:D Wow, this things so goddamn quiet - I love it! There's now only the two panaflows at the front running and they're at 5v each so you can barely hear them. With the disks encased in foam, even when there's hard disk activity, my machine's still damn quiet!
On a cold weekday afternoon last January, 34- year-old Brian Benavidez plopped down with his girlfriend on a big white shabby-chic sofa in his loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to watch a documentary about hot dogs. Mr. Benavidez, an M.B.A. and former investment banker, had been out of work since October, when he was laid off from his six-figure job at Bolt, a Manhattan Internet company.
After a couple months of reading and sleeping until noon, he had begun to interview for jobs, but things weren't looking so good. Mr. Benavidez described himself as "just professionally depressed."
But something about that hot dog documentary caught his attention.
"I noticed that everybody who was being interviewed was happy," Mr. Benavidez said. "The people who worked behind the counters, the owners, the customers, they were all smiling. I told my girlfriend, `I want to make people that happy.' "
A few hours later, Mr. Benavidez said, he had an epiphany: "I'll do hot dogs."
Selling hot dogs and cheese fries was hardly the career Mr. Benavidez imagined for himself when he earned his degree from Columbia Business School in 1996, in the early days of the Internet boom.
Back then, everyone had a business plan in his knapsack and venture capital flowed like Evian on a corporate charge card. But these are times of adjusted -- if not diminished -- expectations, especially for those young ambitious professionals who were swept up in the technology bubble of the late 1990's only to be unceremoniously disgorged a few years later.
A few like Mr. Benavidez are refusing to let go of the entrepreneurial spirit and the dream of self-made riches that fueled start-up mania.
Instead of spending billions to build a global brand, these recalibrated entrepreneurs are spending a few thousand dollars to make it big, or at least medium, in their own neighborhoods. They are opening concession stands, spas and bakeries, many with a post-millennial twist. Mr. Benavidez, for example, spent weeks searching for the perfect hot dog before settling on a hormone-free beef frank from grass-fed cattle on a California ranch.
If the Internet economy was built on vapor, these new ventures are all too real. "I buy eggs, flour and cheese and turn it into things people like and will pay more for than I did," said Assaf Tarnopolsky, 31, a Wharton School of Business graduate who is now the proud owner of two crepe stands in San Francisco, under the self-bestowed title of the West Coast Crepe King. Mr. Tarnopolsky lost his $125,000-a-year job last September when his employer went bankrupt, so he turned to an earlier love.
He had grown up eating crepes in Geneva, and as a hobby slopped batter on a hot iron at a San Francisco farmer's market on weekends. After a couple of "miserable" interviews, he said, "I decided, if it works on Saturday and Sunday, why not Monday through Friday?"
The lifestyle change has not been easy. "Despite what people think," he said, "it's more stressful and more work than my corporate job." Mr. Tarnopolsky frequently wakes up at night worrying about crepes, and he and his wife now live with "a Depression-era mentality."
"We're pinching pennies, cooking at home and not going to weddings we'd love to go to because they're too expensive."
Ari Ginsberg, director of the entrepreneurship program at New York University's Stern School of Business, says that's what it takes. Mr. Ginsberg said that in every generation of professionals there are some who seek the stability of corporate jobs and others who are driven to go it alone.
The current wave of scaled-down start-ups, Mr. Ginsberg said, is being run by "a breed of people who came of entrepreneurial age when there was a gold rush."
"They were in a fantasy world. Now we're in a back-to-basics mode," he said. "Hot dog stands are about handling real merchandise and interacting with real customers. It takes hard work and time to see results when you build a business the old-fashioned way."
Alas, few choose the old-fashioned way voluntarily. Most are like Andrew Reback, a 32-year-old M.B.A. from Boston University who was a director of product management at Excite@Home until he was laid off last Sept. 25.
Mr. Reback said he had received no severance pay and his final paycheck bounced. He liked baking, so as he looked for a job in technology, he started selling desserts like chocolate mousse cake. The technology job never materialized -- Mr. Reback said everyone in his six-unit Burlingame, Calif., apartment building is unemployed -- so he kept on baking.
Technology was all entree and no dessert, Mr. Reback said. With mousse cake, he said, "You get a sense of `It tastes good, and I like it.' I never got that at Excite."
Mr. Reback grosses only "hundreds of dollars a week," he said, not exactly New Economy wages. But he said it did not bother him.
"In the brief period of time I've been in business," he said, "I've already been more profitable than Excite@Home ever was."
And while life in technology seemed like one long strategy meeting, his current job is much simpler. "I don't need a team of M.B.A.'s to tell me what to do next," he said. "The strategy is: make more desserts."
For H. Joseph Ehrmann, a Thunderbird Business School graduate, it's soup. Mr. Ehrmann was laid off from his job at a California software company in July last year. Like many dot-com refugees, he took a monthlong soul-searching trip, to Indonesia. When he got back to San Francisco, he said, "There was a longer line at Starbucks than at any time in the boom."
Mr. Ehrmann got the picture. He needed income, he said, so he joined a friend who had recently started an organic soup business called Heartland Soups.
Where once a sales call meant driving to a mirrored glass building in Silicon Valley to pitch clients on $250,000 software packages, Mr. Ehrmann's pitches now involve handing out little plastic cups of soup to people on the street.
"People love soup," Mr. Ehrmann said. "I say I'm building a soup company and people say, `Soup -- that's cool.' It's satisfying. You're giving people something that affects them right away."
After quitting their jobs at a rapidly failing technology company in Vancouver, British Columbia, Chris Scott, 31, and Jamie McKeough, 33, spent some time in local spas and noticed "this overriding seriousness, like, `We're going to save your soul,' " Mr. Scott said. Their idea: a laid-back spa with no New Age pretense. As for music, Mr. Scott said, "No Enya."
For all the touchy-feely talk about life on five figures, there is one thing about these young professionals that has not changed. They still want to get rich.
"The way to be really successful is through ownership, not through being the 5,000th hire at a company," Mr. Tarnopolsky, the crepe maker, said.
In the middle of the dot-com boom, Mr. Tarnopolsky said he aspired to be like Sky Dayton, the prototypical dot-com whiz kid and founder of EarthLink, the second-largest Internet provider in the United States. His new heroes? Debbi Fields, who started Mrs. Fields Cookies from a counter in Palo Alto, Calif., and Howard Schultz, chairman of Starbucks.
"He successfully marketed and branded something that's been around for a long time," Mr. Tarnopolsky said. "I think the same thing can happen with crepes."
According to Po Bronson, an author who chronicled the technology boom and who profiled 75 people contemplating their careers for his upcoming book, "What Should I Do With My Life?" (Random House), for all the talk of scaling back, today's entrepreneurs have not given up entirely on the dot-com ethos.
"They come to it with the notion that the Internet may be dead but a lot of the values they believe in are the same," Mr. Bronson said. "They believe they can become an expert in something quickly, that brains might be better than experience, that most companies don't push hard enough. But the biggest is, `Life had meaning, and I was juiced when I took risk.'
"I've seen a lot people say, `I'm going to find that same thing somewhere else, maybe not in the Internet but with a hot dog stand.' "
If there's a thrill to be found in staring failure in the face, then small-business owners will have no shortage of excitement. According to the Small Business Administration, less than half of new businesses survive more than four years.
For this reason, perhaps, the budding capitalists have encountered plenty of skepticism from family and friends. Mr. Benavidez approached several business school classmates about investing in his hot dog stand, for example, and was turned down by all of them.
"They said they had got so burned investing in their friends' tech companies that they were tapped out or just too hesitant," he said.
And the new business owners aren't past having their own doubts.
"I've vacillated between thinking I was an absolute genius and the village idiot," Mr. Tarnopolsky said. "I feel a lot of pressure to succeed. This business is all wrapped up in me and my identity."
When that pressure builds, new entrepreneurs seem to fall back on the same M.B.A. training they used to fuel growth in the dot-com sector. After a few days of feeling good about his hot dog epiphany, Mr. Benavidez "went into business-school mode," he said.
He researched the margins of the hot dog market and analyzed neighborhood foot-traffic patterns, going so far as to count the number of customers going into local restaurants at certain hours.
He used unwitting friends as market testers, serving them homemade relishes and mustards at a Super Bowl party and noting their preferences.
And he dashed off a four- page business plan -- about 75 pages shorter than the average business plan he toted around during the boom -- that led to a $50,000 investment by family and friends.
Mr. Benavidez added $40,000 of his own money ("Everything I have," he said) and early next month he will open his stand on North Fifth Street and Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. He named the place after his dog: "Sparky's American Food."
"I'm going to be the one slopping chili on hot dogs and cooking burgers," Mr. Benavidez said. "The sky's the limit if we do things right. But my main goal, is, Please make this little shop work."
Most forests are cycled so that sections are cut and other sections are harvested in a continuous cycle...Sure there are times when some areas only have seedlings in them, but that is offset by the areas that have fully grown trees in them...That is the theory at least...
Slashdot Mirror
Will they also be sending letters to the US Government over the attempted suppression of the Iraqi prisoner of war abuse images?
I did...and only a small percentage are....
though there wasnt much detail in the article, I suspect it is simply going to be ie with an aol 'skin'. I suspect they dont have access to ie source code....
what is this "fill my box" segment that the comments below keep refering to?
sulu ???? I'm not sure...
I think those numbers must include the time spent reading about the virus on Slashdot, I think this is the 4th article in 2 or 3 days...
The X-43A MIB report underscores the fact that the Hyper-X launch vehicle contract was developed under the faster, better, cheaper philosophy
the rules clearly state that you may only choose 2 of the above!!
I know, I know, but by the time I had seen my error it was too late...
/. doesn't look to out of place
besides a spelling error on
I guess we know where that Robot Ballon is heading then...
not quite an accurate analogy, it would be more like modifying the calacualtor that ships in windows and then selling that...
You still need windows (or in this case an XBox) to run it...
at least I dont think anyone is selling XBox knock-offs yet
WARNING : All power supplies have capacitors in them. These components can hold an electrical charge for days even weeks. We do not recommend that anyone opens up their Power Supply unless they do know what they are doing and are willing to take responsibility for their actions.
:D While that little sticker's intact, you can go and whine at your supplier if/when it goes bang. In any case, I'm not afraid so lets get stuck in :
:) Look carefully at the bottom of the board and then double-check the top surface. You should be able to work out which joints on the base correspond to the components on the other side. All the components have three legs which makes life a little easier. I've found quite often that the heatsinks have an additional soldered connection or two to help keep them attatched to the board. Here's a couple of pics of the components and the base of the board :
:D
:/ Having soldered the above into the PSU, I quickly re-assembled the thing and here's the results (photos taken just before I replaced the outer casing) :
:D Wow, this things so goddamn quiet - I love it! There's now only the two panaflows at the front running and they're at 5v each so you can barely hear them. With the disks encased in foam, even when there's hard disk activity, my machine's still damn quiet!
DISCLAIMER : The author of this article and the owner of this page are not responsible or liable for any damage caused to any equipment or persons. In attempting what is detailed below you are taking full responsility for your actions.
A Brief Introduction
When I went about water-cooling my first PSU, I was learning as I went along so now I've had the experience, I'm in a better position to do a decent job. In this article I'll go through, step-by-step, showing you how to water-cool your PSU from scratch! I started off with a nice little QTec 550W PSU :
If you've read the first article I wrote on water-cooling your PSU (which was aimed more at inspiring people than being a step-by-step guide), you'll know that my basic plan is quite simple. Basically, it involves replacing the fans / heatsinks with plates of copper. Each plate has a copper pipe soldered to it which is where the water runs to remove the heat. We'll get to that later - for now lets look at taking this thing apart.
Disassembly
If you have any doubts, this is the time to think again. As with just about every mod on this site, the first thing to do is void your warranty
Four tiny screws later and the top should be loose. If you're doing this to a different PSU, you may find there's a fifth screw near the base - there was one on my old AOpen PSU. Here it is, guts exposed :
Now the whole point of water-cooling the thing was to make it quieter so lets go ahead and get rid of those pesky fans :
I found that Q-Tec had been very helpful and given each fan a little connector that can easily be removed. Here's what you should have after removing the noisy beasts :
Noisy though the fans are, your PSU isn't going to work for very long without some kind of cooling. At this point you should be able to see the two heatsinks we're going to replace. Attatched to the sinks, you'll see rows of components - these are the really hot bits in your PSU and it's these that we'll be cooling. Now if we're going to replace the heatsinks with our water-cooled plates we need access to said components. There's two steps to this. First we need to remove the four screws that hold the main board of the PSU :
Next we need to remove the little board that attatches to the connector where you plug your PSU into the wall. If you don't do this, you'll have to bend the back of the PSU to get the board out!
Okay, all being well, you should have a fully disassembled unit :
The next step is a little more tricky. We need to get those heatsinks off those components but unfortunately, you won't be able to get to the screws that hold them on. So what do we do? Un-solder them of course
Right, lets get the first heatsink off :
With a little more de-soldering, here's the second one removed as well :
Removing the components and attatching them to the new water-cooled plates is a doddle. Just remember two points when doing this :
1) Whatever you do, DON'T FORGET what order the components went in - it could be disastrous if you got them mixed up!
2) Be careful when re-attatching, not to leave out the Mica shims (the grey pads). These stop you getting mains voltages going through the heatsink or water-block so they're pretty goddamn important!
Here you can see them attatched to the water-block I made :
If you're wondering how to get the holes on your block in just the right place, do what I did and use the heatsink you took off earlier as a template
Re-assembling the beast
The next step is to re-attatch the components to the board :
Now I run an XP in my machine and I have no intention of moving to Intel so the P4 connector's just taking up space in my machine. The same is true of the old ATX connector so I got rid of 'em :
Next it's time to implement a very handy bit of kit which makes water-cooling a little safer and easier. When you turn on your machine you don't want to have to remember to turn your pump on - if you forget, your liable to burn your chip! So what can you do to get around this? The answers simple - a 12v relay. Basically, when the computer starts, the 12v line coming out of the PC goes from 0 to 12v which closes the relay, starting the pump. I also find it useful to have an overide switch so you can pulse the pump on and off (to get rid of any trapped air in the system). Here's a quick diagram of the way my circuit works :
Apologies for my poor photochop skillz
And finally, here you can see it installed as I wait for the system to bleed :
Time for some tea and biccies! Well, I tentatively flicked the switch and as I cringed, waiting for a loud bang followed by fireworks, my machine quietly booted
"The most significant victory is that the law has been upheld," Reid said. "The law allows people themselves to take spam cases to court."
lets hope more people take advantage of this...
the site seems to be slashdotted now (is this happening more frequently than it used to?)
but here are plans to build your own fog/smoke machine http://www.juggling.org/help/misc/fog.html
if only I could moderate the guys doing this...a browser that only browses, small, lean and fast. Such a great idea...(+5 sensible)
All the Court Orders have been issued before hearing a single word from the company
remind me not to have legal problems in Hong Kong
specs and pics
here are details on the construction of one of the cases featured on the now slashdotted site...
Other than bragging rights what difference does the reduced amount of colours make?
I presume people are not purchasing these to watch movies
I think it will be interesting to see how many people ask for the refund...
I dont know why the Virus alert has appeared?? It is an exact copy from the orginal site...
...is here
site looks a bit sketchy already, so here you go:
Cached Version
Warchalking PDF
A handy businesscard sized description of the marks and thier uses...
On a cold weekday afternoon last January, 34- year-old Brian Benavidez plopped down with his girlfriend on a big white shabby-chic sofa in his loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to watch a documentary about hot dogs. Mr. Benavidez, an M.B.A. and former investment banker, had been out of work since October, when he was laid off from his six-figure job at Bolt, a Manhattan Internet company.
After a couple months of reading and sleeping until noon, he had begun to interview for jobs, but things weren't looking so good. Mr. Benavidez described himself as "just professionally depressed."
But something about that hot dog documentary caught his attention.
"I noticed that everybody who was being interviewed was happy," Mr. Benavidez said. "The people who worked behind the counters, the owners, the customers, they were all smiling. I told my girlfriend, `I want to make people that happy.' "
A few hours later, Mr. Benavidez said, he had an epiphany: "I'll do hot dogs."
Selling hot dogs and cheese fries was hardly the career Mr. Benavidez imagined for himself when he earned his degree from Columbia Business School in 1996, in the early days of the Internet boom.
Back then, everyone had a business plan in his knapsack and venture capital flowed like Evian on a corporate charge card. But these are times of adjusted -- if not diminished -- expectations, especially for those young ambitious professionals who were swept up in the technology bubble of the late 1990's only to be unceremoniously disgorged a few years later.
A few like Mr. Benavidez are refusing to let go of the entrepreneurial spirit and the dream of self-made riches that fueled start-up mania.
Instead of spending billions to build a global brand, these recalibrated entrepreneurs are spending a few thousand dollars to make it big, or at least medium, in their own neighborhoods. They are opening concession stands, spas and bakeries, many with a post-millennial twist. Mr. Benavidez, for example, spent weeks searching for the perfect hot dog before settling on a hormone-free beef frank from grass-fed cattle on a California ranch.
If the Internet economy was built on vapor, these new ventures are all too real. "I buy eggs, flour and cheese and turn it into things people like and will pay more for than I did," said Assaf Tarnopolsky, 31, a Wharton School of Business graduate who is now the proud owner of two crepe stands in San Francisco, under the self-bestowed title of the West Coast Crepe King. Mr. Tarnopolsky lost his $125,000-a-year job last September when his employer went bankrupt, so he turned to an earlier love.
He had grown up eating crepes in Geneva, and as a hobby slopped batter on a hot iron at a San Francisco farmer's market on weekends. After a couple of "miserable" interviews, he said, "I decided, if it works on Saturday and Sunday, why not Monday through Friday?"
The lifestyle change has not been easy. "Despite what people think," he said, "it's more stressful and more work than my corporate job." Mr. Tarnopolsky frequently wakes up at night worrying about crepes, and he and his wife now live with "a Depression-era mentality."
"We're pinching pennies, cooking at home and not going to weddings we'd love to go to because they're too expensive."
Ari Ginsberg, director of the entrepreneurship program at New York University's Stern School of Business, says that's what it takes. Mr. Ginsberg said that in every generation of professionals there are some who seek the stability of corporate jobs and others who are driven to go it alone.
The current wave of scaled-down start-ups, Mr. Ginsberg said, is being run by "a breed of people who came of entrepreneurial age when there was a gold rush."
"They were in a fantasy world. Now we're in a back-to-basics mode," he said. "Hot dog stands are about handling real merchandise and interacting with real customers. It takes hard work and time to see results when you build a business the old-fashioned way."
Alas, few choose the old-fashioned way voluntarily. Most are like Andrew Reback, a 32-year-old M.B.A. from Boston University who was a director of product management at Excite@Home until he was laid off last Sept. 25.
Mr. Reback said he had received no severance pay and his final paycheck bounced. He liked baking, so as he looked for a job in technology, he started selling desserts like chocolate mousse cake. The technology job never materialized -- Mr. Reback said everyone in his six-unit Burlingame, Calif., apartment building is unemployed -- so he kept on baking.
Technology was all entree and no dessert, Mr. Reback said. With mousse cake, he said, "You get a sense of `It tastes good, and I like it.' I never got that at Excite."
Mr. Reback grosses only "hundreds of dollars a week," he said, not exactly New Economy wages. But he said it did not bother him.
"In the brief period of time I've been in business," he said, "I've already been more profitable than Excite@Home ever was."
And while life in technology seemed like one long strategy meeting, his current job is much simpler. "I don't need a team of M.B.A.'s to tell me what to do next," he said. "The strategy is: make more desserts."
For H. Joseph Ehrmann, a Thunderbird Business School graduate, it's soup. Mr. Ehrmann was laid off from his job at a California software company in July last year. Like many dot-com refugees, he took a monthlong soul-searching trip, to Indonesia. When he got back to San Francisco, he said, "There was a longer line at Starbucks than at any time in the boom."
Mr. Ehrmann got the picture. He needed income, he said, so he joined a friend who had recently started an organic soup business called Heartland Soups.
Where once a sales call meant driving to a mirrored glass building in Silicon Valley to pitch clients on $250,000 software packages, Mr. Ehrmann's pitches now involve handing out little plastic cups of soup to people on the street.
"People love soup," Mr. Ehrmann said. "I say I'm building a soup company and people say, `Soup -- that's cool.' It's satisfying. You're giving people something that affects them right away."
After quitting their jobs at a rapidly failing technology company in Vancouver, British Columbia, Chris Scott, 31, and Jamie McKeough, 33, spent some time in local spas and noticed "this overriding seriousness, like, `We're going to save your soul,' " Mr. Scott said. Their idea: a laid-back spa with no New Age pretense. As for music, Mr. Scott said, "No Enya."
For all the touchy-feely talk about life on five figures, there is one thing about these young professionals that has not changed. They still want to get rich.
"The way to be really successful is through ownership, not through being the 5,000th hire at a company," Mr. Tarnopolsky, the crepe maker, said.
In the middle of the dot-com boom, Mr. Tarnopolsky said he aspired to be like Sky Dayton, the prototypical dot-com whiz kid and founder of EarthLink, the second-largest Internet provider in the United States. His new heroes? Debbi Fields, who started Mrs. Fields Cookies from a counter in Palo Alto, Calif., and Howard Schultz, chairman of Starbucks.
"He successfully marketed and branded something that's been around for a long time," Mr. Tarnopolsky said. "I think the same thing can happen with crepes."
According to Po Bronson, an author who chronicled the technology boom and who profiled 75 people contemplating their careers for his upcoming book, "What Should I Do With My Life?" (Random House), for all the talk of scaling back, today's entrepreneurs have not given up entirely on the dot-com ethos.
"They come to it with the notion that the Internet may be dead but a lot of the values they believe in are the same," Mr. Bronson said. "They believe they can become an expert in something quickly, that brains might be better than experience, that most companies don't push hard enough. But the biggest is, `Life had meaning, and I was juiced when I took risk.'
"I've seen a lot people say, `I'm going to find that same thing somewhere else, maybe not in the Internet but with a hot dog stand.' "
If there's a thrill to be found in staring failure in the face, then small-business owners will have no shortage of excitement. According to the Small Business Administration, less than half of new businesses survive more than four years.
For this reason, perhaps, the budding capitalists have encountered plenty of skepticism from family and friends. Mr. Benavidez approached several business school classmates about investing in his hot dog stand, for example, and was turned down by all of them.
"They said they had got so burned investing in their friends' tech companies that they were tapped out or just too hesitant," he said.
And the new business owners aren't past having their own doubts.
"I've vacillated between thinking I was an absolute genius and the village idiot," Mr. Tarnopolsky said. "I feel a lot of pressure to succeed. This business is all wrapped up in me and my identity."
When that pressure builds, new entrepreneurs seem to fall back on the same M.B.A. training they used to fuel growth in the dot-com sector. After a few days of feeling good about his hot dog epiphany, Mr. Benavidez "went into business-school mode," he said.
He researched the margins of the hot dog market and analyzed neighborhood foot-traffic patterns, going so far as to count the number of customers going into local restaurants at certain hours.
He used unwitting friends as market testers, serving them homemade relishes and mustards at a Super Bowl party and noting their preferences.
And he dashed off a four- page business plan -- about 75 pages shorter than the average business plan he toted around during the boom -- that led to a $50,000 investment by family and friends.
Mr. Benavidez added $40,000 of his own money ("Everything I have," he said) and early next month he will open his stand on North Fifth Street and Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. He named the place after his dog: "Sparky's American Food."
"I'm going to be the one slopping chili on hot dogs and cooking burgers," Mr. Benavidez said. "The sky's the limit if we do things right. But my main goal, is, Please make this little shop work."
Perhaps you have an old 8 bit system in a closet?
If you do (and its complete with games) this would make it legal for you to download an emulator with the rom (disk) images
definitly the way I'd go anyway...
Most forests are cycled so that sections are cut and other sections are harvested in a continuous cycle...Sure there are times when some areas only have seedlings in them, but that is offset by the areas that have fully grown trees in them...That is the theory at least...