Back in the day companies gave away reference designs for their new components, and companies often simply added software to these reference designs to specialize their products. The Tandy Color Computer was a chip-for-chip reference design created by Motorola. The Colecovision was a chip-for-chip reference design from Texas Instruments. These reference designs were zero-cost, modifiable and distributable.
How much different is a freely-distributable reference design schematic with open source DL? It isn't if you think of the chip as a circuit board in miniature and the OSS HDL as a code for a schematic. Of course, that users of the unprogrammed chips have to do the reference design themselves, rather than receiving it gratis from the manufacturers is beyond me...
Oh yeah, I forgot: monetize what was once free or stockholders get angry.
You seem to forget that back in the day, getting a PCB made for these products was a significant expense. Free (as in beer) schematic and PCB layout tools did not exist -- in fact, PCBs were designed by hand using rubylith. There were no quick-turn PCBs fabs like Advanced Circuits who'd take Gerbers and send back a handful of boards for $10 each in three days.
So while the electronics design was basically from the chip vendors, there was still a significant effort and expense in packaging. Don't forget that the product still needed a power supply and an enclosure!
Well evidently someone's making money. Otherwise, we wouldn't have a story to comment on...
The other side to this story is that the open-source hardware which is the basis of this story is little more than gadgetry. They are not products, they are just for a tiny hacker market who like shiny things they can play with.
Besides, why buy an Arduino board when I can buy a Silicon Labs development board for less money and get more features?
By making your hardware more accessible, you are increasing your product's value for your users.
Of course, this works better if you only expect revenue from the sale of hardware units and don't rely heavily on revenue from providing some form of subscription service or software sales.
I believe this is a good thing. Hardware *should* be open. I long for the old days when we could come up with new ways to use our bare hardware.
The vast majority of users of consumer electronics DO NOT CARE about hacking the products they buy. Not at all. They just want the devices to work as indicated on the tin. Remember for every geek who wants to hack an iPod, there's a million people who just want to play songs. The open-hardware "market" is insignificant.
Open source improves this not by "forcing" manufacturers to be open, but by lowering the production costs and lessens the need to offset very large initial investments during the production run with secondary revenue streams.
Adding the capability for user programming increases costs. Using user-modifiable parts, which one might take to mean that instead of the smallest possible SMT, the design is implemented using larger SMT or worse, through-hole devices, increases costs. Most modern parts aren't even available in THT, so that's a non-starter. Larger PCBs are more expensive than smaller. Larger PCBs mean a larger, more expensive enclosure. I don't see at all how production costs could at all be reduced by opening the hardware design.
Finally, allowing for an "open hardware" model means that the manufacturer warranties are basically pointless. The vendor response really can't be anything more than, "you bricked it, tough shit." How is a manufacturer supposed to figure out what hacks you did broke your product? At best, they'll offer to replace your gizmo with a factory second or a refurb, for 10% off list.
I'm not sure anyone is disputing if Verilog or VHDL would be source code but you still need CAD files of the actual board etch patterns and all the other physical parts which are not generally worked with as code. I think the point Hognoxious is making is that why keep calling everything 'source' to force it under the known term 'open source'? Just call it what it is, 'open hardware design' or whatever other term you want to apply the word 'open' to. I'm not sure about the marmalade recipe though, that might be plausible to fit under source code as it might class as a type of script...
Some of the "open source hardware" folks think that releasing a tarball of poorly-designed/documented VHDL, a PDF of a schematic and some Gerber plots is good enough. Of course you also need a bill-of-materials, a way of getting boards built (expensive) and stuffed (expensive).
(Yes, I've looked at a lot of the open-source hardware, especially on opencores.org, and the majority of it is not ready for production use. Sorry. Lots of the code is of first-year student quality and the documentation and design support are worthless.)
This whole open-source/DIY/"Kit" idea is nothing new -- remember Heathkit?.
Most hardver is specified using Verilog or VHDL, so there isn't such big difference between hardware and software.
'cept you've got to put the result of synthesis/fitting into an FPGA, and that FPGA needs to go on a PCB, and you need a power supply, and the other things that make the design interesting (display, user interface, enclosure, etc). Oh, and you've got to get PCBs fabbed and stuffed, which means a significant upfront expense, something that software folks don't have to consider.
Oh, yeah, if there's a bug in that PCB artwork, or even in the FPGA design, once it's in the customer's hands, fixes are difficult and expensive. It's not like you can just download a patch that requires a hardware change.
Other than that, sure, hardware design certainly benefits from some software-development tools and methodologies (source-code control being the most important).
The driver situation has gotten much worse over the years. It used to be the case the HP Printer == PCL. Now they sell lots of "WinPrinters" that follow no particular standard.
And they don't support anything for more than a year. Got a three-year-old, perfectly good printer? And your new computer has OS X 10.6 or Win7? You're outta luck.
Back when I was a photo assistant a roll of medium format film (transparency) cost about $29, including the cost of getting it processed professionally, not down at the drugstore. So, being a bit lazy I'll figure $35 a roll now, which means that $14K can buy you about 400 rolls of film. To a pro photographer that is not a lot of film. The digital will pay for itself fairly quickly.
The one professional lab in Tucson charges $7 to process a roll of 120 E6. They charge $3.50 a roll of 120 C41. 5x5 machine prints are 75 cents each.
Hi-res drum scans are very expensive.
As an example, let's say a car manufacturer sells two variations of the same car, one with 100 horse powers, and the other with 200 horse powers, for different prices. Which is Ok, you get different things, you pay different amounts. Now the manufacturer finds a way to change the horse power of its engine using software. They can still offer the same two car variants, but you are saying they shouldn't be allowed to do that. What justification do you have for that except your own personal greed?
This is nothing new. A lot of professional software is sold using this sort of tiered approach.
For instance, some PCB layout packages let you buy a cheap version that is limited to two layers, a certain board size and perhaps only a hundred pins. Pay them some more money and now you can do 4 layers and a larger board size and more pins. Pay them even more money and you can do 32 routing layers and unlimited board size and pin count.
Or consider VHDL simulation software. You can use the free version which is speed limited and has a limit to the number of lines of code before it becomes unusable. Pay some money and the lines-of-code limit is removed (but it's still slow). Pay more money for the "personal edition" and it's faster. Pay even more money and it's faster yet, plus you can do mixed-language simulation with more advanced features.
In all of these cases, you download and install the software once and if you want the extra features you pay more money and get a license which unlocks those feature. The advanced features are always there, just not available unless you pay. And in many cases, the lower-cost versions are sufficient. So in this manner, the vendor makes money by appealing to all levels of the market.
Hell, even Quicken works like this. The basic version of Quicken has a bunch of features. The Deluxe version, for a few dollars more, allows you to use other features. "Upgrading" is as simple as giving Intuit a credit card number which unlocks those features in your current install.
The iPhone and iPod, however, have always been very locked-down devices. They didn't allow any third-party code on the iPod until the fifth generation, and then only from a few companies. The iPhone allows third-party code, but with a lot of restrictions.
The problem seems to be that Apple makes a strong distinction between computers and consumer electronics devices, while to the rest of us they are just computers and less-powerful computers.
The only people who think that the iPhone is a "less-powerful computer" are Slashdot readers. The average person thinks it's a phone, and really doesn't care about any of the issues Slashdot readers care about.
This is always why Slashdot folks are underwhelmed by the iPad because they wanted a tablet computer. Which is it most certainly is not -- it's a content-delivery device.
Apple is not preventing, nor can they legally prevent, developers from developing apps for their own iPhones or other people's iPhones. This is why there are many apps available for so called "jailbroken" iPhones.
Developing apps in this manner waives your rights in any other contracts with Apple regarding the phone. Such as the warranty.
That is using the law to prevent people from doing what they want with their own property.
Sorry, but you're completely wrong; the law has nothing to do with this.
Most electronic products have little stickers on them that say, "Warranty void if sticker removed." This is because manufacturers don't want to fix, for free under warranty, equipment that has been damaged by a smarty-pants user trying to "mod" the product, only to damage it in the process.
Similarly, Apple has no interest in repairing, under warranty for free, a product which has been modified. And their warranty states this clearly.
If you don't care about the warranty, or you simply wait until it expires, you are free to modify the product in any way you see fit. Apple cannot prevent this, nor can any other manufacturer.
That's like saying don't develop your games for Windows and allowing Microsoft to set a lot of restrictions and control over it. There's little next to nothing more options. It still doesn't mean that big corporations should be allowed to fuck over the small guys and put them into some asshole contract.
Or, better, don't develop a PCIe card that you would like to sell to Windows users. Windows 7 only allows signed drivers, and the only way to get a signed driver is to pay Microsoft a lot of money.
Perhaps. I was disappointed too in the things he has done since gaining office. But can you imagine what the other lizard er McCain would have done if he got elected? Man you people had no choice.
Had McCain been elected we would be fighting "insurgents" in Iran as well as Iraq and Afghanistan.
he has never run even so much as a convenience store
I realize this is really only intended as empty rhetoric but, come on. Here are a few things Obama has run, for everyone's information:
The Harvard law Review
Chicago's Developing Communities Project (DCP)
Illinois's Project Vote
Chicago Annenberg Challenge
Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services
U.S. Senate's subcommittee on European Affairs
Now, I realize that it is at least arguable that none of these provide the leadership experience required to be an effective president. You probably would like to have seen a former governor/mayor/head of a large agency. I don't think that sort of experience is strictly necessary, but I see how reasonable people could disagree. (Though, if I may ask, what leadership experience does John McCain have that qualifies him in your eyes? Is it just length of service in the Senate?)
But to say that Obama has not run so much as a convenience store is just totally false and it smacks of an either mean spirited (or, at best, willfully ignorant) parroting of the popular right-wing line that Obama is somehow a lightweight.
And let's remember that this experience was a LOT more relevant than George W Bush's term as Governor of Texas. Texas has a constitutionally weak governor.
Step one for the GOP is to toss out the evangelicals. Even Nixon warned about mixing politcis and religion. When freaking *Nixon* finds your plans lacking, you might want to run a reassessment. Most who have analyzed the situation feel they'd gain far more than they lost.
Absolutely. If your belief in some mystical imaginary higher power is the most important thing in your life, you are unqualified for public office. Quite frankly, I'm amazed that evangelicals remember to breathe.
The Republican party lost it's spine a long time ago and have splintered into many factions. Effectively, the party was dead even before the 2000 elections and since then has been without leadership.
True, it's splintered into factions (Teabaggers vs business conservatives vs religious wackos) but in the current Congress it has been remarkably unified. It says "No!" to everything. Of course, it's easy to be the minority opposition. You don't have to have any ideas on how to solve problems and move the country forward. (As an example of what happens when Republicans are fully in power, look to Arizona. Here the Republicans remain unified and committed to "No!" Our state is on beyond fucked.)
The Democratic party however, has been very unified but has been rotting from the core since the days of JFK. Now, it too is crumbling apart with rampant thuggery and corruption.
What Democratic party are you talking about? In what bizarro world is it unified? Asshats like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln seem to want to be all "mavericky" like that idiot McCain and his boyfriend Joe Lieberman, so any notion of party unity is a pipe dream. As for "rotting at the core," this happens as the Blue Dogs triangulate and try to have it all ways instead of having any principles.
If I steal a beer, the store is deprived of a beer which they paid for and could otherwise sell. If I "steal" a video game the people selling the game are deprived of exactly nothing (except the money from my purchase, and not even that assuming I would rather have nothing than pay for their game).
No, that's wrong. In either case, you are depriving the store and the manufacturer of income that results from the sale.
If the manufacturers and the resellers don't get paid, then they can't continue to develop products.
Wow, between this resolution and one state legislator's proposal to eliminate 12th grade, these idiots make even Arizona look like a bastion of scholarship.
What is with the need for a docking station? Seriously, I don't get it. And I have both a ThinkPad (now mostly retired) and an MBP and I've never felt the need to plug either into a docking station.
I shlep the MBP to work, and I plug in one USB cable which connects to a keyboard (the mouse connects to the keyboard's hub), the Ethernet cable and the power supply. When it's time to go home, I unplug. At home, I do the same thing (I have two power supplies).
I used to do the same thing with the ThinkPad, 'cept I shlepped the power supply because I only had one.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the day companies gave away reference designs for their new components, and companies often simply added software to these reference designs to specialize their products. The Tandy Color Computer was a chip-for-chip reference design created by Motorola. The Colecovision was a chip-for-chip reference design from Texas Instruments. These reference designs were zero-cost, modifiable and distributable.
How much different is a freely-distributable reference design schematic with open source DL? It isn't if you think of the chip as a circuit board in miniature and the OSS HDL as a code for a schematic. Of course, that users of the unprogrammed chips have to do the reference design themselves, rather than receiving it gratis from the manufacturers is beyond me...
Oh yeah, I forgot: monetize what was once free or stockholders get angry.
You seem to forget that back in the day, getting a PCB made for these products was a significant expense. Free (as in beer) schematic and PCB layout tools did not exist -- in fact, PCBs were designed by hand using rubylith. There were no quick-turn PCBs fabs like Advanced Circuits who'd take Gerbers and send back a handful of boards for $10 each in three days.
So while the electronics design was basically from the chip vendors, there was still a significant effort and expense in packaging. Don't forget that the product still needed a power supply and an enclosure!
Well evidently someone's making money. Otherwise, we wouldn't have a story to comment on...
The other side to this story is that the open-source hardware which is the basis of this story is little more than gadgetry. They are not products, they are just for a tiny hacker market who like shiny things they can play with.
Besides, why buy an Arduino board when I can buy a Silicon Labs development board for less money and get more features?
By making your hardware more accessible, you are increasing your product's value for your users.
Of course, this works better if you only expect revenue from the sale of hardware units and don't rely heavily on revenue from providing some form of subscription service or software sales.
I believe this is a good thing. Hardware *should* be open. I long for the old days when we could come up with new ways to use our bare hardware.
The vast majority of users of consumer electronics DO NOT CARE about hacking the products they buy. Not at all. They just want the devices to work as indicated on the tin. Remember for every geek who wants to hack an iPod, there's a million people who just want to play songs. The open-hardware "market" is insignificant.
Open source improves this not by "forcing" manufacturers to be open, but by lowering the production costs and lessens the need to offset very large initial investments during the production run with secondary revenue streams.
Adding the capability for user programming increases costs. Using user-modifiable parts, which one might take to mean that instead of the smallest possible SMT, the design is implemented using larger SMT or worse, through-hole devices, increases costs. Most modern parts aren't even available in THT, so that's a non-starter. Larger PCBs are more expensive than smaller. Larger PCBs mean a larger, more expensive enclosure. I don't see at all how production costs could at all be reduced by opening the hardware design.
Finally, allowing for an "open hardware" model means that the manufacturer warranties are basically pointless. The vendor response really can't be anything more than, "you bricked it, tough shit." How is a manufacturer supposed to figure out what hacks you did broke your product? At best, they'll offer to replace your gizmo with a factory second or a refurb, for 10% off list.
and how much did AMD or Intel make in their early years? Opensource hardware is relativity new.
The term is new. The idea of selling a user-built and modifiable kit is nothing new. Remember Heathkit?
I'm not sure anyone is disputing if Verilog or VHDL would be source code but you still need CAD files of the actual board etch patterns and all the other physical parts which are not generally worked with as code. I think the point Hognoxious is making is that why keep calling everything 'source' to force it under the known term 'open source'? Just call it what it is, 'open hardware design' or whatever other term you want to apply the word 'open' to. I'm not sure about the marmalade recipe though, that might be plausible to fit under source code as it might class as a type of script...
Some of the "open source hardware" folks think that releasing a tarball of poorly-designed/documented VHDL, a PDF of a schematic and some Gerber plots is good enough. Of course you also need a bill-of-materials, a way of getting boards built (expensive) and stuffed (expensive).
(Yes, I've looked at a lot of the open-source hardware, especially on opencores.org, and the majority of it is not ready for production use. Sorry. Lots of the code is of first-year student quality and the documentation and design support are worthless.)
This whole open-source/DIY/"Kit" idea is nothing new -- remember Heathkit?.
Most hardver is specified using Verilog or VHDL, so there isn't such big difference between hardware and software.
'cept you've got to put the result of synthesis/fitting into an FPGA, and that FPGA needs to go on a PCB, and you need a power supply, and the other things that make the design interesting (display, user interface, enclosure, etc). Oh, and you've got to get PCBs fabbed and stuffed, which means a significant upfront expense, something that software folks don't have to consider.
Oh, yeah, if there's a bug in that PCB artwork, or even in the FPGA design, once it's in the customer's hands, fixes are difficult and expensive. It's not like you can just download a patch that requires a hardware change.
Other than that, sure, hardware design certainly benefits from some software-development tools and methodologies (source-code control being the most important).
The driver situation has gotten much worse over the years. It used to be the case the HP Printer == PCL. Now they sell lots of "WinPrinters" that follow no particular standard.
And they don't support anything for more than a year. Got a three-year-old, perfectly good printer? And your new computer has OS X 10.6 or Win7? You're outta luck.
Back when I was a photo assistant a roll of medium format film (transparency) cost about $29, including the cost of getting it processed professionally, not down at the drugstore. So, being a bit lazy I'll figure $35 a roll now, which means that $14K can buy you about 400 rolls of film. To a pro photographer that is not a lot of film. The digital will pay for itself fairly quickly.
The one professional lab in Tucson charges $7 to process a roll of 120 E6. They charge $3.50 a roll of 120 C41. 5x5 machine prints are 75 cents each. Hi-res drum scans are very expensive.
That's technically four letters, or one acronym. </pedant>
Actually, it's an initialism, not an acronym.
Yea but the Christians rarely follow through with their death threats.
Tim McVeigh.
Scott Roeder.
As an example, let's say a car manufacturer sells two variations of the same car, one with 100 horse powers, and the other with 200 horse powers, for different prices. Which is Ok, you get different things, you pay different amounts. Now the manufacturer finds a way to change the horse power of its engine using software. They can still offer the same two car variants, but you are saying they shouldn't be allowed to do that. What justification do you have for that except your own personal greed?
This is nothing new. A lot of professional software is sold using this sort of tiered approach.
For instance, some PCB layout packages let you buy a cheap version that is limited to two layers, a certain board size and perhaps only a hundred pins. Pay them some more money and now you can do 4 layers and a larger board size and more pins. Pay them even more money and you can do 32 routing layers and unlimited board size and pin count.
Or consider VHDL simulation software. You can use the free version which is speed limited and has a limit to the number of lines of code before it becomes unusable. Pay some money and the lines-of-code limit is removed (but it's still slow). Pay more money for the "personal edition" and it's faster. Pay even more money and it's faster yet, plus you can do mixed-language simulation with more advanced features.
In all of these cases, you download and install the software once and if you want the extra features you pay more money and get a license which unlocks those feature. The advanced features are always there, just not available unless you pay. And in many cases, the lower-cost versions are sufficient. So in this manner, the vendor makes money by appealing to all levels of the market.
Hell, even Quicken works like this. The basic version of Quicken has a bunch of features. The Deluxe version, for a few dollars more, allows you to use other features. "Upgrading" is as simple as giving Intuit a credit card number which unlocks those features in your current install.
Independence Day 2: The Heretic.
Independence Day 3D
Independence Day 2: Electric Boogaloo
Thank you!! (wish I had mod points)
Even if they did, Microsoft doesn't tell you you can only run their development tools on Windows.
Do Windows development tools run on another platform?
The iPhone and iPod, however, have always been very locked-down devices. They didn't allow any third-party code on the iPod until the fifth generation, and then only from a few companies. The iPhone allows third-party code, but with a lot of restrictions.
The problem seems to be that Apple makes a strong distinction between computers and consumer electronics devices, while to the rest of us they are just computers and less-powerful computers.
The only people who think that the iPhone is a "less-powerful computer" are Slashdot readers. The average person thinks it's a phone, and really doesn't care about any of the issues Slashdot readers care about.
This is always why Slashdot folks are underwhelmed by the iPad because they wanted a tablet computer. Which is it most certainly is not -- it's a content-delivery device.
Apple is not preventing, nor can they legally prevent, developers from developing apps for their own iPhones or other people's iPhones. This is why there are many apps available for so called "jailbroken" iPhones.
Developing apps in this manner waives your rights in any other contracts with Apple regarding the phone. Such as the warranty. That is using the law to prevent people from doing what they want with their own property.
Sorry, but you're completely wrong; the law has nothing to do with this.
Most electronic products have little stickers on them that say, "Warranty void if sticker removed." This is because manufacturers don't want to fix, for free under warranty, equipment that has been damaged by a smarty-pants user trying to "mod" the product, only to damage it in the process.
Similarly, Apple has no interest in repairing, under warranty for free, a product which has been modified. And their warranty states this clearly.
If you don't care about the warranty, or you simply wait until it expires, you are free to modify the product in any way you see fit. Apple cannot prevent this, nor can any other manufacturer.
That's like saying don't develop your games for Windows and allowing Microsoft to set a lot of restrictions and control over it. There's little next to nothing more options. It still doesn't mean that big corporations should be allowed to fuck over the small guys and put them into some asshole contract.
Or, better, don't develop a PCIe card that you would like to sell to Windows users. Windows 7 only allows signed drivers, and the only way to get a signed driver is to pay Microsoft a lot of money.
Perhaps. I was disappointed too in the things he has done since gaining office. But can you imagine what the other lizard er McCain would have done if he got elected? Man you people had no choice.
Had McCain been elected we would be fighting "insurgents" in Iran as well as Iraq and Afghanistan.
he has never run even so much as a convenience store
I realize this is really only intended as empty rhetoric but, come on. Here are a few things Obama has run, for everyone's information:
The Harvard law Review Chicago's Developing Communities Project (DCP) Illinois's Project Vote Chicago Annenberg Challenge Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services U.S. Senate's subcommittee on European Affairs
Now, I realize that it is at least arguable that none of these provide the leadership experience required to be an effective president. You probably would like to have seen a former governor/mayor/head of a large agency. I don't think that sort of experience is strictly necessary, but I see how reasonable people could disagree. (Though, if I may ask, what leadership experience does John McCain have that qualifies him in your eyes? Is it just length of service in the Senate?)
But to say that Obama has not run so much as a convenience store is just totally false and it smacks of an either mean spirited (or, at best, willfully ignorant) parroting of the popular right-wing line that Obama is somehow a lightweight.
And let's remember that this experience was a LOT more relevant than George W Bush's term as Governor of Texas. Texas has a constitutionally weak governor.
Step one for the GOP is to toss out the evangelicals. Even Nixon warned about mixing politcis and religion. When freaking *Nixon* finds your plans lacking, you might want to run a reassessment. Most who have analyzed the situation feel they'd gain far more than they lost.
Absolutely. If your belief in some mystical imaginary higher power is the most important thing in your life, you are unqualified for public office. Quite frankly, I'm amazed that evangelicals remember to breathe.
Not surprised.
The Republican party lost it's spine a long time ago and have splintered into many factions. Effectively, the party was dead even before the 2000 elections and since then has been without leadership.
True, it's splintered into factions (Teabaggers vs business conservatives vs religious wackos) but in the current Congress it has been remarkably unified. It says "No!" to everything. Of course, it's easy to be the minority opposition. You don't have to have any ideas on how to solve problems and move the country forward. (As an example of what happens when Republicans are fully in power, look to Arizona. Here the Republicans remain unified and committed to "No!" Our state is on beyond fucked.)
The Democratic party however, has been very unified but has been rotting from the core since the days of JFK. Now, it too is crumbling apart with rampant thuggery and corruption.
What Democratic party are you talking about? In what bizarro world is it unified? Asshats like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln seem to want to be all "mavericky" like that idiot McCain and his boyfriend Joe Lieberman, so any notion of party unity is a pipe dream. As for "rotting at the core," this happens as the Blue Dogs triangulate and try to have it all ways instead of having any principles.
If I steal a beer, the store is deprived of a beer which they paid for and could otherwise sell. If I "steal" a video game the people selling the game are deprived of exactly nothing (except the money from my purchase, and not even that assuming I would rather have nothing than pay for their game).
No, that's wrong. In either case, you are depriving the store and the manufacturer of income that results from the sale.
If the manufacturers and the resellers don't get paid, then they can't continue to develop products.
Wow, between this resolution and one state legislator's proposal to eliminate 12th grade, these idiots make even Arizona look like a bastion of scholarship.
What is with the need for a docking station? Seriously, I don't get it. And I have both a ThinkPad (now mostly retired) and an MBP and I've never felt the need to plug either into a docking station.
I shlep the MBP to work, and I plug in one USB cable which connects to a keyboard (the mouse connects to the keyboard's hub), the Ethernet cable and the power supply. When it's time to go home, I unplug. At home, I do the same thing (I have two power supplies).
I used to do the same thing with the ThinkPad, 'cept I shlepped the power supply because I only had one.
I really don't get the docking station thing.
When you buy a Mac, you don't own squat, *except for* a SATA hard disk and a few empty PCIe slots, except for a round, shiny disk and some cardboard.
And this differs how from a Windows system, or even a Linux system?