I tend to pick up some great steel single post racks (AKA "relay racks") from TV stations as they tend to be used for shipping racks when they get new equipment. Find the local TV transmitter location and befriend an engineer. I have been picking them up for free.
If you are interested in "enclosed" or "standard" racks, then check out old radio or TV broadcast sites that are upgrading their facilities. I have gotten some classic RCA racks (with the "meatball" logo") that way.
Second lowest cost option is flea markets. In SF we have some great HAM and general electronics flea markets such as the Foothill Flea Market at Foothill Jr. College in Los Altos. Livermore has the "Livermore Swap meet" where computer and HAM stuff abound. At both events you will find racks.
Before you purchase a rack you need to inspect that the screw holes are not stripped. This will ussally happen more often with aluminum racks (ie. Chatsworth) and less often with steel. If it has been repainted then it is likely that the holes will need to be cleaned out as paint will make it a problem to thread screws in. Also there once was a standard for screws (10-32) but that seems to have gone by the wayside. Don't just assume that all racks will accept 10-32 screws.
When I was checking out putting real estate info on CDROM back in the early 80's I ran up against many of the city/county asessor's offices that had made a deal with one paticular company that they alone would have sole right to microfiche the books. No other company could come in and reproduce the books. As we were a small startup this hit us big time and stopped us right there from going further. If you wanted the data of real estate transactions you could get it on 1200 bpi 9 track tape for any where from $2K to $20K per tape. Sheesh.
I had thought that information that was gather via public taxes and fees should be availible to the public for no additional cost. Boy were we naive.
Denise Caruso has been pointing this out in her NY Times column "DIGITAL COMMERCE" for several months now. Her latest "Internet Economy Grows on Plans, Not Products" of October 25, 1999 covers how the investor money is hung on plans and not real live companies gaining revenue.
It is very easy to reduce the ping times on analog modems. Just turn off data compression! This adds signifcant latency to the data transmission for the compression and decompression on the other end of the data. It does "add" bandwidth for compressible data.
Wrong URL for Jenni cam...
on
BOFHcam
·
· Score: 1
Should be -
http://www.jennicam.com/
Notice two "n"s. The one you have goes to a porn site.
I was also at the the orginial West Coast Computer Faire and I remember that the crowds were pretty much evenly distributed through the Faire. It wasn't the packed mob scene around Apple that they show. S-100 Bus boxes were still in demand and there were other boxes like the Sol-20 that were "small" computer format boxes that were seen as competitors to the Apple II. The big problem that was seen with the Apple II was the fact it was using a Motorola chipset instead of the standard 8080 or z80 chip set that most of software was written for such as Bill's 4/8 K basic and CP/M.
Interesting that it shows Bill wandering around compairing Ed's booth with the two Steve's. Never did bump into him there.:-)
I have to agree with "Anonymous Coward", you want to make the the shield as short of a radiator as possible. With chips putting out frequencies in the 100-500 Mhz range 1/4 wave antenna lenghts are starting to get short. At 300Mhz a 1/4 wave antenna is 1/4 of a meter. Solder every corner and edge of the fabric to the ajacent fabric. You can get copper tape to make seams with to aid in the soldering.
Ground the shield as near as possible to the central ground point you have, likey next to the ground comming into the box with the A/C and supply ground. Avoid ground loops where you have multiple wires servering the purpose of grounding different parts of the shield.
Most ATX motherboards will have a jumper on the board that will disable automatic power managment or at least tell the power supply to aways stay on and ignore the front panel power switch. I seem to remember Mylex boards having a jumper J13 that did this.
This was an issue for me at I wanted to power cycle machines with X10 cubes remotely (ie. from home) if the machine seriously wedged.
Slashdot Mirror
Couple of places you want to look...
I tend to pick up some great steel single post racks (AKA "relay racks") from TV stations as they tend to be used for shipping racks when they get new equipment. Find the local TV transmitter location and befriend an engineer. I have been picking them up for free.
If you are interested in "enclosed" or "standard" racks, then check out old radio or TV broadcast sites that are upgrading their facilities. I have gotten some classic RCA racks (with the "meatball" logo") that way.
Second lowest cost option is flea markets. In SF we have some great HAM and general electronics flea markets such as the Foothill Flea Market at Foothill Jr. College in Los Altos. Livermore has the "Livermore Swap meet" where computer and HAM stuff abound. At both events you will find racks.
Before you purchase a rack you need to inspect that the screw holes are not stripped. This will ussally happen more often with aluminum racks (ie. Chatsworth) and less often with steel. If it has been repainted then it is likely that the holes will need to be cleaned out as paint will make it a problem to thread screws in. Also there once was a standard for screws (10-32) but that seems to have gone by the wayside. Don't just assume that all racks will accept 10-32 screws.
When I was checking out putting real estate info on CDROM back in the early 80's I ran up against many of the city/county asessor's offices that had made a deal with one paticular company that they alone would have sole right to microfiche the books. No other company could come in and reproduce the books. As we were a small startup this hit us big time and stopped us right there from going further. If you wanted the data of real estate transactions you could get it on 1200 bpi 9 track tape for any where from $2K to $20K per tape. Sheesh.
I had thought that information that was gather via public taxes and fees should be availible to the public for no additional cost. Boy were we naive.
Denise Caruso has been pointing this out in her NY Times column "DIGITAL COMMERCE" for several months now. Her latest "Internet Economy Grows on Plans, Not Products" of October 25, 1999 covers how the investor money is hung on plans and not real live companies gaining revenue.
It is very easy to reduce the ping times on analog modems. Just turn off data compression! This adds signifcant latency to the data transmission for the compression and decompression on the other end of the data. It does "add" bandwidth for compressible data.
Should be -
http://www.jennicam.com/
Notice two "n"s. The one you have goes to a porn site.
I would have to argue RFC-822 (mail) and RFC-1036 (usenet) as being more important than the FTP RFC.
Indirectly there is the "The Bell System Technical Journal / July-August 1978 (UNIX Time Sharing System)" :-)
I was also at the the orginial West Coast Computer Faire and I remember that the crowds were pretty much evenly distributed through the Faire. It wasn't the packed mob scene around Apple that they show. S-100 Bus boxes were still in demand and there were other boxes like the Sol-20 that were "small" computer format boxes that were seen as competitors to the Apple II. The big problem that was seen with the Apple II was the fact it was using a Motorola chipset instead of the standard 8080 or z80 chip set that most of software was written for such as Bill's 4/8 K basic and CP/M.
:-)
Interesting that it shows Bill wandering around compairing Ed's booth with the two Steve's. Never did bump into him there.
I have to agree with "Anonymous Coward", you want to make the the shield as short of a radiator as possible. With chips putting out frequencies in the 100-500 Mhz range 1/4 wave antenna lenghts are starting to get short. At 300Mhz a 1/4 wave antenna is 1/4 of a meter. Solder every corner and edge of the fabric to the ajacent fabric. You can get copper tape to make seams with to aid in the soldering.
Ground the shield as near as possible to the central ground point you have, likey next to the ground comming into the box with the A/C and supply ground. Avoid ground loops where you have multiple wires servering the purpose of grounding different parts of the shield.
Most ATX motherboards will have a jumper on the board that will disable automatic power managment or at least tell the power supply to aways stay on and ignore the front panel power switch. I seem to remember Mylex boards having a jumper J13 that did this.
This was an issue for me at I wanted to power cycle machines with X10 cubes remotely (ie. from home) if the machine seriously wedged.