On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 12:30:26 +0100, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
But in the end, for the campaign to be successful, it also needs to provide products that people want to pledge for (if nothing else, to meet the minimum quantity to fabricate the chips that Luke keeps mentioning), so everybody needs some kind of hook to engage with the project. It also serves to gauge interest in future products, once the campaign ends.
It's the way things work these days. Nobody will pledge money to support a standard on its own. As you say, you need a hook, and in this case it's a set of devices that aim to prove the concept.
- Close family are still well served by the options already available around the home, e.g. Thinkpads a decade old (still from IBM).
Thinking about this: I wonder if it would be possible to reuse existing laptop housings by somehow reusing their PCMCIA card slots to house EOMA68 CPU cards. Maybe this has already been discussed somewhere.
David
On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 3:09 PM, David Boddie david@boddie.org.uk wrote:
On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 12:30:26 +0100, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
But in the end, for the campaign to be successful, it also needs to provide products that people want to pledge for (if nothing else, to meet the minimum quantity to fabricate the chips that Luke keeps mentioning), so everybody needs some kind of hook to engage with the project. It also serves to gauge interest in future products, once the campaign ends.
It's the way things work these days. Nobody will pledge money to support a standard on its own. As you say, you need a hook, and in this case it's a set of devices that aim to prove the concept.
my partner marie has been looking up "sandwich" marketing strategies: put the "new" thing *in between* two totally familiar "things", then people grok the new one immediately...
... except there are *no* modular mass-volume computers around since we as a world-wide community (i mean "every person who buys computers") abdicated responsibility by buying cheaper and letting manufacturers get away with hermetically-sealing our devices.
most people have no clue what the difference is, they implicitly trusted the manufacturers and have been betrayed by the manufacturer's pathological profit-maximising behaviour.
from the perspective that i view things from it's like the entire frickin planet has turned into a bunch of sleep-walking zombies as far as making decisions about the consequences of giving companies money - and i *include myself* in that category of "sleep-walking zombie" only up until a few years ago.
- Close family are still well served by the options already available around the home, e.g. Thinkpads a decade old (still from IBM).
Thinking about this: I wonder if it would be possible to reuse existing laptop housings by somehow reusing their PCMCIA card slots to house EOMA68 CPU cards. Maybe this has already been discussed somewhere.
it was... waaay back around... mmmm.... 2010? 2011? which is why i feel sad for the vero apparatus arm64 open laptop team, because we did such a thorough (and open) analysis here, all that time ago.
bear in mind also that my sponsor was investigating selling thinkpad X200's and stopped doing so (not just because francis began an unethical business model around them, attacking chris on public forums in order to make *himself* look like he was "better"... didn't work because chris's reputation as an ethical supplier of libre hardware is extremely well-known... but anyway...)
so the problem of reusing existing laptop housings is that the moment you pick one particular laptop housing you just automatically drove up the price of that laptop housing by creating a supply problem, and opened yourselves up to enterprising ebay hawkers hoarding them and re-selling them at extortionate profit.
... bear in mind that it's *really hard* to do PCB designs so the moment you succeed a lot of people will want one... thus the prices *will* go up of 2nd-hand housings.
secondly, as it's costly to do PCBs (cost is reduced for EOMA68 because you can do 2-layer PCBs...) you have quite large NREs, if you want to recoup that and stay profitable you must sell the (rather small) production runs at an extremely high mark-up...
thirdly and most importantly: getting hold of the connectors that will have been CUSTOM MADE to fit that ****EXACT***** laptop housing are either laughably implausible (as in, the supplier will laugh at you if you ask for 100 of something that was made 3-15 years ago, given that they cost $0.10 each back when they were made in batches of 30,000 and above), or the tooling has long-since been melted down ....
OR....
the supplier *WILL NOT GIVE THEM TO YOU* because you, as a tiny unknown supplier, asking for $20 worth of end-of-lifed parts, could potentially jeapordise an extremely lucrative and long-term relationship with a laptop manufacturer that has a TRADEMARKED BRAND NAME.
in short the vero apparatus team... well... we have to just let the train-wreck happen, unfortunately. they've cut themselves off from external advice by running closed one-way online infrastructure (no contact details on the wiki, no published IRC channel, no mailing list, and a closed-membership for the wiki)...
much as i am reluctant to publish such an analysis, you asked the question david so i am summarising the key points of the various discussions of the past few years: you can see clearly that the analysis is not unreasonable. if anybody does know how to contact them, perhaps you might consider passing on the above analysis to them for their consideration.
l.
On Mon Jul 25 23:02:45 BST 2016, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
much as i am reluctant to publish such an analysis, you asked the question david so i am summarising the key points of the various discussions of the past few years: you can see clearly that the analysis is not unreasonable. if anybody does know how to contact them, perhaps you might consider passing on the above analysis to them for their consideration.
Thanks for the detailed response!
I feel a bit bad now because I was probably a bit unclear. I was more thinking about a use case inspired by Manuel's mail, where someone might consider buying a CPU card and adapting their old, unused or broken laptop to use the new CPU.
Obviously, old laptops are not designed to work this way. Perhaps there's an interesting maker/hacker/homebrew project for someone to try. I'm hoping to reuse my old laptop for new things, but not quite like this. :-)
David
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 11:29 PM, David Boddie david@boddie.org.uk wrote:
On Mon Jul 25 23:02:45 BST 2016, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
much as i am reluctant to publish such an analysis, you asked the question david so i am summarising the key points of the various discussions of the past few years: you can see clearly that the analysis is not unreasonable. if anybody does know how to contact them, perhaps you might consider passing on the above analysis to them for their consideration.
Thanks for the detailed response!
I feel a bit bad now because I was probably a bit unclear. I was more thinking about a use case inspired by Manuel's mail, where someone might consider buying a CPU card and adapting their old, unused or broken laptop to use the new CPU.
Obviously, old laptops are not designed to work this way.
... sadly... correct. as i learned the hard way: casework, pcb *and* component sourcing *have* to all be done together. even just one component that you leave until last can have massive and total redesign implications because it's either not available (at all, or just "to you, the low-volume buyer"...) or the version you can get has pinouts that don't suit either the casework or PCB that you designed up until that point...
... now you know why i prefer 3D-printing...
Perhaps there's an interesting maker/hacker/homebrew project for someone to try.
yes, ah, now that's totally different, and it's why i added the break-out board, because people can always get a simple converter board, drop in a huuub, drop in a few components, it's a learning experience, then, so actual cost is less important.
I'm hoping to reuse my old laptop for new things, but not quite like this. :-)
yyeah.... :)
mån 2016-07-25 klockan 23:02 +0100 skrev Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton:
most people have no clue what the difference is, they implicitly trusted the manufacturers and have been betrayed by the manufacturer's pathological profit-maximising behaviour.
I'd say that what consumers have fundamentally failed to understand is the nature of the corporation as defined by law. It is *supposed* to be maximising profit. To trust such an entity is either to be blind or to be a fool.
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 8:43 AM, fuumind fuumind@openmailbox.org wrote:
mån 2016-07-25 klockan 23:02 +0100 skrev Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton:
most people have no clue what the difference is, they implicitly trusted the manufacturers and have been betrayed by the manufacturer's pathological profit-maximising behaviour.
I'd say that what consumers have fundamentally failed to understand is the nature of the corporation as defined by law. It is *supposed* to be maximising profit. To trust such an entity is either to be blind or to be a fool.
google: "don't be evil! [except where it interferes with profit-maximisation]...."
professor yunus in his book "creating a world without poverty" sadly has to explain to us that "Corporate Social Responsibility" clauses are, when the chips are down, "Corporate Financial *IR*responsibility"...
*every* corporation's director(s) that have something other than profit-maximisation as their mantra is either lying through their teeth or they are misguided and dangerously misinformed as to what their legal obligations under Company Law really are.
it's not a good situation. the solution if you want to do something "good" as well as remain truly ethical is Benefit Corporations in the USA or Community Interest Companies in the UK. Australia they have Foundations, it costs $AUD 2500 to set one up.
l.
arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk
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David Boddie -
fuumind -
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton