Re: Thinking cheap, being poor and foolish

Alan Grimes :
"... won't get fooled again..."

To balance.
I do eBay electronics buys of cheap electronics.
If they fail, I don't kick myself, but buy again.

I bought a wifi card that was ancient but some
guy in Japan had a free driver for my newton
message pad. I bought the last classic mac to
access newton connection software.

Cheap can work, but you are taking your own chances.
It can be nice to own your own chances
and own your own failures.

I studied on it a long time and was worried
I was foolish. I wasn't going to kick myself
to hard when I failed with my first card which
fortunately didn't blow up my newton message
pad. I considered my foolishness blessed by
only wasting the card.

I tested it at the apple store and it didn't blow
up their back room intel machine, so what really
was wasted was a sporadic wifi connection
through a Kalysis mac os x software.
I found directories where they had unpublished
instructions where they complained at not getting
system info from Apple to patch newer than
graphite wireless to be compatible.

I gave "the safe card" to a poor mission
with the sanction of the Apple Computer Store.

I didn't consider my wasting $20 a loss,
but a contribution.

Now, I am happy that my chances at being foolish
paid off. The 2nd card works consistantly.
I've backed up through it. The first would
have had I used classic connection software,
but the Japanese contact warned it might self
destruct with the newton and I didn't want
to press my luck. I learned from foolishness.
I don't think that is bragging.

Cheap is good sometimes because I have friends
that don't have money to throw around
and I can afford to be foolish
while they can't afford to be.

The concept that we can all do research
together could be a whole lot of fun.
Poor folks have strategy to do cheap research
rather than pay others to do it for them ... .

I've noticed over the past few days that one of my big old View Sonic
CRT (A90f+) is starting to fail, the A91f+ on the secondary card is
still working fine...

The failure mode appears to be the burn-out of a voltage regulator, it
takes too long for it to recover from sleep mode and it is impossible to
increase the brightess to achieve an acceptable black-level. (It's too
dark, the way I calibrate it is to turn the lights off and increase the
brightness until a black part of the screen glows faintly then back off
a little, it's too dark to even do that...) I bought the monitor due to
the sudden failure of its predecessor as surplus. I COULD get another
CRT but I doubt it would last any longer than its predecessors. So, I've
been thinking of the VP2330wb. It seems to be the best one on the market.

Ofcourse, to drive it adiquately, I'd need a DVI output card...

The issue then becomes that my motherboard only supports AGP 4x (or
64x66 PCI 2.2)... Matrox produces a PCI 2.2 card...

--
Opera: Sing it loud! :o(  )>-<

Alan Grimes wrote: There are still Nvidia AGP cards available to purchase. Didn't nvidia
get a lot of slack about dropping AGP for their newer cards and decided
to start including the AGP bus again.... or at least was thinking about it.


--
brad fuller
www.bradfuller.com
+1 (408) 799-6124