>> Connectors are actually extremely difficult to make.
While your points listed are valid, we have been making connectors that overcome these points for decades, in some cases approaching the century mark.
>> I'm not surprised at all that they are running into issues here, these cards are pulling 500+ watts. That is a LOT of current.
Nonsense. I used to work at an industrial power generation company. 500W is _nothing_. At 12VDC, that is 41.66A of current. A few, small, well made pins and wires can handle that. It should not be a big deal to overcome that. We have overcome that in cars (which undergo _extreme_ temperature and environmental changes, in mere minutes and hours, daily, for years), space stations (geez), appliances, and thousands of other industrial applications that you do not see (robots, cranes, elevators, equipment in fields and farmlands, equipment in mines, equipment misused by people)... and those systems fail less frequently than Nvidia connectors. But your comment would lead one to think that building a connector with twelve pins on it to handle a whopping (I am joking) 500W (not much, really, I have had connectors in equipment that needed to handle 1,000,000Watts of power, OUTDOORS, IN THE RAIN, and be taken apart and put back together DAILY) is an insurmountable task.
Those GPUs aren’t particularly cheap, even a $100 connector and cable wouldn’t be a huge deal breaker for a $2000-3000 device if it means it’s reliable and won’t start a fire (that’ll cost way more than $3100)
Yes cheap connectors exist and there is a marked for it, like everything "cheap". But to what point one wants to "defend" a trillion dollar company, on a product that was never marketed as "cheap", that actually comes with a hefty price tag, to skimp on something that is 0.01% of there BoM cost. If you sell for a premium price you should better make sure your product is premium.
Then what's the point of such an arbitrary comparison? It's normal that plenty of commodities that were expensive when new have been devalued by age and can cost less on the used market than the top of the line BRAND NEW cutting edge GPU today, which itself will be worthless in 10-20 years on the used market and so on.
Presumably, the point is that a working car is more complicated & cheaper (in this case) than the graphics card, while the graphics card can't figure out how to make a connector.
I read it as a kind of funny comment making a broader point (and a bit of a jab at nVidia), not a rigorous comparison. I think you might be taking it a bit more seriously than was intended.
An old legacy car is definitely not more complicated than designing and manufacturing a cutting edge silicon made for high performance compute.
The price difference is just the free market supply and demand at work.
People and businesses pay more for the latest Nvidia GPUs than for an old car because for their use case it's worth it, they can't get a better GPU from anywhere else because they're complex to design and manufacture en-masse and nobody else than Nvidia + TSMC can do it right now.
People pay less for an old beater car than for Nvidia GPUs, because it's not worth it, there's a lot better options out there in terms of cars and cars are interchangeable commodities easy and cheap to design and manufacture at scale at this point, but there's no better options easier to replace what Nvidia is selling.
Comparing a top GPU with old cars is like comparing apples to monkeys, it makes no sense that doesn't prove any point.
>An old legacy car is definitely not more complicated than designing and manufacturing a cutting edge silicon made for high performance compute.
A car is more complicated than a connector, at least.
Anyways, the rest of your comment is again taking a humorous one-liner way too seriously. Thanks for the econ lesson though, I guess. I liked the part where you explained to me the basics of supply and demand like I am in 5th grade.
They could use a common XT90 or something similar. You find high amperage connectors on all the RC lipo batteries and they are cheap enough, you find them on $100 products (batteries).
I regularly work with 100amp+ at 12v. It’s obvious the connector NVidia is using is atrocious and we all know it.
There is something strangely magical about the pictures of the city streets at night. Lack of trash? How clean the roads are? The lighting? I have been out at night in plenty of places (not Japan), but it never looks like this. At first I thought it was their camera, but I think it is just Japan at night?
Used to use sublime, and wanted to purchase a license, but it is only good for the version you are on. Since I use gentoo and it upgrades frequently, my license would require me to hold it back, and eventually it will break. How do others deal with this? Just keep purchasing a license?
I used ST2 for like five years in its unregistered state. (I rationalized that by telling myself that nothing I used it for made me money, but I still feel a little gross about it.) In practice it was no problem.
I paid for an ST3 license, then I paid again for an ST4 license. Whenever ST5 comes out, if they ask, I'll pay for that too.
Clicked the link without looking (shame on me), did not realize X/twitter/whatever was trying to disable the back button.
People still do that? Wow.
It really makes me wonder how people think about "free" services, probably owned by a company/corporation/person (e.g. not the government), and get amused/angry/whatever that they can be moderated. Forgetting about if whatever they posted it "right" or "wrong", this reminds me of people I personally saw during covid yelling at WalMart workers that they had the "right" to be in walmart without a mask. Uh, no, its a company, and they can kick you out for any, or even no reason.
And certainly Mc is not what it used to be (the MC-1700 receiver for example, was great)... you are slamming an "empty box" unfairly. It has:
- A light, well, ok, pretty empty.
- Removable back wall. Eh, ok.
- A IR to turn on and off devices. Hrmm.
- It can control other DinkyLink devices (I did not make that up)
- Trigger control to control other audio devices. Hrmm.
- It is a sturdy metal box (go online and purchase a nice one, I bet they are hundreds of bucks)
Not that it is worth $1500, maybe $300, and at the same quality as that box looks with the glass front, probably $500, but again, saying $1500 for empty box is kind of unfair.
To be honest, I have paid $300 for nice rackmount enclosures with handles that were custom made.
In fairness, that's a cheap, powder coated, folded-metal box so we're not really comparing like-with-like. If one of your goals is to have a nicely-coordinated system that's on display in your home, aesthetics do matter - you're paying for what you're getting, not some unscientific claim of "performance".
How things change... I recall having a subscription (had one of those friends who always seemed to know what was coming out right before it came out) right when they started publishing, what was that, 1994? It was so cool.
I just viewed the front page, looks like the definition of "internet chum".
But seriously, to upend Google, you are going to need to be the default on what people use, which I think for now is phones.
Another barrier, maybe they need to get away from this: "will require succeeding at home and growing revenue, which largely comes from running ads."
So what do you do when everyone runs some ublock-origin thing? We need to figure out a search monetization beyond "feed me weird things I do not want" on the sidebar. Should websites pay? No, wait, then only those with real money are on the web. Should we pay? Now, wait, we have had it for "free" for too long (could be wrong, I might at this stage in the game pay to have an actual search engine, like say google circa-internet 2004, of course the net was a different place, but still).
That is not as easy as it looks. My granparents had a number of tops like that (not German, but same style you threw it with a string)... none of the kids could get them to work, and (comically) none of the adults could get them to work either. Some child would find them during the holidays and some grandparent would say "oh yes I remember playing with those, you use a string" (goes and finds string, spends next 15 minutes proving they just can not do it). Then the kids would run off and spend an hour trying to get it to work, unsuccessfully.
I think when I see this video, we all were throwing it upside down.
I ran a company building electronic devices, so I had a lot of parts (LCR, transformers, chassis, screws, wires, connectors, misc)
What types of storage do you use?
I used to use those plastic bins that you see a lot of. I sorted by both resistor, and resistance series. So one bin would be bins of metal film, sorted by series with printable cards on the front drawers of each. Another bin would be carbon composition, another wire wound, etc. One bin had kind of misc (diodes, bridges, transistors), another small screws, another large screws, etc.
Are you subscribed to an organizational philosophy?
The thing that lets me grab the part the fastest. I purchased my bins explicitly so I could get my round nose pliers into them easily and grab a resistor, as I always seemed to have round nose pliers in my right hand, and opened the drawers with my left.
Do you sort your resistors by resistance?
See above comment. I will note that I had a short list of power resistors, and at first they were just bunched in with the regular resistors, but as they were larger
(same with metal film and carbons, they are different sizes) it was slower to have them in one bin.
I will say this, however, after several moves an the economic crashes we went through, it became not my first source of income, and I slowed down a lot, to the point that it is more of a hobby. At this point, I had no room for the bins, and so now I have the following: I purchased a bazillion ziploc bags, perhaps 2"x3" with a white writable area on the outside. I put the resistors in them in the same way as I describe above (e.g. start at 47ohms and move up with metal film, then carbon comp, then power) and I put them standing up in cardboard boxes that allow two of the bags to sit side by side. This has saved a ton of room, although obviously it is slower.
On the "keep finding spare parts between my toes and under pillows", yeah, if you want to get rid of that, you need to have iron-clad will power to find that one you dropped just a moment ago.
Looks cool. if you are interested in analogue sounds and synths and like to make your own, this website is a good place to start. https://musicfromouterspace.com
You can buy kits there which are similar to OP. I have not purchased any, but many times have had them in my cart :)
The intro to the article notes that this was based on a design by Waveform Processing, which was run in part by the late Ray Wilson who was the man behind MFOS! His site even hosts the instruction manual for the WP-20: https://musicfromouterspace.com/analogsynth_new/THE_CAVE/WP2....
While your points listed are valid, we have been making connectors that overcome these points for decades, in some cases approaching the century mark.
>> I'm not surprised at all that they are running into issues here, these cards are pulling 500+ watts. That is a LOT of current.
Nonsense. I used to work at an industrial power generation company. 500W is _nothing_. At 12VDC, that is 41.66A of current. A few, small, well made pins and wires can handle that. It should not be a big deal to overcome that. We have overcome that in cars (which undergo _extreme_ temperature and environmental changes, in mere minutes and hours, daily, for years), space stations (geez), appliances, and thousands of other industrial applications that you do not see (robots, cranes, elevators, equipment in fields and farmlands, equipment in mines, equipment misused by people)... and those systems fail less frequently than Nvidia connectors. But your comment would lead one to think that building a connector with twelve pins on it to handle a whopping (I am joking) 500W (not much, really, I have had connectors in equipment that needed to handle 1,000,000Watts of power, OUTDOORS, IN THE RAIN, and be taken apart and put back together DAILY) is an insurmountable task.