And I would have put the bearing shell over a pvc pipe and used a hand drill or just spun the drill bit between my fingers, assuming it is just bearing material.
DRAM is highly regular and relies on a 1T1C (one transistor, one capacitor) structure. Because those tiny capacitors naturally leak charge, the adjacent transistors must be optimized for ultra-low leakage. That requires thicker gate oxides and higher threshold voltages which makes them slow. Furthermore, digging those deep trench or stacked vertical capacitors requires highly specialized, high-aspect-ratio etching and deposition tools. Also, for DRAM the backend wiring is completely different; DRAM is a giant, uniform grid that only needs about 3–5 metal layers to keep costs rock-bottom while modern logic is highly irregular and complex, requiring 12–16+ metal layers.
Logic processes (CPUs/GPUs), on the other hand, are optimized for raw switching speed. They use thin gate oxides and low threshold voltages, which leak like a sieve. This is fine for a fast processor, but it would wipe out a DRAM cell's charge almost instantly.
Cisco has trained a generation of home-lab would-be cisco engineers to dig through shady russian forums to download sketchball binaries. I think they even hide the checksums of their gated binaries, just to make sure you're never sure how sketchy their code might be.
But in the one specific case of mobility express, you can ... just download it. Unexpected but actually pretty cool.
You still have to figure out installing and configuring it, which is mildly tedious, and you'll probably need one of those cisco serial cables, but it is an exciting side-quest instead of a dirty forum crawl.
To bring it back to "openwrt" -- this nonsense by cisco, broadcom, HP, IBM, etc is why generation after generation the "enterprise" market is dying -- they're excluding 90% of the would-be engineers from the job market protecting their e-waste from secondary or later reuse, likely just on the off-chance they might make a tiny amount of money downstream. But I guess that's not a line-item that shows up in the quarterly reports (what's the value of "community goodwill" ?)
I'm overall not a fan of Cisco; quite the opposite. There are lots of companies ahead of Cisco in the "pretty not so cool" these days so my ire is not as strong as it was when I was a young idealist.
As far as I can tell, in this one case (with mobility express) it seems like Cisco accidentally did something overall (IMO) "good" for the world by making it possible for their kit to be reused by some part of the world where someone will get utility out of the still very nice equipment and somehow cisco won't see a dime from that "someone is using cisco equipment" event.
Mobility express isn't perfect, but considering the cost of the gear and the cost of the license, it is pretty darned good. I suspect some product manager at cisco got fired for accidentally making the world not quite as bad a place as it could be if cisco extracted license fees on all the 2802, 3802, and 4800 access points or otherwise sent them to the e-waste bin 4 years early.
Thanks for the head's up! The Rukus Unleashed looks like the perfect replacement for my icky system.
I'll put in an ebay search notification for when the R650 (and R750) for $50 each and maybe it'll ding in a couple years and I'll be in a place to swap out the 3802 network I've got running now...
I didn't look at those; do they support running some controller thing in one of the APs to allow central management of all the nodes?
Cisco's mobility express just runs on one of the APs and can fail over to another of the APs; it's a slick piece of software.
And yes, it isn't open source, which is a real shame since cisco's killed it (as far as I can tell) and it probably represents an enormous and sophisticated investment in effort and engineering and it'll just melt into entropy.
I loath cisco and don't recommend their kit lightly. In this one case, they seem to have accidentally made (for my use case, running 5 APs at home) a perfect product. They're cheap, extremely reliable, my wife doesn't hate them (though mostly they're in the attic or basement; only one is visible), they've got a (relatively) easy to use UI that manages all of them at once, and (Except for the switch 2) they seem to just work even though I've got vlans and lots of SSIDs and other goofy stuff).
If I had a simpler house to support, I'd just get a single WRT capable "big fast" router / AP...
Unfortunately you need to use the cisco software / firmware. The access points run linux but they're locked down like crazy with signed firmware blobs and such.
That said, the cisco firmware for this specific generation of access points is actually free and trivial to get -- create yourself a cisco account and go to downloads and download the 3802 "mobility express" firmware. The last ME firmware came out in 2024 and all this equipment and software is now totally unsupported by cisco so don't run PCI transactions at home... I'd also avoid running their captive portal or some of their other weird features...
Actually setting it up is a bit of a chore but it is a full featured "enterprise" (cough) AP management system with all the knobs and twiddles you could ask for.
It's really only a good idea if you don't value your time (like me) or if you have a sprawling plaster house where you want to have lots of cheap access points instead of a couple super fast ones.
Lastly, for better or worse, I haven't been able to make my kid's switch 2 work on the network.
It is probably a combination of hitting a (low) cost and mimo; cisco makes pretty reasonable looking APs with lots of radios and decent coverage and they look like UFOs not alien spiders.
But it's probably easier / cheaper to get maximum coverage at larger distances from a single AP using a big array of sticking out antennae, and that's what a normal home user is going to want.
I have been extremely happy with cisco 3802 access points purchased on ebay for $25 each. Sure, it's only wifi5, but they're pretty solid and you can just deploy a swarm of them.
And they don't look fugly.
It is a tremendous shame that cisco hasn't opensourced / unlocked this generation of kit.
Oracle makes their money by promising the C Suite "give us money and we'll solve your problems." There aren't actually many companies in a position to credibly make that promise.
The oracle database is also actually pretty nice, according to the people I've talked to who use it.
But mostly they play in the 'nobody ever got fired for suggesting' club. These days AWS is the most egregious landlord of that club, but whatever.
I think the "party line" is that the goal shouldn't be "1950s grid, but bigger and with more red meat!"
Renewables actually cover a lot of the newer demand and can be put around where it doesn't require as much transmission capacity because the production is happening closer to the demand.
And frankly, these jumbo sized data centers can just go figure out how to power themselves. If they want to put PV and wind and some peaker plants on their campus and they can actually meet the environmental requirements, go to it. So far they seem to be dumping AI dioxin into the local waterways, but it is probably possible to run these things without grid power.
In my whole career I've seen computers getting smaller and more efficient. Sometimes you'd need more of them, especially if your product is growing, but almost never would you need these radical increases in power draw to keep up with the red queen.
In the past couple decades, the vast majority of electricity demands have gone down due to modern substitutions for things people want being way more efficient. People use LED / CFL bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs, heat pumps instead of resistive heating for water heaters and house heaters, etc.
People have also deployed lots of solar to their houses.
So by every normal measure, just by looking around outside and evaluating how I live my life, even with an electric car, my power demands have gone way down.
So the fact that there's some gooner class stroking AI and crypto coins out their network ports and making my electricity more expensive, well, yeah, I'd say that nonsense is lots of externalities that should be better managed.
What you're describing is "bank" where the financial organizations settle transactions using a private media ("the crypto"); but each individual is still dealing with "a bank". In "crypto" you trust "the math" and you don't need to worry about the counterparty absconding with the money. In your scenario, the Argentine service provider is in a position where they trust "the app" not "the math"
Banking is fine; I'm okay with banking. Crypto is also fine, if you're doing one of the 3-4 things "crypto" is good at (mostly crime, but whatever).
But what you're describing is "bank, with settlement not using SWIFT"
Anyhow; my original statement is:
Which shitcoin or shitcoin network is "cryptocurrency" ? Do you mean you're just pushing fiat through stable coins into an exchange? Is the exchange even converting from one cryptothing to another? Are you just asking the peer to shovel bits into a some shitcoin address? If you're just putting fiat into an "exchange" and then pulling fiat out, congratulations, you've invented a pretty ordinary financial service.
You're not describing an actual financial exchange; you're making up some vague situation.
You're probably also breaking some laws around paying taxes unless someone's going out of their way to actually report these activities.
Regardless, please be specific about "pay via cryptocurrency" otherwise you may as well say "pay via paypal" or "pay via putting dollars into a bank of america account I keep open since I was a student abroad."
"cryptocurrency" is doing a lot of work here. I don't see where there's some magic "crypto ledger" in your getting paid for a service. Just an internet service that promises to transmit money from one place to another.
I think I offered a pretty concrete example of a real situation and how the imagined utility of crypto magic isn't actually all that helpful.
Now, perhaps what you're suggesting is "I've got millions of units of money that I've acquired through locally illegal means and I want to transport that money someplace else and I don't feel like renting a private airplane and diamonds up my prison wallet are uncomfortable and I don't want to pay taxes or otherwise explain why I have a brand new S class I paid cash for." then yes, I'll accept that there is some grey area where crypto has a place (to explicitly work around legal regimes I dislike, would like to degrade further, and don't feel like dealing with).
Can you describe a "society collapse" where your cold wallet _can_ get you out of trouble, and why that particular situation isn't subject to "I will shoot your corgi." coercion?
If you're dealing with a peer you can't trust (like the US government) that will ask for your passphrase and then not torture you for it if you refuse, I'd suggest you're not really in a situation where society has broken down.
It looks possible, on paper, if you don't poke at it too often.