The Best Things Come In Small Packages

[giZmo350]

Don't these yo-yos know that the Big Boys all make their own "C=USA Amiga"-like cases already and have done for years?
 
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1422092&CatId=1307
 
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1939178&CatId=4928
 
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1494915&CatId=4929
 
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=685765&CatId=333
 
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1976954&CatId=5139
 
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=7122667&CatId=5139
 
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1926940&CatId=5139
 
I could go on forever, but I think that's enough...

Yup! I grossed a 1/4 million on PC/Laptop sales alone last year and I buy most everything from Tiger, NewEgg or CDW when it's on sale and mark it up to non-sale prices. Their (CDW) margines are around 1%! I'm an authorized Lenovo, Acer, Asus, MSI, HP (JUNK!), Dell & Sony dealer.... when I complaing to my reps about prices being near retail for dealers they just tell me to go to CDW! Anyone can do this! The trick in my case is I have a STORE FRONT where peeps can come in and ask questions and get simple help! I prep the computers for free! Ppl love it! Of course I make most my $$$ on the repairs though. It's long hours and no free time and I'm the only employee but I get the feeling Barry is way working WAY TOO HARD for little return! I make a house payment, pay the store rent, pay the bills for two places, plus Ins.. alarm.. internet... (you get the idea)... plus give the wifey about 4Gs a month & STILL buy my REAL Miggy stuff! Good Times! Oh, and the support is on the MANUFACTURER not me! Of course I help them box it up and send it in if needed (I've only had to do that twice in 5 years).... just don't sell peeps junk! Hell, 30 years ago I used to buy PC Clones from a little place in Texas call Treasure Chest Computer (cause they put together excellent machines at the time with cheap software extras even though they were higher priced than other mail order places) and resell them +10%! I would charge peeps $100 to spend a few hours teaching them how to use them and make 4 or 5 bills a week spare change! You know.... CUSA would make 100 times more money if they DROPPED the Amiga and C= name and came up with their own name and just stuck to great customer service!!! Ahhh, (and some of you honed right in on this) CUSA CAN'T support what they sell 'cause they are the end buyer! Asking for people to be their "dealers" to resell their stuff, and the possible defective parts + any bad computer build decisions for their end product is the "dealers" problem is... well, bad business. The "CUSA DEALER" would have no way to recoup any losses. Sheeeeeeeeesh! I gotta get off this!!!! Cheears Ya'll!!! Oh, and one more thing... [discalimer on] this is just all my own opinion [/disclaimer off]

[runequester]

More on the reseller thing. Leo just posted this.

I also imagine that the dealers will be able to obtain Commodore OS cheaply from us, in a manner yet to be determined.

So er... what exactly are they charging for "commodore OS" and are they making sources to the components they did not create themselves available, in compliance with the GPL?
 
If so, where?

[vox]

So er... what exactly are they charging for "commodore OS" and are they making sources to the components they did not create themselves available, in compliance with the GPL?
 
If so, where?

Complete the reselling scheme looks like easy way to build a distro net, but:

a) Initally reseller has to buy 10 barebones, that is ~$3400 investment that
gives just the case and BD ROM drive. He also determines end price,good news is that every even smaller dealer can get config cheaper then CUSA offer, even with $340 loss over case + licencing costs CUSA will extra charge
b) There will be a confusion on model naming and will and how Mint support exactly all possible combinations
c) Its questionable whether you can resell COS which isn`t exact intellectual property of CUSA without agreement with Mint team
b) Since suppliers will deal with all guarantees CUSA name worldwide depends on their reliablity

Its kind of win win for CUSA (licence and COS fee, barebone profit) without any responsibility or support to end dealer or user. Imagine OS support will be up to each and every dealer.

Again, just the profits, not too much work, just maintaining the webshop orders and sending cases and promo to "dealers". Will see how many will appear and stay in their own business generally working for CUSA profit more then for their own.

Its at the same time MLM genious and very unreliable scheme for dealers and end customers, no quality testing or real support.

But we need to love Leos optimism
Quote:
I We have received thousands of requests worldwide for such a program,


They never receive just few requests or sell few machines even its obviously small startup company

[dammy]

So er... what exactly are they charging for "commodore OS" and are they making sources to the components they did not create themselves available, in compliance with the GPL?
 
If so, where?

As far as the GPL, there are no modified binaries and what Leo has done to Mint is script based.

[runequester]

How much do these scripts cost then?

[Dementhor]

Somehow I can't imagine who is going to buy such an overpriced PC, and I'm trying real hard. I mean - if someone who's got the money and is that retarded, there's usually somebody sane who handles money for him/her, right?

[vox]

*News from CommodoreUSA.net

http://www.commodoreusa.net//CUSA_AMIGAmini.aspx

The Best Things Come In Small Packages

What about "poison comes in small packages"? Unexpandable, overpriced, only 1 year warranty with maybe underpowered PSU for intensive use and presumably low support lifetime (2 C64x models are already unavail) with Beta OS, maybe even built and supported by your local Damocles.

[tone007]

Ha, Commodore USA has small packages.

[Tripitaka]

Ha, Commodore USA has small packages.

I thought them pretty big and made of brass to try this sh1t on us.

[XDelusion]

In regards to the title of this thread...

That's what she said.

Edit: Oh, wait!!!

[TiredOLife]

@Dammy

Is COS V what was originally being called COS2?
Or is COS2 still on the horizon?

I was lead to believe that COS2 would be released with the Commodore Amiga and would be a totally new OS.
COSV is still a Linux variant like COS1, according to the Commodore USA website.

Cheers

[vexar]

Somehow I can't imagine who is going to buy such an overpriced PC, and I'm trying real hard. I mean - if someone who's got the money and is that retarded, there's usually somebody sane who handles money for him/her, right?

Hey everyone!
   I am that retard, apparently.  Or nearly so!


It is refreshing to know that some users never change.  So, two things:
1.  I was willing to buy the system at $2500 USD
2.  I am concerned about the power supply discussion


My post on the Commodore-amiga.org forum (based on what I learned from this thread on amiga.org) yielded this discussion:
http://www.commodore-amiga.org/en/forum/33-hardware-support/13746-amiga-mini-power-supply-gpu

I halted my purchase because half of my original post was not touched.  Thanks to Xerxes for affirming I have a valid concern.  

Also, when companies go from private to public, they get a really solid going-over by investment firms.  These people ask the right questions.  I met one of those folks on a plane flight, and it was an interesting conversation to say the least.  Let's just say that one company's CTO got a lot of questions about why their IT application infrastructure was built exclusively in MUMPS programming language, thanks to my little chat.  

Amiga Mini price:
I admit that until February, I had owned a Mac Mini for four years.  In fact, I wouldn't even be looking at buying a Commodore system if the Mac Mini had not choked and died.  The motherboard fried or the power circuitry failed, if anyone is curious.  Anyway, since Apple won't do a thing to extend warranties past 3 years, I wasn't about to pay further premiums for their funny upgrade practices, one-off HFS+ filesystem (that was annoying, and thanks to Erik Larsson, author of Catacombae, for rescuing me there), I thought maybe a Linux distribution would be a good idea since repairing was prohibitively expensive on the Mac.  So, yes, I agree, $2500 is a lot of money for a computer system.  It certainly was a lot of money when I bought my A4000t.  You are probably wondering why I thought this was a good move.  Well, a Mac Pro quad-core is $2500, and specs aren't quite as good.  An iMac prices in about the same, so no matter which comparable Apple system you go with, you are at or above $2500.  A Dell Vostro, which gets close, comes to around $1500 when you play with the configurator, but it is quite bulky, and size matters for usage and portability to me.  I do put value on the Commodore OS Vision.  I realize that yes, it's a distro of Linux, and you can go and download all these things, but my time is worth something, so not downloading a dozen applications, configuring, and patching, that is easily worth a day of my time, and you can price that out however you see fit.

I do appreciate the efforts of folks here to price out building nearly the same setup as an Amiga Mini on their own.  The 1-year warranty is worth something to me.  I can't go build my own system, though, I don't know what I'm doing.

The Amiga Mini looks impressive on paper.  Until you dig into it, and discover that on paper, the power supply unit is a concern from simple arithmetic.

[Tripitaka]

@vexar

If your after something small and powerful check out the Alienware X51:

http://www.alienware.com/Landings/desktops.aspx

Now this is the sort of machine CUSA should have made (as a Commodore PC not an "Amiga" I might add). Once they got some respect for doing great Commodore PCs then they could have made an Amiga worth calling an Amiga. They didn't do this however, instead they FAIL!

This system:

Alienware X51
OPERATING SYSTEM   Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64Bit, English   
PROCESSOR   Intel® Core™ i7-2600 3.4GHz (8MB Cache) with Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost Technology 2.0   
MEMORY   8GB (2x4GB) Dual Channel DDR3 at 1333MHz   
CHASSIS COLOR   Matte Stealth Black with Dark Chrome Accents   
VIDEO CARD   1GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 555   
HARD DRIVE   1TB SATA 6Gb/s (7,200RPM) 32MB Cache   
WIRELESS   DW1502 Wireless-N WLAN Half Mini-Card

With a 4 year guarantee and 4 years unlimited phone support plus guaranteed discount upgrade option, this setup still comes in at $1,768.00 with a keyboard and mouse. Why does anyone need an Amiga mini? You can of course build the system quite a bit cheaper without all the extra support options.

[CritAnime]

nVidias own specs say this

Thermal and Power Specs:
98  C Maximum GPU Temperature (in C)
49  W Maximum Graphics Card Power (W)
300  W Minimum System Power Requirement (W)

(http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gt-430/specifications)

And some Guru3d.com specs
(http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gt-430-review/5)

Everything I read about this card says a 300w PSU at a min. It's interesting that Guru says full system load, under complete stress, is 242W. A few other give a roundish number of 180w. Also you have to factor in CPU load and any USB devices connected.

While I don't think it would go pop if overloaded, isn't it powered from an external power brick?, I do think it may run into stability issues. Plus some heat stress.

[vexar]

@Tripitaka:  
MEMORY    8GB (2x4GB) Dual Channel DDR3 at 1333MHz    

I need more RAM.  This machine is partially for work, and I'm not using this hardware for serious gaming. Alienware appears to be Dell on the back-end, no wonder they have their act together.  I think my mistake has been to assume that a name is the same thing as a brand experience.

If Commodore comes out with some third-party evaluations in the very near future, I will pay attention, but for a guy like me to be able to understand holes in their engineering is not a good sign.

Thanks for the replies!

[TheBilgeRat]

@Tripitaka:  
MEMORY    8GB (2x4GB) Dual Channel DDR3 at 1333MHz    

I need more RAM.  This machine is partially for work, and I'm not using this hardware for serious gaming. Alienware appears to be Dell on the back-end, no wonder they have their act together.  I think my mistake has been to assume that a name is the same thing as a brand experience.

If Commodore comes out with some third-party evaluations in the very near future, I will pay attention, but for a guy like me to be able to understand holes in their engineering is not a good sign.

Thanks for the replies!

Then go to either:

http://www.crucial.com/

OR:

http://www.newegg.com/

and buy one of the super duper 16GB ram upgrades available for under 100 bucks with warranties of their own.  Seriously - if an extra 8G of ram is making you spend a grand more for hardware, you need to spend some more time researching the field.