[NYTimes] Live from Mars, it's a wireless box.

[Jim Whitehead]

> On Thursday 03 April 2003 12:18 pm, Adam Rifkin wrote:
> > http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/technology/circuits/03driv.html
>
> Hah. I built one of those by ordering the basic box at
> caseoutlet.com added a disk, and a stick of memory.

Hmm, so you spent about an hour spec'ing and buying the parts, 30 minutes to
assemble it, and another 1.5 hours installing and configuring Linux, for a
total of 3 hours to create this configuration from scratch.

Since you're a very knowledgeable and talented person, your time is probably
worth over $100/hr. So, you blew $300 of your time to replicate a device
that only costs a $300-$500 dollars. Worse, you internalized the technical
risk of your chosen configuration not working (all wireless cards work well
under Linux, right? :-). By buying it from Martian, you would have
externalized that risk.

So, did you really get a bargain?

- Jim