By Ben

I’ve been more or less on the sidelines of the modding scene for some time now. Still, I like to poke my head back in on things from time to time.

One thing in particular caught my attention as of late… there’s a company out there that’s suing a truckload of other companies over a power supply innovation: modular cabling.

What is a modular power supply? In the case modding world, the bane of everybody’s existence was cable management. It was bad enough we had wide ribbon cables going every which way, but worse then that, was power supply cables. Practically every device in your machine needed one. All of a sudden the entrails of your killer gaming rig looked like some sort of funky coloured spaghetti. Often enough the higher end power supplies had enough cables & connectors to hang an elephant, and whichever ones you didn’t use needed to be crammed in somewhere out of sight.

Enter the modular power supply. What you do is take a standard high-performance PSU, cut all the cables off it, and add in connectors that enabled you to disconnect the cables you didn’t use in your PC. This way you had only the cables you needed sticking out of the power supply, but had the option to add extra cables back in when you need them, without using those flaky Y-connectors.

Now as far as I know, this modification was originally popularized by Performance-PCs, a computer shop in Florida who started selling customized power supplies online. They would take high-end Antec supplies, replace fans and make the cables modular. Modders everywhere rejoiced.

Fast forward to 2008. As with any enthusiast base, once it becomes popular enough, you get corporate intervention.

Premodding (as the term was coined) is buying a computer case that’s already customized, so you can show off your computer’s innards without any of the elbow grease that was usually required. All of a sudden, decked-out cases with windows, switches (and more fan mounts that anybody really needed) started appearing in the likes of Future Shop and Best Buy.

Premodding did two things: It split the community between the DIY type (the pioneers in PC modding) and the group who wanted to have a kickass-looking machine but didn’t want to put the time or effort into making it truly theirs. What it also did though, was attract major competition from large manufacturers, some good, and some bad.

This rant is about the bad. Particularly, Ultra Products Inc is a company that produces just about anything related to modding has decided to take the idea of modular power supplies and keep it for themselves. With little fanfare, they managed to secure a US patent for a concept that’d been floating around the community for years. Now, they’re taking their largest competitors to court over this patent.

This is the kind of frivolous shit that can kill a community (or an industry for that matter). Once you’re running under the threat of potential lawsuits, you start to wonder why you should continue? Imagine if Ultra Products gets somewhere with this suit, what happens next? Perhaps they’ll start going after tech sites who’ve published a modular power supply HOWTO. After all, this is apparently THEIR intellectual property now.

What a great way to destroy innovation, eh?

Take Cliff’s Fanbus for example. He was arguably the first person to popularize this simple (yet ubiquitous) case mod. It’s a staple in the modding world. There wasn’t a single case modder in the early days who didn’t build a similar circuit for their case fans (let’s not leave the out the baybus, of course). What would happen if some merry band of greedy asswipes tried to secure a patent for this design, then start suing people left and right into licensing and royalty agreements.

You know, this concept sounds eerily like another lawsuit where a company tried to hold patents for an operating system then sue it’s users into licensing compliance. I wonder how well that worked out for them.

When you’re a manufacturer, there IS such thing as bad press. It’s the kind of press that alienates you from your own customers. The kind that happens when you steal an innovation from the very group you’re trying to hawk your goods to, then raking them over the coals with it.

Computer enthusiasts have a very hard time forgetting these kind of things.

By Ben

Well here we go again. After an uncomfortably long hiatus, I’ve swallowed a bomb which is programmed to go off if I deviate from getting things done here. It may also go off if somebody uses a microwave within 30 feet of me, but that’s my own challenge.

Not to mention we’re rocking a new site design to embrace all those fancy bloggy-like ideals that’ll distinguish the site from it’s antiquated brethren from yesteryear. If you see anything out of place, let us know!

For those of you who just stumbled in here, I’ll save you a click and give ya the rundown:

We started this site quite some time ago as an evolution of our old stomping grounds, RabidHardware. As our interests mutated over time, we needed a soapbox with a much broader audience then our humble techie site had previously provided.

Idle thoughts from minds most broken was established as a clearing house for thoughts, ideas and schemes, safe from any particular focus or affiliation. Not to say there isn’t a clear direction in this site’s future, just world domination has been put on the back burner for now.

And there you have it. Enjoy!

By matt

The latest trend in so called “Green” energy is to stick turbine powered generators in the water and let the tides move the blades too and fro. For those of you that haven’t heard of this technology yet, think wind farm with giant propellers and all, under many feet of water that are about 40 times more efficient than their dry counterparts.

Now I have no problems with people attempting to investigate clean and enviromentally safe energy, in truth it’s a very good idea. But that said our concept of this “Green” energy is incredibly skewed, and I’ll tell you why.

Let’s start with the basics, all systems require energy to run, right? Whether it be your car, bike, plane, furnace, hot water heater, or toilet something is providing the energy so that that particular system can complete it’s purpose.

Without that energy, those objects are completely useless, what good is a bike if you aren’t pedaling it? What good is a car with no fuel? You get the drift.

Now say we have a working system like your car, and that particular car burns 12 L of gas per 100 KM of travel. Now lets say that we take away 3 L of gas but expect you to travel the same distance that you travelled the last time, no exceptions. There is a chance that you could make it by driving slower, more gently, or travelling down hill only with a 100km/h tailwind, but that is likely not going to happen. What are you going to see? You’re going to see a drop in efficiency of the system because we’ve removed energy, yet expected the system to function the same.

How does this apply to this “Green” energy that I’m ranting about? Well, the tidal system that they are planning on leveraging to provide us with all of this wonderful “green” power is driven by the same concept right? They are going to be taking energy out of a system that is fundamental to the process by which our earth functions. They will tell you that this energy is simply unharnessed, but how is that true? What happens when you take energy out of waves, tidal systems, currents and other such natural systems? One has to expect a similar effect when we took gas out of your car and expected you to do the same thing with less energy.

Why is this something that is being missed in this “green” energy push? We’re removing energy from a system, by doing so you cannot expect it to function in the same manner that it did before. Does this mean catastrophic earth changing destruction? Likely not, but I bet it comes out somewhere in the wash that our “green” efforts have actually destroyed all kinds of wonderful things. Microclimates and dead birds/bats anyone?

So the next time someone tells you about how wonderful this new green energy is going to be and how it’s going to change the world in all kinds of fantastic ways, remember that nothing is free.