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At this point... if you are buying From Alibaba/Aliexpress you deserve what you get.

I would say you can gamble on ebay and amazon, but do it in 30 days or less and be ready to Hit the return button. It is worth paying the extra price. Sorry but I wouldn't even trust Luyuan at this point. Not worth the wait or hassle.

NOTE: Last year at this time I would have said something different, but back then we were getting 280s shipped to our door for under 430.00 That is not the case any more, now its like 650, and anyone selling the 450 is basically selling junk.

I think what we need to learn here is that ALibaba / Aliexpress = YOUR ON YOUR OWN. There is no returns, the sellers have perfected the bait & switch. Here is why:

1) They know majority of the people that buy these won't know the difference, they don't have testing equipment.

2) Even if they do find a problem Alibaba & Aliexpress will always side with the seller, the only time they will side with you is if the shipment is lost.

3) Remember you should always pay with credit card, but federal law only requires card holders to provide 60 days to file a dispute, any longer and its up to the card issuer to decide. NOTE: You keep filling charge backs and your credit card company will come a point where they aren't going to agree with you as its costing them too much to have you as a customer so they will start denying your claims. You will have to get a new card.

4) Lastly, Lastly even with a successful credit card charge back, the seller is going to require you to send them the items back, this is where you are gonna feel the pain. REAL PAIN. Now you have to find out a carrier that is going to send the cells back, you also have to mark them as UN3481 the hazmat, wait to you find the price. HA more than what you paid for the cells!

NOTE: Not only this, be prepared to have the seller demand you PAY import tariffs into China, makes NO FLIPPING SENSE at all! The damn cells were made in CHINA??!!

Finally all said and done, you may have won, but you really lost.

5) BONUS PAIN: This is a good one, really is.... Ok so now you bought from eBay or Amazon or Aliexpress/Baba from a USA seller that ships from a USA warehouse, paid the higher price. You get the cells but they are bad cells! So you are thinking OK, I'll file a return... Then you get told, you have to send the item BACK TO CHINA! HAHAHA :mad::(:cry: and if you don't NO REFUND! You see, just because you there were sent from a USA warehouse doesn't mean you get to return them back to the USA.

With all of this knowledge, Chinese sellers are in the perfect position to plunder, SURE SURE they will sell to a view youtubers, and initial buyers to get the word out they have legit stuff. But as soon as the mass orders start coming in its party time, send them every piece of crap we have in new fresh blue wrapping.


NOT FREAKING WORHT IT! Stick with battleborns, or if you are going to buy Raw Cells BUY THEM FROM WITH IN THE USA, WITH A USA RETURN ADDRESS.


I have been reading these forums for a year. I HAVE NEVER READ A STORY WHERE someone was able to return cells to China and get a refund it has always been, you take a discount and shut up.
So for you sir, spend your money on commercial batteries. A little under $1000 per KW for BYD and others. You sound like an attorney, so you probably have the money to burn. For simple broke folks like me, I like taking the gamble, and spend around $2000 per 10KW using these cells. Even the crappy ones should last years.
I am very happy with the cells I have received so far from Alibaba merchants. I would not shop express though.

In a perfect world, the US government would make it easy for battery startups, but even Tesla is now buying from CATL, as there are no US suppliers who can compete. Our government
let China eat our lunch for decades, and we are now reaping those rewards.
We have Lithium out in Utah, but the environmentalists will not let anyone get at it. Too many lawyers means much less freedom.
 
Close. Xerox designed Windows which was written on top of DOS.

Gates bought DOS from a nobody programmer for $500. This was back before 286/386 days when we used hexadecimal to write directly to processor. (Thats lower than assembly. Its transforming bitd to hex).

Anyway, Gates is just a businessman. After IBM and keeping DOS rights, other companies said oh lets use that OS and build on it.

Xerox made HUGE mistake. Since it had purchased rts to use DOS from Gates, it gave him complete r&d access. Bam, Xerox had created Windows overtop of DOS. Guess who got the credit?

Btw, full disclosure: I started with IBM in 87'... was at Microsoft by 2000. Left that world for research for national science foundation. Pt is: u wdnt believe how interwoven the tech world is & Gates is no hero.
Yup, and Ethernet was created to use as a mechanism to communicate for Universities, and then the DOD. Digital Equipment worked on that with others. We called it DecNet back then. Besides universities and message boards, AOL was actually one of the first giant users of the inter network. How they screwed up that monopoly is beyond me. You got mail!
 
Regarding the accusation: "Impugning the character of an entire county or ethnicity". That's BS.

1. We are talking about products from mainland (communist) China here. It's a straw man fallacy at minimum to imply that when people say "Chinese" in that context, they are talking about ethnicity, and in the context of current events (routine attempts by the (communist) government of mainland China to conflate complaints about their various forms of bad behavior generally with their ethnicity using widespread propaganda) it's also the equivalent of pointing a finger and crying "racist!" (ad hominem fallacy).

2. The claim is that Alibaba, Aliexpress aren't as safe as most (I'm going to guess Western) people are accustomed to. A couple of examples do not rebut that (anecdotal, cherry picking).
 
Yup. It’s not like Asian people in the US are ever accused of being Chinese who steal our jobs and beaten and killed for it. Where do these thoughts come from?
 
Yup. It’s not like Asian people in the US are ever accused of being Chinese who steal our jobs and beaten and killed for it. Where do these thoughts come from?
Your comment is straw man fallacy and implied accusation (effectively, an ad hominem attack on anyone who dares to suppose that it's comparatively less safe to buy from AliExpress, etc. The subject of this thread has no claim that there are never racist attacks against Asian people. (that's a different subject, and, I think, off-topic). It is, in my opinion, worse than useless as a way of understanding whether the claim in the topic is true or false.
 
Regarding the accusation: "Impugning the character of an entire county or ethnicity". That's BS.

1. We are talking about products from mainland (communist) China here. It's a straw man fallacy at minimum to imply that when people say "Chinese" in that context, they are talking about ethnicity, and in the context of current events (routine attempts by the (communist) government of mainland China to conflate complaints about their various forms of bad behavior generally with their ethnicity using widespread propaganda) it's also the equivalent of pointing a finger and crying "racist!" (ad hominem fallacy).

2. The claim is that Alibaba, Aliexpress aren't as safe as most (I'm going to guess Western) people are accustomed to. A couple of examples do not rebut that (anecdotal, cherry picking).
Fair enough. I'll rephrase my comment to state that "Impugning the character of all vendors on AliExpress is unfair and unwarranted". We might also be advised to avoid conflating the behavior of a few bad actors at AliExpress with the bad behavior of the "(communist) government of mainland China".

As for my example of a positive experience with the company, is it any less "anecdotal" than the original post?
 
Fair enough. I'll rephrase my comment to state that "Impugning the character of all vendors on AliExpress is unfair and unwarranted". We might also be advised to avoid conflating the behavior of a few bad actors at AliExpress with the bad behavior of the "(communist) government of mainland China".

As for my example of a positive experience with the company, is it any less "anecdotal" than the original post?
I'll take the last first:

1. Assuming you mean "more", not "less", maybe, because the claim in the subject probably assumes a common experience.

2. To your first argument, It's not clear that impugning of character (of each individual seller) is implied by the statement, and certainly not clear that a guaranteed bad experience is.
 
I wish the US could manufacture like that.

I hope (but have no real insights) that this will change in the next 18 months or so.
The Tesla 4680 cell is world class, and the Fremont production line is working out the kinks for Texas and Berlin (as well as Shanghai).
Instead of chasing short term profits, the man in charge is chasing long term societal change. I'm as cynical as anyone here, but manufacturing in the USA is not dead yet, it's just dormant and waiting. Seriously, in 5 years time, these prismatic cells we are buying now will be expensive obsolete technology.

I first thought Tesla was a joke. Little chance of it making a radical change. I'm so happy that I'm wrong, and really look forward to what 2022 will bring.

I just recently found out that Chinese manufacturers are NOT subject to the royalties that western manufacturers must pay. That ends in April of 2022 when the patents expire. Technically speaking, every LiFePo4 cell imported to the USA is not legal, and is supposed to only be sold on the Chinese market.

I'm extremely impressed by what Tesla is doing with the automation of cell manufacturing. The shear order of magnitude (assembly speed) they are talking about, coupled with the lithium extraction patents Tesla has recently filed will make the USA a leader in battery production very soon now.

This assumes everything is true, and on schedule. I think it likely is, but don't really know. I have optimism now.
 
I hope (but have no real insights) that this will change in the next 18 months or so.
The Tesla 4680 cell is world class, and the Fremont production line is working out the kinks for Texas and Berlin (as well as Shanghai).
Instead of chasing short term profits, the man in charge is chasing long term societal change. I'm as cynical as anyone here, but manufacturing in the USA is not dead yet, it's just dormant and waiting. Seriously, in 5 years time, these prismatic cells we are buying now will be expensive obsolete technology.

I first thought Tesla was a joke. Little chance of it making a radical change. I'm so happy that I'm wrong, and really look forward to what 2022 will bring.

I just recently found out that Chinese manufacturers are NOT subject to the royalties that western manufacturers must pay. That ends in April of 2022 when the patents expire. Technically speaking, every LiFePo4 cell imported to the USA is not legal, and is supposed to only be sold on the Chinese market.

I'm extremely impressed by what Tesla is doing with the automation of cell manufacturing. The shear order of magnitude (assembly speed) they are talking about, coupled with the lithium extraction patents Tesla has recently filed will make the USA a leader in battery production very soon now.

This assumes everything is true, and on schedule. I think it likely is, but don't really know. I have optimism now.
Big problems with thousands of fake stores with the format “xxxxorders Store” :

 
Big problems with thousands of fake stores with the format “xxxxorders Store” :


it seems that the number of stores that will steal your money and after that you have to provide proof you did not actually get the package is over 100 stores and i counted that 10000 people was robbed by them already, if you do a simple search all are fraudulent stores with identical full list of products added :
fake aliexpress stores to steal money.jpg


you will have this kind of false delivery incredible fast and created with an exploit on shipping companies servers, at times when nobody is working in the post office at 10PM :

WhatsApp Image 2021-09-13 at 21.50.20.jpeg


and if you open a dispute the support won't believe you, they say that the seller has the tracking numbers that is ok for them ?!

support answer.jpg


So what are your thoughts about this fraud ?
 
So what are your thoughts about this fraud ?
Buyer needs to do more research into the store itself. Reminds me of the early days of eBay.

The number in the store name is a red flag. The word "store" in the name is the second red flag. I am sure there are other markers but I am not going to open them to look. People need to search on something besides price and a pretty picture. This is even more important considering there is virtually no real recourse though the platform.
 
The biggest "red flag" is someone advertising 280Ah cells at $160-180 for four of them. That alone should cause you to run.
 
it seems that the number of stores that will steal your money and after that you have to provide proof you did not actually get the package is over 100 stores and i counted that 10000 people was robbed by them already, if you do a simple search all are fraudulent stores with identical full list of products added :
View attachment 65041


you will have this kind of false delivery incredible fast and created with an exploit on shipping companies servers, at times when nobody is working in the post office at 10PM :

View attachment 65042


and if you open a dispute the support won't believe you, they say that the seller has the tracking numbers that is ok for them ?!

View attachment 65045


So what are your thoughts about this fraud ?
Shitty, but this is very different than actual sellers who are just selling used products at seemingly random intervals.
 
Buyer needs to do more research into the store itself. Reminds me of the early days of eBay.

The number in the store name is a red flag. The word "store" in the name is the second red flag. I am sure there are other markers but I am not going to open them to look. People need to search on something besides price and a pretty picture. This is even more important considering there is virtually no real recourse though the platform.
Not necessary, there are many legit sellers that have Store in the name. The big problem is that these sellers also post products at high prices too, so to buy 4 cells with $680 so they cover all kind of buyers and sometimes is almost impossible to know because they also have normal names and they domehow get real reviews, not sure how they do that, probably another exploit as they use for using FAKE tracking number itinerary.
 
Gates bought DOS from a nobody programmer for $500. This was back before 286/386 days when we used hexadecimal to write directly to processor. (Thats lower than assembly. Its transforming bitd to hex).

Writting
Most of your details seem pretty close to the folklore I recall, although I did not work in Silicon Valley.

However, writing in HEX was called hand assembly and it was before assembler because you coded the HEX from the assembler instruction bit codes. I took my first course in 78-79 where we spend 30 hours a week in the microprocessor lab hand assembling all Homework assignments for a Motorola 6800.

The 286 was pretty advanced by 1987 when you could run Windows 3.0/3.1. I remember having triple boot set up for DOS, Win 3.1, and Win Workgroups. Wow pretty amazing that was only 10 years.

In the 1978 microprocessor lab at U of Ark, they were running punch tape to program a mini-computer (advanced lab) and we were recording our 6800 hand-coded programs on audiotape and the mainframe IBM (Fortran) was punch cards although I has an undergraduate TA and also had to learn JCL to program to submit jobs via teletype. This was all for an EE major.
 
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Most of your details seem pretty close to the folklore I recall, although I did not work in Silicon Valley.

However, writing in HEX was called hand assembly and it was before assembler because you coded the HEX from the assembler instruction bit codes. I took my first course in 78-79 where we spend 30 hours a week in the microprocessor lab hand assembling all Homework assignments for a Motorola 6800.

The 286 was pretty advanced by 1987 when you could run Windows 3.0/3.1. I remember having triple boot set up for DOS, Win 3.1, and Win Workgroups. Wow pretty amazing that was only 10 years.

In the 1978 microprocessor lab at U of Ark, they were running punch tape to program a mini-computer (advanced lab) and we were recording our 6800 hand-coded programs on audiotape and the mainframe IBM (Fortran) was punch cards although I has an undergraduate TA and also had to learn JCL to program to submit jobs via teletype. This was all for an EE major.
The first mini computer systems used Octal, not Hex, but both were binary machine language. This was prior to the X86 processor from Intel. PDP8 from DEC was Octal, PDP 1134 was Hex. 1MB of memory was HUGE at that time, and perm memory was constructed using ferrite cores hand strung together into a lattice. You could code machine language programs into the front panel of a PDP 1170, pull out the memory module and swap it into another system, and run it! ( NASA's Apollo navigation systems used core memory)

HP Oscilliscopes were needed to do head alignments on the massive platter based disk drives (20MB?) The X86 instruction set started the PC era, and DOS was the primary OS that leveraged X86. The 286 was first I believe, then the 386, then 486.. and so on. Those were the days, before sound on the PC. Soundblaster cards were the thing back then, but they only worked in a PC, not Apple 2C.

Before that revolution, it was punch cards and paper tape programs for input to run programs. I remember the school I went to in NYC ( Control Data Institute) had a vaccum tube based mainframe in the front window, and it took up almost a half a city block.
They still taught vacuum tube therory at the US Army engineer school in Ft Belvior VA back then too.
 
The first mini computer systems used Octal, not Hex, but both were binary machine language. This was prior to the X86 processor from Intel. PDP8 from DEC was Octal, PDP 1134 was Hex. 1MB of memory was HUGE at that time, and perm memory was constructed using ferrite cores hand strung together into a lattice. You could code machine language programs into the front panel of a PDP 1170, pull out the memory module and swap it into another system, and run it! ( NASA's Apollo navigation systems used core memory)
We can go back to Adda Lovelace and even before in the history of computing, but I was focused more on the context of what was prevalent during the time that the DOS-based personal computers (i.e. the PC) became mainstream. The reference made to hand-coding might lead some to believe that we were in the stone age punching out ones and zeros with a stone ax onto a rock.

For example, at my first job 1980, I started off doing EW simulation work on an HP1000 mini-computer that had an actual CRT and keyboard. There were also HP desktop BASIC computers where you typed in each numbered line of BASIC. There was one TANDY double floppy drive computer that was being used to create a database for all the classified documents. At that time you could buy a CPM "kit" computers (before they were known as "Personal" . I don't recall but if I had to guess those were 6800 based but don't hold me to that. This was 1981-1982 at RTN in Santa Barbara.

That said, the microprocessors we were using at work at the time, did not all have the full software development support that you might expect today. You were lucky to have an assembler and probably did not have a C compiler. I did not even learn C till about 83-84. So one of the first projects I was assigned to do involving actual H/W was to build up a techniques (waveform) generator using a 6800 processor. Another senior engineer had constructed a set of latches and LED that would grab the HALT line and strobe in the state of the address and data busses so you could single-step through a program. The program was burned in EPROM on the CPM machines. Yea this was pretty crude and I'm sure I did not have an assembler.

I will mention one other area that you did not cover. While I did not have any experience with the Intel 4040, The first DOS PC was an 8080 with later 8086 clones. There was also an 80186 which preceded the 286/396 class machines. I don't recall where the 80186 falls but suspect it also had "protected" memory management which is the hardware support that made Windows practical/possible. Although I bought an 8086 clone with a 20 Mbyte ST-225 HD in 1984, it was not till 1987 that I got a 286 Windows machine after changing jobs.

As another example of the variety of computing options at that time, I had been evaluating the TI RISC-based TMS32010 and later managed a program based on the TMS32025 where the C Compiler for a RISC architecture was becoming usable for a multi-million $ defense program. So in hindsight, while there were a lot of changes going on, there were different levels of maturity during the multi-front advancement of computer technology. as mentioned earlier, in school, we were submitting punch card programs to an IBM 360 mainframe batch computer (implying JCL, compliers, and a mainframe operating system), and at the same time hand-coded the 6800 microprocessors.
 
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I just recently found out that Chinese manufacturers are NOT subject to the royalties that western manufacturers must pay. That ends in April of 2022 when the patents expire. Technically speaking, every LiFePo4 cell imported to the USA is not legal, and is supposed to only be sold on the Chinese market.
 
I'm glad I mentioned the story about my computer teacher! I was in elementary school at the time, so my details seem to have been off.

I appreciate all of the cool information about the "old" tech world!
 
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