Lol, you OCers are a different breed of cat! You wait 9 months for your Jalapeños and proceed to blow them up.
I'm just giving you some good-natured grief and I feel bad for the few who've lost or damaged their Jallys. But for us less daring individuals it can difficult for us to understand why you'd even take the risk in the first place.
Partially because this thing was never meant to make money. I'm smart enough to look at the concept of BC, see the logic behind difficuty, and understand the issues surrounding a classic queen's race game. If I wanted to make a profit I would sell it on Ebay for $500 or so which is more than it will probably mine in a year.
The reason I tweak it is because it's fun. It's a nice looking bit of equipment, it's well built, reading the code is kind of relaxng, and I'm curious to see what it can do. The time I'm wasting on it at $150 an hour billable rates means I will never get my money's worth out of it, but as I said, it's fun.
With difficulty rising so quickly, wouldn't it be wiser just to mine with it straight out of the box instead of modding and experimenting with firmware hour after hour, day after day? I start to freak out if my ASICs have any downtime. For example, I just setup 6 ASICMiner Blades a few days ago and during the first night, the PC that was running Stratum Proxy had a Windows update and restarted. I about cried when I saw my stats. Hell, I get mad if one of my USB Erupters goes offline for 5 minutes, lol.
The erupters are also kind of cute. I picked up two of them in the last 2 weeks, one for $28 and one for $24. They're at $22 or so, will be at 19.95 by the end of the week.
But they will never make their investement costs, maybe at $5.00 given a year. But they're fun, so try not to get too upset about the stats. Try taping them to your water tank to heat household water. That is why I would pay $150 for a broken one even though I bought mine for $169 or whatever. It would be fun to float off the chips with the air tools and build a 4 processor JP.
Haven't decided on picking up a FPGA BFL yet on Ebay, maybe for $100. Which is totally stupid since it can hash at 800mh using 40-50 watts while a trio of erupters can do 900+mh using 7.5 watts for 60% of the cost and still never break even :-)
It's the fun that counts. The fun of going to eclipse and seeing another nickel be created from thin air.
C