In addition to the disk controller, credited in the article as dramatically (and masterfully) reducing the parts count and expense, the Apple 2 was the first computer to use a switching power supply.

1977: Apple II is designed with a switching mode power supply. "For its time (1977) it was a breakthrough, since until then switching mode power supplies weren’t used. Designed by Rod Holt,". "Rod Holt was brought in as product engineer and there were several flaws in Apple II that were never publicized. One thing Holt has to his credit is that he created the switching power supply that allowed us to do a very lightweight computer".

The design of the color graphics capability also demonstrated intelligent and practical engineering:

Color on the Apple II series took advantage of a quirk of the NTSC television signal standard, which made color display relatively easy and inexpensive to implement. The original NTSC television signal specification was black-and-white. Color was tacked on later by adding a 3.58-MHz subcarrier signal that was partially ignored by B&W TV sets. Color is encoded based on the phase of this signal in relation to a reference color burst signal. The result is that the position, size, and intensity of a series of pulses define color information. These pulses can translate into pixels on the computer screen.

The Apple II display provided two pixels per subcarrier cycle. When the color burst reference signal was turned on and the computer attached to a color display, it could display green by showing one alternating pattern of pixels, magenta with an opposite pattern of alternating pixels, and white by placing two pixels next to each other. Later, blue and orange became available by tweaking the offset of the pixels by half a pixel-width in relation to the colorburst signal. The high-resolution display offered more colors simply by compressing more, narrower pixels into each subcarrier cycle. The coarse, low-resolution graphics display mode worked differently, as it could output a short burst of high-frequency signal per pixel to offer more color options.

The Apple 2 showed the computer hardware engineering trade that much, much more could be done with less. I'm no Apple fanboi, but accolades earned and deserved should be recognized.

It may seem like a bit of security theater, but it's hardly the most excessive of TSA requirements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid

This is not exactly a new idea

I would beware of the donations requests.

Oracle charges a big fat $0 dollars for their Linux port, including free updates.

Oracle was kind enough to drop free updates from Solaris, drop Ultrasparc support, drop OpenSolaris, and by extension drop the userbase. Why pay when a sibling product is free?

Oracle intended to drive customers out the door. What other conclusion can there be?

Not many people noticed this:

"I am going to make a promise to you," Ellison said. "By this time next year, that Sparc microprocessor will run the Oracle database faster than anything on the planet."

7zip is nice because it quietly adds encryption (unlike xz).

tar cvf - (directory_path) | 7za a -si -mx=9 -pPASSWORD directory.tar.7z

7za x -so -pPASSWORD directory.tar.7z | tar xpf -

You are thinking of doing this on Windows, so beware that tar will not preserve NTFS ACLs. You can use cygwin tar if you want, but I find that the mingw tar works all right too.

If you really want to use flash media, make sure it's SLC, rated for 100,000 write cycles. If you use cheaper MLC media, media failures begin at only 5,000 writes.

...sorry for the slip, for anyone paying particular attention.

I don't program ARM assembly language, but it appears to me that Sophie and Roger made a few calls on the instruction set that proved awkward as the architecture evolved:

• The original instruction set put the results from compare instructions into the high bits of the program counter, and thus they were not 32-bit CPUs and could not address 4gb of memory. Relics of this are found in GCC with the -mapcs-26 and -mapcs-32 flags.
• The program counter is a register like any other, and you are able to mov(e) a value to it directly, causing a branch. This makes branch prediction harder, and has been eliminated on the 64-bit version.

These design decisions made the best desktop CPU for 10 years, but they came at a price.

...with a man that you don't trust. Some facts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape

Drug use, especially alcohol, is frequently involved in rape. A study (only of rape victims that were female and reachable by phone) reported detailed findings related to tactics. In 47% of such rapes, both the victim and the perpetrator had been drinking. In 17%, only the perpetrator had been. 7% of the time, only the victim had been drinking. Rapes where neither the victim nor the perpetrator had been drinking were 29% of all rapes. Contrary to widespread belief, rape outdoors is rare. Over two thirds of all rapes occur in someone's home. 31% occur in the perpetrators' homes, 27% in the victims' homes and 10% in homes shared by the victim and perpetrator. 7% occur at parties, 7% in vehicles, 4% outdoors and 2% in bars.

One of six U.S. women has experienced an attempted or completed rape. More than a quarter of college age women report having experienced a rape or rape attempt since age 14.

For one-third to one-half of the victims, ... symptoms continue beyond the first few months and meet the conditions for the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder. In general, rape and sexual assault are among the most common causes of PTSD in women.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/rape-and-violence-against-women-crisis

• nearly two thirds of all women killed by guns are killed by their partner or ex-partner
• Spouses are also the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US
• Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined

If you have any contact with COBOL in your profession, check out OpenCOBOL.org.

With a free COBOL compiler, you have an option of moving this ancient code onto a modern platform with fast CPUs. If you find it lacking, start coding!

I've tested it for Linux and Cygwin, and it works.

Fear of solitude, isolation, ostracism... these things are powerful motivators to seek sanctuary and acceptance.

Humans have done so through the ages by inventing an enormous pantheon of gods. We all agree that most of these gods do not exist.

The difference between an atheist and a believer is the acceptance of a tiny fraction of these imaginary figments.

Most everything before King David has no objective evidence.