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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Genesis 19:30 Lot and his two daughters left Zoar and settled in the mountains, for he was afraid to stay in Zoar. He and his two daughters lived in a cave. One day the older daughter said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is no man around here to give us children—as is the custom all over the earth. Let’s get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father.”
That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and slept with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.
The next day the older daughter said to the younger, “Last night I slept with my father. Let’s get him to drink wine again tonight, and you go in and sleep with him so we can preserve our family line through our father.” So they got their father to drink wine that night also, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him. Again he was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.
So both of Lot’s daughters became pregnant by their father. The older daughter had a son, and she named him Moab; he is the father of the Moabites of today. The younger daughter also had a son, and she named him Ben-Ammi[h]; he is the father of the Ammonites of today.
Do you really want to live like this? Do you really want your CHILDREN to live like this?
...the just wait until you hear what Paul REALLY thought about marriage:
Corinthians 1:7 Now for the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband...
Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.
A fundamentalist Christian should never celebrate a marriage; conversely, a marriage is an event worthy of mourning, for it is an act of disobedience of God and his apostle Paul.
I have a much better idea. A fundamentalist Christian has no business seeing a physician or being in a hospital ever.
Corinthians 2:12:5:...but for myself I will glory nothing but in my infirmities. For though I should have a mind to glory, I shall not be foolish: for I will say the truth. But I forbear, lest any man should think of me above that which he seeth in me, or any thing he heareth from me. And lest the greatness of the revelations should exalt me, there was given me a sting of my flesh, an angel of Satan, to buffet me. For which thing, thrice I besought the Lord that it might depart from me. And he said to me: My grace is sufficient for thee: for power is made perfect in infirmity. Gladly therefore will I glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Power is made perfect. ..The strength and power of God more perfectly shines forth in our weakness and infirmity; as the more weak we are of ourselves, the more illustrious is his grace in supporting us, and giving us the victory under all trials and conflicts. For which cause I please myself in my infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ. For when I am weak, then am I powerful.
Any Christian that pushes intelligent design over evolution should have the courage of their convictions and forsake modern medicine. Glory in your disease, for it is a gift from God.
At the core, QNX and Android are based on kernels providing POSIX services. The kernel system calls/API do not translate into a strong phone or a weak phone.
The userland is wildly different between these devices. Android relies on the Dalvik JVM to translate a synthetic bytecode, while the QNX phone focus is Javascript among others.
In theory, either kernel could be used to run either userland. For the QNX phone, this is also practice, as it runs Android apps.
Android runs on Linux. Do we argue that Linux is inherently insecure?
There are lots of other kernels that provide POSIX. Building a phone out of the SCO Openserver kernel would not in itself make an insecure phone. Flaws in phone security flow from userland design, not the kernel.
Life's history on earth is odd. Basic bacterial (prokaryotic) life appeared very early on this planet (almost as soon as was possible), then did nothing for 3 billion years - no multicellular life, no complex systems. Then the Cambrian Explosion gave us sudden, enormous specialization, potentially enabled by eukaryotic cells. In a geologically short time since, and with a few wrong turns, it produced us.
This narrative is suspicious. Why are there all these impulse events in the geological record? Do you believe that we should be suspicious of intelligent interference? And by whom?
In your book (The Singularity is Near) you mention that you believe that we are the first intelligent civilization (capable of achieving a singularity) to evolve over the whole of the observable universe. You see this as the answer to the Fermi Paradox, the famous question of "Where Are They?" - the mystery that we do not see civilizations that have overrun their host galaxies.
You made this prediction before the stampede of exoplanet discoveries, and we now have somewhat more data on the number of habitable planets within the galaxy. This number is likely very high. Are you still confident that we are the first? Do you think that some people would see this as a grandiose claim?
Kleptomania is likely an opioid-related disorder (as an opioid antagonist seems to control it).
I would grant you that the social environment has evolved if there was true understanding of the role of the opioid receptor in compulsive behaviors. Alcoholism, abuse of street drugs, problem gambling, and binge eating are all based on opioid receptors, and are significantly impacted by naltrexone.
There is no such understanding. The social order has not evolved significantly. Pretending that we have evolved is not evolution. We are barely beyond apes; we just happen to have iPhones.
Where there is no profit, there is no research (at least in this field).
If you think that you drink too much alcohol, you abuse drugs, you gamble too much, or you steal without reason, ask your doctor for a prescription for naltrexone to quell your opioid receptors. Your physician should make this medication available to you with few restrictions after reading the relevant literature (the book by Eskapa lays out how to obtain and use it).
This is the best advice that I have. I wish that there was more, and it was better.
It's amazing how backward DSM-IV (and -5) can be in considering human behavior. Psychology gives lip service to evolution, then ignores it in determining the grounds for "mental illness."
Let's consider kleptomania. Stealing is a behavior that is rewarded by evolution, and is a cross-species phenomena. The theft of resources is hardly an oddity in a few species like the cuckoo, but is a subset of general parasitic relationships, all of which are hard-wired into our biology. There is an endorphin rush from stealing, and the perpetrator receives an opioid high as a reward in addition to the object of the theft.
Kleptomania is reduced to an illness in mental health, with no particular understanding of its origins. Obviously, we as a species would not exist were it not for the many evolutionary behaviors, including this one, that allowed us to survive. In a supreme gesture of arrogance, an overstatement of an evolutionary imperative becomes a sickness. We do not understand who we are.
The same goes for all the endorphin/opioid compulsive behaviors, including alcohol/substance abuse, compulsive gambling, likely pyromania, and even binge eating (all treatable with the naltrexone family). The quackery of this profession is staggering.
The U.S. has around 30,000 suicides per year, yet there is no thorough study of lithium in an attempt to curb this number (instead we prefer to solve the problem with gun control). Depression is common for these people, yet no studies of the ingestion of tryptophan with niacin to increase serotonin production exist. We don't even understand how basic diet can help these people.
We don't care about those who are dying, only about labeling and profiting. We have the mental health profession that we deserve.
Had I anything to do with netbook manufacture and marketing, I would have made some hardware improvements.
I would have upgraded to retina-class LCD displays. The netbook screen didn't need to be bigger, it needed more pixels.
Netbooks also need Android. I would have made every attempt to get an x86-port of Cyanogenmod, and my own app store - a critically-lauded Android that is easy to use is severely lacking. If Microsoft balked, I would have publicly ditched them.
I would have made netbooks with cpus more powerful than Atom.
I would have made tablet-like netbooks with detachable keyboards.
The failure of the netbook market is due to the inflexibility and lack of vision of the vendors. Should MS Surface join this downward spiral, I will not be surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
The design of the color graphics capability also demonstrated intelligent and practical engineering:
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:
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:
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
...so flash your router's firmware and remove the vendor's vulnerability.
A "bag" of woven metal could take advantage of the oligodynamic effect. Problem solved.
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.
You want to talk Old Testament morality? Game on!
Do you really want to live like this? Do you really want your CHILDREN to live like this?
Cafeteria Christians indeed.
...the just wait until you hear what Paul REALLY thought about marriage:
A fundamentalist Christian should never celebrate a marriage; conversely, a marriage is an event worthy of mourning, for it is an act of disobedience of God and his apostle Paul.
Christian morality is an absolute mess.
I have a much better idea. A fundamentalist Christian has no business seeing a physician or being in a hospital ever.
Any Christian that pushes intelligent design over evolution should have the courage of their convictions and forsake modern medicine. Glory in your disease, for it is a gift from God.
At the core, QNX and Android are based on kernels providing POSIX services. The kernel system calls/API do not translate into a strong phone or a weak phone.
The userland is wildly different between these devices. Android relies on the Dalvik JVM to translate a synthetic bytecode, while the QNX phone focus is Javascript among others.
In theory, either kernel could be used to run either userland. For the QNX phone, this is also practice, as it runs Android apps.
Android runs on Linux. Do we argue that Linux is inherently insecure?
There are lots of other kernels that provide POSIX. Building a phone out of the SCO Openserver kernel would not in itself make an insecure phone. Flaws in phone security flow from userland design, not the kernel.
Life's history on earth is odd. Basic bacterial (prokaryotic) life appeared very early on this planet (almost as soon as was possible), then did nothing for 3 billion years - no multicellular life, no complex systems. Then the Cambrian Explosion gave us sudden, enormous specialization, potentially enabled by eukaryotic cells. In a geologically short time since, and with a few wrong turns, it produced us.
This narrative is suspicious. Why are there all these impulse events in the geological record? Do you believe that we should be suspicious of intelligent interference? And by whom?
In your book (The Singularity is Near) you mention that you believe that we are the first intelligent civilization (capable of achieving a singularity) to evolve over the whole of the observable universe. You see this as the answer to the Fermi Paradox, the famous question of "Where Are They?" - the mystery that we do not see civilizations that have overrun their host galaxies.
You made this prediction before the stampede of exoplanet discoveries, and we now have somewhat more data on the number of habitable planets within the galaxy. This number is likely very high. Are you still confident that we are the first? Do you think that some people would see this as a grandiose claim?
Please consider this action your invitation to take the FBI tracking devices that you peddle and shove them up your fiscally tight posteriors.
There is no one that I want to talk to so much that I will put up with this abuse.
Kleptomania is likely an opioid-related disorder (as an opioid antagonist seems to control it).
I would grant you that the social environment has evolved if there was true understanding of the role of the opioid receptor in compulsive behaviors. Alcoholism, abuse of street drugs, problem gambling, and binge eating are all based on opioid receptors, and are significantly impacted by naltrexone.
There is no such understanding. The social order has not evolved significantly. Pretending that we have evolved is not evolution. We are barely beyond apes; we just happen to have iPhones.
Where there is no profit, there is no research (at least in this field).
If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, consider increasing your intake of lithium, which is available over-the-counter. Statistics from Japan seem to indicate that it is effective. How much should you take? Unknown. Good luck.
If you are depressed, consider increasing your intake of tryptophan, along with niacin, to increase your production of serotonin. I've also heard that saffron and tea have some impact. Your diet in general should be carefully researched.
If you think that you drink too much alcohol, you abuse drugs, you gamble too much, or you steal without reason, ask your doctor for a prescription for naltrexone to quell your opioid receptors. Your physician should make this medication available to you with few restrictions after reading the relevant literature (the book by Eskapa lays out how to obtain and use it).
This is the best advice that I have. I wish that there was more, and it was better.
It's amazing how backward DSM-IV (and -5) can be in considering human behavior. Psychology gives lip service to evolution, then ignores it in determining the grounds for "mental illness."
Let's consider kleptomania. Stealing is a behavior that is rewarded by evolution, and is a cross-species phenomena. The theft of resources is hardly an oddity in a few species like the cuckoo, but is a subset of general parasitic relationships, all of which are hard-wired into our biology. There is an endorphin rush from stealing, and the perpetrator receives an opioid high as a reward in addition to the object of the theft.
Kleptomania is reduced to an illness in mental health, with no particular understanding of its origins. Obviously, we as a species would not exist were it not for the many evolutionary behaviors, including this one, that allowed us to survive. In a supreme gesture of arrogance, an overstatement of an evolutionary imperative becomes a sickness. We do not understand who we are.
The same goes for all the endorphin/opioid compulsive behaviors, including alcohol/substance abuse, compulsive gambling, likely pyromania, and even binge eating (all treatable with the naltrexone family). The quackery of this profession is staggering.
The U.S. has around 30,000 suicides per year, yet there is no thorough study of lithium in an attempt to curb this number (instead we prefer to solve the problem with gun control). Depression is common for these people, yet no studies of the ingestion of tryptophan with niacin to increase serotonin production exist. We don't even understand how basic diet can help these people.
We don't care about those who are dying, only about labeling and profiting. We have the mental health profession that we deserve.
Had I anything to do with netbook manufacture and marketing, I would have made some hardware improvements.
The failure of the netbook market is due to the inflexibility and lack of vision of the vendors. Should MS Surface join this downward spiral, I will not be surprised.