questions about secure wipe (and the similar functions on a Mac) on an SSD: is it necessary? Does it work? Does it shorten the life of the SSD, since they have limited write cycles? Are the answers affected by TRIM?

I go the opposite way— Silicon Valley to San Diego. Under ideal circumstances I can make it in about 7.5 hours. There's no good time to go through LA, but I usually do the equivalent of a red-eye flight, leaving the Bay Area 10-11pm so I go through LA around 4am.

didn't know there was a "quick" pancit canton. I don't know how to make it myself; yet another reason to visit mom!

Being fearless is one thing, but you've also got to be smart. Messing with high-voltage/high-current or gas (i.e., stuff that can kill you) should be approached with some discretion.

Re step 2: Sometimes the approach is "throw everything out and start fresh". Sometimes it's "randomly throw darts at possible causes". But most times for me it's "divide and conquer": Reduce the size of the problem by eliminating things that shouldn't matter, and then possible causes, a little bit at a time.

meh. Not impressed by this at all. Any kind of lock to keep out even your wife is stupid, possibly even dangerous— what if you have some sort of medical emergency?

I wish I could give you more than one star.

(Also in the Bay Area) I've always considered MicroCenter a poor imitation Fry's, and wasn't sorry to see it go away. Fry's is pretty sleazy, but if you know what you're doing you can get good deals.

Snow Leopard is also the last version that is 32-bit, which is why older hardware can't run the newer (64-bit) versions of OS X, and you probably wouldn't be able to simply replace the sh and bash binaries with the ones made available in these security updates.

I also agree this is a terrible idea. One other aspect is that sometimes emotion is part of the message. Face-to-face you can see how passionate someone is, whether they are happy or sad or mad. Other things like sarcasm often do not translate well. With email all you have are the words, no matter how many smilies…

The other thing I sometimes hear is, "why do I need to learn that? My calculator/computer/smart phone can do it for me." Thing is, how do you know if the result is correct, or at least reasonable, if you don't understand the process?

ugh. BASIC, at least unstructured BASIC, is one of the worst languages to teach programming. There is so much you have to unlearn for when you do "real" coding. (Just getting rid of GOTO would go a long way toward forcing you into better habits.)

Other than using coding as a proxy for teaching how to create and debug a problem-solving sequence, I don't get it either. Not everyone can or should code.

I couldn't disagree with this more. High school students are in no position to know what skills they need. Many people change jobs or career tracks many times over the years.

I always think how cool it would be to emulate some of the machines I depended on in the past, but then I still have an actual Apple ][+ and actual 68K Macs (and PPC Macs) that I could plug in and use any time... but I never do.

As I originally said, they all conform to the same standard, which means they have the exact same accuracy. Days are long past where non-compliant hardware is enough faster for anyone to use. The only way to get faster (but less accurate) results is in software, using algorithms that don't guard band the results. I'm…

GPUs are more accurate? Citation please. Unless you're talking about single-precision vs. double-precision hardware, as far as I know everybody builds IEEE754 compliant floating-point, which means a given piece of software will produce the same result— they will all have the exact same rounding errors.

Don't know anything about the WD box, but I have an older DS-413 4 bay, and it's excellent.

Someone always asks this question in articles like this.

Whitson, I'm impressed with your cable management. Under my desk is a huge nest of power and network cables. About the best I can do is keep them from getting too tangled up. I could probably go wireless for a lot of it but wired is still faster and more reliable, especially for stuff that doesn't get moved around…