Indeed, it seems that there is hardly any room left for mere programmers in this industry :-).

Torvalds behaviour is justified, as he provides, despite the rough tone, constructive criticism.

JWZ doesn’t even do that.

(Also, sending people a plaintext page explaining the issue would cost less of his traffic, and be less problematic)

Hah, right. They'll just file a complaint to their ombudsman and the Congress will take care of it.

No, this is Kazakhstan, not California. If citizens band up and demand something that the government is against, the police will crack down on their homes, arrest 15,000 people at random out of which only 10,000 or so will return to their homes (not necessarily alive), and the remaining 5,000 will rot in jail for high treason. And if they keep getting wise ideas, they'll send in the army.

Unless you actually need to do things like move entire e-mail threads between accounts, it works well enough.

It's the good parts : bad parts proportion that tends to ruin things.

For one thing, it's the current that you usually measure in these cases anyway. For the other, power consumption in watts is not what you generally want to know when you design a battery-powered circuit. And, last but not least, it's more useful to have a figure in (m)A than (m)W when batteries are rated in mAh.

It's not correct terminology, mind you, but then neither is that of energy in your energy bill, so I guess this can be forgiven.

Other hobby computers of the day used inefficient power supplies. The Apple ][ was the first computer ever to use a plastic case. The heat buildup using even my own power supply design (inefficient type) would have been too great. Steve tapped an Atari engineer, Rod Holt, to design a switching power supply that was much more efficient and generated less heat. Rod also keyed us into the fact that the plastic case wouldn't conduct heat well. At this point in time we took pride in being the first computer to use a switching power supply. Steve was proud of the fact that we didn't need a fan and seems to hold to that ideal to this day.

So:

* Holt designed a switching power supply which employed a patented addition to an otherwise well-known topology (it's a flyback power supply).

* Computers nowadays "rip off" the same design that Holt ripped off, they all use flyback PSUs.

* I doubt that the Apple II was really the first computer to use a switching-mode power supply, but linear supplies were pretty common among hobby computers back then. The Commodore 64 had one, for instance.

The downvoted comment about Jobs being an ignorant liar is probably spot-on.

None that I've heard of. And when Acorn wanted to put a switched PSU into the BBC Micro four years after the Apple II debuted, apparently switched PSUs were still novel enough that the BBC engineers didn't trust them (they thought that there might be health and safety issues!) and insisted on linear supplies on early models.

how inportant was/is a switching supply, and was incorporating it really as simple as copying a well-known design?

also, i think that in this case Job's has to characterized as ignorant or a liar.

he almost had no idea how power supplies work and this "invention" gave him the ability to credit someone other than woz for the Apple II success. which is how i read this qoute, as jobs usually didn't publicly praise people without a motive.

or.

he did realize how this work and lied to rewrite the books on what company made this contribution. i think it was a bit of both, but the ignorance allows one to attribute some of the mischarachterizations to lack of info rather than simple disingenuousness.

Fairly important. Linear power supplies are pretty large and put out a lot of heat. It was commonplace back then for most appliances, including computers, to have a linear power supply. A switching-mode PSU was an improvement over the status quo in general.

> and was incorporating it really as simple as copying a well-known design?

Yes, it was.

Also, Jobs was a blatant liar :-). The SMPS in any modern computer is based on a standard topology that Rod Holt -- though a brilliant engineer in his own right -- didn't invent. I don't remember the specific details, but it's based on a flyback design that was certainly well-known at the time.

And that's the actual conclusion of the author. Don't buy the other one, not because the extra stuff in the Apple one is worth it but because the others generally cut a corner too far. ( or worded differently, if you don't have the skills to assess the safety of the design from the cheap one, buy the Apple one )

Rod Holts design wasn't electrically unique, but it was extremely light and small. The Apple II wasn't the first computer to use a switching supply but it was shockingly light of a power supply which really helped the Apple II's reputation.

Which... as far as Jobs was likely concerned was all that mattered, but it wasn't the rip-off he claimed, it was just the start of the trend and Holt was at the right time to be one of the first on that wave.

>because what use is a technology if it can't be used on a practical level?

I know you meant it in a general sense, but the act of demonstrating something can also be useful. It could be that its not very profitable to manufacture or that it could serve as an inspiration for others to improve upon the idea itself.