Surplus in inches is absolutely necessary
If they’re necessary, by definition they aren’t surplus.
When the first first Gulf War broke out, I was watching the television coverage with coworkers in the company auditorium.  There was a commercial for a pickup truck, bragging about the size of its engine.  The voiceover said “there’s no substitute for cubic [...]

I used LVM to increase the size of a logical volume containing an ext3 fileystem from 300GB to 500GB. After expanding the logical volume, it is necessary to expand the filesystem to use the added space. In theory, this can be done online (while the filesystem is mounted) by using the resize2fs command. [...]

I just got a refurbished Apple Mac mini, with the 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It is mainly intended for use compiling my open source programs such as Nonpareil for Mac OS X. I am extremely surprised at the user experience of booting Mac OS X Leopard for the first time, [...]

I wanted to clone an image of the internal hard drive of a new Mac Mini before booting it up. It is common knowledge that a putty knife is the tool to use, as long as it has a thin blade. However, I found a posting to one of Apple’s own forum claiming [...]

… you can be almost certain that it isn’t.  For instance, spam claiming to be “legal software sales”, but offering popular commercial software for pennies on the dollar.

One of the earliest uses of punched card tabulating machines, the forerunner of modern computers, was the US Census, as described by Wikipedia:
[Herman] Hollerith built machines under contract for the US Census Bureau, which used them to tabulate the 1890 census in only one year. The 1880 census had taken eight years. [...] In [...]

I’ve generally been happy with my Epson Stylus R300 printer.  I chose it because of its ability to print onto printable CD-R/DVD-R media, which wasn’t common at the time.  As with all inkjet printers, though, it subjects the owner to the Inkjet Conspiracy.

The most recent release of my Bare Bones interpreter made identifiers case-insensitive, and added an optional peephole optimizer that recognizes a common idiom:

while N not 0 do;
  decr N;
  incr X;
end;

Such a loop adds N to X, clearing N in the process. Without the optimizer, this is has time complexity [...]

In 1990, Bob Pease of National Semiconductor published a “design idea” in the June 14, 1990 issue of Electronic Design for the use of a FET for reverse-polarity protection, with the advantage that it will typically have much lower forward voltage drop than a diode.   Pease mentions this on page 164 of his book Troubleshooting [...]

AMD announced last year that they would publish the programming specs for their graphics chips.  Last September they started that, with register-level documentation on several chips.  While that was a good start, today they have made many of their customers who use Linux (and BSD) very happy by publishing the 3D programming specs for the [...]