Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
Nice Ai prompting, bro..

Might want to share your harness /s

Comment · 4 months ago
> In hindsight maybe a binary level translator from 8080 to 8086 would have worked better (and be simple enough)

Many programs written in assembly language used self modifying code back then. It saved RAM and improved performance. All programs that used such trickery would have broken by a binary translator.

Comment · 5 months ago
Linux does not dragged down in performance by the thousands of virus and malware scanners.
Comment · 7 months ago
ARM riding the "everything is AI" train.

So sad.

Comment · 7 months ago
Yea.. having fun with war..

Most American post I have seen here since ages.

Comment · 7 months ago
The fun thing was the Roland Sync. You could sync up all the TB-303, TB-909 and all the others with a 5-pole DIN cable. The sync was badly implemented. It lagged, it had latency.

However!

As soon as you cabled all together their imperfections added up and they started to groove like nothing that has been heard before.

Comment · 8 months ago
Easy, it is dopamine.
Comment · 11 months ago
Back then Microsoft was lobbying as hard as they could to turn that decision to move to linux over.

They knew: If Linux makes it in Munich, it will likely spread over and they loose tons of contracts with other German states.

Comment · 11 months ago
"I could only find a couple tutorials/guides and both were imperative"

Aren't Quadtrees covered by almost all basic data-structure books? It is the most simple form of taking the binary tree into the next (2D) dimension.

Comment · 1 year ago
this

For those who don't know: Vias are not only used to get an electrical connection from one side of the PCB to another.

You also need them to keep radiation in check and often to move heat away.

With this technique, good luck getting through EMC testing for anything but trivial circuits.

Comment · 1 year ago
Honestly,

this is really bad. It might be a breakthrough of what you are doing, but when I listen to the output all of the timing and phrasing is aweful.

Comment · 1 year ago
There are couple of tricks you can do if you fiddle with the bits of a floating point value using integer arithmetic and binary logic.

That was a thing back in the 90th..

I wonder how hard the performance hit from moving values between integer and float pipeline is nowadays.

Last time I looked into that was the Cortex-A8 (first I-Phone area). Doing that kind of trick costed around 26 cycles (back and forth) due to pipeline stalls back then.

Comment · 2 years ago
> 1. Apple having just announced it is opening up NFC > to developers means that both major mobile > platforms can now act as responding devices;

> 2. Mobile consumer hardware is sufficiently fast for the application > operations (eg. Cryptographic operations)

You are right here. It is possible to emulate a card using mobile phones. We've been able to shim/emulate any card for much longer.

The thing is: To connect to the payment system you need a certificate. And you simply don't get it unless you can prove that you have all kinds of security measures applied.

For android and apple, the actual payment stuff runs inside a isolated little micro-controller which has been certified and is temper proof/protected. This little thing is fortified so far that it will destruct itself when you try to open it up. There are alarm meshes, light sensors and much more inside the chip to detect any intrusion just to protect the certificate.

If you don't have that security, the payment providers will deny you their certificate, plain and simple.

You can build your own thing using card emulation via apps, but you will take all the risks.

How it works in practice is the following: These temper proof micro-controllers can run java-card code. You can write an applet for them, get it installed (if you have the key from apple/google - not easy). Then install it and you have a two-way communication: Your applet inside the secure world communicating with the payment world, and your ordinary mobile app showing things on the screen.

Comment · 2 years ago
I've worked in the payment industry and among other things built a payment terminal, so I know a thing or two about it.

1st: The message overhead during communication is not an issue. It is tiny compared to the time it takes for the credit card to do it's crypto thing.

2nd: This won't be adapted ever. There is simply way to much working infrastructure out there build on the APDU protocol. And there are so many companies and stakeholders involved that doing any change will take years. If they start aligning on a change, it would be something that makes a difference, not something that safes time in the order of 5 to 20 milliseconds. per payment.

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