em3rgent0rdr

Well the title and premise is a bit silly. If you're designing easy hardware by wiring parts together that already do all the hard stuff, then "hardware is not so hard" is something you might conclude, but that only applies for designing easy hardware like this. But if you are doing anything that pushes the limits or involves analog signals and having to worry about signal integrity and EMI and impedances and Laplace transfer functions all that other stuff that requires degrees, then "hardware is hard".

"actual regulations...emissions"

yeah, and looking at their board I see they use one of "ESP32-WROOM" modules, which has the wifi & blutooth & antennae (pre-certified by Espressif for FCC, CE so itself doesn't need testing) & flash & processor (which even has its own RC oscillator), which takes care of a whole ton of difficult stuff so all the designer needs to do is plop that module down and power it up and wire some SPI/I2C peripherals which I'm guessing don't need super fast clocks or electrical constraints. Without something like those ESP32 modules, this would be much more difficult.

Star Trek used the fictional "gigaquad" unit of computer data storage, and conveniently deliberately avoided defining how many bits the base unit of a "quad" is, so they never would get embarrassed if such an amount of storage became commonplace nowadays.

Noise and component imprecision has always limited analog computing.

Presumably any new Android 17 features that aren't counter to GrapheneOS's mission, such as "Bubbles allows you to turn any app into a compact, floating window" https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android...

"an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone": https://postmarketos.org/

"an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS": Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) on newer Android versions provides a hypervisor and a hardware-accelerated graphics (VirGL) for AVF virtual machines, allowing users to run an isolated Linux GUI desktop with low overhead.

With more bits, then SUB is going to be more and more expensive to fit in the same number of clocks as XOR. So with an 8-bit CPU like Z80, it probably makes design sense to have XOR and SUB both take one cycle. But if for instance a CPU uses 128-bit registers, then the propagate-and-carry logic for ADD/SUB might take way much longer than XOR that the designers might not try to fit ADD/SUB into the same single clock cycle as XOR, and so might instead do multi-cycle pipelined ADD/SUB.

A real-world CPU example is the Cray-1, where S-Register Scalar Operations (64-bit) take 3 cycles for ADD/SUB but still only 1 cycle for XOR. [1]

[1] https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/CRAY-1-HardRefMan/CRAY-1-HRM...

Some old guitar effects used -9V DC.[1] And the convention with guitar effects power adapter is the barrel is center negative (which is motivated with facilitating easy wiring of the socket's switch to connect to a 9V battery inside).

[1] https://www.analogisnotdead.com/article26/what-is-going-on-w...

"download a pre-prepared disk image directly to your disk"

Well not quite direct; the bits go through your RAM in between.

Too bad can't access $CorpStreamingVideoService full-resolution on linux :(

Impressive. Noting however that double-clicking is not working in Minesweeper. :)

That curricula is often more specifically called "Computer Engineering". CS students meanwhile usually aren't bothered by anything below the compiler.

"CS majors could be taught to design hardware, and the EE curriculum"

"Electrical and Computer Engineering" (ECE) departments already exist and already have such a major: "Computer Engineering".

Stallman was right.

It's about the friends you make when collecting stickers.

It depends. Many modern microcontrollers are perfectly fine driving LEDs directly off IO pins if the pin specs say it is rated for sufficient current (like 20mA). However, older ones like ESP8266 can only do like 2mA and the 8051 even less. Or you run into a total power budget issue if your are running too many pins. Also, some IO pins are perfectly fine at sinking current to ground but aren't suited for sourcing current, in which case the LED would be directly connected to an external high voltage and the IO pin would simply be switching to ground or not.

When C code is run in machines capable of failing with gruesome death, its unsafeness may indeed result in gruesome death.

I don't think the prevalence of these articles this time of year is because the authors go on holiday, but instead is because the new year is the perfect time to ponder: "Will this be the year of the Linux desktop?"

Why can't these posts just say "microsecond" instead of the vague and misleading "ultra-low"?

Very useful. It would be great for the browser become the cross-platform application target. I've been eagerly waiting for Qt WebAssembly to mature.

Looking at the complexity and area of hardware floating point, I often wonder why we don't see more unified combined integer+floating point units, like done in the R4200 [1], which reused most of the integer datapath while just adding a smaller extra smaller 12-bit datapath for the exponent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R4200

If you use a tile-based hardware renderer, such as on the original nintendo chip, then pixels are rendered on the fly to the screen by the hardware automatically pulling pixels based on the tile map.

The '7660 is good for low-power and is my go-to DIP-8 part when I need a half or double voltage supply on a breadboard.

id Software should have just partnered with a heavy metal band that jointly released an album of Doom music you could put in your stereo while you play the game.

I'd much rather invest one powerful machine that cand do work and games instead of two that take up extra space and generate more e-waste.

But how deal with security and DDoS?

yes, and sometimes Grok.

To gauge.

Most look like they were done by a beginner programmer on crack, but every once in a while a correct one appears.

Both infrastructures are made to last.