Posts by Nickd

Ten... PC games you may have missed

What about...

The binding of isaac, it's a roguelike two stick shooter with a really messed up sense of visual design, a decent sense of humor and it's available on steam for £2 including it's DLC at the moment in the summer sale.

Absolutely brilliant game and only on PC.

Plastic semiconductor makes solar cells more efficient

Hmm

I'm pretty sure a 50% increase is actually an 18oz steak instead of a 12oz steak. Being a curious soul I slapped 12 + 50% in to google to see what the top hit was assuming you had found your percentage calculation formula that way and was briefly astonished to see it tell me I was wrong and you were right.

A second glance showed that Google calculator is treating a 50% value as 0.5, presumably so you can say 12oz * 150% to calculate a 50% increase using the method taught to most school children.

I hope you haven't been using Google calculator for anything important; tax returns, employee salary calculations or the effectiveness of your herbal enlargment pills for example.

iOS dev nemesis Lodsys pressures Android coders too?

LG Electronics vs Quanta Computers

My understanding was that the supreme court had ruled specifically against double dipping back in 2008 http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/06/scotus-keeps-lg-from-double-dipping-on-method-patents.ars and further defined the term 'patent exhaustion'

The exact details of the agreement between Apple Inc. and Lodysys are secret, but I'd guess that Lodysys hasn't deliberately slipped something past Apples lawyers.

What they may be claiming is that because App store apps are developed and sold separately to the phone itself then the point of sale of the phone doesn't cover the point of sale of the app, thus each app must separately license each patent.

The hollowness of this claim is that in-app payments are (by my understanding) included using apples API, code developed by apple and shipped in the phone as sold.

Brave new Boris-bikers banjaxed by broken boxes

re: public spirit

Right, because after all what we need is more cars on the road instead

New code strategies to fight side-channel attack

Old Strategies.

What both recent side channel attacks have shown us is that a 'secret' encryption technique rather than a peer reviewed one is a much easier target for to side channel attacks. In both the smartcard and the keyless entry system what was discovered was the weakness in the underlying cryptography.

It is always going to be seriously hard work to prevent people with physical access to your devices, unlimited time, high resolution scopes, JTAG dongles and microscopes from getting the inside scoop on your security through obscurity techniques. Better surely to design using peer reviewed cryptographically strong systems that don't allow you to reverse engineer the master key from any reader?

Penguin-powered UML modeling

C++ Round Trip

Do you know of any Linux based Eclipse integrated tools that provide C++ round trip engineering, or even class / function prototypes and header files? I really like Enterprise Architect but we are very Linux focused currently.