* Posts by stanimir

476 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jan 2012

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Microsoft: YES! You can have your desktop back again for FREE!

stanimir

Re: “advance the bold vision”

That article is by a troll. Not wanting to dilute your argument with any facts or anything, but in most functional benchmarks Windows outperforms Linux on the same hardware (e.g file server, database server, directory server, NFS server, Hypervisor, graphics, local large file copy, etc.)

Citation needed, I mean badly!! In my humble experience Windows is nowhere near Linux's epoll [1].

Not wanting to dilute your argument with any facts or anything...

Show some references, please. Otherwise it's just trolling.

[1]: http://linux.die.net/man/4/epoll

stanimir

Re: ability to discern pictures more quickly than words

I distinguish text faster and more accurately than icons, always have done and I don't see much chance that will change.

I just can't express how true this statement is. Google have similar approach actually, so Microsoft should not be singled out.a Unless you are the designer remembering/associating pictures to actions always seem extra trouble till the point I have to hover the icon to realize what it is.

PayPal security boss: OBLITERATE passwords from THE PLANET

stanimir

Re: Biometric will never work

Actually no good copy of a finger is needed, just a digital copy the data of a comparably sensitive sensor and pass it - sockets transfer data in digital format. If the raw (non hashed/salted) data is acquired, basically the entire system is entirely compromised.

stanimir

Re: I can change my password ...

I know quite little about finger print recognition but I always assume it'd be some hashing of the actual fingerprint. Adding 256bit salt to the fingerprint would solve the case.

My main gripe are injuries, cutting (or esp burning) your fingers leaves out handing dry.

Microsoft honcho pleads with media: 'Stop picking on us!'

stanimir
Pint

Beer or... bust

I'm a Diet Coke drinker, not pepsi. fwiw. diet coke/diet shmoke, see above.

It's Friday, at least be serious about something as you fail at propaganda.

A nifty tip: if you can cause more eye discomfort: pressing 'windows' key, ask the guys to code few extra full screen stroboscope effects and randomly pick one each time. Later you may explain how that innovative feature helps better out cognition.

Avoid nasty plugins with this extension, says Google

stanimir

Re: That sounds useful if I only want to read the document

That should save the time taken to load full fat Word.

Dunno about Word, open office opens in around 1.4sec from SSD (i.e. no disk cache) on a 3years old laptop (core duo). So the entire copy-paste human time will take a lot more than just double-click the file.

Want a coffee with Tim Cook? Better start saving now

stanimir
Facepalm

better looking

For the quoted amount of time, one get can significantly better looking girls (or boys) [yeah plural]. That's way more overpriced compared the entire line of products of Apple.

Hedge fund invests $2bn in Microsoft, thinks Redmond is undervalued

stanimir

Re: In it for the kill

Besides, hedge funds are major stake holders in many, many companies and most don't specialize in dismantling them.

This needs a citation badly.

Japanese Feds urge ISPs to support Tor ban plan

stanimir

Re: In denial

Here [1] is the list of Tor sponsor, I'm just you'd bet your balls off they do to support the piracy!

[1]: https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en

stanimir

Re: Using Japanese logic.

Actually, it's a common practice to extract forced confession in Japan[1]. The conviction rate is extremely high according to wikipedia as well[2] mostly due to the mentioned confession rate and lack of jury.

So the logic is right on the mark.

[1]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7063316.stm

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_Japan#Conviction_rate

stanimir

cyber savvy?

Well, good luck w/ that blocking. Unless they block almost anything that locks like p2p and install the better version of the great wall of China they might as well show some competence.

Who's a Siri boy, then? Apple hoards your voices for TWO years

stanimir
Thumb Down

Voice anon?

Seriously, it'd be quite easy to connect the voice to any other available voice even if the userId has been "lost".

That even doesn't touch like write mail to XXX.

Yeah, what a dishonest statement.

Ex-LulzSec bloke to spend a YEAR in the cooler for Sony hack

stanimir
Devil

The companies are "too big to fail" and cannot be tried under criminal law. As we all know money laundering for drug cartels is a fine only verdict. Something among the lines.

Black hats attack popular Russian stock-trading software

stanimir

firewall?

Few simple firewall rules: blocking anything that doesn't access the said stock exchange.

Use proxy for any regular web (and block the social crap site), setup a local mail server and then block the rest. The trader won't need more network access.

Banks are usually flooded by super paranoid "security guys", if they take care VNC alike stuff won't be an issue.

Netflix plotting move to HTML5 video - but only if DRM works

stanimir

Re: I don't think it's a good idea...

There are tons of easily available tools to allow capturing the screen(s) content. DRM is waste of time (incl. CPU), coding and servers no purpose, add unnecessary bloat and obscurity.

I can affect only legitimate customers and I bet "how to save files from netflix " in a search engine will yield a very simple step-by-step. To put it simply in order DRM to work it has to violate the laws of physics.

stanimir

shortcuts

Use Ctrl+U to view source or proxy.

Yet, I will block any javascript that tampers the controls. The most annoying is blocking the spacebar (or using it for different purposes) - spacebar = scroll down, shift+scrollbar=scroll up.

Movie review: Oblivion

stanimir
Thumb Up

Moon?

The movie greatly reminds about "Moon" w/ significantly larger budget... and chicks, erm female characters. And tons of bright scenes, easy on the eyes. It's not a bad movie, especially if you are a sci-fi fan, though. There are some clues about how the story is to unfold and for picking on them I was labeled 'geek' by my girlfriend.

Perhaps the greatest downside would be pretty straightforward storyline.

Want to know if that hottie has HIV? Put their blood in the DVD player

stanimir
Trollface

Re: Clever

To get a blood sample you need some scratches, use a modified bathroom door handle.

Alternatives include sedatives in the proposed wine. I am sure you can figure a way once you lay hands on the portable tester.

Judge scolds Apple, Motorola for using court as 'business strategy'

stanimir

Re: Is it snowing in hell? - the IT angle

if it snows in hell it is probably raining.

The IT angle: w/ enough rain and brimstone fire you get a nice cloud, albeit sulfur one... but cloud.

The gloves are on: Nokia emits super-sensitive £99 Windows Phone

stanimir

Re: Perfect phone

James, you could have skipped malware slur infestation in that marketing rant.

Hard luck lads, todger size DOES matter: Official

stanimir

Re: Also (1" would be big enough)

Large penis help remove the sperm out of the vagina. Other specimens' sperm that's it! The larger it is the higher chance to rub it off and yours to prevail.

Mozilla devs plotting to put a stake in <blink> tag – at last

stanimir

Now if you take javascript along...

b/c achieving *blink* w/ javascript (erm the assembly language of the web) and style change is just as trivial.

If blink is bad for accessibility popping out ladies, walking half way and offering support in the middle of screen is a truly magnificent idea.

German court says nein to Apple's slide-to-unlock patent

stanimir
Thumb Up

Apple... can't patent writing.

but selection over that writing is there to take

Apple handed victory in Samsung text-selection patent case

stanimir

I'd not be surprised if Apple has managed to patent even fart w/ overlays.

Back in the days text selection was simple xor but functionally was exactly the same thing. How on earth can anyone hold patent for such a trivial functionality.

Google offers Adwords deals - but you can't trust their numbers

stanimir

I mentioned that was the way I read it first but it required the voodoo bag so I discounted the option.

stanimir

Re: More marbles

@Arbee, or they are color blind and mistook red for green. :)

stanimir

More marbles

The riddle is rather trivial, so I wonder how they managed to screw the answer... or lost the count of their marbles in this particular case.

The 1st time I read it it appeared to me blue and green marbles also had 3/5 odds to be picked and that would have made the bag sort of magic or voodoo magic. The latter would explain adwords deals nicely.

Major blow for Apple: 'Bounce back' patent bounced back by USPTO

stanimir

The most shocking...

...is that bounce back mambo-jumbo could actually be considered patentable. The game is so rigid it's just stupid. Laws from the lawyers for the lawyers, etc. Software patents help no one but the trolls.

Oracle's new T5 Sparcs boost scalability in chip and chassis

stanimir

Re: humm x86 anyone?

Google/Facebook/Twitter other big boy do not care about consistency.

Who cares if you have receive a different search result ?

stanimir

Re: humm x86 anyone?

The main problem w/ x86 is the CAP theorem: out of Consistency, Availability and Partitioning you can pick only 2.

So you either sacrifice the Consistency or Availability as you go for the Partitioning . To mitigate the problem you might need to roll into 40Gb infinity band.

Bill Gates offers big bucks for better condoms

stanimir

Re:30% chance of pregnancy after 50 'perfect uses'

I didn't discuss getting pregnant in general as that involves ovulation, the swimmers actually being able to make it to the final destination and so on.

It was only regarding Math and probabilities. But yeah, probably unclear.

stanimir

I am suggesting that citing current condoms as efficient birth-control is overstatement.

For instance: Fertility "Awareness based methods e.g. standard days method, symptothermal method." are reported as 75-99% (compared to the 85% of the condom). So no exactly true "more effective than not using them".

I cannot support more condoms for STD/I prevention, yet I do not see them as effective birth-control method.

stanimir

Re: @stanimir - bollocks

Ohh, I seriously thought I had provided the source (I do not quote w/o sources). Firstly I looked up wikipedia which has adopted it from http://www.fpq.com.au/pdf/Contraception_Efficacy.pdf

Looks pretty fine source and the 98.x % I have seen written on the leaflet w/ the condoms.

The main problem w/ condoms is the friction and then then not-proper placement or size. Wrong sizes can result into a burst/tear and men are often unlikely to pull out to check if the condom is still whole.

Church propaganda would be the last thing I'd do as the Church is significantly unrepresented where I live and has close to zero influence.

Having yourself as anecdotal evidence doesn't work either. The reported rates are from females using the method.

Also 2% fail rate based on attempts would be 0.98^50 ~ .36 chance to get pregnant after 50 attempts w/ 2% chance - I mean your math is incorrect.

stanimir

also make an effective family planning tool

Unless someone considers one night stands family planning, the condoms are very far from effective w/ their fail rate:

With proper knowledge and application technique—and use at every act of intercourse—women whose partners use male condoms experience a 2% per-year pregnancy rate with perfect use and a 15% per-year pregnancy rate with typical use

I understand Bill Gates may not take security seriously but that's beyond laughable - 2% w/ perfect usage and 15% w/ typical :). Here, pals we have 15% fail rate as "effective"

US democracy activists lose case against Baidu and China

stanimir

Moral of the story...

you can't sell democracy to People's Republic of China.

Well played by Baidu.

Build a BONKERS gaming PC

stanimir

Re: Cores

This is not how it works, to use more than one core the application has to be designed to do so. Writing concurrent stuff aint trivial and it's quite error prone.

At some point you need to synchronize everything just b/c everyone rushes doesn't mean it's done concurrently.

Some tasks can be easily parallelized like path finding, sorting large arrays, etc however when operating on small structures the lack of locality and price to fork/join outweights ability to run in multi-core.

For games usually single threaded performance is the most important factor when picking the CPU (unlike servers [usually])

Mozilla to Apple: we don't care about iOS

stanimir

Re: Is this a bit strange

iOS is not monopoly, if it were Apple would be facing fines in the US of A as well.

Apple: OK, we tracked your every move... but let's call it a caching bug, m'kay?

stanimir

Re: Google does no evil (tm)

Where did you read "google" in the article?

Google open sources very slow compression algorithm

stanimir
Meh

@domino

I Already mentioned it -> the javascript would be downloaded once only, as it'd be cached by the user-agent.

Simple rule - if a resource can be served by that algorithm it'd be done once only - also the algorithm will not be so "good" on smaller resources.

Compared to the video sizes - 8k (optimistic ratio of your quote 100k) once is less than a drop in the sea.

stanimir

Re: -bzip2/xzip is the way to go

Neither of them will decompress with zlib

@Paul,

I quite realize that (having 1st hand experience porting zlib to java, java lacks Z_SYNC_FLUSH support - lame as it gets). However, the idea is that even if one browser starts providing support for a better algorithm and there is a mod for apache/tomcat/nginx/whatever it will be automatically available.

The use of compression is quite flexible w/ http and the user agent (browser) can announce any supported one, it's up to the server to decide. It could be a good selling point and it doesn't require a lot of work actually.

Also, LZMA SDK is placed in the public domain. So there is no issue w/ the licensing terms.

Btw I posted results about lzma (xzip) and the compression level is noticeably improved compared to bzip2 but the cpu cycles are increased an order of magnitude too - still a lot better than the "new compression".

stanimir

@Eddie Edwards -- Re: It is even slower than you say

The idea is that the compression works w/ deflate/inflate that's readily available on every browser - so there is no need to change anything on the client side

On a wimpy Opteron 2372 (@2.1GHz) -- benchmark on sizes/speed vs

corpus - 100000000 enwik8

gzip -9 36’445’248 enwik8.gz (~10sec) - matches the PDF results

bzip2 29’008’758 enwik8.bz2 (~17sec)

xz 26’375’764 enwik8.xz (123 sec) [lzma -- the algorithm is just better]

Zopfli 34’995’756 (didn't wish to way 15+ minutes to complete, data from the linked PDF)

stanimir

Re: Its a standard (zip format)

The CEN is at the end of the file to allow easier adding of new files w/o necessarily decompress/compress of the entire archive

...but zip file format has nothing to do w/ the article.

stanimir

Re: It is even slower than you say

@Silverburn,

The client enjoys less CPU cycles and less bandwidth - it's the server/compressor that has to do way too much work for little benefit.

As for storage -bzip2/xzip is the way to go if you wish to save space (bzip2 is 20% better than zopfli on enwik8 test... and orders of magnitude faster)

stanimir

Re: useful

and an 8% saving in traffic sent externally for the cost of a set of Zopfli boxes on the outgoing lines

The quoted 8% would be applicable to large enough static text files that are actually cacheable.

If the file is cacheable - the client would likely fetch it once only anyway. So there you have it - if you have huge, huge javascript file Zopfli can be of a tiny use (and you can just compress it yourself anyways instead of using proxy). "Tiny" - b/c the clients will use their own cached version instead of downloading it on each request.

Facebook and BCC would have dynamic content mostly, so they need online compression. Zopfli compression algorithm is way way way too slow for online compression. Deflate is fast enough, though.

Side note: sites shall use 'deflate' not 'gzip' - gzip comes w/ crc32 and extra header.

For reference compared to LZMA algorithm Zopfli still ~25% worse in size and still slower processing.

To save bandwidth some browsers shall start supporting LZMA and announce that in Accept-Encoding header - the server would pick the best from gzip/deflate/lzma and server the content w/o wasting tons of cycles and bandwidth on a dated 16bit compression.

stanimir
Holmes

Re: The question I have is,,,

From the linked PDF -> the decompression is the same (inflate) as any other algorithm compared to. Probably even slightly better due better cache hits (smaller size).

stanimir

zlib compression

By default deflate (the zlib compression) does not use maximum compression nor max memory for dictionaries. -9 would be the max compression but not max memory

Also gzip uses crc32 that's practically unnecessary over tcp, so they should have tested via simple deflate.

80times as cited in the pdf is just too slow for few percentages for files in sizes of megabytes. The deflate algorithm is essentially 16bit as well. When transferring such files they would be compressed w/ better algorithms no necessary compatible w/ inflate on the client side. Since "web content" like images and video that are large enough are already compressed internally and their is nothing much to gain.

@jamie jones

bzip is not "inflate" compatible on the decompression end.

.

Microsoft secure Azure Storage goes down WORLDWIDE

stanimir

Not the 1st SSL accident by Microsoft, it happened (iirc 2000) once w/ hotmail / password. Does anyone have fresher memory?

Perfect sex minx calculated from 'deep' probe of X-rated flicks

stanimir

JPEG -- Re: @DAM 08:24 (was: ::yawns::)

There was no jpeg in '80s. JPEG was firstly released in yearly 90s (namely '92).

I still recall '93 when I saw the 1st jpegs on a 512KB video card that allowed 15bit color on VESA mode - stunning.

We've slashed account hijackings by 99.7% - Google

stanimir

Same google

That includes obfuscation in the set of best practices for deploying android applications, is it?

The main problem w/ proposed security "defense" is that it works mostly against mass-targeting attacks not against prolific ones and against the former strong password is all you need.

Speedy MySQL 5.6 takes aim at NoSQL, MariaDB

stanimir

Re: Rehashed press release

*As changing indices imposes a table copy penalty they are definitely discouraged.*

As of 5.5 it doesn't need to copy the entire table.

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