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demallien

2,742 karma · joined February 18, 2008

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demallien··on Stellar Wind (code name)
Yup. I would be very wary of any article claiming that a religious group is preferred by a government because of their righteous lifestyle. It's just so many more opportunities for blackmail. You'd have to screen those candidates so carefully, and you couldn't even do the usual thing of asking their family, friends, neighbours etc, because these are precisely the people they are hiding their quirks from.

If you have a very open person that engaged on the occasional responsible drink, they are much more useful to spy agencies. How do you blackmail someone whose life is an open book? On the other hand, it could be relatively easy to blackmail a Mormon over some minor (from an outsiders perspective) infraction, particularly as the price for being excluded from the Mormon community is so high

demallien··on How To Find A Technical Co-Founder
There are two types of "awesome idea" 1) a truly awesome idea, which if executed properly will lead to me becoming a billionaire 2) a sucky idea that will make me work on a project for two years for pretty much no financial return.

The problem is that nobody knows the way to tell the difference between the two without actually trying to execute. The GP apparently understands this, that's why he only has a drawful of ideas rather than Google. The GP is right to say that creating type 2 ideas is relatively trivial.

Which is not to say that the "ideas" guy might not have a type 1 idea in his pocket, but nobody (including the ideas guy) can actually tell, and the odds are that he has more of a type 2 idea than a type 1 idea.

demallien··on The GNOME developers removed it.
I've said this before here, but Apple have really concentrated on the laptop experience at the expense of the desktop experience. Which is understandable if you look at their sales figures. I was using a Mac Mini when I first upgraded to Mountain Lion, and really wasn't a big fan. Then I got a Macbook Air, and all of a sudden all of the modifications made sense. Things like the fact that they have optimised the OS for SSDs - which you find in laptops, not desktops. But that optimisation makes hard-drive based Macs much much slower than they were before. Or the fullscreen interface which works really well when you can do a three finger swipe to swap between screens, but not so well if you have a mouse.
demallien··on Dear Class of ’13: You’ve been scammed
Noooo, not what the GP is suggesting at all. The GP is saying that local public schools generally pay subsidies to instate students, so that's not a very expensive proposition. He's saying that it shouldn't be $40k + $40k, but rather $10k + $0k (live at home with parents). Racking up an unnecessary $70k/annum debt is something of a self-infliceted wound if that more expensive option isn't going to pay itself off through increased earnings later in life.
demallien··on New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More
My guess is that someone on a phone accidentally down-voted you when they wanted to up-vote. Those little arrows are... well... little!
demallien··on Terra – a low-level counterpart to Lua
Something like "tfunction" may have been better - it's obvious that its still a function, and the leading t let's you easily guess / remember the connection to Terra.

That minor gripe aside, this looks awesome.

demallien··on The C++ Programming Language (4th Edition)
Yup. The day I discovered "smart" pointers was the day I vowed to never use C++ again. I mean this is a language that touts being close to the metal as an advantage, and then it allows you to create something that looks like a pointer but doesn't fit into the space for a pointer. Genius...

I'll take C any day of the week, and if I need some higher level features, I'll either write a precompiler that can parse my higher level features before generating C code, or I'll write a bindings generator to connect to Javascript/Ruby (I've used both options successfully in the past).

demallien··on Food Practices Banned in Europe But Allowed in the US
A bit less: http://www.bing.com/search?q=horsemeat+scandal+timeline&... p=-1&sk=

They think it started in August 2012, and it was detected in January 2013...

demallien··on Dear Apple, let's talk about photos
I've noticed that I never go back to looking at old photos. If I've been off at a special event - holidays, a conference a wedding etc, I take any photos / video that I took, and edit it into a short film using iMovie. Because the film has been curated and worked, it is generally of higher quality than the raw shots, and as a result I have noticed that I tend watch the resulting films far (two orders of magnitude?) more often than the raw photos.

I've been doing this for a about 5-6 years now, so about 3 years ago I started deleting the raw shots a few months after having finished the film. To date I have not once regretted deleting a photo.

demallien··on Florida Teen Charged With Felony After Science Experiment Goes Bad
The US is a massively policed society. As an Australia, I expect to see a police car about once a month. In France, where I have lived for the last 10 years, it might be more like 1-2 times a week. In the US (based on a few weeks holidays that included rural/small town/big cities), I saw multiple police cars every day. I saw two violent arrests in those few weeks, which was the same as I had seen in my life up to that point.

Now maybe I was just unlucky, but Washington DC, and rural Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania are hardly considered hotspots of trouble (well, maybe DC, but I was in the nice parts of town!)

demallien··on Compiler Warnings for Objective-C Developers
Warnings are output to stderr. Personally I just do this: make > /dev/null

All that you see after that are warnings and errors.

demallien··on My Time at Lehman
Yes. Just to finish off the argument for you (I think you already get this, just forgot to explicitly state it), not only would the programmer have to assume the risk in choosing postgres over Oracle, but she would typically also not get any share of the thousands of dollars she saved the company by so doing. It's all downside and no upside, so it's no surprise that many people opt for the vendor solution.
demallien··on An Interview with Computing Pioneer Alan Kay
If we're talking about getting a kids to learn how to use these wonderful tools, that's a feature, not a bug. I for one know that I learned to program precisely because I couldn't just swap cassettes with the other kids. I had a crappy computer that no one else had, so the only games I had were the ones I typed in myself. That act of typing (and hence reading) the source code was how I learned to program.
demallien··on I’m done with the web
You can just write web apps for the iPhone, even today. And yes, you can create an icon in Speongboard so that it looks just like a native app. That's how I use Google Maps on my iPhone.
demallien··on Canon develops 35 mm full-frame CMOS sensor for video capture
I think the gp might be talking about quantization noise...
demallien··on Torvalds clarifies Linux's Windows 8 Secure Boot position
You cannot sell a computer with an OS license if you don't sell the computer alone (you're not buying the disk, but the license to use the software on it).

Sure you can. I bought a very nice MacBook Air in Paris a couple of months back - and you most definitely can't buy a MacBook Air without OS X.

demallien··on This Is Why You Can’t Have Nice Things, Yahoos
I'd agree with you if the only output of the "best" engineers was their code. But in my experience, good engineers help pass on their practices to the engineers working with them that aren't as good, making new "best" engineers in the process. That can't happen, at least not as effectively, if the good engineers and the average engineers are not working side-by-side.
demallien··on France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country
You don't actually have to provide fibre to someone living in Cobar for the NBN to be useful though. If you cover the ten biggest cities in Australia, you have covered about 90% of the population. If you cover the ten biggest cities in france, you haven't even got to 50%
demallien··on Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery
I have a question for you. Knowing that Broder definately misrepresented the facts, based on what we do see in the logs, why should we then believe his recounting of the conversations that he had with Tesla support staff?
demallien··on A Most Peculiar Test Drive
Who do you trust more - an engineering company with runs on the board, with multiple good reviews of their product, and a CEO known for attention to detail, or a journalist with a known previous bias against electrical cars?

Whilst we will never be 100% sure, I think that Tesla have proven their point beyond reasonable doubt.

demallien··on Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
Yup :)
demallien··on Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)
Heh. Be jealous - I'll be working in the same team as Fab, starting next month :D
demallien··on Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps
Actually, the performance might not be as bad as you would at first think. A good chunk of the work done by a graphical application is actually done by the graphics system supplied by the "OS", and in this case, that code would be natively compiled.

It's analogous (performance-wise) to writing gui apps in python - provided you're not trying to do any heavy lifting in the actual application code, it could work quite well.

Apple's Rosetta technology for running PowerPC code on Intel Macs actually worked this way, and the performance for most apps was really quite acceptable. That said, Rosetta had the advantage of moving from relatively slow CPUs to the fastest in the world. In the case of ARM / Android, you would be trying to run Windows apps on a slower CPU, so the results wouldn't be as good as Rosetta...

demallien··on Apps? No root? Your device serves others, warns Berners-Lee
Not a terribly coherent discourse by Tim B.Lee. On the one hand, he wants you to run apps downloaded off the internet in your browser. On the other hand, he wants the user to have root. There's not even a whelk's chance in a supernova that I will ever run a browser as root. I assume that Tim's OK with that as a security stance, but it then follows that browser apps can't have root, and if you're a non-tech-savvy user, if your apps don't have root, then you don't have root.

Focusing a bit more on the whole root access thing, I think it would be well to remember that we tried the open root thing already, and it turned out to be a security disaster for normal users. I think it's a good thing that the mainstream computing platforms (Windows, MacOSX, iOS) are trying a new approach. I also think that it's a very good thing that there are more open solutions, such as Android (which, just to be clear, is also a mainstream choice) and Linux, that allow us to see what can be done with more open access. Then the closed platforms can see how to go about providing that functionality in a more secure manner for less tech-savvy users.

demallien··on PIN number analysis
Yes and a quick search of the evening news shows how frequently people are murdered.
demallien··on PIN number analysis
You're talking about rainbow tables. They aren't used very much anymore, since the salting of hashes has become commonplace.

As for your idea that hash functions can't be reversed, not so much. They can't be easily reversed, but that's not the same thing.

In reality, brute forcing is pretty much the only viable attack left now that salting is commonplace. Still, if you have managed to get your hands on the password table, you can brute force without having to worry about rate limiting etc.

demallien··on PIN number analysis
Well, yes and no. I actually mostly agree with your point, but just to play devil's advocate:

When we talk about secure passwords (Not PINs for the moment, I'll get back to those in a moment), we're mostly worrying about how easy it is to recover someone's password from a database once a system has been compromised. However these days, we don't store the password, we store a hash of the password. To recover the password, the hacker has to successfully 'un-hash' the hashed password, which is done by applying a brute force cryptographic algorithm. The computer detects hits by examining the frequency of letters in the output, knowing that letters don't have an even distribution in passwords (or any other text). Choosing a random password is actually useful in this case, because even if the computer correctly finds the right key for de-hashing, it doesn't recognize your password as 'de-hashed' and just passes right over it.

So, for passwords, it is fairly clear that a random password is going to be safer than a word / name or other commonly used password constructs, in its ability to resist extraction from a compromised database.

Can we make the same claim for PIN codes? It would be harder - you only have 4 digits to work with, which makes it much harder to determine if digits are distributed in a pattern or randomly. You would expect a lot of false positives and false negatives. Nevertheless, distributions in real life numbers do exist - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law is an obvious example, which leads us to the non-obvious conclusion that making PIN codes longer probably leads to a lower level of security. On the other hand, the scenario in which this is a problem is when a database is compromised, and bank databases are amongst the most hardened targets on the planet, so the increase in risk is probably negligeable.

demallien··on Javascript Cryptography Considered Harmful
As someone that has spent the better part of the last 18 months getting animations as smooth as possible in Javascript, I will happily buy a beer for anyone trying to execute a time-based side-channel attack against Javascript. You'll need the beer to cry into when the garbage collector craps all over your assumptions of constant durations for code path execution...
demallien··on Amazon, Apple, and the beauty of low margins
I'm not so sure that it is that obvious that the iPad mini was in response to competition. My personal theory is more that they recognised that there was an unfulfilled need for an iPad that was smaller / lighter than the original. For example, many people find an iPad too heavy for long periods of reading, but an iPhone is too small. As this is one of the biggest use cases for tablets, it is not surprising that Apple wanted to make a product that is optimised for that use case.

Another way to look at it - if competition was the motivation for the iPad mini, it would have cost $50 less.

demallien··on Why We’re Raising the Signature Threshold for We the People
I don't know. They already tried seceding without DC's permission, and that didn't work out too well for them...
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