* Posts by xXSwolGunzXx

21 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jun 2017

Judge stalls Uber trade-secret theft trial after learning upstart 'ran a trade-secret stealing op'

xXSwolGunzXx

That does seem to be their game. Ignore inconvenient laws and drag out enforcement until they're big enough to get the law changed or at worst pay any fines out of spare change. All part of an over-arching strategy of causing and exploiting as much market failure as possible.

What is the probability of being drunk at work and also being tested? Let's find out! Correctly

xXSwolGunzXx

Re: 260 working days per year

Nah it's typically 10 holidays and then 2-4 weeks of PTO, sometimes split up into vacation/sick. Except for the companies that provide "unlimited" vacation. At my current job, after totaling up holidays, vacation, sick, personal days, and volunteer days, a work year is 225 days.

Why Uber isn't the poster child for capitalism you wanted

xXSwolGunzXx

Re: "if you're losing 5p a transaction you can't make it up with volume"

C'mon guy, you know he meant negative net revenue.

Fresh chips from Intel (yay?) at 14nm (awww)

xXSwolGunzXx

Re: AC

I remember just about no one saying that, except for my boss, who insisted on Bulldozer chips so our servers would have FORTY-EIGHT CORES. Bulldozer was shit and obsolete before it shipped. Epyc at least has a MIPS/$ advantage. For the first time in this decade, speccing AMD in a server isn't sufficient grounds for termination.

IoT botnet Linux.ProxyM turns its grubby claws to spam rather than DDoS

xXSwolGunzXx

Re: Most unauth SMTP connects from dialup ranges are treated as spam anyway.

Last time I tried to make SMTP connections from my home I learned that my ISP firewalled outgoing connections. You had to send through their relay. They didn't mind my few messages, but I'm sure anyone trying to do anything substantial (legitimate or not) would get blocked and informed of the benefits of a business account with them.

Since then I've given up direct involvement with email entirely and let the hosting provider deal with SPF, DKIM, reputation, and all that crap.

VMworld schwag heist CCTV didn't work and casino wouldn't share it

xXSwolGunzXx

Re: Other Explanations

A judge would say search warrants are for police not angry marketers.

China orders immediate shuttering of Bitcoin exchanges

xXSwolGunzXx

Re: Already back up?

Not much really. The expected lifespan of a Bitcoin exchange before it closes due to theft is 2-3 years.

Boffins fear we might be running out of ideas

xXSwolGunzXx

That's a better example than you think. The fundamentals of railroading--tractive effort and top speed--haven't changed significantly in the last 100 years. Diesels and electrification were around back then, only the economics didn't favor them in general. The only things happening there that wouldn't be easily understood by a GWR engineer of the time are computer-related. Maybe something else will revolutionize everything in the next 100 years, but it won't be semiconductors.

Massive iPhone X leak trashes Apple's 10th anniversary circus

xXSwolGunzXx

Re: Other tech you could buy for a grand...

If spending your thousand quid on other things than tech is an option then why not skip straight to the booze. Tequila is never obsolete.

Amazon crowd-sources new HQ location, Bezos tells mayors to woo him

xXSwolGunzXx

IOW hiring everyone remotely qualified that they can find in Seattle, or willing to move to Seattle, to work crazy hours for below-market pay is no longer enough and headcount is dropping at Amazon's main people warehouse. Solution being, of course, scaling up. There's no problem Bezos can't solve by going bigger! To be fair it's worked so far.

Stand up who HASN'T been hit in the Equifax mega-hack – whoa, whoa, sit down everyone

xXSwolGunzXx

" the company's core consumer and commercial credit reporting databases were untouched – only the names, social security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some instances, driver's license numbers of 143 million Americans were exposed"

Rigorous risk analysis determined that securing the proprietary information was cost-effective. Not so much the PII--Equifax's competitors all have that data as well so why bother?

Vaping ads flout EU rules, even if to promote healthier lifestyles

xXSwolGunzXx

Re: Nicotine is not Tobacco

Nicotine is pretty well understood. The carriers, propylene glycol and glycerin, are as well. You're right about the additives though. Inhaling flavorings is a new thing and not tested by regulatory bodies. Who cares whether it's safe to inhale fake raspberry flavoring when it's going into food, right? If candy or soda gets in your lungs the safety of the flavorings is the least of your worries.

We know of some substances that are definitely safe to ingest and definitely unsafe to inhale over a long peiod, such as diacetyl (used in microwave popcorn, causes popcorn lung, it's a real thing). I don't know that cinnamaldehyde has been proven to be unsafe for inhalation but it's an irritant. Using e-liquid containing it is probably not a great idea. There's just very little data available on inhalation of flavorings, and good luck finding out what's in a retail e-liquid. That plus cost is why I only use the e-liquid my wife makes, as she's sifted through all of the available information and uses only the flavorings least likely to cause problems 20 years down the road. It's still a gamble though, and is the main reason I think that the safety of vaping is dubious except as an alternative to smoking.

Post Office puts stamp on ISP minnow Fuel

xXSwolGunzXx

Why is the post office providing broadband?

Boffins throw Amazon Alexa on the rack to extract hidden clues

xXSwolGunzXx

Re: Sales of these are going to crash at some point

Because the increased power consumption caused by always-on recording is much less noticeable on a plugged in device. But why not do both?

We're into lap 21 and Node.js features have again overtaken those attempting to teach it

xXSwolGunzXx

Ah, node.js is PHP for millenials. I was wondering why it's so popular.

Twitter's twits turned troll's tech taunt into thought-provoking tonic

xXSwolGunzXx

It means they moved all the work from their servers to your phone.

Wisconsin badgers Apple to cough up half a billion dollars for ripping off chip designs

xXSwolGunzXx

Re: Wisconsin court rules in favour of Wisconsin U

They'd have to have some presence in east Texas to sue there. Dunno how much. Of course if your company is a patent troll with no real business activity it's trivial to set up in the patent-friendliest area you can find.

Q. What's today's top language? A. Python... no, wait, Java... no, C

xXSwolGunzXx

Re: Proof of Fermat's last theorem used infinite sets

Nah java.util.Set supports that just fine. I guess implementing Iterable could be fun depending on the set, but that's all.

xXSwolGunzXx

Re: I suspect there are quite a few Java devs out there

Java has 2 key features: GC and not too much power. You can turn loose a bunch of average devs and get them to churn out a pile of Java code that meets the requirements. If they get into a tight spot, the staff bright spark can fix things without too much trouble because Java doesn't provide any sharp things that destroy maintainability when used badly--macros, decorators, metaclasses, etc.

UK government's war on e-cigs is over

xXSwolGunzXx

Re: Just wait

Considered that already, still worth it. Eight years of smoking caused my lungs to declare that they were tired of exchanging gases and I could find another way to obtain oxygen, thank you very much. Vaping fixed that. Wife says that's not normal but finding out your lungs are shit after they've already gone to shit is a little late...

Don't panic, but Linux's Systemd can be pwned via an evil DNS query

xXSwolGunzXx

You know what else is almost everywhere and had a vulnerability in its DNS resolver? glibc. Zawinski's Law at work, at the OS level. "Every system service attempts to expand until it can resolve DNS queries. Those services which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

P.S. systemd is the greatest achievement of humankind. Well, it works. Usually. Better than SysV init anyway.