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samworm

209 karma · joined February 11, 2013

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samworm··on Ask HN: My Suspicion Regarding “M247 Ltd”
I was an M247 colo customer in Manchester for approx 5 years. I went to their primary DC many times, interacted with their staff. They're a hosting company. The colo racks are full of servers with lots of little labels with different company names. The managed (and hence vps) racks are numerous and anonymous, which is what you'd expect. I'm not sure what you think is going on. They're cheap. They have excess capacity. So bottom-feeding race-to-the-bottom operators like VPN providers are buying from them. It doesn't seem too surprising.
samworm··on A plane has been in space for 500 days
"NO ONE KNOWS" - Really? No One? In a world of terrible link-bait headlines this one manages to impress with its idiocy.
samworm··on Fallen drone found on streets of San Francisco
Posting on Craigslist and some random websites is not an adequate defence against Theft By Finding charges. The person that removed this clearly valuable and not marked as abandoned item needs to immediately report it to the local authorities, and make arrangements to ultimately hand it in.
samworm··on Microsoft breaks into leaker employee's Hotmail without warrant
"breaks into"? Errm, they have the keys to the door. They own the house. No one broke in. Hotmail users give MS permission to look in their email when they agree to the T&Cs. So using an account hosted by them to conspire against them was pretty boneheaded to say the least.
samworm··on Occupy founder calls on Obama to appoint Eric Schmidt 'CEO of America'
A story about a petition with 2 signatures (2!) created by someone who's main qualification doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Slow news day huh?
samworm··on Android Wearables: Developer Preview
Most of my friends aren't tech people, and most of them own iPhones because they like the way they look and feel. One of them just swapped to a Nokia because she liked the colour. Phones are jewellery for a lot of people, they're all roughly functionally equivalent anyway. Why not smartwatches?
samworm··on Drupal Maintainer Makes $530 a week on GitTip
$27778.92 per annum before taxes and expenses. There are an awful lot of people getting paid an awful lot more to paste bad themes into their employer's Drupal config. So it goes.
samworm··on Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto's official denial of Bitcoin involvement
It was sarcasm.

The joke was a reference back to Goodman's observartion in the original article: "the punctuation in the proposal is also consistent with how Dorian S. Nakamoto writes, with double spaces after periods and other format quirks."

Your comments about prevalence of this technique stand, of course.

samworm··on Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto's official denial of Bitcoin involvement
Double spaces in this statement. Double spaces in the original bitcoin announcements. Ipso facto my friend.
samworm··on Chromecast URL Player
Since they opened the SDK you've been able to do most (all?) the stuff people were initially excited about. The problem is that all the excitement has long since died away so very few people are developing versatile Chromecast apps... and the ones that are out there are mostly buggy and poor designs.

AllCast [1] is probably the most well known despite being crippled (limited to 1 min playback I think?) unless you pay.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.koushikdut...

samworm··on Man Confronts CEO of MT. Gox In Tokyo
There are very good procedural reasons for not paying out to random people that turn up at your offices. Try going to your bank's office building (not branch) and demanding cash. Proper withdrawal processes should be designed to protect both parties from fraud / risk while remaining convenient.

I'm not saying I think mtgox's actual procedures aren't batshit insane (they are), but trying (and failing) to operate outside of those procedures doesn't really prove anything.

samworm··on Bitcoin transaction malleability: looking at the bytes
Which is paid by everyone, even people that settle their transaction in case. I use a cash-back credit-card and effectively my fellow shoppers are subsidising my purchases, because we're all collectively paying the card fees which I'm getting a rev-share on. CCs are a deeply weird model.
samworm··on New Android OEM licensing terms leak; “Open” comes with a lot of restrictions
New in the sense that they're newly available to the public. The agreement is dated Jan 2011.
samworm··on Ask HN: Is it legally enforceable for your company to own your IP?
I was responsible for hiring a development team for a company in England some years ago.

The boilerplate contract we got from our solicitors[1] had this clause in. I fed back that this would be a barrier to hiring quality staff and was told that it would likely be unenforceable anyway and was only in there to intimidate people if the company needed to force something through later.

The clause was removed for the hiring I did but I understand that at the next annual legal review it was reinserted as a "standard contact term" by the solicitors for all new hires :(

[1] Halliwells - who I apparently no longer exist - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliwells

samworm··on What should we expect from a modern init system?
I personally prefer systemd to upstart. I just hope that distros (in this case Debian) stick to a technical review and don't get drawn into ad hominem arguments.

For many people it seems the answer to the question posed in the post title is "I would expect it to not be designed/authored by the man behind pulseaudio".

samworm··on Cloud IDEs: The importance of being open
why don't tesla use charts comparing searches for "internal combustion engine car" vs "electric car".

no one searches for the term "desktop ide" because the only people that call them that are people in the cloud ide marketing game. the terms are junk. the axises are junk. the chart is junk.

samworm··on FFmpeg and a thousand fixes
It is interesting that YouTube isn't mentioned in this blogpost, despite there being good evidence that ffmpeg has been used there[1].

The fuzz testing they mention is based around constructing malformed (or at least "exotic") input files and then monitoring for failures... ie simulating exactly the kind of attack someone might use against YouTube's transcoding infrastructure.

[1] http://multimedia.cx/eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/

samworm··on Building a living photo frame with a Raspberry Pi and a motion detector
Nice project!

One tip for keeping the cost down - small LCD screens with composite inputs are available very cheaply on ebay (and elsewhere) if you search for rear view camera screens.

I got one for about half the price of similar units on adafruit. The viewing angle is terrible (as is the case on most really cheap screens) but the colour and brightness are great.

samworm··on Why you should fly United Airlines
Am I the only one who would happily pay a little more to fly on an airline that didn't allow animals in the cabin? A load of stinking cats an their over-active sebaceous glands? No thanks!
samworm··on Google hijacking DNS to sabotage projects like Namecoin?
Are Google "hijacking DNS to sabotage projects like Namecoin?" - No. I doubt the people working on this give any thought to Namecoin, the user-base overlap is approximately 0%. They're doing this because they think it will improve performance.
samworm··on UK could build 50 new nuclear plants
This is a logistical impossibility. Power plants, especially nuclear ones, are a nightmare to get past public consultations. They can eventually be forced through if the location is right and there is government level pressure. That might allow a small number to be built, but 50? No chance.
samworm··on First 3D Commercial Web Game Powered By asm.js
Minecraft is FAR bigger and more complicated than people give it credit for. Getting a terrain generation demo running in a browser is not even remotely the same thing.
samworm··on Google Shopping: Upload Your Content Without Watermarks or Be Banned
"I have to invest a ton of money" did you miss the bit where this is an optional service? A service which you (and your competitors) should only use if you consider the value offered to outweigh the cost?
samworm··on Great roundup of the best PS3 games in its swan-song year...
This is nowhere close to the PS3's swansong. The PS2 was on sale until Jan of /This Year/! So the PS3 will be around for a long time yet...
samworm··on DynoSRC - Eliminate HTTP requests for JavaScript files
I agree the "send me differences" model is appealing. A version based off rsync was created back in 1999 but patents killed it. I think the patent in question runs out pretty soon though...

The Tragedy of the RProxy: http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/rproxy.html

samworm··on Research at Google
Because when an area of a business is reported in a positive light the supporters of other business with similar activities all want to shout "me too". Such is life.
samworm··on Hövding – Airbag for cyclists
The "Two Swedish Girls" are two women, who studied Industrial Design at University before moving into product development. If two males in their mid twenties were launching a product no one would refer to them as "boys".

"Hövding started out in 2005 as a master’s thesis by the two founders Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin, who, at the time, were studying Industrial Design at the University of Lund."

The title of this post is condescending and clichéd. Yawn.

samworm··on USB Implementers Forum Says No to Open Source
The way these things normally work is that you're only allowed to use the name and marks if you're an official licensee.

So if you put the USB logo on your marketing and claim to have a "USB Mini" connector in your specifications then you could be in trouble on two fronts: (1) the usb folks can sue you for using their IP and (2) purchasers can claim the product is not "as described" which may given them certain rights dependent upon the location.

Not using the official logo shouldn't be a problem in hobby market. Everyone will recognise the connector. Not being allowed to identify it as USB2 or USB3 or whatever, that could be a problem. I'm sure there are creative ways around it though.

samworm··on Obamacare’s impact on our startup and what to do to avoid rate hikes
"Now, you can still do some of those tricks, but not as extensively." The language in this blog post make it pretty clear that this isn't a company you want to work for. Stop trying to nickel and dime your employees. Provide good affordable health care for everyone from the CEO down to the cleaner. Be a socially responsible entity. Make that one of the pillars of your business. Success without it isn't success at all.
samworm··on How the Raspberry Pi boots up
"The config.txt is loaded after the split is done so you cannot specify the splitting amounts in the config.txt. However, different .elf files having different splits exist in the SD Card."

This hasn't been true for some time. In fact runtime dynamic RAM management has been available since Nov '12. See http://elinux.org/RPiconfig#CMA_-_Dynamic_Memory_Split for more details.

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