Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Keeeeerhiiist I want to laugh at this... (Score 1) 637

Wow, to get that upset about someone else's appearence and habits you must have deep psychological problems. Maybe you should be the one seeking therapy, to realize the world isn't a fashion show or beauty contest put on for your own aesthetic entertainment. Your rant makes me want to go back to wearing white socks and sandles just to piss people like you off.

Comment Re: What a world we live in (Score 3, Interesting) 138

Really the wristwatch is a silly example; there are better ways to harvest energy on a wristwatch than RF leaching. Stationary objects that can't rely on kinetic energy harvesting could utilize this technology, though.

Anyway, they did test for the interference potential of this, and it was indeed very little at the rates/distances acheived.

I think they should see how much they could *increase* the effect of the reflection on WiFi signals. Then they could look to market passive devices that, instead of being purposed for the "internet of things", are purposed to work in cooperation with MIMO/spatial multiplexing to dynamically adapt the RF environment to increase the overall bandwidth of WiFi devices, allowing an access point to turn them on and off until it gets just the right reflections. Then license that to WiFi vendors to sell them lithographed by the thousands into wallpaper or just thrown helter skepter on top of drop ceiling tiles.

Comment Re:Very original (Score 1) 182

That's pretty much it. Or they think the $1000 is buying them some special features like running quieter.

The prices in this market are downright crazy, probably because it's a quasi-medical application. Yes there are some that offer things like UV sterilizers and engineer the air flow such that it goes through the UV sterilizer at a rate that actually allows it to work, but even the ones with features that actually work are completely overpriced, and that doesn't change as long as it's a small percentage of desperate people that need it. It's no surprise to me that once the need for the product becomes mainstream, gouging the hell out of the consumer gets harder, and no it has nothing to do with mass production, just exploitation of the sick.

 

Comment Re:CPU time for charity (Score 1) 208

This suggestion would probably be the least work to set up and then tear down. Assuming the existing hardware is running a supported platform, it's just packages and a small amount of configuration and can run in an unprivileged account. When you get towards the end of the unplug date, start disabling new jobs from tasks with long-running jobs so you don't leave too many unfinished ones. And yes the WCG does have tasks that need storage, not just CPU.

Comment Re:user error (Score 0) 710

People can live without a clothing dryer.

...If they are not allergic to dust mites like some tens of percent of people, or if they spend even more energy heating their water to 140F, or buy a bunch of chemicals to kill them with cold water, they can, Oh, and then there is the allergy to pollen from the clothes line some other tens of percent of people have.

As to the OP, there is only a small sliver of people who are perceptive enough to realize their impact on the environment, but not perceptive enough to realize that it does not do much good to cut their own emissions for the most part because the vast majority of people will not. There are productive things to do that help push technology forward, like buying into advanced auto technology or alt energy systems if you can. The rest of the stuff just makes energy cheaper for the glutton across the street, so he can have more kids raised without your environmental values.

Comment Re:This just illustrates (Score 2) 365

If we knew about the effects of excessive CO2 production in the 1900s,

FWIW.

"The greenhouse effect is the process by which absorption and emission of infrared radiation by gases in a planet's atmosphere warm its lower atmosphere and surface. It was proposed by Joseph Fourier in 1824, discovered in 1860 by John Tyndall,[66] was first investigated quantitatively by Svante Arrhenius in 1896,[67] and was developed in the 1930s through 1960s by Guy Stewart Callendar.[68]" ...just because it always amuses me to remind myself how long we've known much physics.

Comment Re:I prefer (Score 1) 337

You make that 6% and more back in improved latency performance. Of course these days, even with jumbo frames ethernet link speeds are up high enough that jitter is less of an issue, but still, that's only because bandwidth was thrown at the problem, which, if done to ATM, would easily have made up for the overhead, without the hackery of MPLS.

Comment Re:I prefer (Score 1) 337

And that's great from the perspective of defining what should happen with basic service traffic, with the exception of not allowing the ISPs to mitigate obvious DDoS attacks because they must treat all similar traffic the same.

Also, we do not want to make it impossible for Company A to build a super-fast, super reliable, prioritized network over normal ISP/carrier links that allows them to provide e.g. home-based medical monitoring or even more trivial services. There's a legitimate case for premium service contracts, and they should be looked at as an opportunity to raise money for improving basic service rather than some sort of evil back-room deal. Locking the ratio of basic service capacity to prioritized offerings is how to do this most simply, with something akin to the "medical loss ratio" also an option.

Finally, the more legal policy that gets thrown at the network staff, the harder their job gets, and believe me, in most places the network staff is already oversubscribed both manpower and talent wise (heck ISPs can't even reliably rid us of source address spoofing to this day.) Having to pass every rule change through a legislative compliance test would be back breaking.

Comment Re:I prefer (Score 1) 337

What we need is something like RSVP being widely implemented, but I haven't noticed it mentioned anywhere in these net neutrality discussions.

What we really needed was widescale deployment of ATM so the client could define QoS properly in a call-based fashion. But that didn't happen.

Comment Re:Umm, no (Score 1) 323

Are you *seriously* suggesting using an easily spoofed MAC address is one way to do that?

No, and I remind my employers of this pretty much monthly to try to push towards 802.1x/MACSec on the wired side. However, we already use (password-based) 802.1x on the WiFi side, and you can't gain anything by changing your MAC after WPA2 enterprise authentication because your encryption keys and AAA state are tied to it, and trying to use someone else's for a fresh authentication isn't something the controllers abide. Which is why the Apple tweak doesn't try to touch anything but probes; it would be completely dysfunctional if they did it on actual traffic.

Also in our case your IP is locked to the MAC and ARP traffic is properly inspected and filtered (you'd be surprised how many WiFi systems do not do this.)

So yes, our network relies on a feature (802.1x auth and WPA2) which "means less privacy for users" in the sense that we know who is using what machine, for what, and roughly where. You would be hard pressed to find an enterprise network that did not.

As far as what we use it for in house, it's to improve the odds that each client has virus-checked each of their IOS or Windows devices individually (it is more trouble for most of them to learn how to change a MAC address than just to update their virus signatures, so this works well), and, as mentioned above, the controllers do location-based roaming optimization to unstick sticky clients, and that last part it what the Apple changes have the potential to break. We do carve out exemptions for network troubleshooting, deployment planning, and for stuff like locating lost or stolen equipment, but for the most part our policy on location tracking data is "don't look at that data and throw it away promptly."

Now, if this feature does become a problem, I sincerely hope Apple bothered to put in a user-accessible control for it. Given they seem to be of the mindset that the more user control they can take away from their WiFi setup the better, that hope is pretty bleak, and we'll be lucky to even get the ability to tweak it via a .mobileconfig.

Slashdot Top Deals

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso

Working...