I fail to see how your word-games here are anything but arbitrary...

For example between 100 and 110 MHz there is 10MHz of bandwidth. Between 1000 and 1100 MHz there is 100MHz of bandwidth.

Yes, but you just picked a couple numbers arbitrarily, with no particular significance. Between 100 and 200MHz, there's 100MHz of bandwidth, just like 1000 to 1100MHz.

Between 5 and 5.5 GHz there is 500MHz of bandwidth.

And? The US TV broadcast band starts at 50MHz, and has several hundred MHz of bandwidth as well.

If we make a simplified assumtion as assume that we're going to regulate that a fixed percentage (say 10%) of bandwidth throughout the spectrum will be available for general public use then the vast majority of the bandwidth is going to be in the higher frequencies.

You're picking "higher" arbitrarily wherever you feel like...

Since the spectrum starts at zero and continues on into infinity, 10% would be infinite, and the overwhelming majority of it would be in the 999trillion terahertz+ range. But I'm guessing that's not quite what you meant by "higher frequencies".

Arguing out of ignorance and anecdotes is never a good idea...

Go look up a chart or other hard numbers on the penetration of various frequencies in whatever wall material, and get back to us...

Your first line is nonsense... A given bandwidth (eg. 6MHz channel) will give you the same throughput, whether it's at 700Mhz or 50GHz. People see higher frequencies as faster, only because there's usually a lot more bandwidth available at higher frequencies, in part because pentration is lower and reuse is higher.

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Monday March 31, 2014 @11:58PM

The date/time you see on the story depends on your timezone. Yet it doesn't put everyone else into a time-warp where it's not April 1st for them...

This story absolutely was posted on April 1st, /. local time, as evidenced by the date embedded in the link to it:

http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

One reason why you've never seen an area saturated with 5 GHz signals is that they don't penetrate walls and other obstacles as easily as 2.4 GHz signals.

The difference certainly exists, but it is actually very small, and this element gets horribly overblown.

Most people don't really use WiFi signals going through their walls and floors, anyhow (thin, interior doors notwithstanding). Instead, they use the diffraction down corridors, through windows, etc., and both frequencies can easily manage that...

I've done side-by-side comparisons of 2.4GHz and 5GHz, and the latter only has a very tiny reduction in range, in all but extreme scenarios.

The FCC should just allow a 20% increase in transmit power on the 5GHz band, and suddenly 5GHz (with more available channels) would be much more desirable than 2.4GHz. Then manufacturers will start defaulting to do, and the band would open up for those stuck on it for legacy reasons.

While Hydrogen is significantly more dangerous, depending on the overall cost and possible ways to limit the dangers, it may be an option.

I don't know why everyone seems to think hydrogen and helium are the only gases lighter than air.

Natural gas is dirt cheap in the US, and is extremely buoyant.

Reply to them and say your minimum is $210k per year (or whatever).

Yeah, I'll get right on that... I'm still a little busy replying to every spam e-mail I get, telling them I'm not interested and asking them to remove me from their mailing list. Once I get that finished up, and don't get any more spam, I'll switch over to recruiters.

Have you seriously not talked to a recruiter in the past 5 years? There's a horde of (I'm guessing: Pakistani?) 3rd world "recruiters" that call up the phone numbers of EVERY SINGLE RESUME they find with a single matching keyword on it. Hiring companies are smart enough that they don't even tell these morons what salary they are even willing to pay. Hell, these guys don't even check where you are located, with a few maybe making sure you're somewhere in the state, but nothing more.

They're not even hired by any firms, they're just hoping you'll hear about the job from them, before you've submitted your own resume, so they'll get the $1,000 finders fee that meant to reward GOOD leads. When you've got 3rd world recruiters that don't earn that much in a month, it's worth a bunch of non-stop fishing expeditions, submitting completely random resumes to every company, for every job, in the hopes of just one of millions matching-up... Tell them you want $X, and they'll tell you they have no clue, and they'll keep trying to sign you up, anyhow. Ask them a question, and they'll tell you they have no clue, and keep trying to sign you up, anyhow. It's so bad I've entirely removed my phone number from my resume, it's been such a massive nuisance.

The only counter-measure I've seen is companies requiring recruiters to state that they've met the candidate in person, before they can submit the resume. That's quite a mess when the recruiter may be 200 miles away from you, and again, they don't know anything about the job, the company, or the salary, so I'm not willing to go through the hassle. I've even removed my resume from certain job sites, because the irrelevant noise e-mails from recruiters became incessant.

If things keep going this way, I suppose I'll be permanently unemployed in just a few years, and unable to find jobs, even if there's an opening across the street from me.

My salary's been steadily rising, except when I deliberately took a hit to change specialties.

That's possible on a personal scale quite easily... You may not have been in the job market very long, started low, switched fields, moved to a higher cost-of-living area, etc., etc.

But on an industry scale, has the average income for your job position been rising faster than the rate of inflation? The general answer, across the board, is no.

tl;dr: There is no shortage of bodies in STEM fields. However, there is a shortage of good people who also have a solid education in and understand of their field. This is true in computer science, and almost certainly in every other STEM field out there.

If that was true, it would show in rising salaries for those jobs. Companies don't believe they can continue to attract a sufficient number of employees, by paying wages which have stagnated for a decade.

I know there are horrible inefficiencies in the recruiting/hiring process... that may make it seem like there's no-one when you need them, but the majority of open positions seem to be big companies that are doing just fine, but leaving it open in case a hot-shot or someone with ridiculously-low salary expectations comes along.

Never understood why Bill's TV show was ever popular. Beakman predates him, and that show was both sciency and a lot more fun.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

OpenSUSE users beta test EVERYTHING for everyone. I thought Fedora was bad, but OpenSUSE puts them to shame...

Yes you could do video with native plugins like WMPlayer. Do you remember how terrible that was?

No, I remember how my 233MHz computer could play full-screen video from a web page, with no tearing and my browser never crashing... Something my 2.4GHz P4 couldn't manage using Flash.

I've had a love / hate relationship with Firefox for many years - but for about the past 18 months it's been mostly stable.

Unless you're going to be submitting bug reports about the browser, or need bleeding-edge features (like VP9), you should just stay on the ESR branch:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/...

They make it hard to find, but I wouldn't use anything else... Those are the REAL stable releases, while their numbered releases are just betas.

With distros like CentOS/RHEL, the ESR version is in the yum repo, so you get a stable browser, updates are seamless, and you may not even notice the change when a new version gets installed.

Re: Your sig

Have you seen: http://avantslash.org/

The RSS feed is pretty light on bandwidth, too.

And Opera's Turbo mode, or similar bandwidth-saving proxies do a pretty good job these days.

If back in 1995, you had told people that every single channel, including re-broadcast Broadcast TV, in both the US and Canada would be "Scrambled" like HBO, Cinemax, Disney, and Showtime, requiring a cable box be present in every room, and that VCRs would be next to useless (you can still use a VCR, technically.) and that we would be paying $150+ in bills for it, we would be in outrage mode

Before '95, people EXPECTED to need a cable box on every TV, just because TV tuners didn't have a "cable" mode to tune in channels above 13.

You can't really fault cable companies for doing it too much, since DirecTV/DishNet get to encrypt all their local channels and force you to rent a box from them to watch... And works just as poorly with your VCR...

Not to mention that encryption across the board allows them to completely eliminate the installation step, which is an extremely common source of complaints and frustration from customers.

And complaining that your VCR doesn't work in 2014??? You might as well yell at the cashier at Wal-mart for not carrying blank 8-track tapes... You can't even BUY a VCR in stores today that has an ATSC/QAM tuner in it at all!

Complaining about your DVR not working would be a more reasonable complaint, but CableCard is an option available on Tivos and the like.

And frankly, it's ridiculous to pay for cable or satellite, when the overwhelming majority of people in the US can get a huge number of local broadcast channels, with content far better than those hundreds of cable channels, with just a modest antenna system, costing less than $200 up-front... Perhaps 3 months of cable/satellite subscription fees.

As a result, OTA is growing, especially with younger people:

"The number of households relying on OTA reception only is also growing, [...] Growth is especially strong amongst younger households,"

"One in five young households never bothered to get a TV subscription to begin with."

"Also, 28 percent of all households with a head of household under the age of 35 use an antenna instead of a pay-TV subscription."

http://www.tvtechnology.com/rf...