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Comment Re:Spectrum Frequency (Score 1) 73

MIMO is a great technology, but it has two problems.

First is that there is a lot of equipment that is too small to implement MIMO (think phones, iPods and other, similarly-sized devices) because there is not enough room to put the requisite multiple antennas in place at a sufficient distance from each other to do the job. This may be curable with another advance in technology, but we don't have this one yet.

Second is the large amount of equipment in which it just isn't being implemented. Look at the shelves of a store (or pages of a webstore) and you will find a gajillion "N150" routers and cards. Naturally, these are the ones with the lowest prices on them, and therefore are the ones that get bought. Band congestion takes that 150 and turns it into a 36 or so, where if you had bought an "N300" or "N600" you might see 72 or 144 respectively.

Of course, this is less of a problem on 5 GHz because there is more spectrum, no channel overlap (unless you bonded your channels) and the signals don't carry as far.

Comment Re:Customers may benefit... maybe (Score 5, Interesting) 455

Aldi is also a very interesting case study in store efficiency.

Most of their stores that I have seen have four aisles. Coming in the door dumps you into aisle 1. Most traffic in aisles 1 and 3 is heading to the back of the store and most in aisles 2 and 4 is heading to the front.

Every one of the store products has at least two copies of the barcode on the package, and many times more than two. In one extreme case, I saw a barcode turned into package decoration by wrapping it all the way around the bag.

Of course, that last one wouldn't work well if things double-scanned, so the cash registers have a duplicate code lockout on them, and the cashiers are trained to group and count, and use the '@' button on their cash registers.

Checkout lanes have very long conveyor belts on them so that 2-3 customers can be unloading their carts at once without getting in each others' way.

Cashiers sit, rather than stand, in order to lower fatigue and improve productivity.

The till is arranged like a vertical file with a lid that pops open in front of the scanner. This is because, with the cashier seated, a cash drawer would collide with him/her requiring him/her to move his/her seat to slide it all the way open. It pops open driven by a spring at the appropriate moment in the transaction, and closes with less effort than a cash drawer, again, reducing fatigue.

Oh, and last but not least, staff are actually paid decently.

Comment Re:Without her permission? (Score 1) 367

How many home schooled kids have you met? I have met four, from two families, and in all of their cases, they are functioning at an intellectual level well above most adults. Were I not able to see that they were children, I would have expected them to be at least 30 based on the way they communicated.

One of the kids, at age five, was throwing around college-level vocabulary and asking me if I knew what the words meant.

Of course, I see you posted AC, so you'll probably never see these comments. After all, we wouldn't want to take responsibility for our broad brushstrokes, now would we?

Comment Re:Fast, Cheap, High Quality (Score 1) 370

High quality doesn't seem to be in this asker's requirements. He already has the knowledge, he just needs a piece of paper to prove it.

Never minding that, though, I did go to university with someone who was earning her Bachelor's degree in Architecture (traditional meaning of the word - buildings, not IT). She went from start to finish in 3 years by taking on an oppressive courseload. Using this methodology, and assuming you can get your credits for your Associate's degree to transfer, you should be able to get there in 1.5 years from where you are now.

I also went to uni with someone who went from start to Master's in four years. He did it by creative border-hopping, transferring his credits back and forth between Canadian and US universities, and relentlessly bullshitting the various administrators when trying to convince them to accept his credits in a way that would be beneficial to him.

Finally, I will point out that the degree need not be in Computer Science. I have many current co-workers whose degrees are in other fields, yet here they are, populating the IT department of my particular organization. HR wants to know you have the paper, and that's kind of where it ends.

Comment Responsiveness (Score 2) 119

Bluecoat don't vet every site. They vet what they can, and let bayesian classifiers do the rest.

That said, when you find a mistake, you can submit it to them and they will look into it. I have had a 100% success rate getting them to adjust the classification of sites I've submitted to them over the last six or seven years.

Comment Re:From the Article (Score 4, Informative) 220

Because even when using a client cert to auth, your credentials are indeed sent to the server. Otherwise, how could the server auth you?

The cert provides the server with your public key and an attestation from a third party that the public key belongs to a particular party. Once the server is satisfied with the validity of the cert for this particular account, it does this:

  • The server generates a random token that only it knows.
  • The server encrypts this random token using the public key that it now believes is yours. This can only be decrypted with the matching private key.
  • The server sends this encrypted random token to you.
  • You decrypt the random token, using the private key that only you have.
  • You send the decrypted random token back to the server. That it is plaintext is of no relevance because this token has no value except to get you into this session; other sessions will have other tokens.
  • The server receives the token, sees that it matches, and lets you in

Most notably, at no time did your actual credential, the private key, exist in any place except in your machine. For bonus points, you can password-protect that private key, which will involve using your password as a key to a symmetric cipher to encrypt your private key.

Comment Re:Absolutely (Score 1) 212

Right, so you apply the Dalton principle: be nice. When (not if!) they ask you if you will follow instructions and law, then, and only then, nicely, tell them that you believe in the principle of jury nullification, and that you cannot promise such a thing in good faith.

Of course, IANAL, and what exactly you encounter will depend on the other people present as well as those doing the selecting, so whatever happens from there will depend a lot on the human factor. You should, therefore, only do this if you truly believe it (as I do). Trying to get out of jury duty is shirking your responsibility, but telling the truth, and getting out of it because it is the truth, is not your problem.

Comment Re:LTE for the win (Score 1) 105

Agreed 100%. I considered network support to be a given if the software on the handset were updated to do this. Alternatively, you could (provided you have the data plan for it) use it against a third-party server. It would be analogous to running VoIP for your home phone even though your ISP might offer phone service.

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