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Comment Re:Hulk hogan could code too (Score 1) 581

Unfortunately, this is true of many art forms. TV has become so much "reality" TV because it is formulaic and easy and cheap to produce because it has no production value. Movies have become very uniform and bland, also, because the "spice" they use is special effects rather than writing a decent story, because it is cheaper and easier to do. Music is not "performed" an more, but "produced" by stringing together bits of this and pieces of that, then "normalizing" it by compressing the living shit out of the dynamics to the point where you can easily hear the whole sound go "squish" on every beat of the thing that used to be a kick drum. And so it goes.

The good news is that every now and then, some market niche will buck the trend . . . going to see a local band play live . . . buying bread that came from a bakery rather than a factory . . . seeing an independent film that was produced by an artist and not subject to the whims of a studio exec . . . but these niches are just that, and not enough to reverse the trend, at least, not yet.

Comment Re:Hulk hogan could code too (Score 5, Insightful) 581

Anyone working as a coal miner is so far past the "I'm willing to do jobs that suck" threshold that it has vanished over the horizon.

Yep, but so, sometimes is the "Jobs that are available, that I can get to" threshold. I know a lot of people who are stuck in this type of mess because:

  • They were born in East Bumfuck, and
  • They were born poor because they live in East Bumfuck, and
  • They have no transportation because they are poor and
  • They can't commute far because they have no transportation and
  • The only job they can find that is within walking/biking/bumming a ride distance is the one they got.

Pay close attention to that bumming a ride distance. If you are dependent on another family member for a lift to work, and you are poor, you know that one car that works (not counting the ones parked on the lawn) will break because they're poor and can't maintain it well. You're not going to go anywhere that that family member doesn't deem, and so, there you sit, another generation festering in the rot that is East Bumfuck

I know it first hand because these folks are my in-laws. Some of them have escaped (very few, my wife being one), and some of them are going to, but mostly the opportunities just aren't there.

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.

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