In a residential building with no central authority on how AP are distributed, it seems to be a impossible task. I don't see myself explaining this kind of technical stuff to my neighbors and going door by door configuring each of their AP.
But this is a very good reminder for people who set up wireless network at events, schools, ...
My school had huge thick concrete wall that basically killed any Wi-Fi signal. But for some reason, instead of having more cheap AP distributed more evenly, the guys handling it insisted on putting 1-2 big expensive AP in each building, which meant that the Wi-Fi was unusable in most of the classroom. Not really cleaver when most of your classes require you to be connected to the internet.
You're right in that, your neighbours likely won't do the same thing... But you loose nothing by turning the AP power down to a level that covers the necessary area...
In a sense, it's lose-lose, but you can choose the higher ground...
All that said - if you have multiple APs, then you absolutely want to tune the power levels, or you're only making yourself a looser!
*Loser not looser, lose not loose. Lose/loser is to not winning as loose/looser is to not tight. This mistake is prevalent even among HNers. Sorry for being pedantic.
I've noticed this one quite a bit recently on HN and reddit. I'm seeing it far more often than "they're, there, and their" and "your and you're" mistakes, to the point where I wondered if it were something localized (like color / colour or aluminum / aluminium).
One that I've noticed everywhere throughout the tech community is "it's" instead of "its". It seems unrelated to whether the article author is from a majority-English speaking country. And I see it on the blogs of companies big enough that I would assume proof read all of their posts.
It sticks out like a sore thumb to me because my brain reads it as "it is", which does not fit.
It could be in the process of regularizing. There's no particular reason why "it's" can't be both things. Language changes.
One I've witnessed in my lifetime is "different than" vs. "different to". I was taught the first one. The latter sounds wrong to me, which is why I notice I'm hearing it more and more. (Note I have phrased this subjectively; I'm not saying it is wrong. I'm generally a descriptive grammarian. But it does sound wrong to me.) It may be a dialect thing, in which case my dialect seems to be shifting. Languages change.
This (and others who pointed out the regularisation effect) might actually help me to accept it more. It's more constructive to think "grammar is slowly changing due to a weird rule that was difficult for even native speakers to remember" vs "people keep spelling this word wrong and they should just be less sloppy about it". I think once you internally accept a change in language, it starts looking/sounding less wrong over time.
When I was in high school, I read a lot of the "classics" of my own free will. I could read pretty comfortably into the 18th century, and I could understand most 17th century English.
I remember thinking at the time that I live to be an average 70, then at the rate of change I could see in books from various centuries, I should be able to witness some changes myself in my lifetime. And I mean changes in "real", core language, not merely the rapid churn of local dialects and slang. (Which the Internet has greatly accelerated. I suspect in general it pulls us all together towards a more "core" English, but it also means an incredible proliferation of local slang communities.)
Now that I'm 40, I can say that I'm definitely starting to notice it. It's not a fast process on a day-by-day basis, and it's hard to notice the small differences at first, or assume they're dialect differences (and in some cases they are, after all). But the change is definitely happening. I would be unsurprised within my lifetime that there's only "it's" and it has two distinct meanings, and that it will be officially recognized by dictionaries as such.
The "hacker" style of quoting [1] also seems to be generally accepted. I've on several occasions done something like 'Have you ever said "It's not a tumor!"?' and I'm yet to get jumped by a grammar nazi for the two punctuation marks like that, too. I suspect that'll never quite become the official style (a bit on the complicated side), but it doesn't seem to bother people much.
I think people can accept change in language as it pertains to new contexts, but I really don't like it when people just don't bother (especially with misuse by native speakers). This is especially true for those of us who don't correctly parse poorly-written language. I normally read very quickly, but when something isn't right, it's jarring and I have to go back, scan it several times, and figure out what it means.
I've always found it odd that in a place like HN, most are pedantic in their use of every language but English.
That reminds me of how in the Northeast they say "Quarter of [hour]" whereas in the Midwest it's "Quarter after [hour]". The former confuses me every time, with my immediate thought being "is 'of' before or after"? My wife, who is from the Northeast, just confirmed it's "before"
Edit: I mistyped my comment as "after". The replies are justified.
I'm pretty sure that "quarter of" means 15 minutes before, not after. But confusingly, I've also heard people day just "quarter" (no "of") to mean 15 minutes after.
The rule for possessive its is backwards from all other possessives. As a native English speaker, I still have to look up “its vs it’s” because it’s confusing. I think we should drop use of its without an apostrophe, and always use it’s, and let people figure it out by context. It’s happening anyway, and it’ll become de facto accepted English grammar when enough people use “it’s” differently than the old rule.
Ah, that is a great point. Of course you know I meant that the rule of not apostrophizing its is backwards from the more common case of personal pronouns. Okay, so the possessive pronouns don’t use apostrophes and personal pronouns do. And its and whose are possessive pronouns, or possessive determiners. Is that the whole apostrophe rule? Are there any other cases or exceptions for possession? Do all indefinite pronouns use apostrophes, e.g., it’s anybody’s guess?
I've also learned to read contractions in their extracted form in order to help me when editing. It's a similar trick to remembering spelling versions of every word, like "Wed-nes-day", or "Col-o-nel". Sometimes I think it's more bothersome than it's worth. I could really use my own environment variables for `IGNORE_GRAMMAR` and `IGNORE_SPELLING`.
Does it also bother you that a lot of people tend to say "amount of people" instead of "number of people"? I think of cannibals talking about their food whenever someone says "amount of people".
For me, I understand the difference quite well. However when typing it feels like I occasionally have this blindness to the words I typed and occasionally my brain sends the other version to my hands. If I look directly at the word after typing it, I dont even recognize the word as incorrect.
In this case, though, note that if you turned power way up, it might cause your neighbors to do the same, and you could be said to loose a power war upon the neighborhood (in which everyone would probably lose...).
Turning power down, on the other hand, probably will loose nothing, just like he said.
I love this[1] website which illustrates some of the nuances of the prisoners dilemma in a quite frankly great way. In fact I've deleted the rest of my post as I believe the website does a much better job of explaining how the correct answer to the prisoners dilemma changes depending on how the population behaves and how often they make mistakes.
The commons typically concerns a shared public resource. PD normally concerns a decision that affects 2 players in a direct and immediate way. In PD both parties see every outcome as an immediate consequence of their decision.
People may want to look at the "Criticism" section of that article, as the commons wasn't as big of a tragedy as people think it was when Garrett Hardin popularized the notion:
>Hardin blamed the welfare state for allowing the tragedy of the commons; where the state provides for children and supports over-breeding as a fundamental human right, Malthusian catastrophe is inevitable. Hardin stated in his analysis of the tragedy of the commons that "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."[1]:1244 Environmental historians Joachim Radkau, Alfred Thomas Grove and Oliver Rackham criticized Hardin "as an American with no notion at all how Commons actually work".[8]
>In addition, Hardin's pessimistic outlook was subsequently contradicted by Elinor Ostrom's later work on success of co-operative structures like the management of common land,[9] for which she shared the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Oliver E. Williamson. In contrast to Hardin, they stated neither commons or "Allmende" in the generic nor classical meaning are bound to fail; to the contrary "the wealth of the commons" has gained renewed interest in the scientific community.[10] Hardin's work was also criticized[11] as historically inaccurate in failing to account for the demographic transition, and for failing to distinguish between common property and open access resources.[12][13]
>Despite the criticisms, the theory has nonetheless been influential.[14]
The meaning of commons is here as described in the last sentence of the first paragraph:
In this modern economic context, commons is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource such as atmosphere, oceans, rivers, fish stocks, roads and highways, or even an office refrigerator.
Hardin was concerned primarily with overpopulation and the welfare state. His intention was to demonstrate that the welfare state contributes to overpopulation, which will doom us all. The more general concept of "tragedy of the commons" outgrew his incorrect assumption, and so his original theory and its criticisms are of little consequence outside of a historical curiosity.
I've seen some videos of people blocking wifi signals (both ways) with a cheap metal mesh. If you don't own the place you can put it on the inside. Only real issue is the image: it's like a tinfoil hat for your house! But you could put something more aesthetic over it again :) eg. embedding it in the wallpaper.
Exactly, and they all have the crappy Comcast combo which advertises the extra XFINITY AP that I don't think you can turn off. As a Comcast customer, I have NEVER been able to connect to that and get data. 2.4 ghz is a sh!tshow and everyone is just spamming it with more and more noise.
Don't pay the $10 monthly fee to rent a Comcast cable modem and instead buy your own cable modem and router for $110. Side benefit: no extraneous Xfinity AP clogging up your precious wifi bandwidth.
I've actually had pretty decent luck getting connectivity on the Xfinity networks. If my phone was better at quick handoffs between wifi and LTE while moving, it would be quite helpful in lowering my mobile data usage.
Less an issue with 5 GHz, because drywall does a fairly effective job of blocking signal. Not entirely, but quite a lot. Which is why I have 4 mesh APs in our 1700 sqft house: One in each of the rooms where we use wireless most, and one in the middle.
We went from having spotty Internet to it being really solid. I think we have some neighbors that have devices that interfere with 2.4G (cordless phone? Microwave? Baby monitor?)
