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On 8/19/2011 5:00, Invisible wrote:
> Does *anybody* still use token ring?
Anywhere the benefits of token ring outweigh the costs of using a less
common networking technology, yes. Primarily where you need a fixed upper
limit on how long a packet takes to be delivered, such as in many forms of
industrial processing.
> How about ATM, is that still used?
It's used quite a lot internally to the phone company. You're probably using
it right now.
> Aside from that, the report isn't well written at all. The tone is very,
> very informal. Like, if you imagine being given a topic, and just
> monologuing about it to your friend off the top of your head,
I'm not sure I need to *imagine* that as such...
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
How come I never get only one kudo?
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Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> As part of the drive to empty our house of useless crap, I was going
> through some of my old college work last night. Ah, the memories.
>
> ...but it was somewhat baffling to walk into a classroom
> and discover that I know more about the subject than the lecturer does.
Oh c'mon now! Anyone who can think his way out of a wet paper bag has had this
experience repeatedly. We're just socially trained not to say so.
> ..."but comments are rather sparse". ...there's not a hell of a
> lot to comment on.
>
Been there squared. Sadly, MANY programming classes are taught by folks who
can't follow more than a few lines of simple code without a continuous running
series of comments telling them what they're reading. Also, the catechism of
who want to be able to hire low-wage nitwits to make any code change they might
ever want. One particularly irritating instructor actually FORBADE me to bring
grudge, however. After my final grade was securely recorded, I gave him a very
nice going away present, a gift-wrapped box of Constant Comment tea. ;-)
> And then there were the Quants lessons. ("Quantitative Methods") This,
> as best as I can tell from my lecture notes, was simply an orgy of
> mathematics. ...
Well, we can never have too many of those, can we? I'm sure nearly all of us
have seen this, but here goes anyway:
http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~pjbk/humour/polynomial.html
> You cannot
> simply /tell/ me that (A + B)^2 = A^2 + 2AB + B^2. I have to know /why/
> this is true. ...
Bravo. I'm pretty sure that this attiude is a necessary condition for any
meaningful application of the term "sentient".
> ...DKJ came over and informed me that I had just
> invented differential calculus, and showed me the general formula for
> the derivative of any polynomial.
It's probably a very good thing that you delved into the foundations BEFORE
being exposed to Leibniz notation, which (IMHO) strongly tends to obscure rather
than illuminate underlying principles. (But, hey, /productivity/ is the ONLY
truly important reason for mathematics, right?)
> It still makes me chuckle that I enrolled for a computing diploma and I
> spent two terms learning how double-entry accounting works.
Historically, there are really only two significant primary sources on the true
nature of double-entry accounting. I'm referring to Houdini and Machiavelli, of
course.
>I have nobody to impress anymore. :'{
Why the ":'{" ?... Seriously. Do you not grasp that THIS is truly ultimate
victory?
> (Although... I wonder how much of the praise I received was actually
> justified. ...
In a very real sense, the answer is "none" for you, me and all of our kind. I
really do understand just how difficult it can be to break our addiction to
praise, but unless we pull that particularly nasty little monkey off our backs
and stomp on it, they'll always own us.
> Go on, admit it. You thought this was going to be about SRAM vs DRAM,
> didn't you? :-P
Not for one second... I considered the source, ;-)
Best Regards, /* Closing */
Mike C. /* Signature */
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On 19/08/2011 04:14 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 8/19/2011 5:00, Invisible wrote:
>> Does *anybody* still use token ring?
>
> Anywhere the benefits of token ring outweigh the costs of using a less
> common networking technology, yes. Primarily where you need a fixed
> upper limit on how long a packet takes to be delivered, such as in many
> forms of industrial processing.
Wouldn't you just use a dedicated network with no other traffic on it?
Also, wasn't the last token ring technology to be released 10mbit/sec or
something? That's a tad slow... (Then again, industrial control. How
much bandwidth can it possibly need?)
>> How about ATM, is that still used?
>
> It's used quite a lot internally to the phone company. You're probably
> using it right now.
OK. So exchange to exchange links and stuff?
>> Aside from that, the report isn't well written at all. The tone is very,
>> very informal. Like, if you imagine being given a topic, and just
>> monologuing about it to your friend off the top of your head,
>
> I'm not sure I need to *imagine* that as such...
Nice to know I've *always* sucked at report writing. :-P
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>> ...but it was somewhat baffling to walk into a classroom
>> and discover that I know more about the subject than the lecturer does.
> Oh c'mon now! Anyone who can think his way out of a wet paper bag has had this
> experience repeatedly. We're just socially trained not to say so.
What, that the person being paid to teach you something knows less about
it than you already do?
Damn, if my driving instructor knew less about driving than me, I'd be
pretty concerned!
>> ..."but comments are rather sparse". ...there's not a hell of a
>> lot to comment on.
>
> Been there squared. Sadly, MANY programming classes are taught by folks who
> can't follow more than a few lines of simple code without a continuous running
> series of comments telling them what they're reading. Also, the catechism of
> who want to be able to hire low-wage nitwits to make any code change they might
> ever want.
In some sense, they're trying to teach you good programming technique
and practises, and part of that is documenting what you're doing.
On the other hand, the Jackson's Structured Drawings, flow charts,
extensive comments, etc. are all really, really overkill for any sort of
programming project that you could realistically expect novice
programmers to pull off in a month. The task has to be simple enough
that it can be implemented in the time allotted; that kind of dooms it
to be simple enough to not really need comments, elaborate design
methodologies, nor any of the other lofty things they're trying to teach us.
So in a sense, they're trying to teach us to document our work, and I
didn't. On the other hand, it didn't really *need* it.
A similar thing could be said of my programming assignment. In a sense,
I did way, way more work than actually necessary, and made the program
quite a bit more complicated than it could have been. On the other
hand... GIVE ME A BREAK! Go learn how to write programs, and THEN you
can lecture me about how I'm coding stuff wrong. :-P
>> And then there were the Quants lessons. ("Quantitative Methods") This,
>> as best as I can tell from my lecture notes, was simply an orgy of
>> mathematics. ...
> Well, we can never have too many of those, can we?
I never get this any more. :-(
>> You cannot
>> simply /tell/ me that (A + B)^2 = A^2 + 2AB + B^2. I have to know /why/
>> this is true. ...
> Bravo. I'm pretty sure that this attiude is a necessary condition for any
> meaningful application of the term "sentient".
Not one other person in the whole class cared in the slightest.
Then again, they all spent 25 minutes mindlessly computing like human
calculators, so maybe "sentient" is stretching it. *I* learned
something. :-P (Although not the thing on the syllabus...)
>> ...DKJ came over and informed me that I had just
>> invented differential calculus, and showed me the general formula for
>> the derivative of any polynomial.
> It's probably a very good thing that you delved into the foundations BEFORE
> being exposed to Leibniz notation, which (IMHO) strongly tends to obscure rather
> than illuminate underlying principles. (But, hey, /productivity/ is the ONLY
> truly important reason for mathematics, right?)
I borrowed my dad's calculus book. It explained it all from first
principles, in really very clear language.
(I'd actually read the book once already, but utterly failed to
comprehend what the hell it was talking about. I suppose having seen a
practical application, it made more sense...)
>> I have nobody to impress anymore. :'{
> Why the ":'{" ?... Seriously. Do you not grasp that THIS is truly ultimate
> victory?
How do you work that one out?
> I really do understand just how difficult it can be to break our addiction to
> praise, but unless we pull that particularly nasty little monkey off our backs
> and stomp on it, they'll always own us.
Nobody likes people who constantly seek attention. On the other hand,
nobody wants to spend their entire life doing stuff and never getting
any recognition at all...
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On Fri, 19 Aug 2011 09:15:00 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:
>> (Come to think of it, *all* of the networking stuff at college was done
>> by Novel Netware. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time...)
>
> They're still around.
Well, Novell (with two l's) is. ;)
They were just acquired by Attachmate (there's a name *I* hadn't heard in
a while until they made the offer back in 2010). But Andy should have
heard the name Novell, certainly, because that's where I worked until
May, and I know I mentioned it in here on more than one occasion.
:)
Jim
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On 8/19/2011 8:16, Invisible wrote:
> OK. So exchange to exchange links and stuff?
That, carrying text messages sometimes, control backplane, DOCSIS, DSL, etc
etc etc. Anything where high-speed packet switching with connection-oriented
service makes more sense. Any place where the actual physical connections
aren't changing very fast, an underlying connection-oriented protocol is not
uncommon and usually much more robust, managable, and efficient. *Then* you
layer IP on top, in order to give you a layer of virtual switching. (And
indeed, network switches go through a lot of effort to try to turn IP
networks into connection-oriented networks, with stuff like caching of
recently seen IP addresses, path MTU protocols, etc.
I.e., ATM is used over fiber (usually in turn over SONET) wherever in *your*
house you are using ethernet.
Honestly, IP is a pretty sucky and limited technology, except for its
flexibility. It's both inefficient in transmission and extremely difficult
to manage well. You couldn't possibly use it internal to the phone company
for routing or addressing. (For example, one area code (aka "city code") in
the USA supports more phone numbers than all of IPv4.) But it's everywhere,
for the same reason that C is everywhere: It's so limited you can layer it
on top of pretty much any underlying transport.
For example, one of my colleagues was making fun of ISO's CMIP for being
connection-oriented, because having trouble getting a connection is one of
the most common reasons you'd use SNMP. I said "they just dedicate a
physical connection to it. The smallest bundle going into any switch has 900
physical pairs, and usually closer to hundreds of thousands." At this point,
the student was enlightened.
>>> Aside from that, the report isn't well written at all. The tone is very,
>>> very informal. Like, if you imagine being given a topic, and just
>>> monologuing about it to your friend off the top of your head,
>>
>> I'm not sure I need to *imagine* that as such...
>
> Nice to know I've *always* sucked at report writing. :-P
Wrong tense. ;-) Read the last sentence I quoted, then start over on your
message again. ;-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
How come I never get only one kudo?
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On Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:32:22 +0100, Invisible wrote:
>>> ...but it was somewhat baffling to walk into a classroom and discover
>>> that I know more about the subject than the lecturer does.
>
>> Oh c'mon now! Anyone who can think his way out of a wet paper bag has
>> had this experience repeatedly. We're just socially trained not to say
>> so.
>
> What, that the person being paid to teach you something knows less about
> it than you already do?
Yes, it's not that uncommon. In my case, it was an assembly language
class I took in college - it started from how to use MASM, but I'd
already used TASM quite extensively - but the course was a required
course in my degree program.
I've also run into that in a number of technical courses I've taken over
the years - I took a course on Advanced NDS Troubleshooting from Novell
years ago, but I'd already co-written a book on the topic (in fact, we
gave a couple copies away in class). I learned a few things, but mostly
they were things not in the course. The instructor was good, but a few
years ago I was teaching a similar class, and the instructor from that
first class was a student of mine - and he learned some things he didn't
know.
Jim
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On 19/08/2011 04:41 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 8/19/2011 8:16, Invisible wrote:
>> OK. So exchange to exchange links and stuff?
>
> That, carrying text messages sometimes, control backplane, DOCSIS, DSL,
> etc etc etc.
> I.e., ATM is used over fiber (usually in turn over SONET) wherever in
> *your* house you are using ethernet.
OK. Is that for legacy reasons, or because ATM is actually good at
something?
> Honestly, IP is a pretty sucky and limited technology, except for its
> flexibility.
Pffaaahahaha!
"Yeah, IP really sucks, except for being really flexible." Yes, because
flexibility is a really sucky thing to have.
> It's both inefficient in transmission and extremely
> difficult to manage well.
In what way?
> You couldn't possibly use it internal to the
> phone company for routing or addressing. (For example, one area code
> (aka "city code") in the USA supports more phone numbers than all of
> IPv4.)
Um, excuse me?
The entire population of Kansas is only 2 million people. The IP address
space is 4 *thousand* million unique addresses. So unless each person
has a thousand telephone numbers, you don't have a problem.
> But it's everywhere, for the same reason that C is everywhere:
> It's so limited you can layer it on top of pretty much any underlying
> transport.
I still don't see the problem. Then again, IP is the only thing I've
seen that can handle more than 100 nodes at once...
> For example, one of my colleagues was making fun of ISO's CMIP for being
> connection-oriented, because having trouble getting a connection is one
> of the most common reasons you'd use SNMP. I said "they just dedicate a
> physical connection to it. The smallest bundle going into any switch has
> 900 physical pairs, and usually closer to hundreds of thousands." At
> this point, the student was enlightened.
I'm not though.
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On 8/19/2011 8:41, Darren New wrote:
> (For example, one area code (aka "city code") in
> the USA supports more phone numbers than all of IPv4.)
Actually, I did that math wrong. Nevermind. :-) But certainly just USA
dialing supports more numbers than IPv4, let alone the six orders of
magnitude added by international dialing.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
How come I never get only one kudo?
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Mike the Elder <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > As part of the drive to empty our house of useless crap, I was going
> > through some of my old college work last night. Ah, the memories.
> >
> > ...but it was somewhat baffling to walk into a classroom
> > and discover that I know more about the subject than the lecturer does.
> Oh c'mon now! Anyone who can think his way out of a wet paper bag has had this
> experience repeatedly. We're just socially trained not to say so.
When I went to the university, I don't remember any obviously incompetent
professors. Some teaching assistants were, but that's completely different
(because they were often just students like everybody else, usually just
a few years senior).
Most (if not all) of the professors related to computing science that
ever taught me were much more competent and knowledgeable about programming
than I am today. Perhaps the only field where there was slightly less
abundant expertise overall was computer graphics.
--
- Warp
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