Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Providing data over the Internet isn't hard. But providing HD video *in 
> realtime* would seem difficult given that people don't have 
> megabit-speed Internet access yet.

I think you are confusing the word "people" with the word "I".

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>>> You don't understand why people would pay a moderate sum of money in
>>> order to be able to watch movies or listen to music?
>>>
>> No, he doesn't understand how a service can offer near-HD resolution
>> over the Internet.
>
> Providing data over the Internet isn't hard. But providing HD video *in
> realtime* would seem difficult given that people don't have
> megabit-speed Internet access yet.

I currently have 10Mbps downstream/1.5Mbps upstream.  And both my 
provider and its direct competitor offer better packages.

>
>> Despite the fact that tv providers have had no
>> problem doing 60 channels of the same thing over the same wires for the
>> last 30 years (10 years in the case of HD).
>
> Digital TV isn't 30 years old. :-P

That's why I said 10 years for HD.  And besides, digital channels take 
the same bandwidth spectrum as analog tv channels.

>
> Besides, it's no secret that a simplex broadcast channel is much easier
> to set up than a full-duplex communications channel.

That's why it's asymmetrical.  And also why most ISPs frown upon you 
hosting servers out of your basement, since you would be hogging the 
upstream channel.

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> The thing is, *nobody* thinks they can just walk in and pretend to know
> how to be a brick layer. Because it's ****ing obvious that it'll take
> the people interviewing you about 11 seconds to figure out that you know
> nothing about anything.
>
> So *why* the hell does this constantly happen in computing?!? >_<
>

Because a lot of people don't even know what they don't know.

Afew years ago, the customer I was working for had their own cafeteria. 
  At one point, they decided to outsource the services to an outside 
supplier.  The cafeteria cooks, being members of the company's union, 
were given the choice of either accepting a non-union job at the new 
supplier (at a lower salary, of course), or put themselves on the union 
avaialability list in the hope that another job would become available 
in another dept.

One of the cooks asked me one day:  "You're in IT, right?  Do you think 
I could apply in your dept?  I'm pretty good with my computer at home..."

Me: "Do you know the difference between the IP address classes?"
Him:  [quizzical dog look]
Me: (Ok networking is not for him) "Have you ever played with Linux?"
Him:  [quizzical dog look]
Me: (Ok, hmm... ) "Do you have a home network?"
Him: Huh... No.  But I customized the hell out of my MySpace page.
Me: "I'll get back to you."

He was really disappointed when I told him we were also an outside 
supplier so he couldn't simply waltz in an bump one of the lower 
seniority guys.

There was also the girl who wrote in her presentation letter that she 
was a networking expert, (her cv mentioned her only experience as having 
set up a 10 PC internet cafe), and that she knew both versions of 
Windows inside and out (Win 98 *and* Win2000... we're talking serious IT 
Geekage, here!)

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Francois Labreque <fla### [at] videotronca> wrote:
> There was also the girl who wrote in her presentation letter that she 
> was a networking expert, (her cv mentioned her only experience as having 
> set up a 10 PC internet cafe), and that she knew both versions of 
> Windows inside and out (Win 98 *and* Win2000... we're talking serious IT 
> Geekage, here!)

OTOH, the reverse also is problematic. In other words, if you are
completely and absolutely *honest* about your expertise, you might not
get even a job interview.

For instance, if I were seeking for a job that requires PHP skills, and
I would write honestly that I have only rudimentary experience of said
language, they would most probably not even interview me, instead opting
for someone who *claims* to have extensive knowledge and experience.

However, if I outright lied and told them that I have a lot of experience
on PHP, and I got the job, I'm pretty certain that I would learn the
tidbits quite quickly. (The language itself is really close to C++, and
basically the only thing you need to learn is the few syntactical and
semantical oddities and the different libraries.)

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                                                          - Warp

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On Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:37:04 -0500, Francois Labreque wrote:

> That's why I said 10 years for HD.  And besides, digital channels take
> the same bandwidth spectrum as analog tv channels.

IIRC, in the US at least, digital takes less spectrum.

Jim

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On 06/12/2012 07:54 AM, Warp wrote:
> Orchid Win7 v1<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> The C# "List" class actually represents a growable array. So it has O(1)
>> index and O(1) append until the underlying array needs to be enlarged
>> (which is obviously O(n) time).
>
> Why is C# using the wrong terminology? (Or at the very least, really
> misleading?)
>
> What that sounds more like is a dynamic array, not a list.

Yeah, I don't really know.

Java has a /interface/ called "list", which represents "a list of 
things". It then provides several different implementations of this 
interface, including "LinkedList" and "ArrayList".

C# seems to have copied this terminology, having an IList interface and 
a List class which implements it. But it's certainly nothing to do with 
linked lists (which don't implement IList at all, and hence don't even 
*offer* element indexing as a build-in method).

Go sue the designers. :-P

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On 06/12/2012 03:48 PM, Warp wrote:
> OTOH, the reverse also is problematic. In other words, if you are
> completely and absolutely *honest* about your expertise, you might not
> get even a job interview.

This is the problem. The market is so utterly flooded with "IT experts" 
who claim to know everything about everything, that if you write on your 
CV what you *actually* know about, nobody will even look at it. That's 
utterly messed up.

Seriously, how many people apply to work as an engine designer when they 
don't know anything about physics?

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On 06/12/2012 02:57 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:

>> The thing is, *nobody* thinks they can just walk in and pretend to know
>> how to be a brick layer. Because it's ****ing obvious that it'll take
>> the people interviewing you about 11 seconds to figure out that you know
>> nothing about anything.
>>
>> So *why* the hell does this constantly happen in computing?!? >_<
>
> Because a lot of people don't even know what they don't know.

Sure. But why is that peculiar to IT?

Nobody out there thinks they could totally draw up the blueprints for a 
suspension bridge and have it actually work. Yet people think they can 
write commands to make a computer perform a complex task and it'll be 
fine. WTF is up with that?

> Me: "Do you know the difference between the IP address classes?"
> Him: [quizzical dog look]
> Me: (Ok networking is not for him) "Have you ever played with Linux?"
> Him: [quizzical dog look]
> Me: (Ok, hmm... ) "Do you have a home network?"
> Him: Huh... No. But I customized the hell out of my MySpace page.
> Me: "I'll get back to you."

Yeah, this is pretty standard. Everybody understands that designing 
(say) an aeroplane is really hard. And yet people think that designing 
computer software is somehow trivially easy...

This probably isn't helped by the following fact: If you pay somebody to 
build a skyscraper, and they actually build a small wooden hut, you know 
that you did not get what you paid for. If you pay somebody to build an 
enterprise-class data management engine and they actually give you an 
Excel spreadsheet and an instruction manual, you might not necessarily 
realise that something is wrong - and neither might they...

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On Thu, 06 Dec 2012 20:54:43 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> Seriously, how many people apply to work as an engine designer when they
> don't know anything about physics?

It's a little different when the results aren't tangible, I find.  As in 
something physical that someone can look at and test.  When something is 
non-physical, I find people tend to think it's easier than it is to go 
from concept to implementation.

Jim

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> Why is C# using the wrong terminology? (Or at the very least, really
> misleading?)

According to Wikipedia:

"Lists are typically implemented either as linked lists (either singly 
or doubly linked) or as arrays, usually variable length or dynamic arrays."

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