> 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?
>

Most jurisdiction have rules concerning not harming the public so 
engineers, doctors, pharmacists, etc... will have to have some sort of 
accreditation before being allowed to do their job.

So the HR person reviewing your application only has to verify that you 
are a member of your neck-of-the-woods profesional engineer's 
association.  She doesn't have to actually assess your bridge-making skills.

    Doing the same with IT is very difficult because you risk being too 
strict and the Jobs, Gates, and Torvalds of this world would be thrown 
out, or having to grand-father so many people in that the license 
doesn't hold any real value.

In this case, the HR person has to make some sort of judgement call on 
your IT abilities, and since they don't know the difference between the 
alphabet soup of acronyms, they look for buzzwords, so you end up having 

telecomm engineer position.

> 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...

Actual quote I overheard:  "Oracle is just multi-user Excel."

-- 
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/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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>>> 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.
>>
>
> I thought analog channels were 6MHz wide as well, but couldn't find any
> actual numbers after a 3.5 nanosecond wiki search.

In the UK single analogue TV channels (which were 8 MHz wide) were 
replaced with digital "multiplexes" of up to 40 MBit/s that occupied the 
same 8 MHz bandwidth. The frequencies used were the same for both 
systems which is why they had to wait until analog was turned off before 
the digital signals could be transmitted at full power (to avoid 
interference with adjacent transmitters).

Each digital multiplex can hold a variable combination of video, audio 
and data, but typically 10+ TV channels per multiplex. Also this allows 
some channels to have a higher bitrate than others.

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On Tue, 11 Dec 2012 09:48:43 -0500, Francois Labreque wrote:

> Le 2012-12-06 12:32, Jim Henderson a écrit :
>> 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.
>>
>>
> I thought analog channels were 6MHz wide as well, but couldn't find any
> actual numbers after a 3.5 nanosecond wiki search.

What I found in a quick search is that it's 6-8 MHz, and while analog and 
digital use the same amount of bandwidth (for "legacy reasons"), digital 
can have subchannels that analog doesn't.  So perhaps I should have said 
that the spectrum used is the same, but the usage is different and 
digital can be more efficient in using the bandwidth.

I think I might've been thinking about SSTV in HAM applications, because 
I knew there were gaps that could be used for (for example) regular FM 
transmissions within the channel's spectrum.

Jim

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