3 ms·

Yes - since nobody actually learns telephony any more, and it's a byzantine mess ... tons of guys earning a living being experts in domains we thought were goin

Yes - since nobody actually learns telephony any more, and it's a byzantine mess ... tons of guys earning a living being experts in domains we thought were going to go away ... But in 20 years from now, we'll still be installing classic land-lines, in which case, they'll still be around. Idea: build a wireless framework with the robustness of land-line efficiency - good enough for 9/11 calls and emergencies etc..

busterarm 9y ago
It goes way deeper than that though, honestly. It's really just a matter of small failures blowing up bigger and faster. They're 'closer to the metal', in a sense. I've worked with plenty of tech people who just don't grok things as simple as network transmission times or that you can't 'just run a long enough wire (and through any conditions)'. Physics always gets its way. (Side rant: please do your best not to try to send me 20MB of data bounced off of a tin can spinning around the planet, down through dense, negatively-charged clouds to a mixed-elevation terrain through feet of steel and concrete surrounded by 1000 other phones like mine just to view your website/500-word article, plox. kthx) We're very lucky that our systems are resilient (as in fault-tolerant, not inherently-stable) enough that most of us can work at very high level of abstraction and never dig deeper. Phone people have to get this or their systems don't work right away. Same with power transmission. We think of these things like they're separate systems and domains from ours, but we're just very far removed from that layer. Everything we build is a client of these networks. There will be bugs or better designs that elude you if you don't understand this. Just to drive the point home, there's this classic: http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

busterarm 9y ago

It goes way deeper than that though, honestly. It's really just a matter of small failures blowing up bigger and faster. They're 'closer to the metal', in a sense. I've worked with plenty of tech people who just don't grok things as simple as network transmission times or that you can't 'just run a long enough wire (and through any conditions)'. Physics always gets its way. (Side rant: please do your best not to try to send me 20MB of data bounced off of a tin can spinning around the planet, down through dense, negatively-charged clouds to a mixed-elevation terrain through feet of steel and concrete surrounded by 1000 other phones like mine just to view your website/500-word article, plox. kthx) We're very lucky that our systems are resilient (as in fault-tolerant, not inherently-stable) enough that most of us can work at very high level of abstraction and never dig deeper. Phone people have to get this or their systems don't work right away. Same with power transmission. We think of these things like they're separate systems and domains from ours, but we're just very far removed from that layer. Everything we build is a client of these networks. There will be bugs or better designs that elude you if you don't understand this. Just to drive the point home, there's this classic: http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles