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The amount of transcoding needed to get a conference call up hurts my brain. If 20 people are talking on Skype, the server needs to receive those 20 streams, de
by dragontamer 4y ago
The amount of transcoding needed to get a conference call up hurts my brain. If 20 people are talking on Skype, the server needs to receive those 20 streams, decode them, mix the audio together, recode the streams, and then broadcast it back out to all 20 people.
I'm not a telecommunications guy, but I had some professors back in college explain how difficult and fundamental the research of "ma-bell" was from the 60s through 80s. I'm talking Erlang, C++, CLOS circuits, etc. etc. The innovations from Bell Labs are nearly endless.
Telephone communications is one of the biggest sources of fundamental comp. sci research over the 1950s through 2000s.
- nordsieck 4y ago> I'm talking Erlang, C++, CLOS circuits, etc. etc. The innovations from Bell Labs are nearly endless. A lot of innovations did come out of Bell Labs. But I'm pretty sure Erlang wasn't one of them.
- dragontamer 4y agoOh, you're right. There seems to have been a glitch in my memory somehow. Still, its Ericsson, which is telecommunications nonetheless.
- eru 4y agoSee also Claude Shannon's trifecta of compression, error correcting codes, and cryptography, which also came out of the study of telecommunications. Compression removes redundancy from your message. Error correcting codes introduces carefully controlled redundancies, so your message survives transmission errors, so your recipient can read it. And cryptography deals with 'scrambling' your message, so that no one else can read it (and also deal with authentication etc).