How Things Work
Thanks!
I couldn’t sleep. (Note post time.)But I’m gett......zzzzzzzzz.
Neuro-Physiology works just as good! Who need Ambien!!!
Well, I care, but then, I used to work for a company that designed and sold TCP-aware network switches.
Sigh. It’s lonely being an Alpha Geek.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto
08/26/2006 at 05:14 AM
To be honest - and jests aside - I found it to be quite a lucid and useful tutorial. Its not my field so I’d not seen (or looked for) the actual details of the comm protocol. Its fairly straightforward.
I didn’t see the “666” or BushHitlerCheneyRoves’s ID in it though. Is that included in the data following?
You layer 4 guys are a bunch of propeller heads
Everyone knows the real engineering is done on layer 1.
(anybody needing a tutorial, wikipedia kind of has the osi model laid out in an easy to understand format)
Oh, that’s where the porn comes from…
Hehehehehehe .... I knew this post would flush out the geeks in the crowd!
Geek alert! Oh, wait, that was me that set it off…
It doesn’t get sillier? Wanna bet?
Let’s consider all the other useful things they taught us - 2’s complement math, algorithm bounding (Big O, Little O) analysis, linguistics (remember finite state pushdown automata grammars?), raster-synched flood fill algorithms, heap sorts, QuickSort, radixes, TTL labs, NAND gates, register manipulations, hashing and thrashing and table building and snapshots and stored procedures ... n+1 amounts of good stuff. Polymorphism! Well, at least that’s a bit useful when you have to kludge some objects.
And to help make learning more fun, each class required you to do the labs in a different, dead OS and nearly dead language the learning of which wasn’t part of the syllabus. PL/1. Modula-4. LISP, for goodness sake!!! Hammer home those rules: Thou Shalt Not Avoid Typing! Thou Shalt Not Allow Scope Creep or Side Effects! No Module Shall Do More Than One Task! Yet a big part of the real world runs on Visual Basic, the loosest pile of doo-doo going, and people love it!
Then take your sheepskin and get a job in the real world only to find that there are only two rules: Get It Done Yesterday, and Make It Pretty If The Customer Can See It. Everything we learned in school was long since standardized and built in, so the developer/user never ever had to go to that low a level to get things done. No wonder the number of technical undergrads is down 85% in the past decade; spend 4+ years to get that BS in CS/IS and find that your coworkers didn’t even goto tech school and thus have a 4 year field advantage. Nobody cares about tight code anymore, or even fixing all the bugs along the critical path. Just get the product out the door and we’ll issue a patch release when enough users raise a stink. CM is a joke just about everywhere, but every couple years let’s pay lip service to the latest emerging standard (CMM, ISO 9000, etc).
These days it’s almost pointless for this post of yours to be in English. Better that it be in Hindu.
And prof? The reason we had hangovers is because that was how we dealt with the stress induced by having to learn this stuff while knowing it was yet another subject we would just about never ever get to use once we graduated. But at least in your classes we could understand the words. Dr. Umrigarla and Dr. Su were just about impossible: “serious apparel” wasn’t a lecture about tuxedos and ball gowns, it was a dissertation on the two basic kinds of DC circuit. But hey, they had PHDs, so that made the university look good.
Learning the network packaging stuff was easy: each little piece can take any path to get to where its going eventually, and the receiver just has to pile them up and sort them, then ta-da! message received.
Ok, techno-rant over.
Drew, I not only had to sit in those same classes and digest all of the stuff you mentioned (and a few more) but then I was stupid and let them talk me into coming back after I completed the Masters and stand up in front of the classes and teach the same crap for four years as an adjunct professor. The hard part was keeping a straight face, knowing they would never use 50% of it.
so where are the naked ladies?
Skip n Drew 458
Give me gears and hex bolts any day!
[Delurk:] Another geek flushed out.
Yes I remember all the network training. No - not all what I was taught, but the fact that I was taught something like that. All stuff of a bygone age, even the company where I took the courses (DEC/Digital).
I could play language poker with Drew, for I dabbled in Forth, Modular-2, and Occam. But this was not as a student but as a hobbyist. Yes I was a sad git who could recite the hexcode instructions for a Z80 CPU.
And Drew ranting about CRM/CM drew my eye - for it’s my field nowadays. It appears that the only serious users of CRM are telcos - well in my experience anyway. You think you were in a backwater at school, Drew. Well I started out as an Analytical Chemist at London University, churning out analyses for the researchers. Took 4 years to train myself up and switch career to IT.
I find that the best programmers are people who have worked in other fields beforehand. They have life-experience, some appreciation for the users, and knowledge of the context in which they are working. I would NOT engage a young squit straight out of college, who has no track record. Unless he/she was VERY cheap.
TTFN.
[Re-lurk]
08/26/2006 at 06:27 AM
08/26/2006 at 04:42 PM
08/29/2006 at 11:00 AM
