Subject: Re: corba or sockets?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: 01 Nov 2000 01:51:50 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3182032310424817@naggum.net>

* Marius Vollmer <mvo@zagadka.ping.de>
| I don't know how 56kbps or ISDN etc really work, but I guess they are
| more about very high modulation schemes, good channel estimations and
| equalizations, error correcting codes and data compression than they
| are about clever protocols.

  I didn't say "clever".  I answered a question on which protocols I
  thought were good and worth a study.  The issues you raise are taken
  care of at different layers of the protocol.  The interesting aspect
  for protocol designers is the _signalling_system_.  That's why I
  explicitly spelled out the names of SS#7 and DSS#1.

  Rather than list the results of your guesswork, how about their
  foundation?

| And the old copper wires aren't probably the problem, anyway.  They
| should not be much worse than your ordinary 10Base-T twisted pair
| ethernet wire.  The problems are probably more with the filters
| along the way that have been optimized for base-band speech signals.

  This is completely false and just more random guesswork.  Quit it
  and talk to people who know this stuff.  It's been _years_ since I
  worked with this stuff, but any competent telecom engineer will be
  able to tell you about the electrical qualities of those copper
  wires and why that is _completely_ irrelevant to ISDN signalling.

| I'm very impressed by these techniques as well, but I don't think
| you can learn from them how to design a better CORBA.  They are just
| worlds apart.

  I'd like to know why you don't think so, apart from being "worlds
  apart", which is just too funny when referring to the telecom world.

  Incidentally, most of the interesting things appeared to be "worlds
  apart" at one time or another.  I believe good high-level language
  programmers need to understand machine architectures more than good
  low-level language programmers do, for the _reason_ that they are
  worlds apart.  If you don't understand what's going on on the wire,
  the likelihood that you will not understand how to make a high-level
  protocol work _with_ the intermediate layers is very high.

#:Erik
-- 
  Does anyone remember where I parked Air Force One?
                                   -- George W. Bush