[BC] I Would Like To Say Something

[RichardBJohnson at comcast.net]

That reminds me of a technical discussion during a
conference about cell phone engineering. One engineer
took the position that sometimes he loses calls on his
cell phone. The signaling didn't get through, but the
voice-mail paging did so that he could get a message,
about 30 minutes later, that he missed a call, but the
call was never signaled plus, the cell-phone location
didn't change so he was sure it wasn't a receiving problem.
This, he was told, was because signaling was handled
by a different server (transmitter) than messaging.
The engineer then said, "Well then that's the problem.
It's a design flaw, a bug!"

"No," said another engineer; "That’s how we DO it!"

This is typical of engineering committees where a closed
mind is required and learning has been forced to stop. It
is also typical of the so-called engineering "team" because
the sole purpose of the team is to spread the blame if anything
goes wrong.

The result of recent committees such as IBOC and ATSC...

>From Wikipedia, an example of where the committee stopped
the learning process;

" Broadcasts
In the United States, the ATSC standard allows 1080p24 and 1080p30 video.
In practice, 1080p is extremely rare in broadcasting, as all
major networks use a 60 Hz format in the MPEG-2 header –
either 720p60 or 1080i60, and the consumer televisions do not support
codecs needed to support 1080p50 or 1080p60 as of yet. For material
that originated from a 24 frame/s source (such as film), MPEG-2
allows the video to be coded as 1080p24, irrespective of the final
output format. The progressively-coded frames are then tagged with
metadata (literally, fields of the PICTURE header) instructing a
decoder how to perform a 3:2 pulldown to interlace them.

While the formal output of the MPEG-2 decoding process from such
stations is 1080i60, the actual content is coded as 1080p24 and can be
viewed as such. That is to say, twenty-four progressively-coded frames
per second are present in the bitstream; it is the decoder that turns
them into 60 interlaced fields per second. NBC is known to use this
method with some stations. "

Cheers,
Richard B. Johnson
Book: http://www.AbominableFirebug.com/

----- Original Message -----
From: "Glen Kippel" <glen.kippel at gmail.com>

And Willie, learning SHOULD never end, but unfortunately for some people it
does.  "This is how to do it," they say.  If everybody had that opinion, the
wheel would have never been invented, let alone anything that came after.
There must always be a questioning to see if there could be a way to do
something better.  That's how progress is made.