Every once in a while, some idiot who thinks they know everything questions my authority and is dead wrong. It becomes even more aggravating when said person works under you and despite not know what they’re talking about, they still talk about it anyways. Such is the case of John Bishop (name changed to protect the guilty). My favorite part was when John and his “friends” noted a blatant inaccuracy in your numbers for how many people could listen to the stream at any one time inside the mines network. You stated that the network was more than capable of handling 5000 users at 128kbps. This comes out to 640000kbps, or 640Mbps. This happens to be more than six times the 100Mbps that the Mines LAN runs at, a fact the members of the committee that also work in networking will notice. Even if the LAN is Gigabit this would take a very significant portion of the entire bandwidth available. Just thought we’d point out some problems and technical inaccuracies in the report that was turned into the tech fee committee.”
While the numbers do look like it would be impossible, it is, in fact, not. Due to the miracle of multicasting. Perhaps the best part is that John was at the meeting with Academic Computing and Networking where they specifically brought up the issue of multicasting and I explicitly said, “Yes, we will have multicasting.”
So what does this teach you? Andrew is always right1
0execpt when he’s wrong ↩