WTF are you talking about? We develop VOIP systems and use VLC to both host and client streaming video all the time, both over LAN and WAN, and it works just fine under both UDP and RTP.

So GOML and HAND.

:,-(

Oh, I agree, I could have prevented a metric fuckton of shit landing in my lap. I know that now. That's just how i learned it the hard way.

Now, any estimate I give includes plenty of margin. Like the top post says, poor managers get worst-case estimates, plus a healthy margin for the inevitable negotiation that will take place.

The same applies for cost estimates. I learned the hard way the first time I was asked to present an estimated cost to complete forced by an unexpected 16-week delay in critical long lead part from an overseas supplier. I made a diligent effort to present an accurate ETC to the customer. No margin, no padding, just my honest, well-documented estimate of the cost to complete the project.

I was expecting to be dealing with the engineers and project managers I'd been working with all along, who were competent technically and I got along with well. But instead, the customer (major aerospace prime contractor) sent in their best hard-ass negotiator who was an MBA with no understanding of the technical side.

Mr. Hard Ass refused to accept that I wasn't bullshitting him. And the engineers I got along with so well didn't do a thing to back me up. They just sat there looking uncomfortable. After two days of going over the schedule and estimate line by line, and me refusing to cut anything other than the slightest costs, Mr. Hard Ass went over my head to the CEO, who agreed to a 25% percent reduction in the estimate across the board. He just ate the cost.

I got dressed down hard for not padding my numbers, but he was decent enough to understand that the ultimate blame lied with the suppliers who waited until 4 weeks before their agreed delivery date to notify us they'd be 16 weeks late. And it was a lesson I will never forget.

No, it's a very common problem in engineering in general, and not unique to software. But the reaction "let's eliminate estimates" appears to be.

As an engineering manager, I learned the hard way many times how estimates turn into deadlines. Your estimate is reported to the manager's manager and so on up the line, and someone uses it in planning their shit.

Your estimate, in which you did not build any schedule margin, then becomes an item in the critical path of someone else's plan, someone who didn't build in any margin either, or —worse— who was pressured to make a completely fictional "plan" which is really just a backwards-calculated paper justification to "prove" that a job could be completed in an impossibly short period of time by assuming nine women can make a baby in one month and things like shipping, reproduction, and quality assurance take place in zero time. This "plan" makes upper management happy. Temporarily.

You, leader of a small team that is working merrily away, accomplishing real work and solving the occasional unexpected problem (OEM pinouts were wrong, widget zeta delayed in shipping, amplifier stage behaving like oscillator, etc.), are asked for a status update. Because of your unexpected problems, your estimated completion date is now two weeks later than your previous estimate.

Now the middle manager, who knew he wasn't going to meet the "plan" he was forced to develop, now has someone to place the blame on. He knows he's going to be in the path of a metric fuckton of shit, but he's placed himself uphill of you.

It's clear even in TFS that the real problem isn't estimation, it's poor program management, lack of requirements management, and often also marketing-driven decision-making.

In other words, the same old shit.

For space-hardened laptops, that is high-resolution.

Then don't forget that many HDMI cables now include Ethernet along with video and audio, so unless you also want to quarantine your video players, stay away from cables labeled HDMI 1.4 (or later).

Personally, I'd rather avoid installing things needing quarantine.

You've been pretty busy here defending the "rights" of corporations to be deceitful and unethical.

Are you being paid to shill for deceptive practices, or have corporate "libertarians" done a good job brainwashing you into believing that a corporation has no obligation to protect the public interest in exchange for the liability protection and corporate "personhood?"

Or maybe you've bought into the promise that, yes, you'll grow up and be a rich corporation one day too and so therefore you should defend the corporations.

I have deleted the superfluous parts of your post.

What part of bait and switch don't you understand?

I think he'd get laid.

But not on the moon.

"And this! Number Seventeen! This is the cover for the waste management unit in my Moon Suit. I peed on the fucking Moon, baby!"

Same here. Just over 10 years ago, I was single, and stayed home most nights, watching broadcast TV (live) and rented VHS/DVD movies.

Now, 11 years into a marriage, I have a DVR with a 5TB library of recordings and rips, a Netflix streaming account, Miro for watching bootleg/bittorrent downloads, and we recently discovered Popcorn and Kodi.

But I watch far less TV because the wife controls the remote, and I can only watch so much Bachelorette, Top Chef, Project Runway, etc.

And it's OK, because I've come to realize that watching video is a waste of time. I can absorb a lot more information faster by reading, and even an average SF novel is far better than all but the very best movie or TV series. So I go read instead.

Currently reading the Expanse (James S A Corey) series, which, ironically, is set to air as a SyFy Network miniseries this year.

Agreed. And it is the basis for my prediction: Fundamentalists from every religion will be threatened in a way they never have before. They'll at each others' throats trying to prove to/convince/intimidate one another (and themselves) that their beliefs are still the one and only truth, and they'll drag the rest of us into global conflict.

And, on top of the existing whack jobs, millions more will come out of the woodwork in response to the new alien presence, bickering and squabbling over what their presence means.

It will make humanity look like what it still really is: a bunch of monkeys throwing shit at each other, only pretending to be civilized.

You're obviously confused about which group of people the GP is talking about...

Hint: it's not the FCC.