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Speedcabling - Untangling For Fun and Profit
ibnsuleiman writes "A new competitive sport is emerging amongst IT professionals and hobbyists. Speedcabling tests the ability to untangle the rat's nests that grow inside and outside of the beige boxes that pervade todays homes and workplaces. The first public competition was held in an LA gallery for a $50 gift certificate to a local Italian restaurant. The winner, LA web developer Matthew Howell, had to untangle a dozen ethernet cables in record time leaving them in working order to win."
finally a sport where steroids wont help you!
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
Apologies to my Scottish and Canadian friends. But, really??
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
ESPN 8 the ocho!
The trouble is, the techniques that help you disentangle a bundle of cables not attached to any equipment are not applicable when some of the cables are plugged in and need to stay plugged in, as usually in real life. They need a variant of the sport where there are thirty cables, some plugged into various patch panels at both ends, some at one end only, and some free; your task is to extract the loose and dangling cables and leave the working ones.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
From the blurb: The winner, LA web developer Matthew Howell, had to untangle a dozen ethernet cables in record time leaving them in working order to win.
Working order? Man, there's a catch to everything. I guess I can put my weed whacker with it's steel blades back...
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
My normal failure mode with a cable jumble, that reassuring crack as it breaks off ensuring a lurking connectivity problem when its used in the future. I suppose those tabs need to be maintained in the contest FTW no?
Yes, but as a spectator sport? That takes innovation. And a lot of really easily-entertained spectators.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'll bet the national championships will end up on ESPN2 during the middle of the night... just like those tweens stacking cups.
Another sport that deserves a WTF? award.
And in case anyone is wondering, yes, those are punchdown boxes you see. It would be horrible to run the cable directly to the switch without having boxes and patch cables on each end.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Throw in power cables, phone lines, and mice to make it more realistic.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I mean, is this legal?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The Japanese still have us beat on wacky game shows.
Bearded Dragon
I hear he spent a lot of time training with this.
It can't be any more boring than most 'reality TV' we've been seeing since the writers' strike started.
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
...since this is precisely what I do in my sleep, after all the MCSE weenies who weren't allowed to touch the cables in class have left for the day.
Now, a hunt for the loose terminator in a Thinnet network, or the forced-duplex port in your Cisco stack, or the one Linksys VPN router with different firmware out among the 50+ telecommuters, or even the splitters over the ceilings in your Localtalk network at the elementary school, or any number of real-world-ish scenarios.
Bah. Like playing pool for money. Too much like real work. And playing for beer makes you pee too much.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The change only seems to be on stories in idle.slashdot.org. Maybe taco is testing it out before letting it loose on the rest of the site... I hope not though, because I'm not a fan of the new theme.
Round four: Profit!
that there is finally a story where my following formalization of the process of wire entanglement is on-topic.
Kevin's First Law: For any number of wires, strings or similar objects, the probability of complex entanglement between them increases exponentially with the inverse of distance. Time required to entangle is also affected in a similar fashion. This phenomenon can be observed in consequence, but not in action.
Also, for those who are interested, my second law is formalized thusly:
Kevin's Second Law: There exists no robot that cannot be improved in form or function by the addition of a flamethrower.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
There. Fixed that for ya' This is Slashdot, after all.
I gave up religion for Lent.
Some of the cables will be live and have shorts in the insulation.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
What the hell are 'ethernet cables,' anyway? Ethernet is a protocol. Back in the good ol' days I set up Ethernet LANs with 10BASE-2 coax cable.
As much as I love a good round of detangling the ether.. I'm not exactly doing that everyday. Every sound gig resembles the following: Find the boxen/buckets of mic/power/adapter cables, untangle the mess left by the wank the night before, make a bad band sound good then untangle all those same cables from their gear and the beverages they have spilled throughout the night and just early enough that it has begun to congeal and stick and properly wrap to try to be nice the next shmoe unlike said wank from the night before.
Add to that a mix of christmas lights that some band thought would look cool and the raw wiring that's frays grab each other like teeny-boppers at a rave and you have a whole pile of fun on your hands 8}
Not to mention that it should be done under a poorly lit desk with insufficient room for more than one arm at a time while someone tries to do work around you during the contest.