A geek buddy of mine actually had a doc prescribe a dilute caffeine solution added to the drip during the week or so of recovery because his withdrawl symptoms were interfering with his ability to heal.
Personally, I'll stick to morphine when I'm at hospital: Not only do you not notice the coffee/nicotine withdrawl, you can ignore the visiting relatives too!
Hell, I will personally drive over to Holland and proofread, if only for the deep satisfaction that will ensue after I whack Rob's hand away from carraige return with a newspaper.
'No, Mr. Malda, 13 billion cannot be expressed in Gazillions, nor is it only slightly more than you made last year. Now let's discuss that story you posted while I was out for lunch. Wasn't there a better way of describing the new AIBO add-on than 'Your cyberpet can new give the fire hydrant stiff compitetion' from the '40,000-PSI-cant-be-wrong dept.' For crying out loud, if you're going to say something crass, at least use appropriate punctuation and ispell!'
While I can't directly comment on your case, I have worked on a couple dozen shared-memory SiS SS7 mobo's with the same problem. The odd display lag was fixed by going to good PC100 memory. Yes, the memory is only ever clocked at 66, (same as the retarded AGP implementation) but most of the 'PC66' out there is pure crap.
That or disable the onboard video and stick a PCI videocard in it.
MCA was a great idea. It worked like a charm on their 'larger' systems, and filled the need for a faster-than-ISA bus. VLB wasn't yet commercially produced, PCI was still a twinkle in someone's eye. IBM had peripherials available for MCA, it was better than ISA by an order of magnitude, and they could control it. What would you do?
I know this is vastly off-topic, but how did you deal with the memory-space issue? Linear style partitioning or pseudo-allocation? Active VM or abstraction layer? I had an argument just today (with one of the Parsippany engineers, no less) about how this could be done on IBM midranges without dipping into the LIC for help..
Yes, Office is a great product.. But think about this: BSD, with little headway and open kernel internals, managed to build a binary emulation layer for Linux. We have a huge headstart with Wine. If they open Windows 95, how long before Linux/BSD + X is running Office 100%???
Opened Office will only allow us to knock off one application. Open Windows, we can knock them all off.. Want to run a Notes client? Outlook? Sure!!
I advocated getting something in place now because I figure most people are like me and procrastinate the start of the job, prolong the course of the job in the name of perfection, and then just generally get sidetracked in the course of any home project. By the time I get around to 'scheduled' maint on many of my boxen, a month or more has passed since I was supposed to perform it.
The problem with services is eliminated with a properly built ipchains firewall. Don't need people telnetting in? Reject requests from outside of the 'sandbox'. You should never have to deactivate a useful service if the firewall is configured properly.
In the case of SuSE, I usually kill Apache and Sendmail, and finger, etc, are disabled by default.
Besides, I would have mentioned service deactivation but I had to scoot off to a meeting and cut comment short... I appreciate you filling in the gap..
First, get a working firewall in place. It doesn't matter that you don't comprehend it, because you're wide open as-is. Visit ipchains.nerdherd.org and download the automatic firewalling scripts.
Second, print a copy of the Ipchains HOWTO. Yeah, you just killed.1% of a tree, but it you can always use it as toilet paper after the Great War. Read it and the ipchains man page until you feel you have mastery of the 'chain' concept and of DENY, ACCEPT, and REJECT. This should take you less time than printing the HOWTO on an Epson 1200.
Sit down and determine what ports you need wide open, what ports you need one-way and what ports you need closed./etc/services helps here. Write it down, perhaps on the back of the ipchains HOWTO.
Now you actually write the firewall script. You've got your ports picked and you know the basics of the ipchains command, so it shouldn't be hard. Test it. Have a friend nmap you, etc. Test your applications. Do they still make it out fine? Print it and staple it to the HOWTO.
Why have I told you to make hard copies? That box is probably going to be running without intervention far longer than you will remember every decision you just made. When it does need attention, or you need to do the same sort of thing again, pull down the HOWTO and you have everything you need.
Hey now! I just played Rogue on a SGI Power Challenge 10000.. Theres absolutly nothing wrong with tying up a supercomputer for games, especially if you get to kill something!
On a side note, it's the only box I have access to that has Rogue installed.. And I didn't even do it!
Actually, having heard about every anti-Canadian insult as a result of sitting on a Windsor bar stool amongst insensitive US citizens, I'd love to hear some of what you bash us with..
Yeah, and I promise to shoot the militia wacko before he even draws on you..
Room temperature my left, ehrm... That baby was so hot you could fry chicken between the slats in the oversize, high-speed dual fan cpu cooler!! And they mention no test of stability! I can overclock a 450 K6-2 by a third and have it boot.. It won't make it into the OS, but its running at 650Mhz!
Enlightenment is probably the cause. The version that came with RH6.0 (15.3?) had a couple of hang issues and a issue with window properties. You should at very least install the 'Errata' RPM from RedHat, and I'd install 16.3, but thats just a preference!
Sure, we've known ideas spread and change for eons longer than we've known about evolution. Dawkins used the term 'meme' much in the same way he used the term 'animal-space' in his later books; it was a convenient vehicle to make people think of a particular aspect of the thing. 'Animal-space' means an organized three-dimensional set of all lifeforms, and implies that one can draw a straight line between any two and predict by the length of the line how many mutations and how much time is needed for the transition. While 'meme' can be used interchangably with idea, he specifically used it to imply that it was the basic unit of cultural evolution, and the same set of laws that apply to physical evolution apply in the cultural sphere.
Again, merely splitting hairs over a connotation of the same thing, but, eh! Why the heck not!
I think it was a simultaneous moderation race condition.. They happen from time to time; check out the Hall of Fame to see the fellow with a +6 comment! In the past, when 'the management' has seen fit to remove comments they're modded down to at least -5.
That's like saying that after the Nuke attack was published, that each and every subsequent exploit of its type was pointless, because we already knew there were holes in the stack! Bull. Every fix caused a new hole to be discovered, and although not all vendors (Redmond, are you out there?) have even completly fixed the exploits at least we know they are there.
should have let the relevant people know abot the problem before putting the code in the public domain.
What relevant people? Should he have called up everyone running a website from their whois entry just to tell them that DoS just got bigger and badder? This could happen to anyone for chrissakes! It's a damn DoS attack! He did all he could do: Submit the program to relevant security organizations. CERT, etc, all had a heads up on this attack to the tune of months! If they stuck their heads up their asses and ignored it, thats not his problem.
While I have been advocating more moderation over a wide range, perhaps the status quo over a shorter range would be preferable. Say -1 through +3. Moderators couldn't overrate comments by an order of magnitude. They could also give 'mad props' to some of the equally valuable gems down at +1, having spent fewer points on those three +5. Coupled with a +1 bonus for 'high-karma' individuals, it might serve to keep the upper limit for karma low enough we can all use it as a BS detector again. If you give yourself a +1 when you don't deserve it, someone will kneecap you down one. You could lose significantly more (-3) from misuse, and with the limit being +2 karma per post, the 'whores' would melt away because it is simply no longer productive.
As is, I have to leave my +1 bonux on to stay above the chaff.
Point-by point analysis of your original argument:
1) post_default == (months/x) There are a lot of old posters. I have a friend who still retains an account from the pre-1000 days. He hasn't posted anything but pointless anonymous trolls, and I don't think he is capable of anything better. (He is a MCSE, after all!) Just because you got in on the ground floor doesn't make you smarter than 90% of today's new users.
2) karma_weight^2 Poppycock. Under the current moderation system, I can fluctuate as much as 10 points daily. Some of us intentionally abused the moderation system in order to 'whore ourselves for karma'. The process is too easily abused to carry merit as anything else than a BS compass.
3)post_time^post_number Besides beginning to smell like technologicaly enforced 'Thou shalt not post' for trolls, it stinks for regular users as well. I have posted twenty times in a single day, and I'm sure Signal 11 has me toasted in daily # of posts! So you're saying that my insightful, meaningful post to the 11:57 pm story shouldn't be seen until after the light of day Thursday? Bah! Give me a locked 60 second delay anytime. I'll wait, or load a new browser window, but I won't be able to spam the forums
4)More moderation Perhaps. Instituting a/. elite with a "+100 permamod" system is extreme. Granted, it would assure you a steady 70-100 committed individuals, but over time would become a burden as more people accululate karma. Additionally, most of the recent moderation has been wasted sending trolls to -1 Never-never land when it should have concentrated on the insightful questions in today's interview. Increase the number of moderators 10-15%, and give them 6 points, which can be spent promoting six good posts or punishing 3 bad ones. Moderators are not here to open a can of whoop-ass on every troll that comes along. They're here to make sure notable ideas get seen. We reduce the damage the trolls inflict on the S/N by not giving them the old 'Moderation screwed me down to -1. I'm gonna get that fucker' excuse.
Murky bell-curve? Real life is a murky bell curve. What makes you think/. should aspire to more?
It is plain to see that you are not the run-of-the-mill troll. And not just because you know how to use sed correctly!
What would you propose to eliminate the need for all the hateful waste of bandwidth trolling going on here? There has always been what I call 'enlightened trolling': The funny or inane comments that make my cup of coffee enjoyable in the morning, and the 'middle-finger in the face of convention' unpopular opinions with serious merit. Now there appear th be a second breed, the 'destructives'. How do we keep the former and kill the latter?
First off, you're taking it to an extreme more likely to promote trolls. Second, you're placing too much weight on karma and time. If you've been here longer than a few weeks, you know that most of what I say deserves neither mass attention nor reward. And yet your system would have me post at +4! Not even my inflated ego will accept that; it is unjustifiably ridiculous.
So what if I've been reading for more than a year! So what if I've managed to get three-digit karma! They are as meaningless as indicators of my post and it's worth to the/. community as my IQ. And yes, I hold the somewhat unfortunate bastion to lump us in together as a community. These trolls have come together, as members of our community, to protest what they see as Slashdot's UCITA.
I know through casual observance of the trolls that most of the notable ones are the very high-karma intellectuals you propose to promote. Most of the leaders of the world's revolutions have been members of the intellegencia and burgious. They are feeding the one before you! Will you see that they, the troll revolutionaries, stand for the side of good even though their means are less than honourable?
Answer honestly this: Do you think that a police state will actually squash them? In the early phase of enforcement we are in they have won. They have won through sheer volume and obviousness, not through the system of +'s and -'s. I think they will win again, lest we calm whatever destructive urge they have through allowing their content.
I have great empathy for the trolls. They as a whole are a truly worthwhile lot of folk. Don't marginalize them because the percieved extremity of the situation has fueled this. Instead, ask how we can maintain order and still give them space. Perhaps instead of your Gestapo tactics of supression and elimination we can concentrate on promoting the good. Allow only positive moderations, and set the ceiling higher so those that deserve the notice get it.
Apologies to Mr. Katz for stealing his style; I tend to ramble meanderingly whilst drunk. Both of us should adopt concrete themes and ideas before writing. You, while sober, me, while inebriated.
Fortunes.. They're the output of/usr/games/fortune. Some 'innovative' troll seems to have written a shell script. Unfortunatly, not even a moderation-based ban can kill this sort of troll completly.
C'mon 'President Clinton'! Both of us know there are three kinds of trolls: The funny, the repetitive, and the garbage. Knock it off before the good Commander posts your vital statistics to sid=killfile and some malicious hack (like me!) wipes you and your box off the face of the planet.
with Inprise/Borland on its turf, Linux would be an ideal software development platform
I will second that. Linux is already stiff competition, and in my opinion having Builder available for Linux would push a significant chunk of the sphere back into the Unix/Linux camp. I know at least three companies that will wipe Windows NT the day Borland ships its Linux IDE/RAD. One company I know is even developing in Builder and porting to Linux, their primary platform.
Offtopic, but does anyone else think they 'dumbed down' Crystal Reports for Delphi??
I suppose the question would be how far the statement had to be away from the letter of the truth to be considered untrue, or how intentional the untruth had to be to count as a lie. For certain venues, what I say can be radically different from the letter of the truth and still be correct. Say I choose to explain networking to one of my [l]users. I say to him 'See those big phone wires plugged into the back of the PC? The computer sends information over them to that big stack of equipment, called a switch, which sends it to all of the other computers. The switch is hooked up to a bigger switch, and so on until you reach the switch at Sprint. Once you reach that top switch, your data can go anywhere.' Now all of us can see that is a box truck of manure, but it is closer than anything in the [l]user's head, so it can be called the truth.
Slashdot Mirror
A geek buddy of mine actually had a doc prescribe a dilute caffeine solution added to the drip during the week or so of recovery because his withdrawl symptoms were interfering with his ability to heal.
Personally, I'll stick to morphine when I'm at hospital: Not only do you not notice the coffee/nicotine withdrawl, you can ignore the visiting relatives too!
Hell, I will personally drive over to Holland and proofread, if only for the deep satisfaction that will ensue after I whack Rob's hand away from carraige return with a newspaper.
'No, Mr. Malda, 13 billion cannot be expressed in Gazillions, nor is it only slightly more than you made last year. Now let's discuss that story you posted while I was out for lunch. Wasn't there a better way of describing the new AIBO add-on than 'Your cyberpet can new give the fire hydrant stiff compitetion' from the '40,000-PSI-cant-be-wrong dept.' For crying out loud, if you're going to say something crass, at least use appropriate punctuation and ispell!'
While I can't directly comment on your case, I have worked on a couple dozen shared-memory SiS SS7 mobo's with the same problem. The odd display lag was fixed by going to good PC100 memory. Yes, the memory is only ever clocked at 66, (same as the retarded AGP implementation) but most of the 'PC66' out there is pure crap.
That or disable the onboard video and stick a PCI videocard in it.
MCA was a great idea. It worked like a charm on their 'larger' systems, and filled the need for a faster-than-ISA bus. VLB wasn't yet commercially produced, PCI was still a twinkle in someone's eye. IBM had peripherials available for MCA, it was better than ISA by an order of magnitude, and they could control it. What would you do?
I know this is vastly off-topic, but how did you deal with the memory-space issue? Linear style partitioning or pseudo-allocation? Active VM or abstraction layer? I had an argument just today (with one of the Parsippany engineers, no less) about how this could be done on IBM midranges without dipping into the LIC for help..
Yes, Office is a great product.. But think about this: BSD, with little headway and open kernel internals, managed to build a binary emulation layer for Linux. We have a huge headstart with Wine. If they open Windows 95, how long before Linux/BSD + X is running Office 100%???
Opened Office will only allow us to knock off one application. Open Windows, we can knock them all off.. Want to run a Notes client? Outlook? Sure!!
Hmmm.. ESR as Keith, RMS as Lance, Linus as Pidge... Debate will be open on AC as Hunk..
But the real question is? Sven or Princess Allura? How about a BSD grrl, or would we have to swap Linus into Sven's roll and fill Pidge?
My head is swimming!
BTB, auditions for Princess Allura will bw held at my apartment, eight-ish. Dress is completly optional..
I advocated getting something in place now because I figure most people are like me and procrastinate the start of the job, prolong the course of the job in the name of perfection, and then just generally get sidetracked in the course of any home project. By the time I get around to 'scheduled' maint on many of my boxen, a month or more has passed since I was supposed to perform it.
The problem with services is eliminated with a properly built ipchains firewall. Don't need people telnetting in? Reject requests from outside of the 'sandbox'. You should never have to deactivate a useful service if the firewall is configured properly.
In the case of SuSE, I usually kill Apache and Sendmail, and finger, etc, are disabled by default.
Besides, I would have mentioned service deactivation but I had to scoot off to a meeting and cut comment short... I appreciate you filling in the gap..
First, get a working firewall in place. It doesn't matter that you don't comprehend it, because you're wide open as-is. Visit ipchains.nerdherd.org and download the automatic firewalling scripts.
.1% of a tree, but it you can always use it as toilet paper after the Great War. Read it and the ipchains man page until you feel you have mastery of the 'chain' concept and of DENY, ACCEPT, and REJECT. This should take you less time than printing the HOWTO on an Epson 1200.
/etc/services helps here. Write it down, perhaps on the back of the ipchains HOWTO.
Second, print a copy of the Ipchains HOWTO. Yeah, you just killed
Sit down and determine what ports you need wide open, what ports you need one-way and what ports you need closed.
Now you actually write the firewall script. You've got your ports picked and you know the basics of the ipchains command, so it shouldn't be hard. Test it. Have a friend nmap you, etc. Test your applications. Do they still make it out fine? Print it and staple it to the HOWTO.
Why have I told you to make hard copies? That box is probably going to be running without intervention far longer than you will remember every decision you just made. When it does need attention, or you need to do the same sort of thing again, pull down the HOWTO and you have everything you need.
Hey now! I just played Rogue on a SGI Power Challenge 10000.. Theres absolutly nothing wrong with tying up a supercomputer for games, especially if you get to kill something!
On a side note, it's the only box I have access to that has Rogue installed.. And I didn't even do it!
Thank God there are so many Perl programmers here! When the Great Flamewar erupts, we'll roll right over those OO, Python-using Zope dealers!
Don your asbestos!
You, you, and you. Break out the weapons!
You, you and you. Into the rigging!
And you! Put the kettle on..
Actually, having heard about every anti-Canadian insult as a result of sitting on a Windsor bar stool amongst insensitive US citizens, I'd love to hear some of what you bash us with..
Yeah, and I promise to shoot the militia wacko before he even draws on you..
Room temperature my left, ehrm... That baby was so hot you could fry chicken between the slats in the oversize, high-speed dual fan cpu cooler!! And they mention no test of stability! I can overclock a 450 K6-2 by a third and have it boot.. It won't make it into the OS, but its running at 650Mhz!
Enlightenment is probably the cause. The version that came with RH6.0 (15.3?) had a couple of hang issues and a issue with window properties. You should at very least install the 'Errata' RPM from RedHat, and I'd install 16.3, but thats just a preference!
Sure, we've known ideas spread and change for eons longer than we've known about evolution. Dawkins used the term 'meme' much in the same way he used the term 'animal-space' in his later books; it was a convenient vehicle to make people think of a particular aspect of the thing. 'Animal-space' means an organized three-dimensional set of all lifeforms, and implies that one can draw a straight line between any two and predict by the length of the line how many mutations and how much time is needed for the transition. While 'meme' can be used interchangably with idea, he specifically used it to imply that it was the basic unit of cultural evolution, and the same set of laws that apply to physical evolution apply in the cultural sphere.
Again, merely splitting hairs over a connotation of the same thing, but, eh! Why the heck not!
I think it was a simultaneous moderation race condition.. They happen from time to time; check out the Hall of Fame to see the fellow with a +6 comment! In the past, when 'the management' has seen fit to remove comments they're modded down to at least -5.
That's like saying that after the Nuke attack was published, that each and every subsequent exploit of its type was pointless, because we already knew there were holes in the stack! Bull. Every fix caused a new hole to be discovered, and although not all vendors (Redmond, are you out there?) have even completly fixed the exploits at least we know they are there.
should have let the relevant people know abot the problem before putting the code in the public domain.
What relevant people? Should he have called up everyone running a website from their whois entry just to tell them that DoS just got bigger and badder? This could happen to anyone for chrissakes! It's a damn DoS attack! He did all he could do: Submit the program to relevant security organizations. CERT, etc, all had a heads up on this attack to the tune of months! If they stuck their heads up their asses and ignored it, thats not his problem.
While I have been advocating more moderation over a wide range, perhaps the status quo over a shorter range would be preferable. Say -1 through +3. Moderators couldn't overrate comments by an order of magnitude. They could also give 'mad props' to some of the equally valuable gems down at +1, having spent fewer points on those three +5. Coupled with a +1 bonus for 'high-karma' individuals, it might serve to keep the upper limit for karma low enough we can all use it as a BS detector again. If you give yourself a +1 when you don't deserve it, someone will kneecap you down one. You could lose significantly more (-3) from misuse, and with the limit being +2 karma per post, the 'whores' would melt away because it is simply no longer productive.
As is, I have to leave my +1 bonux on to stay above the chaff.
Point-by point analysis of your original argument:
/. elite with a "+100 permamod" system is extreme. Granted, it would assure you a steady 70-100 committed individuals, but over time would become a burden as more people accululate karma. Additionally, most of the recent moderation has been wasted sending trolls to -1 Never-never land when it should have concentrated on the insightful questions in today's interview. Increase the number of moderators 10-15%, and give them 6 points, which can be spent promoting six good posts or punishing 3 bad ones. Moderators are not here to open a can of whoop-ass on every troll that comes along. They're here to make sure notable ideas get seen. We reduce the damage the trolls inflict on the S/N by not giving them the old 'Moderation screwed me down to -1. I'm gonna get that fucker' excuse.
/. should aspire to more?
1) post_default == (months/x)
There are a lot of old posters. I have a friend who still retains an account from the pre-1000 days. He hasn't posted anything but pointless anonymous trolls, and I don't think he is capable of anything better. (He is a MCSE, after all!) Just because you got in on the ground floor doesn't make you smarter than 90% of today's new users.
2) karma_weight^2
Poppycock. Under the current moderation system, I can fluctuate as much as 10 points daily. Some of us intentionally abused the moderation system in order to 'whore ourselves for karma'. The process is too easily abused to carry merit as anything else than a BS compass.
3)post_time^post_number
Besides beginning to smell like technologicaly enforced 'Thou shalt not post' for trolls, it stinks for regular users as well. I have posted twenty times in a single day, and I'm sure Signal 11 has me toasted in daily # of posts! So you're saying that my insightful, meaningful post to the 11:57 pm story shouldn't be seen until after the light of day Thursday? Bah! Give me a locked 60 second delay anytime. I'll wait, or load a new browser window, but I won't be able to spam the forums
4)More moderation
Perhaps. Instituting a
Murky bell-curve? Real life is a murky bell curve. What makes you think
It is plain to see that you are not the run-of-the-mill troll. And not just because you know how to use sed correctly!
What would you propose to eliminate the need for all the hateful waste of bandwidth trolling going on here? There has always been what I call 'enlightened trolling': The funny or inane comments that make my cup of coffee enjoyable in the morning, and the 'middle-finger in the face of convention' unpopular opinions with serious merit. Now there appear th be a second breed, the 'destructives'. How do we keep the former and kill the latter?
First off, you're taking it to an extreme more likely to promote trolls. Second, you're placing too much weight on karma and time. If you've been here longer than a few weeks, you know that most of what I say deserves neither mass attention nor reward. And yet your system would have me post at +4! Not even my inflated ego will accept that; it is unjustifiably ridiculous.
/. community as my IQ. And yes, I hold the somewhat unfortunate bastion to lump us in together as a community. These trolls have come together, as members of our community, to protest what they see as Slashdot's UCITA.
So what if I've been reading for more than a year! So what if I've managed to get three-digit karma! They are as meaningless as indicators of my post and it's worth to the
I know through casual observance of the trolls that most of the notable ones are the very high-karma intellectuals you propose to promote. Most of the leaders of the world's revolutions have been members of the intellegencia and burgious. They are feeding the one before you! Will you see that they, the troll revolutionaries, stand for the side of good even though their means are less than honourable?
Answer honestly this: Do you think that a police state will actually squash them? In the early phase of enforcement we are in they have won. They have won through sheer volume and obviousness, not through the system of +'s and -'s. I think they will win again, lest we calm whatever destructive urge they have through allowing their content.
I have great empathy for the trolls. They as a whole are a truly worthwhile lot of folk. Don't marginalize them because the percieved extremity of the situation has fueled this. Instead, ask how we can maintain order and still give them space. Perhaps instead of your Gestapo tactics of supression and elimination we can concentrate on promoting the good. Allow only positive moderations, and set the ceiling higher so those that deserve the notice get it.
Apologies to Mr. Katz for stealing his style; I tend to ramble meanderingly whilst drunk. Both of us should adopt concrete themes and ideas before writing. You, while sober, me, while inebriated.
Fortunes.. They're the output of /usr/games/fortune. Some 'innovative' troll seems to have written a shell script. Unfortunatly, not even a moderation-based ban can kill this sort of troll completly.
C'mon 'President Clinton'! Both of us know there are three kinds of trolls: The funny, the repetitive, and the garbage. Knock it off before the good Commander posts your vital statistics to sid=killfile and some malicious hack (like me!) wipes you and your box off the face of the planet.
with Inprise/Borland on its turf, Linux would be an ideal software development platform
I will second that. Linux is already stiff competition, and in my opinion having Builder available for Linux would push a significant chunk of the sphere back into the Unix/Linux camp. I know at least three companies that will wipe Windows NT the day Borland ships its Linux IDE/RAD. One company I know is even developing in Builder and porting to Linux, their primary platform.
Offtopic, but does anyone else think they 'dumbed down' Crystal Reports for Delphi??
I suppose the question would be how far the statement had to be away from the letter of the truth to be considered untrue, or how intentional the untruth had to be to count as a lie. For certain venues, what I say can be radically different from the letter of the truth and still be correct. Say I choose to explain networking to one of my [l]users. I say to him 'See those big phone wires plugged into the back of the PC? The computer sends information over them to that big stack of equipment, called a switch, which sends it to all of the other computers. The switch is hooked up to a bigger switch, and so on until you reach the switch at Sprint. Once you reach that top switch, your data can go anywhere.' Now all of us can see that is a box truck of manure, but it is closer than anything in the [l]user's head, so it can be called the truth.