|Forum|Articles|Networking, the other white meat. By Anubis   Counselor: Well I think you really need to make more of an attempt to network with your classmates Me: Well I would like too but none of them have Ethernet cards. ... Well I started networking class the other day. The fact that I think I have enough fodder to write an article about this soon should give you an idea of the classes, um, article-worthy-ness. A few things I noticed on the first day The classroom is small. Really really small. You could fit maybe 12 people in here, max. No wonder I had such a hard time getting in. On top of that the fact that there were only eight computers for these 12 people set off my highly evolved Group Work Detection Node. The only other thing in the room that gave any indication that this was a networking class as opposed to,say Engilsh 12A, were the two largish 19' racks full of hubs and routers and other networking paraphanlea in the front of the room. For most of the two hours the teacher was talking about (INSERT CURRICULUM 2.0 HERE) I was staring at those mounts, wondering if I could synthesize a suitable nerve gas substitute from the stuff that was in my pockets at the time and if so, would the front desk question a nerd dragging a rack of hubs and forty feet of trailing wires out to his car. The teacher said right off the bat that you should have taken either network 150 or network 152 (whatever the hell they were) before taking this class. It was not a prerequisite in spring, when I signed up in spring there were no prerequisites but according to Curriculum 2.0, which they instituted in summer, there now is. Incidentally according to Curriculum 2.0 most of the classes I took in the year before don't exist. Anyway, needless to say, half the people in there had not taken network 150 or 152 As I sat there, trying to stay awake I found myself staring at the "racks" in the front of the room. each of the racks had about 800 RJ-45 patch cables dangling from the front of them. Now in my (admittedly) extremely limited networking experience cables have always been color coded, or numbered so that the guy who was hooking them up knew which cable went to which device. Everyone of these cables was institutional blue, and they had no markings. And what the hell was up with all those AUI transceivers. (I should probably say something here. I don't know how prevalent AUI is in the PC world but in the Mac world AUI has not been hot since the Reagan Administration. The reason for this is simple, AUI uses the same 15 pin port as Mac monitors do and back in the late 80s when Apple started putting AUI in Macs people were mistaking it for the monitor port. End of aside) The first day he went over the most basic of computer concepts. he started by explaining what a capacitor was and closed by explaining what binary was. Yawn. After seeing what the subject matter was like several people (all bimbos) dropped, because they thought the class would be too hard. No comment       Syntax Error/:|Forum|Articles|