In article <201004071023.o37ANtww018405@aurora.sol.net>, Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> writes
interoperability and backwards compatibility were the tipping points.
Ah, yes, backwards compatibility: implementing the fantastic feature of breaking the network...
By "backwards compatibility" I mean the ability to use the new LAN from a laptop that didn't have an Ethernet connection built in, and didn't have an optional [proprietary] internal Ethernet card available either.
There are a lot of things to target with the term, I was picking conveniently. :-)
we all remember the fun of what happened when someone incorrectly unhooked a 10base2 network segment; D-Link managed to one-up that on the theoretically more-robust 10baseT/UTP by introducing a card that'd break your network when you powered off the attached PC.
That tale of woe doesn't really sound like it's the fault of backwards compatibility.
No, but I remember network people talking gleefully about the benefits of 10baseT (and come on - it has lots), and how it fixed the "someone needed to move a PC and disconnected the cables from the T rather than the T from the NIC" problem... and along came D-Link (and some other vendors I think) with the brilliant idea of a host-integrated hub. Now, remember, some network guys walked around with new-in-bag BNC T's in their pocket because they'd run across someone who disappeared a T every month or two, and there's great power in turning your back, twiddling for a few seconds, and then being able to holler "Network's back up!"... Unfortunately, power-cycling crashed PC's is (was?) pretty common, and many users are (were?) also trained to shut off PC's when done, so here you've introduced something that is by-design going to fail periodically. Not just if-and-when someone decides to move a computer and screws it up. Of course, if someone actually removes the PC in question, and does not realize that the network actually feeds _through_ the PC, um, well, you cannot just whip a T out of your pocket to "fix" the network. To me, this is a Dilbert-class engineering failure. I would imagine that if you could implement a hub on the network card, the same chip(s) would work in an external tin can with a separate power supply. Designing a product that actually exhibits a worse failure mode than 10base2 is ... strange to me. I was sarcastically referring to this as "backwards compatibility", possibly also with New Enhanced Features, ha ha.
Didn't the operational status of the LAX immigration department fall to zero for almost a whole day, once; as a result of a rogue network card crashing the LAN?
Probably. Not my area of the country. There are plenty of examples of networking disasters. ;-) ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.