454: Rewiring

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 19:14, 14 June 2013 by 66.202.132.250 (talk) (Explanation)
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Rewiring
My friend Elizabeth tried to mail one end of the cable to me and thread the mail system.
Title text: My friend Elizabeth tried to mail one end of the cable to me and thread the mail system.

Explanation

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If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Nearly all buildings are wired for landline phone service. Typically, the wiring comes into the residence at one point (the telco's Network interface device) and then extends throughout the house to multiple jacks, so that the same phone line can be shared among multiple devices. High-speed Internet access is similar in that it originates from one point in the house (the cable modem or DSL modem). Many people wish the phone wiring and phone jacks in their residences were Ethernet (Cat-5 or Cat-6) wiring and (RJ-45) jacks for distributing Internet access around the home, so that they wouldn't have to resort to wifi (speed is comparable but reliability is less), running cables through the living area (ugly and hazardous) or rewiring-- pulling new cable behind the walls (difficult or expensive).

The comic depicts a fanciful way to convert phone lines to ethernet lines by simply faxing an ethernet cable to someone else (a fax machine being a way of digitizing something).

Transcript

[Cueball is feeding cable into a device on a desk labeled "fax".]
Fax: zzz zzz
[Outdoors, showing a plant and a lamp (indicates panels 1 and 3 are separate locations).]
[Megan, laptop behind her, is pulling a cable out of a fax machine.]
Fax: zzzzz


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Discussion

As well as physically 'threading' the mail system, an email (or other messaging) client that keeps track of what messages reply to which others (often as a linear progression or cascade, or a tree-view where multiplie participants can be expected to branch the conversation) is said to show 'threaded' messages. Or was. (These days it's probably got some other name, and everyone seems to just want to top-post anyway. Thank you, Eternal September!!!) 178.107.249.215 13:12, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

If there were so many homes with phone wiring and no ethernet wiring and they were complaining, why didn't they just use the phone wiring for ethernet. It is a little less stable because of lack of addditional grounding/isolation wiring, but ethernet does only actually use 4 wires. Tharkon (talk) 19:35, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
The RJ11 jacks in more than half the houses I've lived in only had 2 wires connected. The most common reason to have 4 wires is that someone ordered two handsets in the 70s--sometimes dialing on one handset would cause the other one to ring, in which case AT&T would install an "anti-tinkle system", which required another wire pair. I also lived in one house whose owner had ordered a business phone when he lived there, and the lights on the business phone were powered by a second pair. 162.158.255.69 18:44, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

I believe that there needs to be more explanation about the title text, particularly about what "threading" and a mail system are. Codefreak5 (talk) 05:20, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

Hey folks, when I check the comic on my computer the title text reads "Finn", not "Elizabeth". Is this an error on this site, or is it one of Randall's meta-jokes? 198.41.235.185 13:41, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Added an explanation. It contains all the facts of the situation that I'm aware of, but someone who frequents the chat more than I do may be able to correct me. --162.158.153.113 21:40, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Why is the google trends list a link for in Canada, would not a link straight to the world wide data be more appropriate? 108.162.246.191 11:51, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

I've removed the link because it didn't explain anything. Nevertheless google.ca should be the same as google.com, also true for most other countries but not for cn and a few more.--Dgbrt (talk) 15:49, 19 July 2017 (UTC)