Conforming to the Rules

Conforming to the Rules

Anyone who has spent time around a teenagerand I figure most people reading this book have at least been teenagers beforeknows that those years bring out the rebel inside. Instead of conforming, teenagers sometimes think that rules are meant to be broken! In some cases, breaking the rules might be okay. But often times, as all parents know, the wisdom of having rules and conforming to them become obvious after a little thoughteven to a teenager.

Standards are rules that make life a lot easier. For example, look at a power socket on a nearby wall. If you live in the U.S., you probably see an electrical socket with three holestwo that accept flat metal prongs, and one that accepts a round metal prong. The flat metal prongs are parallel to each other. If you go to the store and buy a lamp, you'd expect it to come with a power cord, and you'd expect that one end of the power cord would fit into the wall socket. In fact, you'd be pretty ticked off if the power cord wouldn't fit into the power socket. That's one example of a popular standard. If you go to the store and buy a toaster, a can opener, or a stereo, you would expect the vendor to conform to the standards for how the electrical wall socket works in your country.

Now imagine that you bought a new lamp. You plug it in, and the light bulb instantly "pops," indicating that the light bulb is broken. You put in a new bulb, and it doesn't light up. You decide that the lamp must be broken, so you bring it back to the store and replace it with an identical lamp. When you get it home, the same thing happens to this lamp. Finally, you call customer service and explain your problem. Now imagine this response: "Oh, you bought our special 'We light up your life' model of lamp. It uses the same kind of power cord you are used to using, but it requires less electrical voltage, saving you money. If you read your instructions for the lamp, you will see that it directs you to get an electrician out to your house to rewire and change the voltage coming out of the sockets you want to use for the lamp. Also, note the disclaimer in the instructions: 'If you plug this lamp into a normal wall socket, the extra voltage will fry the lamp, and it will no longer light up your life.' So, go get a new lamp at the store and get your wall socket changed!" If you're like me, you would return to the store to get your money back and buy a lamp made by some other company.

But what does this scenario have to do with networking? A standard tends to define one particular thing, such as the shape of the wall socket and connector used by an electrical socket and electrical power cable. Another standard might dictate how much juice (voltage) flows through the wall socket, whether it is AC or DC, how much current, and the like. Both standards are important and must be followed to prevent exploding lamps. In short, just because you can plug in a lamp does not mean that all the necessary standards have been used. Similarly, networking has standards for physical details so that you can plug in the cables correctly; however, networking devices must support other standards as well for a network to work correctly.