Ohhh.. that's Token Ring, not Tolkien Ring. My mistake.

Heh. Well, hobbits are nowhere near as deterministic as Token Ring, but they'll be with us a lot longer!

multi-speed hubs

As I understand it, these are simply switches that switch between the two speeds -- imagine switches, but with only two ports on them -- the 10Mbps port and the 100Mbps port. These are then "hubbed out" to the other ports.

I could be wrong, though.

So if you graft...

Actually, most orange trees are grafted onto lemon root stocks, anyway...

More interestingly: Apparently, citrus is citrus is citrus. If you take an orange and plant it, you could end up with a lemon tree. If you take the lemon and plant it, you could end up with a grapefruit tree, and so on...

Check out "Oranges", John McPhee, ISBN 0141182032

If you take an orange and plant it, you could end up with a lemon tree.

I've never heard of this. What's your source? It sounds farfetched to me, considering that for this to happen, the plants in question would have to spontaneously change species at some point during their life cycle.

It sounded farfetched to me, too, when I first heard it, which is why I bought that book. It doesn't cover it in too much detail, but I did find these two references:

Preface, page ix:

"Citrus does not come true from seed. If you plant an orange seed, a grapefruit might spring up. If you plant a seed of that grapefruit, you might get a bitter lemon."

Page 35:

"Up from those lime seeds came sweet orange trees, tangerines, limequats, citrons..."

OK, a little work with google once I got the term-of-art, "come true from seed", seems to reveal that not all species of citrus can do this, but that some of them can.

I actually have one of those multi-speed hubs and it has no documentation warning about only being able to plug certain speeds into certain places. In fact, I can move my empeg (the only 10Mbps device I have on that network) to any port and not have a problem. Now it's still possible that there's something like what you suggest going on behind the scenes, but, if so, it's totally transparent to the user.

In reply to:

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Now it's still possible that there's something like what you suggest going on behind the scenes, but, if so, it's totally transparent to the user.

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Exactly. Dual-speed hubs can tell when a connection is 100Mbit - there's usually a light next to the port.

Obviously. But that doesn't mean there's any switching going on, which is the part of Roger's statement I was refuting. And the fact that it can detect whether it's 10Mbps or 100Mbps would seem to me to be 90% of the way towards not needing a switch anyway (assuming switching is not a priority to the product).

Citrus does not come true from seed.

(avoids temptation to mark quotation with [lime] tags)

The wonderful Oxford Companion To Food goes on about this, too. Basically, in many highly-bred plants, the borderlines between species are not as clear-cut as "this is a giraffe, but that's a hamster". If you think about (say) limeness as a recessive gene that's carried by many oranges, then there will be a certain number of lime trees every time two oranges pollinate.

The same, IIRC, happens with brassicas, where a huge variety of cultivars (cabbages, kale, brussels sprouts, oilseed rape, cauliflowers, broccoli/calabrese) have been bred from the relatively small genetic raw material of the seakale. "Although consumers can easily distinguish broccoli and cauliflowers," says OCF, "botanists have great difficulty".

Peter

PS. I read somewhere that all the world's domesticated hamsters are descended from one pregnant female caught one day in Egypt. Anyone know whether that's true?

Yes, it is totally transparent, the ports are auto-sensing, but there's still a (virtual) two-port switch in there.

In particular, from Netgear's website (talking about the DS108):

Each unit has a built-in self-learning bridge which provides the communications link between the 10 and 100 Mbps network devices. The intelligent bridge automatically manages network traffic such that 100 Mbps traffic does not unnecessarily crowd the 10 Mbps network segment and 10 Mbps traffic does not crowd the 100 Mbps segment.

Personally, I'd get a switch (I have a pair of Netgear FS108 switches at home). They're not much more expensive, and performance is better.

Well, there you go. I'd generally get the switch, too. (I got my dual-speed hub for free.)

domesticated hamsters

Actually, Syria:

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/1327/guide1.html
http://www.doghause.com/funfacts05.html