When thinking of a server, most people envision someone who brings you food in a restaurant. In computer circles, however, a server is something different.

Simply put, a server is a computer which serves some very specific purpose. There are many different types of servers: print servers, file servers, web servers, etc. Let’s stick with the restaurant analogy and pretend your printer is Grand Sultan of your office. All of the individual PCs in the office are the sultan’s many chefs, cooking up fabulous documents for the printer’s consumption. Just like a server at a restaurant, the print server delivers the documents from the chefs (your PCs) to the Sultan (the printer) .

A file server works the same way, only this time the individual PCs are all the guests in the restaurant and the file server is in charge of delivering food (files) fom the central kitchen (its hard drive).

Finally, a web server delivers web content from a central location (again, the server’s hard drive) to a multitude of guests (your web site visitors).

Here’s a new one. A herd of cows that graze in a pasture along Fruitville road in Sarasota are being stenciled to advertise GoldenPalace.com, an online casino. In the past, Golden Palace has been known to use some unorthodox advertising techniques, such as tatooing their ads on the backs of boxers and streakers. They’ve also purchased the ten year old grilled cheese sandwich shaped like the Virgin Mary - all in the name of some (relatively) free publicity. All of these stunts have garnered a lot of attention for Golden Palace and apparently resulted in a lot of hits to their website.

Here’s the kicker: PETA is actually supporting this activity on the grounds that it’s better to use the cows as billboards than to slaughter them for food. The cows are painted with the same non toxic paint that ranchers use to “brand” their cows before hurricanes in case they get lost. It remains to be seen how many gamblers the cows will garner.