To protect and serve. That's the motto of the Buzz Bashing Patrol.

For this special roundtable interview, we pulled together an elite group of analysts and consultants - elite because they are Network World columnists (for one thing) - and asked them to take a stand on some of the most-talked about issues in the IT industry today: Gigabit Ethernet v. ATM, Windows NT v. the world, electronic commerce, intranets and more. They are the Buzz Bashers, hype-fighting action-figures whose mission is to help you untangle all the acronyms and make better decisions.

Your Buzz Bashers are Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. in Voorhees, N.J.; Scott Bradner, a consultant with Harvard University's University Information Systems; Christine Heckart and Danny Briere are director of broadband and president, respectively, of Verona, N.J.-based TeleChoice, Inc; Mark Gibbs, president of Gibbs & Co. in Ventura, Calif.; and Dave Kearns, a freelance writer and consultant based in Austin, Texas.

The discussion was a long one - there were many buzzwords to bash. So we've divided the discussion into several parts. If you like, though, you can read or download the entire roundtable in one large file. The links start at the right...