Somewhere in my collection of stuff I have a box of SGI knobs, and I think some buttons as well. SGI made them as serial devices to hook to their workstations, probably in the Indigo days, maybe as recently as Indigo 2.

I think these days you would look either to the music world or the arcade cabinet builders if you were looking for something that would give tactile input and didn't require a lot of hardware hacking.

They might also be blue, or orange, or maybe frictionless black on black. Who actually thinks we have enough data to populate a computer model to make this wild conjecture? For Pete's sake, we can't even model Earth well enough to predict vague global temperature trends, how in the world can we have a valid model of an theoretical ecosystem that might or might not exist somewhere in the universe, which might or might not have life systems that use the energy from starlight to feed chemical reactions to store and use energy???? Can we please start using dewey decimal to categorize these stories so we know which ones are fiction without bothering to read TFA?

I guess I was referring to a transmission system, not a single long distance link. In a transmission system which includes the voltage reduction mechanism at the various tap-in points the fact that you can use simple transformers adds significant simplicity and reliability to the system, which actually matters as much if not more than the actual transmission losses in the wire. In fact, I understand that resistance losses in the wire are a good thing in climates that have icing problems in winter, since the HV lines are self heating. In fact, in the wikipedia article you mentioned it appears the only place HVDC has real transmission advantage over AC is in constrained wire cables, such as undersea links, where capacitance kills the AC. The phase decoupling when using a DC link between AC grids would also be extremely beneficial, but for other uses the inherent difficulties of switching and converting high power DC lines seem to outweigh the benefits

It has taken a while for the economical advantage of this to trickle into user space. Electronic devices are almost all DC in nature, and the efficiency improvements here are not actually the computers, they are the lack of individual power supplies. Other poster have made comments about laptops, but normal laptops are actually no more efficient than desktops. They use less power, but that power brick is not any more efficient than a good desktop power supply.

What they get to do here is run one big, presumably very efficient power supply, and run it outside of populated space, moving the noise and heat generation to where it can be more efficiently controlled.

Of course telco types will say "Umm, yeah?" because a lot of telco heavy iron has been DC forever, for the same reasons TFA is bragging up this system.

This doesn't apply very well to consumerland, because houses don't lend themselves well to special DC wiring that doesn't easily move when you rearrange the room.

And before people start asking "Why don't the power companies just use DC?" Electricity transmission over distance is much more efficient as a high voltage/low current AC than DC current, especially since you can't use transformers on DC.

But I can very easily imagine datacenters utilizing a rack sized high efficiency DC power supply to run row(s) of server racks. This would tie in very nicely to Googles battery-in-every-server method.

"Most college networks require a login to use- even from your personal computer(s)."

Actually, not a login, for the simple reason that that breaks all non-browser devices. They require registration of your device, but if they required a login then no Playstations, Xboxes, or iPhones would work, because you can't login with an email client or a video game. Once a machine is registered (Identified by the closest thing there is to unique, the MAC)then all the bad guy needs to do is check to make sure the target machine is not on at the moment, and spoof the MAC address. The traffic will be logged as belong to the poor innocent spoofee. And yeah, it may be less than 1% that know how to do it, but a single innocent person be persecuted or prosecuted is too many.

Managed switches don't help prevent MAC address spoofing unless you actually allow a MAC to only connect through the port it first connected on, which kinda gets in the way of people roaming on wifi. Yes there are actually wireless solutions that will approximate physical location by access point triangulation, but good luck in a busy spot. Actually identifying a specific computer on an untrusted network (which they all are these days) is extremely difficult. Knowing what port a particular machine is plugged into is easy, but knowing what machine it is is not. Some wireless solutions now also backhaul all traffic to a wireless controller, so when you roam your connection point to the network doesn't change, but like I said, specifically locating a wireless machine is also next to impossible in a busy public spot.

The problem with MAC spoofing is the incredibly difficult time the person who gets spoofed will have proving their innocence. And of course the legal types on the plaintiffs side will attempt to tell a jury that a MAC address uniquely identifies a machine, and if the poor innocent spoofee gets a normal non tech-savvy lawyer they will probably succeed.

Did I miss something? Have the people coding Ares implemented a new protocol, or is this college 5 years behind? Of course, having actually been involved in writing software to track computers on a college campus I am also curious how the college is fingerprinting machines to detect MAC address spoofing, but since this is a press release I wouldn't expect any technically informative information.

(I think it could of meant paving the way.)????

(I think it could have meant "could have meant")

For Pete's sake, if you are going to criticize accidental errors at least try to avoid stupid ones.

Netbook loaded with CS4?? Wow I didn't realize how far that term had been stretched. I thought netbooks were supposed to be low power little internet gadgets.

For all the players putting their arms around eachother and kicking everyone else in the shins. At least that sounds like what the poster was talking about.

It seems to me you either mistyped an existing domain, or correctly typed a nonexistant domain, unless of course you actually meant to type a different nonexistant domain :-)

hmm, Google, when I was ten... not likely.

umm, doood, why is PS not working when you swap out one of its DLLs with a "hacked" version some evidence of DRM? Adobe is perfectly capable of creating their own convoluted licensing enforcement without Microsoft getting involved.

And I must ask, if you are looping the output into the input of your sound card (which you seem to be doing) do you even have the competence to ensure you don't get good old fashioned feedback? This "story" really reminds me of some of the stuff I overhear from the seventh graders at the school where I work.

Do the Slashdot rubber stampers even read this stuff before putting it on the front page? Or is this some devious troll because we all quit reading idle?

You still need to do homework. I realized a while ago that I not only lack a good understanding of potential weaknesses in my sites, but I also lack the knowledge needed to actually do the forensic log analysis if I was to actually get exploited. Along the lines of the original post, what good introductory tools are there that relate to forensic log analysis?