Posted 04/01/09 at 09:20:34 AM by Paul Lilly

Any geek worth his mettle has, among other things, a bundle or three of Ethernet cables sitting in some box in a dingy corner of the basement. If you've considered tossing the cables in the garbage, don't do it. Instead, why not make a fashion statement?

That's exactly what took place in Medellin, Colombia, and could catch on if...who are we kidding, this will never catch on. Looking more like data disasters than data divas, one outfit, which was designed by students of the Pontificia Bolivariana University in Medellin, consisted of several bundles of different color cables used as a makeshift wig (see pic below). Another model appears to have covered herself in thousands of zip ties.

Take a peak here.

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Posted 02/15/09 at 11:44:15 AM by Justin Kerr

Gigabit Ethernet may still outrun all but the most extreme SSD Raid configurations, but researchers can never rest on their laurels. Always hoping to invent the next big thing, scientists now have their sights set on Terabit Ethernet to help quell our insatiable hunger for bandwidth. A team from Australia, Denmark, and China has combined their efforts to demonstrate terabit-per-second speeds using fiber optic cables, laser light, and an unusual material named chalcogenide.

The group documented the results of its most recent trial in a white paper published in the February 16th 2009 issue of Optics Express. Though the technology is promising, Ben Eggleton, research director for CUDOS (Center for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems), points out the current limitations. “The problem isn't injecting that much high speed data into an optical strand, called multiplexing, but retrieving data at such high rates”. Conventional electronics are capable of injecting dozens of 10 Gbps streams, but trying to retrieve these streams any faster than 40 Gbps is beyond our current capabilities.

The breakthrough here however isn’t in the speed itself, but in proving the concept.  Until the processing hardware catches up with our transmission capabilities, you won’t be finding this in routers anytime soon. Eggleton speculates that these concepts can be adapted to achieve slower and more manageable results, but the goal of this experiment was simply to prove that it was possible using fully photonic chips built using the same methods employed by current CMOS circuits. "It's years to complete," Eggleton said, taking these research efforts into a production technology. But these demonstrations "are starting to establish this is a serious proposition."

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Posted 07/22/08 at 04:59:07 PM by Mark Edward Soper

ArsTechnica reports that a July 15 visit by Intel representatives to the FCC wasn't a social call. Instead, Intel is encouraging the FCC to mandate the addition of Ethernet ports to the set-top boxes used by cable TV companies. Their rationale? IP based networking is just about everywhere, except in cable TV, and it's about time to enable cable TV to join the home networking revolution.

It is about time to get cable TV on the home network, but should Intel ask the government to force the industry to do it? To find out why Intel thinks it's the government's role, and for a different take on the argument, see us after the jump.

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Posted 07/08/08 at 02:01:31 PM by Zack Stern

We tend to take things for granted when they work exceptionally well. Take Ethernet, for instance; it’s almost magical: Plug a simple cable into a computer, and it can exchange data with another rig—or many others. Peek behind the curtain and you’ll discover a brilliantly simple yet continually evolving networking system.

But let's make one thing clear: Ethernet technology doesn't actually contain ether.

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Posted 09/07/07 at 05:23:04 PM by Will Smith

Will Smith spent all day Sunday in his crawlspace wiring his home with old-school Ethernet. Why would he do such a thing?

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Posted 05/18/07 at 01:45:19 PM by Michael Brown

Practical advice for building a professional-quality LAN at home.

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Posted 08/16/06 at 04:12:31 PM by Michael Brown

Streaming music and video from a server to your TV is nothing new, but this streaming box offers something a little different

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