Thomas

I have a spare machine. The power draw for both machines is around $10 a month, including the excess heat generated. Considering I'm in Texas and my wife likes the AC cold....it's a really minor part of our electric bill.

That is why the good lord invented the KVM switch. The windows box sits on my left, the linux fits on the right. The Mac is a laptop that is actully my wife's. But the Mac mini is tempting me. Honestly I don't use the Mac that much, I generally work in LaTeX for small documents, I only use office for Excel and large documents. All I have to do is double tap scroll lock twice and up and I'm in the next machine. If I go more then that then I will do double tap scroll lock and the machine number (1-.

Sorry, I didn't see your responce. Cat 3 because when the customer was putting in trenching they put in 1/2" conduit. This conduit needs to feed 8 cameras. (The dealer asked for 3/4" conduit for each camera.) So we're hoping to figure out a way to get the video signal. Wireless is out and fiber is possible but expensive.

Which OS I use depends on what I'm doing. Windows for Gaming, Linux for Network based stuff and Mac OS X for when I have to use Office (I know we have some Mac haters but you really need to try office for OS X...it's actully usable!) . I don't belive in the "One true OS". I've tried the newer verisons of SUSE and it's pretty good, but I still ran into dependancy issues. Before I settled on Gentroo I tried out Mandrake (before they changed thier name) Suse, Red Hat, and Ubnuntu (Debain just scares me). All of them mostly work, all had minor issues but where fixable for me. For an average user they would have presented signifgant obsticals. The X config file for instance is not a good place to send an average user. (Side note here. The machine I use for Linux is a P3 with a Matrox Millenium II graphics card. Not high end obscure gear that is bleeding edge.) I think Linux is good on the desktop for something like a company, or somewhere where you have an admin situation. I don't think Linux is going to work for the average user. Too many choices, too much knowage needed. Dumbing it down leads to things like Linspire.

I'm not refering to the lastest greatest gear. There is still alot of trouble with wi-fi cards, USB devices, TV out on video cards, winmodems, ect. 95% of it is the manufacturers but the end user really doesn't care why his web cam doesn't work, all he cares about is that it doesn't work. Some of it will get better, but it won't be in the next year. I understand why dependancies can be good, but all the end user sees is I need to go spend X hours installing Y other programs to make foo work. And Yast, and Gentroo portage varient can make life easier for installs. (In fact that is why my fileserver/Samba/AD replacement/NAT box is Gentroo.) But they break down when I try to install something not thier repository. If I download a front-end for X program from freshmeat for some obscure program also from freshmeat or sourceforge, then things start breaking down. But there is a deeper issue from a software industry stand point. How do I get my closed source software to the end user? If I use .rpms then I exlcude Slack/Gentroo/Debian users. I use .debs then I exclude the Slack/Red Hat/Gentroo world. With a closed source product, then a source based install is out period. Window's has many issues with it from an design standpoint. Too many open ports on a default install. Active X. But Linux has it's issues. No binary compatabilty between verisons. Lack of manufacture support. Too much elitism in some of the support communities. (RTFM is a bad answer to give in a support channel.) I'm not attacking Linux, I use it. I would install it for someone who was going to have a very static system. But it is not ready for the mainstream desktop. It's a question of having the right tools for the job. There are times when Windows is the right tool, times when the Mac is the right tool, times where Linux is the right tool, times when *BSD is the right tool. And one last point, any OS is only as secure as the user makes it. Generally most Linux installs are more secure out of the box, but a dumb user can screw that up. Social Engineering can still get a root kit on your system. An error in a listening service can still get you ownned.

There are some things that are legitamately keeping Linux from the desktop. 1. Software installs. Installing software can be a massive pain. Too many installer types that don't play well together. Too many depenancys. 2. Drivers. Also a general pain in the rear. There are some other minor things, but these two are the major killers.

If you don't have a spare PC Rory, then try Knoppix. It's a live CD based distro (meaning it runs from the CD rather then the hard drive.) No install needed.

I will be there at our booth.

DSL is and isn't on demand. Most DSL clients are using PPPoE (Point to Point over ethernet). PPP is the protocol used for dial up connections and has provisions for being timed out to lack of use. Most DSL companies do the same thing. Most PPPoE clients have ways of tricking the connection to make it look like it's still in use.

Not to be mean but Chirac wasn't far off. I mean the British have many wonderful cultural achivements, but cooking isn't on that list.

The French don't really like anyone. Thier attiude to international relations is alot like ours, they just generally don't have the ability to project as much force.

Um, Mac work well too.

Except burn in is a factor of the phosphor in the screen. LCD's can lock pixels (in this case it's more of a burn out then burned in image and that pixel would have failed at that time no matter what) and the POS industry really pushed for better phosphorb technologies. Just turn them off once a week for a few min and you shouldn't see burn in.

Screen burn in isn't an issue with LCDs. Honestly, burn in isn't an issue very much with CRTs any more.

GE has a converter box you need to use when using one of thier PTZs with a PC.

PTZ's are serial devices. So you do one of a few things. Wire them in a seris, or wire them to a terminal block then wire the cameras to that in a star pattern. Before hanging the cameras you'll want to set the camera ID. And terminate the last one.

One of the sites set up to promote Firefox was compromised. It looks from the logs that they got a list of e-mail addresses. The main Mozilla/Firefox sites weren't affected (they are in a differant datacenter.)

Um, I've personally seen the API for No-ip.com for thier DDNS client. All you need to do is send a packet with the account name to them, they grab the IP from the packet headers. How do you screw that up?

Actully I recommended Starband for a reason. You can get up to 256k upload from them. And with 3g's price per gig, that's insane.

Having a Father, Grandfather, Uncle, and brother who are/were firefighters, DO NOT USE THIS AS A WEB CAM. There will be lawsuits.

I can think of a couple of ways to do this but there isn't an elegant, simple solution. 1. Use No-IP.com/DynDNS or what ever service the wi-fi router wants to us for dynamic IP. Then log into the site and manually update the IP address. This is going to require a laptop. 2. Don't use wi-fi but something like a Star Band satillite connection. It's mountable on an RV and I belive can be used to get satillite TV as well. This is going to be expensive and the upload is going to suck. I was going to have three, but I realized only option two will work for remote access. Any spot with wi-fi is going to have a router/switch and that generally implies a firewall. Even a bad firewall is going to not allow remote access. The only way to make that work is a push relationship between server and client. (I.E. The server sends the signal the IP address you tell it to, rather then the client requesting it from the server's IP address.) The only other way around it is to configure port forwarding at each location and I wouldn't bet the farm on them doing that for you.

We don't stream audio. To be frank, we are not going to be the right solution for this problem.

The IP camera software runs as both an app and a service. Verison 3.0 will allow the video server to do both. I've never used thier client software so I can't speak about it.

It sounds like you're looking for an AGP Capture card?

It's Javascript we use, not Java.