Thomas

Very possible. This isn't an industry that is used to not much techonlogy churn and it's comming into conflict with one (IT) that is used to rapid churn. The tradisional CCTV companies are going to have to move faster or get killed. The old Chinese curse "May you live in intresting times" is about to hit the industry. The good news is that we should get some intresting stuff.

I like the Fujinon lenses. The one's we've been playing with have a real low F stop and it makes a differance in low light.

Something else to note: Sony doesn't make alot of CCTV cameras. They do however make most of the CCD's used in the industry. Do the cameras say "Sony" in big letters?

Give it five years. I suspect that's when we'll start seeing cheaper MP IP based cameras. Standard cameras will start cranking up TVL's if only to keep up. At which point recording medium will have to work out as well. It wouldn't shock me to see 2 or 4 TB drives by then. Put a bunch of those in Raid and who knows, maybe we'll start looking at lossless compression. Maybe some of that mythical CSI tech.

Waiting for the recording medium to catch up. Who cares if you've got 10,000 TVL if you can only record 300 of them?

Um, the 2nd Marine Division would be enough with some Navy sea support. Maybe an extra MP Unit.

Yes and no. VNC is more vunerable to brute force attacks. RD has had some exploits for it. All forms of remote desktop are more insecure then no remote desktop. But the best way to do VNC is via SSH which will make a VPN between the two machines.

For most users the cost on the dual core gear isn't going to be worth surfing the web while burning CDs/DVDs. For apps like ours, we see benfits form dual procs/cores. Big DB's will see some benfits. In the practical short term it is alot more useful then say 64 bits. They aren't for general use yet is all I'm saying. Plus Intel screwed up how they handle memory with dual cores so you still run into bandwith limits to the ram.

Dual cores are closer to true SMP, so wiether or not you see a benfit to the app will be the same as if you saw a benfit with dual proccessors. It all depends on how many threads a program generates. For gaming at the moment, it will do next to nothing. (Most games are single threaded). For those running multiple databases, you'll see dramatic improvements. I've had a chance to play with a few of them and they are nice but not a must have for generally anything less then server class work. (So for what we do, yes. For grandma, no.)

H.264 does edge out MPEG-4 at higher resolutions but not radically so. At lower resolutions it's pretty much a dead heat. It's nice but it does have some issues. H.264 codecs have been noted to not play nicely with some older MPEG-4 codecs.

The differances between the two are pretty minmual. If memory serves smoothwall is just based around IPtables/linux, which is what Linksys routers run. Smoothwall is just ment if you have a few spare PC's and/or parts laying around. It also allows for a greater degree of control, but 90% of users don't need it.

Okay, personal pet peeve time. For the love of christ people, do not put machines in the DMZ. Mr. DMZ is not your friend. The DMZ on a router places the machine outside the firewall. This renders a router into an expensive paperweight.

Yep, new salesman, two interns and a tech support position that starts Friday.

You could also try adjusting the frame rate.

It's 12 miles to IW.

Don't overclock the system. That's just begging for trouble.

You don't want to use Comart's software. For the love of god, don't use Comart's software. The card is good, but Comart's software isn't stable.

VPN's are a pain to set up but when they work well, they are a joy. They can be expensive but they offer a great degree of protection.

The E-IDE cables.

Generally I've only seen that on SLI boards. But it's probley not going to harm it to plug in all 8.

We have it. PC based DVR to PC viewing it.

Actully the Charter blocking is pretty well documented. But keep in mind, some geographic areas will have some differant policies.

They may be running an incomming proxy server that just routes all requests to dev/null/ at the ISP level.

I've seen some pretty intresting wireless IP set ups. 60 cameras, multiple AC's, encrypted with a mesh network. They used some of Panasonic's wireless IP cameras. Pretty decent picture quality without some of the common problems if analogue wireless.

But please note that the hint chips are not the only way to connect multiple compression chips. So stop saying not to use VIA chipsets with all multichip DVR boards. It's not true.