Thomas

It should work just fine. The only thing you may need is an adaptor for the plug. Some mics have a bigger jack then others, but there is a standard adaptor for that.

One thing to note. PC's take standard line-in inputs. All of that was codefided when the music hardware makers set up the midi standard. So any mike should work just fine.

Movies use a simular techinque. They show 24 fps but then use a device (maltase cross) that moves in front of the film to make it more like 48 fps, just duplicating each frame.

Can I ask why you need 25 frames a camera?

If you can do it without a wireless router, then yes. Wireless networks don't require special software settings, they are transparent to them.

I was looking through some catalogs (slow day, everyone is at the trade show in Dallas I guess) and all of the covert camera's that are made to look like a real object and all of the dummy cameras look like they'd be painfully easy to spot. Am I just looking at the wrong catalog? Or is everything in those catagories just junk? (I know there is debate if dummy cameras should even be used and I'm not trying to bring that up, just asking on the base of pure asthetics.)

If you have to do it, you have to do it...but wireless would be a better solution. The other part will be you will cap the max network speed at roughly three times dial up speed. It's not a very good solution.

You'll have to find (or recrimp the ends). Phone wire is RJ-11, Cat5 is RJ-45. Transmission speeds are going to suck, and it won't be the worlds most stable network. You know you can also get white jacketed Cat5. You really should use Cat5.

About 150 ft...but wavy lines sound like maybe a ground loop? Or a voltage issue?

Check the duplex settings on your network cards. If your router allows it, check the network usage from it.

Well there are somethings you can do to narrow down your choices. First, what is your budget? How many cameras are you going to expand to? Those Dome cameras, who makes them? Are they PTZ (movabile, zoomable)? Do you need support for thier protocol? Do you need recording? How much? What kind of tech support level do you need? And what resources do you have now?

Vonage is one you can try, Time Warner offers one...both have plans in the $30 to $50 range. There are some downsides. If your power goes out, your phone goes out. Your phone may not be able to access 911 services.

Not sure, I was flipping through random catalogues. But it was all pretty low end gear.

The spec for DB-9/RS232 is 50 ft. And I really wouldn't go beyond that. It's not a shielding issue so much as a voltage signal drop. You might try doing this: RS-232->RS-485->RS-232 using a pair of converters.

With the dummies you are right, but some of the covert ones I saw...oh well, they will probley be in a hurry anyway.

I'm reading Damjanovski's book right now, but it's a little dry.

Speaking of books, any good recomendations for books on CCTV? I'm not going to be an installer, but it would help with troubleshooting.

Yeah, fast user switching is a bad hack to try to allow the NT family multi-user capability. As you learned, it doesn't work so well.

I don't use Geovision, but windows XP has a feature called fast user switching. The problem with it is that it doesn't share drivers in use very well.

Eh, I've hit my happy spot with windows with w2k. For me it's my sweet spot. But my gentoo box has my heart.

If it makes you feel any better, the remains of Tropical Storm Ivan is getting us now.

Robca is right in many ways. 98 for instance has some limitations. It can't "see" more then 512 megs of ram. XP has better native support for NTFS and you get better read/write then ME and FAT32. The NT family has better driver support and it shows up with video card intensive tasks. And of course there are the testing questions, which tweaks did you use, which tweaks did you not use, ect. And ME is much closer to XP then 98 was. Try that test with Win95.

Try reading it with your glasses off, or from more then a few inches away. It's not bad when the sticker is still on the jewel case or the OEM copy. But try reading it off of a dell or HP that needs a reinstall.

Firefox is basicly mozilla light. Smaller, faster, but not all of the bells and whistles thrown in. Mozilla has a built in IRC client, Mail client, Calender Client...firefox is just a web browser. And a darn good one.

I'm guessing you mean BSD. BSD is still around. It's a Unix varient that is both older and fairly compatable with Linux. BSD isn't as dynamic, BSD is for when under no circumstances is the hacking of the computer acceptable. There is one distro of it that has gone eight years without a remote expliot in thier default install. In theory, Longhorn will be what you ask for Rory (kinda) with the downside that many, if not all existing copies of our software will not run on it. And you can uninstall IE. It's not fun, but doable. Just take your time. And since you bring up IE, let me just plug www.getfirefox.com . Very few expliots, free, built in popup blocker, all the extentions you could ever want......