"If the virtual keyboard works for you in other contexts, it works just fine for SSH."
No. SSH in particular is a nightmare with an on-screen keyboard. Not only is it nightmarishly slow to just type regular words, but switching modes all the time makes it Sisyphisianly tedious to use. And if nothing else, the on-screen keyboard is completely in the way, covering most of the SSH session. Just try some console application that requires somewhat-realtime interaction (elinks perhaps?) And you'll decide in short order that you desperately need a keyboard.
There's nothing wrong with smartphones (though I'll admit battery life in most is pathetic). HTC is known to be one of the crappiest, and your experience will vary greatly between a top-rate device and a PoS.
And one bit of advice... if you want your phone to be useful, stick with a slider. It's the only option. I learned from experience with PDAs a decade ago, and it's perhaps even more true, today. VX ConnectBot (SSH client) works wonderfully if you've got any slider, and horrendously if you don't. All kinds of games (Sonic 4, MAME, other emulators) work pretty well with a keyboard, and horribly with out one. On-screen keyboards just can't compete. You'll make all your counterparts without sliders look like slow idiots by comparison. I know from experience.
Lots of people will dismiss the sentiment quickly, because they don't like the thicker phones, or they're just accustomed to the suffering and can't imagine the improvement. But I know from experience, those of us with sliders can run circles around those without. The Blackberry-style keyboards are better than nothing, but it's the wrong orientation for SSH, games, text-input boxes like the one I'm typing-in, etc. Either type of keyboard will work for email and texts.
HTC got the word out just fine. The thunderbolt was very well known as one of the first 4g lte android phones. Problem was, everybody that got one hated it. They earned their reputation as having lots of "shiny" that doesn't actually work well. They are the anti apple, they've got the least-polished products I've seen from any Android maker...
Motorolla seems to be the most polished (and sane), even if their hardware is unexciting. Samsung isn't too bad, but they just don't put a lot of thought and effort into fixing bad decisions in the Android UI. Seriously, appointments default to no reminder, and I can't change that setting? Blech.
"3m" was a typo, I meant 5m (or 15'). USB has strict timing restrictions. Far, far shorter maximum than the common 60' of cabling per-camera that comes with most surveilance DVRs.
Of course it can. It can't do a lot else at the same time, but who cares? It doesn't have to.
No, it can't do it, end of story. You'd be overloading the single USB bus like mad, and losing frames left and right. If it had multiple USB buses, like a real computer, you could potentially do it, but it doesn't makes sense to try, when real DVRs are better and cheaper. I have no idea why you're trying so hard to defend the Pi, to the point of making yourself look technically inept fool.
How odd that everyone else sells them for $50. I've never seen one in-store so you'll have to have one shipped, anyway.
No, I can walk down the street and pick one up for $38 right now. In fact ALL the walmarts in my area have them in-stock. Did you even bother to type in your zip code to check? I bet you didn't. Does all that willful ignorance make you feel better about being a Pi supporter? Besides, you aren't getting a Pi in stores (at least not for anywhere near $35), so it's a ridiculous complaint, anyhow.
I can go out and buy any old netbook, starting from $100, and I can install any Linux or BSD distro I choose, or I can install any version of Windows I want, install DOS, or SCO for some nightmare of a legacy application the's still needed by my employer, or I can do any number of other things with it.
Once I've installed an OS on it, I can run pretty much any application on it that was built for that OS. I have access to the full feature set of the program, and can do pretty much anything with it.
Compare this to tablets...
I can go find a $50 tablet, with decent enough specs that it would make a passable Linux laptop, but I can't just go install Linux on it. Even while Android runs on Linux, the kernel has been hacked to hell to support that one tablet. All manner of memory addresses are hard-coded into it, with no way for a generic kernel to boot up and attempt to auto-discover which bits it should be fiddiling to reach each component it needs to control. Never mind things like all the power management hacks burried in there.
Even if you're happy to keep using that kernel, you've got a long way to go... The GPU and display are also going to be complete custom jobs, not even guaranteed to be similar between different revisions of the same model of tablet. So prepare to write your own X11 driver for each individual tablet you want to use.
If ARM had a standard architecture, as x86 does, I'd love to get a $50 tablet, install a Linux distro and lightweight window manager on it, and use it like a desktop with USB or bluetooth keyboard and trackball. Instead, you're buying a consumer device that you can't hope to customize, maintain, repair or upgrade, yourself. It's a "WebTV" until, that you are locked-out from. The market is fleetingly small, because the manufacturer of the device is also the ONLY source of operating system for it, and may give you a useless boxx of circuits because of their unwillingness to fix some bug in the OS. Never mind not being able to upgrade. And in such a case, the hardware then becomes completely worthless, and it can't be used for anything else.
For tablets to eliminate anything... Desktops, laptops/netBooks, etc., they're really going to have to start getting standardized. Perhaps not to the extent that PCs have, but far more than they currently are. It's not practical to make as OS custom for every piece of hardware, nor is it practical for 3rd parties to release updated images for the proliferating hardware variations, making this a very tight market, difficult to break into, because of the catch-22 of popularilty begetting popularity.
Because of the sad state of things, I'd be interested in watching the Windows 8 tablet market... x86 compatible devices would get us closer to the goal posts. We just need mass market adoption of them, and cheap Chinese brands selling at incredibly low prices, trying to break-in to the big-money market.
Oh yeah... And for weatherproof outdoor mounting, cut the top off a 2-litre soda bottle, slip it over the top of the camera, and find some way to attach it. You want to leave the bottom open, so that moisture inside will escape, and you don't get internal condensation.
For those without a source of power near by the distant WiFi repeater, or the WiFi cameras, a modest solar panel can easily power them. If size isn't an issue, you can get a (not very efficient) 45W solar panel + charge regulator for $150 from HarborFreight (they send out 20%-off coupons all the time). Car adapters will be needed for anything that doesn't run on 12V directly. And if you don't have an old car battery handy, a small sealed lead-acid battery can be had for only about $20 if you have very modest power requirements... Maybe hook two together if you need more: http://www.batteryspec.com/ I've also had decent luck buying used car batteries from junkyards for such small projects. And even if they don't last long, you can get most of your money back turning in the dead battery for the "core charge".
But if you're entirely off-grid, and need the PC/DVR powered by solar as well, this can get very expensive, very quickly. You'll probably want to buy the cheapest car battery with 3-year free-replacement warranty that you can find (most likely from walmart). And an old PC with high power draw isn't such a good option for solar... An old laptop or netbook might work, but for even lower-power, some low-end ARM device like a Raspberry Pi would really be a good option, and prevent you from needing to go to a larger and more expensive solar panel. Being off-grid can get expensive, very quickly.
buy a bunch of empty "surveillance camera" big white cases and install them prominently near a big "No Dumping" sign. Probably a lot cheaper.
I was looking into that, but I found the fake cameras aren't much cheaper than REAL cameras. There's some $5 gear, but they look fake as hell. You're probably better off buying a working, $10 webcam, even if you don't hook it up to anything.
But personally, I decided cameras are so cheap these days, that it's worth going all-out. You can find some highly-rated pan, tilt, zoom (PTZ) cameras, with built-in ethernet and WiFi for $50 each, perhaps a bit less...
If the rear of your property is too far from your WiFi access point (AP), a high-power Buffalo AP can be had for $50 easily enough, and the included DD-WRT firmware can be configured as a repeater easily enough, needing only a source of power where you site it (halfway between your PTZ cameras and your main AP).
From there, any old PC with a decent sized hard drive, running Linux/BSD can do the job with minimal scripting... And if you need any cameras closer-by, $10 USB webcams can be used, as USB cables can be extended up to 3m to position the cameras appropriately.
I can't think of many good reasons that they would look at customers coming in and buying assloads of their merchandise and say "NO! Get out of here and don't buy stuff from us ever again!"
Costco depends on membership card fees. If one person, only paying for one membership, comes in and clears out the the store, they've lost TONS of money. It's much better for them to keep the largest number of people happy, rather than just selling all their inventory.
The R-Pi is a DVR with multiple cameras and built-in network connectivity, with the addition of some cameras which are dirt cheap now, and a hub, likewise.
NO, it certainly isn't. A surveillance DVR has maybe 16 (analog) channels for capture,includes all cameras, with 60ft of cable for each (or wireless otherwise), includes 500GB+ HDD, has realtime H.264 encoding for all 16 channels at 640x480, and enough power to stream out a live (or recorded) feed of all 16 at once, to numerous users at once. Let's not forget it includes a power supply, case, and all the software (no setup required).
Nothing like that is even POSSIBLE with the Pi. USB cameras are cheap, but they've got a strict 3m upper-limit on cable length. And 16 off a USB hub, that's daisy-chained to the built-in USB hub, which is shared between cameras, networking, the data all streaming to the external HDD enclosure you also had to buy, and whatever else you need attached? I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell a Pi could do it... and if you could make any of it work, it would still be FAR more expensive...
Hell, once you need a hard drive, fast networking, or more than a fraction of the speed of a single shared USB port, a refurb $35 PC is infinitely cheaper, and superior. Trying to pretend a Pi is a practical option for such a ridiculous poor fitting use case is exactly the kind of nonsense I'm decrying.
That is not cheaper than an R-Pi. It's the same price, nominally, once you account for a remote for the R-Pi. That's a cool heads-up, though.
NO, it's FAR cheaper than a Pi! Walmart has them for $38. A Pi plus shipping, plus power supply, plus remote, plus case/enclosure, plus SD card, plus other odds and ends, is dramatically more expensive.
Problem is, most cheap Blu-Ray players have shit streaming, if any.
You didn't mention streaming in your earlier post. Streaming 1080p over the network is non-trivial, and I'd bet for most uses, locally storing the video clips would be preferred... Burning a disc is simple and much cheaper than buying a Pi and supporting hardware, plus large SD card or USB thumb drive, or external HDD.
As it is a nifty video player in a very small power envelope already, that seems a lot of nonsense.
No, the D-Link and the Blu-Ray players are nifty video players... The Pi is only just one little component of a video player. What's more, it's the part that's already embedded in most HDTVs these days, anyhow.
$80 > $35...and that's the upper version of the pi. There's a $25 version that has the capability as well.
No, in this case, $38 < $25.
It's not even remotely fair to call the Pi even $35, because that's without power, SD card to boot off of, a case for the board, storage for videos, etc. When you drop down to $25, you LOSE NETWORKING, so you need to add the cost of a USB hub and USB to ethernet (or wifi) adapter as well. In short, the D-Link is a considerably cheaper option. And let's not forget, the $25 model isn't available yet... by the time it is, D-Link's unit could well be quite a bit cheaper.
Name a cheaper, better way to get a couple of usb cameras onto an IP network, for example.
You can get network-attached cameras, cheaper than a Pi+Camera, and I'm betting, better features and quality all-around. Not to mention surveillance DVRs with multiple cameras, and built-in network connectivity.
And name a cheaper device with 1080p video decoding;
D-Link MovieNite Streaming Player, DSM310.
There are also several Blu-Ray players near the same price as well... If you need to add power, and storage, and more to a Pi for your purposes, these could easily work out cheaper.
you can't do it
Actually, it seems that I can... Nice try, though.
At this price, it's a good fit for MANY things.
I wasn't trying to say that there weren't a few niches where a Pi might be handy, but it's most certainly NOT "a good fit for MANY things". The areas were it might be useful are fleetingly small. There's nothing wrong with that, per-se, except that it's getting obscene amounts of coverage on/. and elsewhere, making it out to be the ultimate everything... Something we saw with the OLPC before it, and other devices that didn't live up to the hype before that...
Raspberry Pi isn't a great fit for much of anything, and there are cheaper options available.
If you want a smartphone, the Venture has comparable specs, and sells for $50, contract-free, and VirginMobile has some of the cheapest cell plans, too.
If you want a desktop, you can usually get a used, mini P4 system (40w idle) for $35 from geeks.com. Better deals are often available from local off-lease PC dealers.
If you want a tablet, Walmart stocks a $50 Pandigital model for $50.
It was easier back then, first because the EPA changed their MPG rating system, back when hybrids were turning-in ridiculous numbers. Your old CRX would be rated at 41city/50hwy MPG, if sold today.
Second, the national speed limit was a strict 55MPH. Your CRX, going up an incline, on 75MPH freeways, will get run-over by tractor-trailers doing 80...
Third, your CRX would need a lot more safety devices and pollution controls than it did back then. Airbags, stronger passenger compartment, etc. As-it, it would probably get a 1-star crash-test rating.
Personally, I look forward to seeing motorized Velomobiles being sold in large numbers in the US... It's only a matter of time.
You don't let other countries build your infrastructure be it telecoms, miltary, energy, etc...
The US will still have "other countries" building it's infrastructure... It'll just be companies in European countries (Alcatel, Siemens, Ericsson), rather than Chinese ones (Huawei, LTE). The US has no telecom companies building most of this stuff, anymore.
First off i have a very hard time believing backdoors are built in the large networks they sell. In complex systems like that its next to impossible to hide things in the long run. Anything suspicious would have been found in the audits.
Umm, they WERE FOUND. The report mentions sending "beacons", "relaying data", and other "anomalies".
Huawei's only contention is that they're merely INCOMPETENT, and their firmware just has tons of bugs, and none of them are (intentional) backdoors.
the reason that Huawei got started was because the Chinese did all sorts of experiments with Cisco gear and determined that they couldn't trust them because of all the backdoors they had to accommodate US agencies.
The Chinese needed network gear they could trust
If that was the motivation, it turned out to be one of the biggest failed experiments in history. Huawei's code is riddled with exploitable holes, in large part due to software development bad practices.
The Chinese government would be BETTER OFF with something else that was written well, and ONLY has one backdoor that select few know about, rather than being subject to the whims of every kiddie who can find a buffer overflow in their horrible code.
Besides, I don't believe for a second that there was such a high-minded motive for Huawei. China has been dedicated to developing as much domestic capability as they can, for purely economic reasons. They've put lots of effort into doing so for things as trivial as DVD players, which obviously don't have national security implications. I fail to see why China would NEED a better motive than that one, which is the basis for everything they've done in the past couple decades, to support domestic telecom companies.
Anybody here evaluated Huawei equipment, or otherwise know more details about the reported issues of it sending "beacons" or "relaying data" back home, or the "anomolies" that appear to be backdoors? The real good stuff seems to be locked-up in that "classified" section we don't get to see...
Absolutely everything you've said is 100%, provably false. I don't know where in the hell you get your incorrect info, but you really need to stop.
she had consensual sex with him. No rape ever occurred except of the statutory kind.
Complete bull. Not only was she only 13 years old, it is also on the record as CLEARLY non-consentual.
"Polanski had sexual intercourse with the teen despite her resistance and requests to be taken home." "I said, 'No, no. I don't want to go in there. No, I don't want to do this. No!', and then I didn't know what else to do."
The statute of limitation has been reached long ago,
Nonsense. The CASE WENT TO TRIAL right away, long before the statute of limitations could be an issue. He even accepted a plea-bargain, yet he fled, just before he was about to be sentenced for his crimes.
But since he fled, his plea bargain is out, he will likely face a new trial, and potentially the maximum sentence for all his felonies.
The girl never wanted to press charged and she still don't.
Bull. Geimer "sued Polanski in December 1988 when she was 25 years old, alleging sexual assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress and seduction."
She has requested dismissal, NOW, because she's tired of having it hanging over her head. He could have served his expected 90 days in jail, and been done with it, letting her move on with her life, instead he victimized her once again by fleeing. He deserves every bit of bad press he gets, and deserves to be hounded, to his dying day, for living as a fugitive.
How about just a small cabin coming off a boom arm, for medical emergencies and recreation if otherwise unoccupied? It's not like we don't know how to make something like that...
See the Roman Polanski case a couple years back. He's living in France, a fugitive of US justice, having been convicted of drugging and raping an uder-aged girl. He couldn't travel to the UK for fear of extradition to the US, but the UK allowed his lawsuit to proceed, regardless. He was involved via video link, IIRC.
Though the US is a common-law territory, I expect the rules are a bit more strict, but I don't know how much so. However, Assange isn't, in-fact, accusted or charged with any crimes in the US, and extradition laws from the US to other countries are... intentionally weak.
How many more teachers could they hire if they didn't have this kind of garbage?
That's exactly the way I saw it as well. Before my time, came the proliferation of TVs and VCRs in EVERY classroom. They were pieces of furniture, stuck in the corner, getting dusty. They'd be used to what some mindless animated or otherwise G-rated movies during the occasions where the teachers didn't want to do any work...
I can only think of one teacher, my old coach, who actually made good use of it in his world history class. We'd watched numerous topical, reasonably historically accurate films, pretty much the main source of information in that class. I heard one type-A girl complain she wasn't learning anything in the class, just "watching movies all the time", but I know I learned more in that class than any other, and I still remember plenty of it, from decades ago, such as the fall of Tsar Nicholas and the rise of communism in Russia, the civil war between white and red Russians. etc.
What's more, I retained all this knowledge, back at a time when History was at the absolute bottom of my list... I enjoyed my algebra classes more than history, both before and after that, with that class as an exception. It was only several years later, that I'd pivot around and gain interest in all types of history. I've probably consumed every bit of information the History Channel had to offer, from US history, to hour after hour of Roman battle tactics, from the rise to the fall of Rome. And everything in-between. (I'll pass on all the reality shows, and aliens, thanks).
Anyhow, their complete failure made me doubt they could ever make use of the computers they were buying up, and filling classrooms with. And indeed, my experience with computers during my school years was horrid and nearly worthless, as I wrote before:
My experience with computers in school was entirely about locked-down window managers, and learning to type-up MS Office documents. Where the hell were these schools with actually useful computer science or IT classes?
Hell, for years I thought that Mac OS was the "At Ease" shell, the only thing students were able to get to. For Windows 9x as well, it wasn't until late in high school that I finally saw some shell other than the Novell program launcher.
For years I was trying to learn everything I could about computers... I never suceeded at convincing my parents to buy one, and didn't know of any neighbors who owned one. So, I'd sign up for every computer class offered. Through elementary, "computers" consisted of an hour of lab time each month, where we would be forced to run typing-tutor after typing tutor, and as a reward, we could click-to-paint photos. I was just as horrible a typist at the end as when I started.
In Jr High I was excited about the computer class offered. Made it my #1 elective... the class was canceled the year I started. Again, my computer experience would be limited to a little lab time for word processing. Around that point, I started clicking around, looking for ANYTHING other than the 3 programs we were given. Clicking around in Help allowed launching a few random programs here and there, but never anything interesting.
Come high school, I again signed-up for every computer class offered, and got in. First year it was some Office class, where we typed-up documents, basic spread-sheets, do some drawing, etc. It was really quite worthless, and I retained none of it.
Next year I signed-up for a CAD class that was offered. They had a few Win 95 computers in the class, but NO CAD software. My teacher made no appologies, and the class wasn't canceled, so everyone was locked in a room for an hour with nothing to do. Most talked, did homework, listened to music, and only a few used the locked-down computers for anything. The teacher had to brag about how well they were locked-down, so I had my challege. In a few days I learned about F8, and booting into DOS mode. I borrowed a friend's MS-DOS book (he didn't use) and learned the command-line. I learned the file system the hard way. I'd learn all the commands the book taught, and then I'd keep going, running every executable I could find. One of them I ran just suddenly restored the computer to regular Win 95, pre-lockdown. I was told not to touch those computers again, which developed for the first time a habbit of ditching classes (since I was guaranteed an A there) that would come back to bite me, repeatedly.
Next year, some "advanced" computer class, where the computers were running good old Win 3.1 with Netware. After a few weeks, I stumbled upon a way to break-out of the restrictions (controlled by batch files on network drives, which I was able to disconnect. First time around, I'd restarted into an unrestricted windows fileman shell, found how to send netware messages, and broadcast out something clever to everyone in the class, not realizing it would reveal the source, and I got busted within seconds. But as luck would have it, one computer wasn't booting, so my techer gave me a screwdriver, and told me to go fix it.
I had zero idea WTF I was doing. I flailed around in the dark for days, like a chimp on a bicyles, no idea about the boot process, no background to compare to. The BIOS was protected with an unknown password (no CMOS jumpers on those mobos at all). Disconnecting the battery overnight didn't even work. Disconnecting the HDD cause it to try the floppy, but I didn't know what that meant. My teacher gave me a couple disks, the worthless diagnostics disk booted, but the DOS one didn't. I had no background to tell me thee disk must have been bad, and my teacher, and computer-owning friends, never had any advice to offer. But in hindsight, it was only a minor waste of time.
I searched the web, and found several apps that claimed to recover CMOS passwords,
Slashdot... It's the website I watch like a hawk, so that I can find out about live events, 5 minutes before they happen (if I'm really, really lucky).
Yes, apple has gone on record they use Yelp POI, but that can't be the only POI data they use. They have to use multiple POI sources. [...] Clearly apple's search implementation is partly to blame, but the problem is far from simple.
Many of the reported problems involve things like people searching for Starbucks in a major city, and finding none. That is, without question, very simply a serious problem on their back-end.
Slashdot Mirror
"If the virtual keyboard works for you in other contexts, it works just fine for SSH."
No. SSH in particular is a nightmare with an on-screen keyboard. Not only is it nightmarishly slow to just type regular words, but switching modes all the time makes it Sisyphisianly tedious to use. And if nothing else, the on-screen keyboard is completely in the way, covering most of the SSH session. Just try some console application that requires somewhat-realtime interaction (elinks perhaps?) And you'll decide in short order that you desperately need a keyboard.
There's nothing wrong with smartphones (though I'll admit battery life in most is pathetic). HTC is known to be one of the crappiest, and your experience will vary greatly between a top-rate device and a PoS.
And one bit of advice... if you want your phone to be useful, stick with a slider. It's the only option. I learned from experience with PDAs a decade ago, and it's perhaps even more true, today. VX ConnectBot (SSH client) works wonderfully if you've got any slider, and horrendously if you don't. All kinds of games (Sonic 4, MAME, other emulators) work pretty well with a keyboard, and horribly with out one. On-screen keyboards just can't compete. You'll make all your counterparts without sliders look like slow idiots by comparison. I know from experience.
Lots of people will dismiss the sentiment quickly, because they don't like the thicker phones, or they're just accustomed to the suffering and can't imagine the improvement. But I know from experience, those of us with sliders can run circles around those without. The Blackberry-style keyboards are better than nothing, but it's the wrong orientation for SSH, games, text-input boxes like the one I'm typing-in, etc. Either type of keyboard will work for email and texts.
HTC got the word out just fine. The thunderbolt was very well known as one of the first 4g lte android phones. Problem was, everybody that got one hated it. They earned their reputation as having lots of "shiny" that doesn't actually work well. They are the anti apple, they've got the least-polished products I've seen from any Android maker...
Motorolla seems to be the most polished (and sane), even if their hardware is unexciting. Samsung isn't too bad, but they just don't put a lot of thought and effort into fixing bad decisions in the Android UI. Seriously, appointments default to no reminder, and I can't change that setting? Blech.
"3m" was a typo, I meant 5m (or 15'). USB has strict timing restrictions. Far, far shorter maximum than the common 60' of cabling per-camera that comes with most surveilance DVRs.
No, it can't do it, end of story. You'd be overloading the single USB bus like mad, and losing frames left and right. If it had multiple USB buses, like a real computer, you could potentially do it, but it doesn't makes sense to try, when real DVRs are better and cheaper. I have no idea why you're trying so hard to defend the Pi, to the point of making yourself look technically inept fool.
No, I can walk down the street and pick one up for $38 right now. In fact ALL the walmarts in my area have them in-stock. Did you even bother to type in your zip code to check? I bet you didn't. Does all that willful ignorance make you feel better about being a Pi supporter? Besides, you aren't getting a Pi in stores (at least not for anywhere near $35), so it's a ridiculous complaint, anyhow.
I can go out and buy any old netbook, starting from $100, and I can install any Linux or BSD distro I choose, or I can install any version of Windows I want, install DOS, or SCO for some nightmare of a legacy application the's still needed by my employer, or I can do any number of other things with it.
Once I've installed an OS on it, I can run pretty much any application on it that was built for that OS. I have access to the full feature set of the program, and can do pretty much anything with it.
Compare this to tablets...
I can go find a $50 tablet, with decent enough specs that it would make a passable Linux laptop, but I can't just go install Linux on it. Even while Android runs on Linux, the kernel has been hacked to hell to support that one tablet. All manner of memory addresses are hard-coded into it, with no way for a generic kernel to boot up and attempt to auto-discover which bits it should be fiddiling to reach each component it needs to control. Never mind things like all the power management hacks burried in there.
Even if you're happy to keep using that kernel, you've got a long way to go... The GPU and display are also going to be complete custom jobs, not even guaranteed to be similar between different revisions of the same model of tablet. So prepare to write your own X11 driver for each individual tablet you want to use.
If ARM had a standard architecture, as x86 does, I'd love to get a $50 tablet, install a Linux distro and lightweight window manager on it, and use it like a desktop with USB or bluetooth keyboard and trackball. Instead, you're buying a consumer device that you can't hope to customize, maintain, repair or upgrade, yourself. It's a "WebTV" until, that you are locked-out from. The market is fleetingly small, because the manufacturer of the device is also the ONLY source of operating system for it, and may give you a useless boxx of circuits because of their unwillingness to fix some bug in the OS. Never mind not being able to upgrade. And in such a case, the hardware then becomes completely worthless, and it can't be used for anything else.
For tablets to eliminate anything... Desktops, laptops/netBooks, etc., they're really going to have to start getting standardized. Perhaps not to the extent that PCs have, but far more than they currently are. It's not practical to make as OS custom for every piece of hardware, nor is it practical for 3rd parties to release updated images for the proliferating hardware variations, making this a very tight market, difficult to break into, because of the catch-22 of popularilty begetting popularity.
Because of the sad state of things, I'd be interested in watching the Windows 8 tablet market... x86 compatible devices would get us closer to the goal posts. We just need mass market adoption of them, and cheap Chinese brands selling at incredibly low prices, trying to break-in to the big-money market.
Oh yeah... And for weatherproof outdoor mounting, cut the top off a 2-litre soda bottle, slip it over the top of the camera, and find some way to attach it. You want to leave the bottom open, so that moisture inside will escape, and you don't get internal condensation.
For those without a source of power near by the distant WiFi repeater, or the WiFi cameras, a modest solar panel can easily power them. If size isn't an issue, you can get a (not very efficient) 45W solar panel + charge regulator for $150 from HarborFreight (they send out 20%-off coupons all the time). Car adapters will be needed for anything that doesn't run on 12V directly. And if you don't have an old car battery handy, a small sealed lead-acid battery can be had for only about $20 if you have very modest power requirements... Maybe hook two together if you need more: http://www.batteryspec.com/ I've also had decent luck buying used car batteries from junkyards for such small projects. And even if they don't last long, you can get most of your money back turning in the dead battery for the "core charge".
But if you're entirely off-grid, and need the PC/DVR powered by solar as well, this can get very expensive, very quickly. You'll probably want to buy the cheapest car battery with 3-year free-replacement warranty that you can find (most likely from walmart). And an old PC with high power draw isn't such a good option for solar... An old laptop or netbook might work, but for even lower-power, some low-end ARM device like a Raspberry Pi would really be a good option, and prevent you from needing to go to a larger and more expensive solar panel. Being off-grid can get expensive, very quickly.
I was looking into that, but I found the fake cameras aren't much cheaper than REAL cameras. There's some $5 gear, but they look fake as hell. You're probably better off buying a working, $10 webcam, even if you don't hook it up to anything.
But personally, I decided cameras are so cheap these days, that it's worth going all-out. You can find some highly-rated pan, tilt, zoom (PTZ) cameras, with built-in ethernet and WiFi for $50 each, perhaps a bit less...
If the rear of your property is too far from your WiFi access point (AP), a high-power Buffalo AP can be had for $50 easily enough, and the included DD-WRT firmware can be configured as a repeater easily enough, needing only a source of power where you site it (halfway between your PTZ cameras and your main AP).
From there, any old PC with a decent sized hard drive, running Linux/BSD can do the job with minimal scripting... And if you need any cameras closer-by, $10 USB webcams can be used, as USB cables can be extended up to 3m to position the cameras appropriately.
Costco depends on membership card fees. If one person, only paying for one membership, comes in and clears out the the store, they've lost TONS of money. It's much better for them to keep the largest number of people happy, rather than just selling all their inventory.
NO, it certainly isn't. A surveillance DVR has maybe 16 (analog) channels for capture,includes all cameras, with 60ft of cable for each (or wireless otherwise), includes 500GB+ HDD, has realtime H.264 encoding for all 16 channels at 640x480, and enough power to stream out a live (or recorded) feed of all 16 at once, to numerous users at once. Let's not forget it includes a power supply, case, and all the software (no setup required).
Nothing like that is even POSSIBLE with the Pi. USB cameras are cheap, but they've got a strict 3m upper-limit on cable length. And 16 off a USB hub, that's daisy-chained to the built-in USB hub, which is shared between cameras, networking, the data all streaming to the external HDD enclosure you also had to buy, and whatever else you need attached? I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell a Pi could do it... and if you could make any of it work, it would still be FAR more expensive...
Hell, once you need a hard drive, fast networking, or more than a fraction of the speed of a single shared USB port, a refurb $35 PC is infinitely cheaper, and superior. Trying to pretend a Pi is a practical option for such a ridiculous poor fitting use case is exactly the kind of nonsense I'm decrying.
NO, it's FAR cheaper than a Pi! Walmart has them for $38. A Pi plus shipping, plus power supply, plus remote, plus case/enclosure, plus SD card, plus other odds and ends, is dramatically more expensive.
You didn't mention streaming in your earlier post. Streaming 1080p over the network is non-trivial, and I'd bet for most uses, locally storing the video clips would be preferred... Burning a disc is simple and much cheaper than buying a Pi and supporting hardware, plus large SD card or USB thumb drive, or external HDD.
No, the D-Link and the Blu-Ray players are nifty video players... The Pi is only just one little component of a video player. What's more, it's the part that's already embedded in most HDTVs these days, anyhow.
No, it's $38.00:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/D-Link-MovieNite-Streaming-Player-DSM310/20666759
No, in this case, $38 < $25.
It's not even remotely fair to call the Pi even $35, because that's without power, SD card to boot off of, a case for the board, storage for videos, etc. When you drop down to $25, you LOSE NETWORKING, so you need to add the cost of a USB hub and USB to ethernet (or wifi) adapter as well. In short, the D-Link is a considerably cheaper option. And let's not forget, the $25 model isn't available yet... by the time it is, D-Link's unit could well be quite a bit cheaper.
You can get network-attached cameras, cheaper than a Pi+Camera, and I'm betting, better features and quality all-around. Not to mention surveillance DVRs with multiple cameras, and built-in network connectivity.
D-Link MovieNite Streaming Player, DSM310.
There are also several Blu-Ray players near the same price as well... If you need to add power, and storage, and more to a Pi for your purposes, these could easily work out cheaper.
Actually, it seems that I can... Nice try, though.
I wasn't trying to say that there weren't a few niches where a Pi might be handy, but it's most certainly NOT "a good fit for MANY things". The areas were it might be useful are fleetingly small. There's nothing wrong with that, per-se, except that it's getting obscene amounts of coverage on /. and elsewhere, making it out to be the ultimate everything... Something we saw with the OLPC before it, and other devices that didn't live up to the hype before that...
Raspberry Pi isn't a great fit for much of anything, and there are cheaper options available.
If you want a smartphone, the Venture has comparable specs, and sells for $50, contract-free, and VirginMobile has some of the cheapest cell plans, too.
If you want a desktop, you can usually get a used, mini P4 system (40w idle) for $35 from geeks.com. Better deals are often available from local off-lease PC dealers.
If you want a tablet, Walmart stocks a $50 Pandigital model for $50.
It was easier back then, first because the EPA changed their MPG rating system, back when hybrids were turning-in ridiculous numbers. Your old CRX would be rated at 41city/50hwy MPG, if sold today.
Second, the national speed limit was a strict 55MPH. Your CRX, going up an incline, on 75MPH freeways, will get run-over by tractor-trailers doing 80...
Third, your CRX would need a lot more safety devices and pollution controls than it did back then. Airbags, stronger passenger compartment, etc. As-it, it would probably get a 1-star crash-test rating.
Personally, I look forward to seeing motorized Velomobiles being sold in large numbers in the US... It's only a matter of time.
The US will still have "other countries" building it's infrastructure... It'll just be companies in European countries (Alcatel, Siemens, Ericsson), rather than Chinese ones (Huawei, LTE). The US has no telecom companies building most of this stuff, anymore.
Umm, they WERE FOUND. The report mentions sending "beacons", "relaying data", and other "anomalies".
Huawei's only contention is that they're merely INCOMPETENT, and their firmware just has tons of bugs, and none of them are (intentional) backdoors.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9229785/Hackers_reveal_critical_vulnerabilities_in_Huawei_routers_at_Defcon
http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/China-high-tech-firms-deny-spying-before-Congress-3861472.php
If that was the motivation, it turned out to be one of the biggest failed experiments in history. Huawei's code is riddled with exploitable holes, in large part due to software development bad practices.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9229785/Hackers_reveal_critical_vulnerabilities_in_Huawei_routers_at_Defcon
The Chinese government would be BETTER OFF with something else that was written well, and ONLY has one backdoor that select few know about, rather than being subject to the whims of every kiddie who can find a buffer overflow in their horrible code.
Besides, I don't believe for a second that there was such a high-minded motive for Huawei. China has been dedicated to developing as much domestic capability as they can, for purely economic reasons. They've put lots of effort into doing so for things as trivial as DVD players, which obviously don't have national security implications. I fail to see why China would NEED a better motive than that one, which is the basis for everything they've done in the past couple decades, to support domestic telecom companies.
Anybody here evaluated Huawei equipment, or otherwise know more details about the reported issues of it sending "beacons" or "relaying data" back home, or the "anomolies" that appear to be backdoors? The real good stuff seems to be locked-up in that "classified" section we don't get to see...
http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/China-high-tech-firms-deny-spying-before-Congress-3861472.php
I'm assuming there's something more than just the bugs exposed at defcon:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9229785/Hackers_reveal_critical_vulnerabilities_in_Huawei_routers_at_Defcon
Absolutely everything you've said is 100%, provably false. I don't know where in the hell you get your incorrect info, but you really need to stop.
Complete bull. Not only was she only 13 years old, it is also on the record as CLEARLY non-consentual.
"Polanski had sexual intercourse with the teen despite her resistance and requests to be taken home." "I said, 'No, no. I don't want to go in there. No, I don't want to do this. No!', and then I didn't know what else to do."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/6237442/Roman-Polanskis-victim-is-mother-who-wants-charges-dropped.html
Nonsense. The CASE WENT TO TRIAL right away, long before the statute of limitations could be an issue. He even accepted a plea-bargain, yet he fled, just before he was about to be sentenced for his crimes.
But since he fled, his plea bargain is out, he will likely face a new trial, and potentially the maximum sentence for all his felonies.
Bull. Geimer "sued Polanski in December 1988 when she was 25 years old, alleging sexual assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress and seduction."
She has requested dismissal, NOW, because she's tired of having it hanging over her head. He could have served his expected 90 days in jail, and been done with it, letting her move on with her life, instead he victimized her once again by fleeing. He deserves every bit of bad press he gets, and deserves to be hounded, to his dying day, for living as a fugitive.
How about just a small cabin coming off a boom arm, for medical emergencies and recreation if otherwise unoccupied? It's not like we don't know how to make something like that...
http://dontmesswithtaxes.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/screamer_carnival_ride.jpg
Looks like the domain neanderthal.xxx is still available!
See the Roman Polanski case a couple years back. He's living in France, a fugitive of US justice, having been convicted of drugging and raping an uder-aged girl. He couldn't travel to the UK for fear of extradition to the US, but the UK allowed his lawsuit to proceed, regardless. He was involved via video link, IIRC.
Though the US is a common-law territory, I expect the rules are a bit more strict, but I don't know how much so. However, Assange isn't, in-fact, accusted or charged with any crimes in the US, and extradition laws from the US to other countries are... intentionally weak.
That's exactly the way I saw it as well. Before my time, came the proliferation of TVs and VCRs in EVERY classroom. They were pieces of furniture, stuck in the corner, getting dusty. They'd be used to what some mindless animated or otherwise G-rated movies during the occasions where the teachers didn't want to do any work...
I can only think of one teacher, my old coach, who actually made good use of it in his world history class. We'd watched numerous topical, reasonably historically accurate films, pretty much the main source of information in that class. I heard one type-A girl complain she wasn't learning anything in the class, just "watching movies all the time", but I know I learned more in that class than any other, and I still remember plenty of it, from decades ago, such as the fall of Tsar Nicholas and the rise of communism in Russia, the civil war between white and red Russians. etc.
What's more, I retained all this knowledge, back at a time when History was at the absolute bottom of my list... I enjoyed my algebra classes more than history, both before and after that, with that class as an exception. It was only several years later, that I'd pivot around and gain interest in all types of history. I've probably consumed every bit of information the History Channel had to offer, from US history, to hour after hour of Roman battle tactics, from the rise to the fall of Rome. And everything in-between. (I'll pass on all the reality shows, and aliens, thanks).
Anyhow, their complete failure made me doubt they could ever make use of the computers they were buying up, and filling classrooms with. And indeed, my experience with computers during my school years was horrid and nearly worthless, as I wrote before:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3168903&cid=41580599
My experience with computers in school was entirely about locked-down window managers, and learning to type-up MS Office documents. Where the hell were these schools with actually useful computer science or IT classes?
Hell, for years I thought that Mac OS was the "At Ease" shell, the only thing students were able to get to. For Windows 9x as well, it wasn't until late in high school that I finally saw some shell other than the Novell program launcher.
For years I was trying to learn everything I could about computers... I never suceeded at convincing my parents to buy one, and didn't know of any neighbors who owned one. So, I'd sign up for every computer class offered. Through elementary, "computers" consisted of an hour of lab time each month, where we would be forced to run typing-tutor after typing tutor, and as a reward, we could click-to-paint photos. I was just as horrible a typist at the end as when I started.
In Jr High I was excited about the computer class offered. Made it my #1 elective... the class was canceled the year I started. Again, my computer experience would be limited to a little lab time for word processing. Around that point, I started clicking around, looking for ANYTHING other than the 3 programs we were given. Clicking around in Help allowed launching a few random programs here and there, but never anything interesting.
Come high school, I again signed-up for every computer class offered, and got in. First year it was some Office class, where we typed-up documents, basic spread-sheets, do some drawing, etc. It was really quite worthless, and I retained none of it.
Next year I signed-up for a CAD class that was offered. They had a few Win 95 computers in the class, but NO CAD software. My teacher made no appologies, and the class wasn't canceled, so everyone was locked in a room for an hour with nothing to do. Most talked, did homework, listened to music, and only a few used the locked-down computers for anything. The teacher had to brag about how well they were locked-down, so I had my challege. In a few days I learned about F8, and booting into DOS mode. I borrowed a friend's MS-DOS book (he didn't use) and learned the command-line. I learned the file system the hard way. I'd learn all the commands the book taught, and then I'd keep going, running every executable I could find. One of them I ran just suddenly restored the computer to regular Win 95, pre-lockdown. I was told not to touch those computers again, which developed for the first time a habbit of ditching classes (since I was guaranteed an A there) that would come back to bite me, repeatedly.
Next year, some "advanced" computer class, where the computers were running good old Win 3.1 with Netware. After a few weeks, I stumbled upon a way to break-out of the restrictions (controlled by batch files on network drives, which I was able to disconnect. First time around, I'd restarted into an unrestricted windows fileman shell, found how to send netware messages, and broadcast out something clever to everyone in the class, not realizing it would reveal the source, and I got busted within seconds. But as luck would have it, one computer wasn't booting, so my techer gave me a screwdriver, and told me to go fix it.
I had zero idea WTF I was doing. I flailed around in the dark for days, like a chimp on a bicyles, no idea about the boot process, no background to compare to. The BIOS was protected with an unknown password (no CMOS jumpers on those mobos at all). Disconnecting the battery overnight didn't even work. Disconnecting the HDD cause it to try the floppy, but I didn't know what that meant. My teacher gave me a couple disks, the worthless diagnostics disk booted, but the DOS one didn't. I had no background to tell me thee disk must have been bad, and my teacher, and computer-owning friends, never had any advice to offer. But in hindsight, it was only a minor waste of time.
I searched the web, and found several apps that claimed to recover CMOS passwords,
Slashdot... It's the website I watch like a hawk, so that I can find out about live events, 5 minutes before they happen (if I'm really, really lucky).
Many of the reported problems involve things like people searching for Starbucks in a major city, and finding none. That is, without question, very simply a serious problem on their back-end.