I don't want to sound like an argle-fargling old timer with an onion on my belt, but for christ's sake, since when is "new to a montreal mother" new for/. ? Ad retargetting has been around for YEARS.
Small advertisers in particular love it, because it makes them look huge: "Hey, wow, these guys advertise on CNN.com!" Yep, they do! Only for you at this particular moment in time, but they do.
Mod parent up. There's no safeguards. The Cocoa Touch SDK doesn't protect the user's phone number or name. Even the contents of the entire address book are accessed without safeguards. I was amazed to learn that I have to give an app permission to get my location, but meanwhile apps could pull every email address from Contacts and post them to a web server somewhere without my ever knowing.
I'm not sure there's any point to this, since the Red5 guys have already documented and implemented the protocol. And Wowza has a fantastic implementation, even though it's not open source. If nothing else, I'd like to see "Abobe" explains the fucked-up connection handshaking. "Send me any ol' 1500 bytes! Ok great, you're connected!"
Try Groovix. This was mentioned above, but it's been overwhelmed by do-it-yourself solutions, and if you're the one IT guy for a charter school, you probably need it simple and reliable. Check out their distro. It's based on Ubuntu, and you can download it from their web site.
For more info, check this page: http://groovix.com/slim.html which explains how they support up to 10 seats (monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers) per computer.
You know, the Windows-based Mac OS layer actually shipped, in Quicktime. If you installed Quicktime (4 or 5, can't remember which) on a PC, a large number of core Mac API functions were available. I remember once trying, and succeeding, to write a program that used the Mac Window Manager, via Quicktime, to open a new Window (via NewWindow)and draw some text in it. There was a serious discussion on some mac lists about whether or not we should use that stuff for porting our Mac apps. It was an incredible idea and there seemed to be no reason why Apple wasn't promoting to developers as cheap and easy to port to Windows. Maybe it wasn't fully QA'd.
I have no idea if today's QuickTime still has any of that stuff.
Our neighbor's dog likes to crap in our yard, where our kids like to play, but our neighbor claims it's not their dog, so I am often roused early to perform poo-removal. So there I was, in sweatpants and a too-small t-shirt , carrying a shovelful of the neighbor's dog shit over to the trees at the end of our dead-end street, when this SUV bristling with antennas and cameras drove up. It's not unusual, because our street is somehow wrongly shown on every Nav system map as magically passing through the train tracks, when in fact it ends at our house. But this SUV, instead of u-turning in my driveway, slowly backed up. I looked closer and it's then I saw the "Windows Live" markings, realized it's competition to the A9 thing, and further realized I'm about to be immortalized on the internets as a fat, balding guy in sweats carrying a shovel of poo. I can't WAIT until my kids search for their house on Windows Live.
Now, if only the guy had been ten minutes earlier, I would have had immortalized photographic proof of my neighbor's dog's guilt, which would be handy indeed.
Actually, that NYT review is strongly positive. The review makes no mention of anything "crackpot." The one complaint about showing source code of hacks related to the reviewer's inability to understand what the code would do. You, as a/. reader, should not have this problem -- looks like SQL to me. I had little interest in seeing the film until I read that review -- so thanks, your mischaracterization has led me to Tivo it.
There's lots of internet conference options out there:
1. Avacast (cross-platform, browser-based, small groups or large audiences) http://www.avacast.com/ (note: my employer) 2. Citrix GoToMeeting 3. Adobe Breeze (also browser-based, small to medium sized audiences) 4. Microsoft LiveMeeting (video not supported) 5. Webex (video not so good) 6. NetMeeting (H.323, have big bandwidth at the ready) 7. Other H.323 products from companies like Polycom, Tandberg, Sony (big bandwidth) 8. Skype (for limited audio and video conferences) 9. iChat AV (if everyone is on a Mac) 10. WiredRed (no Mac support)
You can google for more. There's probably 50 vendors, all told. Of the commercial options, I'm gonna have to say that I think Avacast is the best.
In the world of open source:
11. OpenH323-based products like Xmeeting & GnomePhone
With Red5 on its way, expect more open source SWF-based web conferencing solutions soon.
First of all, you can't stream live Flash video without a Flash Communication Server license, and it's one of the most expensive prospects in the entire streaming world right now, plus most of the world still only has the Flash 7 live codecs, which are a shitty subset of H.264, so skip that. Secondly, everyone who saying crap like VLC and ogg theora... please. Shut the fuck up. He's specifically asking about Windows Media and Quicktime.
Refreshingly, the post that asks about your audience is dead on. The choice of streaming format will be entirely driven by your audience (and also by your budget).
Some questions to consider:
Do you have streaming servers? What formats do they handle? If not, you need to start learning their care and feeding right now.
How many users do you expect? Do your streaming servers have adequate bandwidth? Do you know how to calculate adequate bandwidth? Are your end users all in australia, or are they international? Have you considered a CDN like Akamai, Playstream, VitalStream, etc.?
Are you archiving on the server or on the encoder? Are you backing to tape, for the inevitable "I forgot to hit record" issues?
If this is your first webcast, you might do well to call a streaming expert (I recommend www.incitedmedia.com, ask for Joe -- they did Live8 so they know what they're doing) and ask some questions.
Keep in mind: Windows Media looks like crap on Macs. Quicktime is on lots more Windows machines nowadays thanks to iTunes. Quicktime Broadcaster isn't as rock-solid as Windows Media Encoder (and certainly isn't nearly as fully-featured) but will run on the machines you already have.
I'll speak up for the developers use tools like Macromedia Flash and Director. These tools produce binary source files, for which the advantages of CVS are slim when compared to the classic method of of "save as..." version number incrementing.
The very nature of the tools make multi-programmer projects extremely difficult as is, so not using CVS -- making each developer an island -- is a natural extension of the tools. Macromedia tools are like sharing a hammer -- you can't really have multiple hands on the hammer at once.
Mix in the fact that multimedia developers are routinely working with lots of binary files (sounds, graphics, whatnot) that also don't get a lot of benefit from CVS repositories, and you've got a recipe for a wholesale subset of developers who have no need to learn CVS commands.
Recent versions of Flash and Director allow developers to link in external text files for ActionScript/Lingo/JavaScript coding, so it's now possible to use version control for the code, at least, in your project. However, in these tools, code isn't half of the data in a source file: you've got the timeline (or score) data, the library (or cast) data, you've got any internal text references... plus, when the feature first came our, we had trouble with external code references being buggy, so people avoided it rather than lose hours of code.
It's still just a pain in the ass to use version control with Macromedia products. Not impossible, not entirely fruitless like in years past, just a pain in the ass. So many old-school developers I know just stick with what they know: "save as.." ++i.
However, in our company we recently set up a Subversion server, and hopefully we can get some more traction with checking in and out code. Since we now have multiple developers touching the same file, version control will help us with things like "who's got the ball" at the very least. But regardless, getting CVS used is an uphill battle.
I love Slashdot. "Gee, I dunno, therefore it must suck."
Folks, Google didn't invent the "20% of your time on personal projects" idea. I don't know who did, but I know one other company that uses it: 3M.
What did they get from it? Post-it Notes. That's right, the now-so-ubiquitos-it's-hard-to-believe-it-was-inven ted yellow sticky came from some worker's goof-off time.
Basically, he was in a church choir, and needed a way to bookmark pages of the music the were using, so during his 20% time he looked up some of their failed glues, put some on bright yellow paper, and made some pads of the stuff. As more and more people asked him for his samples, 3M realized they had just invented a whole new product.
Perhaps YOU never made anything worthwhile on goof-off time. But 3M made a few billion dollars off theirs.
I'm only a system admin because my laptop runs unix, so I'm stuck with the job. I have adopted PHP as my shell scripting language of choice, because I've been doing lots of PHP work, and because (ack) I've gotten older and it's a pain in the ass remembering all the minute differences in syntax between languages that are, for all intents and purposes, the same. fi, anyone? I mean, how fucking cute.
Mostly I've used it for file processing type stuff, where I didn't particularly cared how quickly it ran. I haven't done lots of admin stuff, trying to glue together the results of various commands.
If you're a real sysadmin, you probably want Perl and CPAN. But if you spend your days hacking at websites with PHP, you might as well use the same skills for system scripting.
Sweet jesus. The flip side of "every ask slashdot is stupid" is "every decent ask slashdot gets stupid answers." The only valid responses above (Webex and Flash Comm Sevrer) were modded to 1, while all the useless chatter about Tiger and iSights and not enough bandwidth are modded up. Crazy.
- Not enough bandwidth: You can easily do this on a 512k link, although you're not going to fall in love with the video quality. With three locations, Flash Communication Server would do fine. In fact, I think the developer edition supports a max of three users an 1Mbit of bandwidth, so you'd be able to use it on the cheap.
Even if you didn't use FCS, you could roll your own using Windows Media Encoders at each location pushing streams to a windows media server. You can make a page that hosts all three videos in it, with an area below for the quiz. Don't like WME? You can use Real's Helix, although it's a little harder to set up the first time. Both WME video and Helix introduce significant buffering delay, so you'll have to configure all components (encoder, server, and client-side playback control) to use the minimum buffering allowed. You'll still end up with at least 5 seconds of buffering.
- Lag: I doubt you'd have enough lag to make a big difference in determining whose answers are correct. Regardless, in our system, every message up & downstream is timestamped (down to thousandths of a second), and the client and server clocks are synchronized together, so you'll have a very decent idea who answered first. Not that it really matters, since it's for charity, who cares if it's slightly off, right?
- Webex is a fine choice if you DON'T care about video. Their video is very lousy, hugely bandwith intensive, and doesn't support n-way video conferences. The price mentioned above does not include video, I don't think. A better pay-per-minute options would be Breeze Live. They also have a 15-day free trial, which is nice.
Also, you should consider something like a Polycom, Tandberg, or other traditional video conferencing product. For one, lots of companies have them, so you can probably get loaner units easily.
Or (ahem) maybe give us a call. Our software does polls, quizzes, slides, chat, moderated Q&A, all synchronized to the video and and internal clock. Up to 5-way video conferences are supported using the Flash Communication Server, and we have bandwidth partners in the UK if you need them.
That's really strange. Are they recompiling XP and key Office apps for the G5, or running everything under an embedded VirtualPC, or doing something entirely new? Because I can't imagine they'll be letting it boot Mac OS X, let alone Yellowdog Linux.
The first car MP3 player, http://www.phatnoise.com, is still the best. You replace you trunk-mounted CD unit with it, and it translates the key-presses from the stereo faceplate. It's very slick. It runs a little embedded linux (well, not embedded, it's actually on the drive cartridge) and you can mount the linux filesystem and hack at it to your heart's delight. I haven't looked at the forums in over a year, but last time I checked someone was hacking in a wireless device. Is it *really* such a pain in the ass to pull out a cartridge to load new music? Yes, I guess it is.
First, you need to realize what you're looking for is not an editing tool, but a live production tool. Once you know this... well, insert the standard ask-google-not-slashdot comment here.
The best Mac live-video-switching-with-effects product I've heard of is VDMX.
You want this although you're probably not willing to pay for it.
I'm not sure if VideoScript will generate NTSC output to DV. Probably not, but if so, it's a cheap alternative.
If you're ultra-low budget, dig into the QuickTime docs. It's not tremendously hard to write a C app that pulls a live DV stream and adds some QT text or effect tracks.
Bluetooth is dead? Then how am I going to get all these pictures out of my phone? IR? Jeez. Get your hands on a Mac and install the Developer tools. In/Developer/Examples/Bluetooth you'll find:
I never looked at these before, so I checked them out. BluetoothMonitor seems to watche Bluetooth traffic (snort without the data). PacketDecoder2 seems to let you snoop on CMD, EVENTS, RFCOMM, SDP, and other interesting packets.
I spent the day wrestling with XCode and I totally hate it, but it looks like there are tools in here you want, so go spend $129 on Panther.
Um, the x1000 I'm typing this on does have wifi. Are you sure about that? It's a Centrino, and wifi is part of the package.
The screen is amazing (my other laptop is a 15" TiBook and this is far superior) but it also has the standard Compaq high-pitched whine when on AC power, which drives me batshit.
Speaking of A/UX, my Dad (an old AT&T guy) is still running this today on a Mac IIci. It's freaky to watch. He dual-boots from a Syquest cartridge. Talk about old school.
No, XENIX on the Lisa predates A/UX by several years. Google it, there's some Lisa fanatics out there whose pages mention it.
You could get XENIX only for the Lisa, too, that's why students had to get one instead of the cheaper Mac Plus. Not sure why. I had some surplus Mac XL conversion kits (this is all coming back to me) that I bought at a MacWorld and sold at a huge profit on campus. Once someone converted their Lisa to a Mac XL, they couldn't run XENIX anymore. As I recall.
>There wasn't online gaming to lure you away from >your studies for hours at a time.
Riiight...So you weren't cool enough to get invited to play Empire (http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/empire/faq/). Or a MUD. Okay. At my school, you could tell who was playing because they'd all head for their PC or a terminal once an hour, every hour, if they'd even left the terminal at all.
Well, instead you could have been playing dorm-wide games of Strategic Conquest (over homebuilt PhoneNet connectors) like we were. Shit, we even played the Ur-Doom, MazeWars. Or even single-player games. I had a bad habit of getting really deeply into Dark Castle every time exams rolled around.
>You had to actually communicate with people in >person instead of email, and you had to go to >the library and do your research from books.
You didn't have email? Email is ancient. Usenet, too. I recall searching online for research info when I was in college. Sure, it wasn't exactly like now, where I google "Spanish Inquisituion" and can enter my credit card and download a term paper. But that's what the ads in Rolling Stone were for.
> You only had a computer if you were in CS, and >sometimes not even CS students had them.
At Virginia Tech in 1986, every CS student had a Mac XL running (I think) XENIX, Microsoft's UNIX clone. Every engineering student had an IBM running DOS, Microsoft's CP/M clone. Buying one (at a super discount) was a requirement for incoming students.
I remember some witnessing some spectacular drunken arguments, CS students vs. Engineering students, about Mac GUI vs. PC command line goodness. Part of me wishes all those arrogant anti-gui fuckwads are today stuck at runlevel 3, but I suspect they're tweaking their KDE prefs even now.
The DirecTivo doesn't have an MPEG compressor. It records streams right off the satellite feed. It would be a more expensive unit with all the DirecTV crap AND an analog tuner. Also, the service is from DirecTV, not Tivo, so if they go under, your combo box is useless. (Well, not totally, you can probably rip the drives out and use them for something.)
Plus, you really think that Murdoch bought Directv for $6.6B last week just to watch it wither and die?
Your arguments against buying it don't hold water. Go ahead and buy one.
This is stupid geek parent advice, but whatever. I thought a wifi laptop would be perfect for parenting. However, the screens are just too damn fragile. I say this after replacing two screens. Keep your laptops away from the kids.
Also -- by age 2.5, KidPix is your best friend. After lots of initial frustration learning the mouse, they'll play with that sucker for hours. And they learn lots of basic GUI skills. Perhaps that's terrible, having a kid internalize GUIs are we know them. Hmmm. Either way, make sure you've got a screen you don't about finger smudges on. Removing finger-grease laced with juice, paint, and boogies from your expensive 18" LCD screen every day will start to make you cry. Or maybe that's just sleep deprivation.
You might also try some web games -- I know a little girl who highly recommends Rolly Polly Ollie and those damn Disney Clay games. Damn that Disney, they firgure something out and kids get sucked in fast. However, if you've actually read and loved the A. A. Milne books, under no circumstances should you surf to or purchase anything related to "The Book Of Pooh" or you'll be cursing while your kid's entranced by total crap. Freakin' Disney sucks the life out of everything, but kids don't care how stupid it's become.
A poster above said his wifi was killed by his baby monitor. This didn't happen to me at all. So caveat emptor. Baby monitors are horrible, anyway; they screech static or make those tiny little ticking noises that you'll never notice until you're trying to get some much-needed sleep. Rig something up with a spare PC + sound card + wifi and serve a live ogg stream from your kid's room.
Okay, yeah, that's a terrible idea. But hmmmm...then I could listen to the baby montitor from anywhere in the world!...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to sound like an argle-fargling old timer with an onion on my belt, but for christ's sake, since when is "new to a montreal mother" new for /. ? Ad retargetting has been around for YEARS.
Small advertisers in particular love it, because it makes them look huge: "Hey, wow, these guys advertise on CNN.com!" Yep, they do! Only for you at this particular moment in time, but they do.
It's all true:
http://www.vgg.com/tr/tr_102201_moon.html
Mod parent up. There's no safeguards. The Cocoa Touch SDK doesn't protect the user's phone number or name. Even the contents of the entire address book are accessed without safeguards. I was amazed to learn that I have to give an app permission to get my location, but meanwhile apps could pull every email address from Contacts and post them to a web server somewhere without my ever knowing.
I'm not sure there's any point to this, since the Red5 guys have already documented and implemented the protocol. And Wowza has a fantastic implementation, even though it's not open source. If nothing else, I'd like to see "Abobe" explains the fucked-up connection handshaking. "Send me any ol' 1500 bytes! Ok great, you're connected!"
Try Groovix. This was mentioned above, but it's been overwhelmed by do-it-yourself solutions, and if you're the one IT guy for a charter school, you probably need it simple and reliable. Check out their distro. It's based on Ubuntu, and you can download it from their web site.
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For more info, check this page: http://groovix.com/slim.html which explains how they support up to 10 seats (monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers) per computer.
There's an article about Groovix being used in Maryland libraries here: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/09/22/1542
You know, the Windows-based Mac OS layer actually shipped, in Quicktime. If you installed Quicktime (4 or 5, can't remember which) on a PC, a large number of core Mac API functions were available. I remember once trying, and succeeding, to write a program that used the Mac Window Manager, via Quicktime, to open a new Window (via NewWindow)and draw some text in it. There was a serious discussion on some mac lists about whether or not we should use that stuff for porting our Mac apps. It was an incredible idea and there seemed to be no reason why Apple wasn't promoting to developers as cheap and easy to port to Windows. Maybe it wasn't fully QA'd.
I have no idea if today's QuickTime still has any of that stuff.
Our neighbor's dog likes to crap in our yard, where our kids like to play, but our neighbor claims it's not their dog, so I am often roused early to perform poo-removal. So there I was, in sweatpants and a too-small t-shirt , carrying a shovelful of the neighbor's dog shit over to the trees at the end of our dead-end street, when this SUV bristling with antennas and cameras drove up. It's not unusual, because our street is somehow wrongly shown on every Nav system map as magically passing through the train tracks, when in fact it ends at our house. But this SUV, instead of u-turning in my driveway, slowly backed up. I looked closer and it's then I saw the "Windows Live" markings, realized it's competition to the A9 thing, and further realized I'm about to be immortalized on the internets as a fat, balding guy in sweats carrying a shovel of poo. I can't WAIT until my kids search for their house on Windows Live.
Now, if only the guy had been ten minutes earlier, I would have had immortalized photographic proof of my neighbor's dog's guilt, which would be handy indeed.
Actually, that NYT review is strongly positive. The review makes no mention of anything "crackpot." The one complaint about showing source code of hacks related to the reviewer's inability to understand what the code would do. You, as a /. reader, should not have this problem -- looks like SQL to me. I had little interest in seeing the film until I read that review -- so thanks, your mischaracterization has led me to Tivo it.
There's lots of internet conference options out there:
1. Avacast (cross-platform, browser-based, small groups or large audiences) http://www.avacast.com/ (note: my employer)
2. Citrix GoToMeeting
3. Adobe Breeze (also browser-based, small to medium sized audiences)
4. Microsoft LiveMeeting (video not supported)
5. Webex (video not so good)
6. NetMeeting (H.323, have big bandwidth at the ready)
7. Other H.323 products from companies like Polycom, Tandberg, Sony (big bandwidth)
8. Skype (for limited audio and video conferences)
9. iChat AV (if everyone is on a Mac)
10. WiredRed (no Mac support)
You can google for more. There's probably 50 vendors, all told. Of the commercial options, I'm gonna have to say that I think Avacast is the best.
In the world of open source:
11. OpenH323-based products like Xmeeting & GnomePhone
With Red5 on its way, expect more open source SWF-based web conferencing solutions soon.
First of all, you can't stream live Flash video without a Flash Communication Server license, and it's one of the most expensive prospects in the entire streaming world right now, plus most of the world still only has the Flash 7 live codecs, which are a shitty subset of H.264, so skip that. Secondly, everyone who saying crap like VLC and ogg theora... please. Shut the fuck up. He's specifically asking about Windows Media and Quicktime.
Refreshingly, the post that asks about your audience is dead on. The choice of streaming format will be entirely driven by your audience (and also by your budget).
Some questions to consider:
- Do you have streaming servers? What formats do they handle? If not, you need to start learning their care and feeding right now.
- How many users do you expect? Do your streaming servers have adequate bandwidth? Do you know how to calculate adequate bandwidth? Are your end users all in australia, or are they international? Have you considered a CDN like Akamai, Playstream, VitalStream, etc.?
- Are you archiving on the server or on the encoder? Are you backing to tape, for the inevitable "I forgot to hit record" issues?
If this is your first webcast, you might do well to call a streaming expert (I recommend www.incitedmedia.com, ask for Joe -- they did Live8 so they know what they're doing) and ask some questions.Keep in mind: Windows Media looks like crap on Macs. Quicktime is on lots more Windows machines nowadays thanks to iTunes. Quicktime Broadcaster isn't as rock-solid as Windows Media Encoder (and certainly isn't nearly as fully-featured) but will run on the machines you already have.
I'll speak up for the developers use tools like Macromedia Flash and Director. These tools produce binary source files, for which the advantages of CVS are slim when compared to the classic method of of "save as..." version number incrementing.
The very nature of the tools make multi-programmer projects extremely difficult as is, so not using CVS -- making each developer an island -- is a natural extension of the tools. Macromedia tools are like sharing a hammer -- you can't really have multiple hands on the hammer at once.
Mix in the fact that multimedia developers are routinely working with lots of binary files (sounds, graphics, whatnot) that also don't get a lot of benefit from CVS repositories, and you've got a recipe for a wholesale subset of developers who have no need to learn CVS commands.
Recent versions of Flash and Director allow developers to link in external text files for ActionScript/Lingo/JavaScript coding, so it's now possible to use version control for the code, at least, in your project. However, in these tools, code isn't half of the data in a source file: you've got the timeline (or score) data, the library (or cast) data, you've got any internal text references... plus, when the feature first came our, we had trouble with external code references being buggy, so people avoided it rather than lose hours of code.
It's still just a pain in the ass to use version control with Macromedia products. Not impossible, not entirely fruitless like in years past, just a pain in the ass. So many old-school developers I know just stick with what they know: "save as.." ++i.
However, in our company we recently set up a Subversion server, and hopefully we can get some more traction with checking in and out code. Since we now have multiple developers touching the same file, version control will help us with things like "who's got the ball" at the very least. But regardless, getting CVS used is an uphill battle.
I love Slashdot. "Gee, I dunno, therefore it must suck."
n ted yellow sticky came from some worker's goof-off time.
Folks, Google didn't invent the "20% of your time on personal projects" idea. I don't know who did, but I know one other company that uses it: 3M.
What did they get from it? Post-it Notes. That's right, the now-so-ubiquitos-it's-hard-to-believe-it-was-inve
Basically, he was in a church choir, and needed a way to bookmark pages of the music the were using, so during his 20% time he looked up some of their failed glues, put some on bright yellow paper, and made some pads of the stuff. As more and more people asked him for his samples, 3M realized they had just invented a whole new product.
Perhaps YOU never made anything worthwhile on goof-off time. But 3M made a few billion dollars off theirs.
I'm only a system admin because my laptop runs unix, so I'm stuck with the job. I have adopted PHP as my shell scripting language of choice, because I've been doing lots of PHP work, and because (ack) I've gotten older and it's a pain in the ass remembering all the minute differences in syntax between languages that are, for all intents and purposes, the same. fi, anyone? I mean, how fucking cute.
Mostly I've used it for file processing type stuff, where I didn't particularly cared how quickly it ran. I haven't done lots of admin stuff, trying to glue together the results of various commands.
If you're a real sysadmin, you probably want Perl and CPAN. But if you spend your days hacking at websites with PHP, you might as well use the same skills for system scripting.
Sweet jesus. The flip side of "every ask slashdot is stupid" is "every decent ask slashdot gets stupid answers." The only valid responses above (Webex and Flash Comm Sevrer) were modded to 1, while all the useless chatter about Tiger and iSights and not enough bandwidth are modded up. Crazy.
Anyway, this is exactly what our company's software does, so pardon the self promotion.
Let me answer some of the points above:
- Not enough bandwidth: You can easily do this on a 512k link, although you're not going to fall in love with the video quality. With three locations, Flash Communication Server would do fine. In fact, I think the developer edition supports a max of three users an 1Mbit of bandwidth, so you'd be able to use it on the cheap.
Even if you didn't use FCS, you could roll your own using Windows Media Encoders at each location pushing streams to a windows media server. You can make a page that hosts all three videos in it, with an area below for the quiz. Don't like WME? You can use Real's Helix, although it's a little harder to set up the first time. Both WME video and Helix introduce significant buffering delay, so you'll have to configure all components (encoder, server, and client-side playback control) to use the minimum buffering allowed. You'll still end up with at least 5 seconds of buffering.
- Lag: I doubt you'd have enough lag to make a big difference in determining whose answers are correct. Regardless, in our system, every message up & downstream is timestamped (down to thousandths of a second), and the client and server clocks are synchronized together, so you'll have a very decent idea who answered first. Not that it really matters, since it's for charity, who cares if it's slightly off, right?
- Webex is a fine choice if you DON'T care about video. Their video is very lousy, hugely bandwith intensive, and doesn't support n-way video conferences. The price mentioned above does not include video, I don't think. A better pay-per-minute options would be Breeze Live. They also have a 15-day free trial, which is nice.
Also, you should consider something like a Polycom, Tandberg, or other traditional video conferencing product. For one, lots of companies have them, so you can probably get loaner units easily.
Or (ahem) maybe give us a call. Our software does polls, quizzes, slides, chat, moderated Q&A, all synchronized to the video and and internal clock. Up to 5-way video conferences are supported using the Flash Communication Server, and we have bandwidth partners in the UK if you need them.
That's really strange. Are they recompiling XP and key Office apps for the G5, or running everything under an embedded VirtualPC, or doing something entirely new? Because I can't imagine they'll be letting it boot Mac OS X, let alone Yellowdog Linux.
The first car MP3 player, http://www.phatnoise.com, is still the best. You replace you trunk-mounted CD unit with it, and it translates the key-presses from the stereo faceplate. It's very slick. It runs a little embedded linux (well, not embedded, it's actually on the drive cartridge) and you can mount the linux filesystem and hack at it to your heart's delight. I haven't looked at the forums in over a year, but last time I checked someone was hacking in a wireless device. Is it *really* such a pain in the ass to pull out a cartridge to load new music? Yes, I guess it is.
The best Mac live-video-switching-with-effects product I've heard of is VDMX.
You want this although you're probably not willing to pay for it.
I'm not sure if VideoScript will generate NTSC output to DV. Probably not, but if so, it's a cheap alternative.If you're ultra-low budget, dig into the QuickTime docs. It's not tremendously hard to write a C app that pulls a live DV stream and adds some QT text or effect tracks.
Bluetooth is dead? Then how am I going to get all these pictures out of my phone? IR? Jeez. Get your hands on a Mac and install the Developer tools. In /Developer/Examples/Bluetooth you'll find:
m ple
/Developer/Utilities/Bluetooth you'll find:
OBEXSample
OBEXSampleSendVCard
RFCOMMClientSa
RFCOMMServerSample
In
BluetoothMonitor
PacketDecoder2
I never looked at these before, so I checked them out. BluetoothMonitor seems to watche Bluetooth traffic (snort without the data). PacketDecoder2 seems to let you snoop on CMD, EVENTS, RFCOMM, SDP, and other interesting packets.
I spent the day wrestling with XCode and I totally hate it, but it looks like there are tools in here you want, so go spend $129 on Panther.
Um, the x1000 I'm typing this on does have wifi. Are you sure about that? It's a Centrino, and wifi is part of the package.
The screen is amazing (my other laptop is a 15" TiBook and this is far superior) but it also has the standard Compaq high-pitched whine when on AC power, which drives me batshit.
Mod the parent up, please. I don't know if it's true but if so it's important to consider.
Speaking of A/UX, my Dad (an old AT&T guy) is still running this today on a Mac IIci. It's freaky to watch. He dual-boots from a Syquest cartridge. Talk about old school.
No, XENIX on the Lisa predates A/UX by several years. Google it, there's some Lisa fanatics out there whose pages mention it.
You could get XENIX only for the Lisa, too, that's why students had to get one instead of the cheaper Mac Plus. Not sure why. I had some surplus Mac XL conversion kits (this is all coming back to me) that I bought at a MacWorld and sold at a huge profit on campus. Once someone converted their Lisa to a Mac XL, they couldn't run XENIX anymore. As I recall.
What college did you go to?
>There wasn't online gaming to lure you away from
>your studies for hours at a time.
Riiight...So you weren't cool enough to get invited to play Empire (http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/empire/faq/). Or a MUD. Okay. At my school, you could tell who was playing because they'd all head for their PC or a terminal once an hour, every hour, if they'd even left the terminal at all.
Well, instead you could have been playing dorm-wide games of Strategic Conquest (over homebuilt PhoneNet connectors) like we were. Shit, we even played the Ur-Doom, MazeWars. Or even single-player games. I had a bad habit of getting really deeply into Dark Castle every time exams rolled around.
>You had to actually communicate with people in
>person instead of email, and you had to go to
>the library and do your research from books.
You didn't have email? Email is ancient. Usenet, too. I recall searching online for research info when I was in college. Sure, it wasn't exactly like now, where I google "Spanish Inquisituion" and can enter my credit card and download a term paper. But that's what the ads in Rolling Stone were for.
> You only had a computer if you were in CS, and
>sometimes not even CS students had them.
At Virginia Tech in 1986, every CS student had a Mac XL running (I think) XENIX, Microsoft's UNIX clone. Every engineering student had an IBM running DOS, Microsoft's CP/M clone. Buying one (at a super discount) was a requirement for incoming students.
I remember some witnessing some spectacular drunken arguments, CS students vs. Engineering students, about Mac GUI vs. PC command line goodness. Part of me wishes all those arrogant anti-gui fuckwads are today stuck at runlevel 3, but I suspect they're tweaking their KDE prefs even now.
The DirecTivo doesn't have an MPEG compressor. It records streams right off the satellite feed. It would be a more expensive unit with all the DirecTV crap AND an analog tuner. Also, the service is from DirecTV, not Tivo, so if they go under, your combo box is useless. (Well, not totally, you can probably rip the drives out and use them for something.)
Plus, you really think that Murdoch bought Directv for $6.6B last week just to watch it wither and die?
Your arguments against buying it don't hold water. Go ahead and buy one.
This is stupid geek parent advice, but whatever. I thought a wifi laptop would be perfect for parenting. However, the screens are just too damn fragile. I say this after replacing two screens. Keep your laptops away from the kids.
Also -- by age 2.5, KidPix is your best friend. After lots of initial frustration learning the mouse, they'll play with that sucker for hours. And they learn lots of basic GUI skills. Perhaps that's terrible, having a kid internalize GUIs are we know them. Hmmm. Either way, make sure you've got a screen you don't about finger smudges on. Removing finger-grease laced with juice, paint, and boogies from your expensive 18" LCD screen every day will start to make you cry. Or maybe that's just sleep deprivation.
You might also try some web games -- I know a little girl who highly recommends Rolly Polly Ollie and those damn Disney Clay games. Damn that Disney, they firgure something out and kids get sucked in fast. However, if you've actually read and loved the A. A. Milne books, under no circumstances should you surf to or purchase anything related to "The Book Of Pooh" or you'll be cursing while your kid's entranced by total crap. Freakin' Disney sucks the life out of everything, but kids don't care how stupid it's become.
A poster above said his wifi was killed by his baby monitor. This didn't happen to me at all. So caveat emptor. Baby monitors are horrible, anyway; they screech static or make those tiny little ticking noises that you'll never notice until you're trying to get some much-needed sleep. Rig something up with a spare PC + sound card + wifi and serve a live ogg stream from your kid's room.
Okay, yeah, that's a terrible idea. But hmmmm...then I could listen to the baby montitor from anywhere in the world!...