Large downloads are a potential impediment to piracy, but with the ability to run unsigned code, it can likely run backup manager with an ftp server that can be used to move games directly onto the PS3 hard drive and run from there, not unlike the current situation with JTAG 360 systems now. Therefore, bluray blank prices aren't going to be an issue.
The ace in the hole for net neutrality is the latest crop of cheap TVs with built-in Netflix and other online services. My in-laws just purchased one a few months ago and they use Netflix constantly. These are dye-in-the-wool, Ann Coulter-reading, FOXNews-watching Republicans. I mentioned to my father-in-law about net neutrality being a big issue. He had never heard of it. When I explained the ramifications for their Netflix usage, his response was to immediately support it. It will be interesting to see this shake out. This is another chance where we can see if FOX and Rush can convince more people to act against their own self interest in support of some bastardization of "freedom."
Not rosy. But I do expect CIOs to project a bit more foresight than this. But with all of the Chinese hacking and Wikileaks in the news, maybe it will fan the paranoia and knock some sense into them. I'd love to see "the cloud" go poof in a new Red cyber-scare.
Grid computing achieved buzzword status too...among suits. People dumped money into it and it fizzled. Who is still doing grid computing...except for SETI or Folding? Eventually, this will go the same way.
I suspect that it will take one thorough breach of just one of these cloud platforms to make everyone realize that this is bad bad idea. Even just one employee accessing "the cloud" from their home PC that happens to be rooted with a keylogger installed is enough. Then that delicious "access from anywhere" feature becomes a wicked liability.
What enterprise momentum in the cloud sector? What CIO is seriously going to shunt critical infrastructure into some cloud environment? Seriously? Who? Backups...maybe? Personal photos and email? Of course. But, trade secrets? Human Resources info? Salaries and performance evaluations? To the cloud? Really?
GEOS was great on the C64, but the PC version was excellent. I used Geoworks Ensemble as an undergrad on my 286. It had a functional word processor and desktop tools. And it allowed DOS applications to run under it pretty smoothly...I remember using the symbolic math program Derive under DOS and then writing up the results in the word processor. It was significantly better than Microsoft's (or even Apple's) offerings at the time. Too bad it didn't catch on.
IANAL either, but it strikes me as odd that any lawyer can purport to represent me in some legal affair without some consent from me. Pursuing legal actions on my behalf without my issuing of power of attorney is, in fact, illegal. I have to sign over power of attorney to my accountant to have him interact with the IRS on my behalf. How is this any different?
I agree completely. I think, as a group, we should OBJECT to the terms of the settlement because as the aggrieved parties, we were never in anyway contacted by the attorneys in question, never gave implicit or explicit permission for them to represent us, and are currently sharing none of the windfall. Some lawyer among us should draft and official response that we can all cut and paste. Ten or twenty objections will be blown off. Ten or Twenty thousand will not.
Google has their fingers in a lot of pies, I know. But please pull resources from this crap and get some truly useful things workings, like the ability to import an existing phone number into Google Voice! That has been "on the way" for 18 months, and many many people will jump to use it. As it sits now, my GV number is unused and that makes GV mostly unused. If I could put my home/business numbers on GV, usage (and potential data for mining) will skyrocket for me and for a lot of other people disaffected by crappy phone companies. Imagine transparently picking up incoming calls to your REAL NUMBERS via VOIP, cell, or landline and swapping out destination phone with a few clicks on the setup page rather than enduring the porting process for the n-th time.
1 Gb is 1 gigaBIT. 2 GB is 2 gigaBYTES. So, to make 2 GBs, you need 16 of those $2 chips, not two. So, ~$32 for 2 GB of RAM, just for the chips. 2 GB DIMMs/SoDIMMs are in $35-$40 range on the site you posted.
If you want to roll you own, use XBMC on an Acer Aspire Revo R1600 ($200). It uses the Nvidia ION LE chipset that supports h264 offloading. I would use these myself, but I already have three Popcorn Hours.
PCHs are nice, quiet, and cheap, but the UI is awful. It will require some tinkering to make nice. YAMJ is your friend (Yet Another Movie Jukebox).
I've had a geothermal heatpump for almost 10 years. My parents for even longer. They are great, especially in harsh heating climates. We live near Pittsburgh, and they have proved quite affordable. Local contractors have really just started installing them...I had to really look around to find an installer. Most HVAC guys don't want to have to mess with a well-drilling sub and a maybe a backhoe sub to trench from the wells to the house. It is a lot more work, compared to an air-source unit...and far messier! Install an air-source unit, you will get a few holes in your foundation for coolant lines and power to the compressor unit...and then the normal ductwork, air handler inside and the air-source unit sitting outside on a drop-down concrete pad. If the ductwork is in place, it is a 1-2 day job.
With geothermal, (if it is done right) you will have a dozen or more holes in your foundation for the in/out of the loops from each well into a manifold in the basement. You WANT that manifold in case one of the wells dies. You will have trenches from the foundation to the wells...and the wells need to be 10-15 feet apart, so some significant part of your yard will look like hell. Mine took about two weeks to complete because the well driller broke down on the fourth well. And the backhoe operator came *this* close to putting the bucket through my foundation wall. It is a monstrous headache to do a retrofit install, but for new construction, it would be a bit easier. In any case, the cost for the loop install can be a back-breaker. The geothermal units themselves are IMO overpriced too, due to lower production volumes.
Capacity would be measured in kW or MW, not in kWh. Capacity is the amount of power that can be produced by the facility at any given time, not the total amount of energy that the facility could produce over its lifetime. Whatever the case, the numbers make no sense as listed in the OP.
I am a proponent of insulation and building a house from scratch make it possible. In fact, I'd argue FOR double framing walls with 2x4s outside and 2x3s inside with an insulation (and wiring and plumbing) gap, rather than framing with 2x6 (to code). If you stagger them, you can avoid the thermal bridging in the wall studs.
But I still insist that the doors and windows are more expensive and persistent problem, both thermally and economically. Maybe that R50/inch foam will fix the door issue. But the window problem is still there, unless you live in a cave.
And I think you will see that earth berming will help more than any of the insulation options you've mentioned. The proper goal for future housing should be figuring out how to get light and open feeling architecture that works with earth berming and working out cheap efficient dehumidification.
I disagree. Nothing said it has to be permanent. The "tarp" solution could be nothing more than a large scale version of the Sunsetter. Just reel it in when the weather sets in. The ROI for that could be quite good, especially if roof and wall insulation is not easy to improve.
Yes, I am doing wind load study. It is all about the shape. Check out the tensile roof at the Denver airport...and that is designed for wind load and snow load. It is certainly possible to build such a thing.
My pet design projects is an earth-bermed house with a very large "courtyard" that is covered with a tensile roof, likely two layers with a sandwich of R30 between and southfacing opening covered with greenhouse glazing. So, in the summer, the white canvas will reduce the radiative load, the R30 and the thermal mass of the ground will moderate the temperature year round...maybe 40-50s in winter...70-80s in the summer. Then only space condition the earth-bermed rooms around the periphery. I can design it and make sure it works...I can add a few "earth tubes" if I need additional temperature moderation. And with steel wire and proper shaping, I can make sure it holds up. The big task will be getting a building inspector to sign off on it. Of course, I've already convinced my wife that should could garden year-round (in PA) if I built it. So maybe the hard work *is* done.
Your argument is bogus. R30 fiberglass bats are 9 1/2 inches thick. Are you saying to frame the walls with 2x10s. You know the cost of dimensional lumber increases geometrically with dimension, right. Or do you stagger frame with 2x6s...basically build each wall twice and double your labor costs?
What about existing structures? Because the US market has enough backlog of existing structures. Do you build another layer of insulation INSIDE the house and lose a foot of floorspace near each exterior wall..and then pay to reframe, drywall, move out electrical outlets, etc? Or do you reframe the exterior of the house and then cover and weatherize your new outside envelope?
In either case, what about windows and doors? You do know that heat will gladly take a parallel path. Third-year ME heat transfer class...remember the resistor analogy? You can make the walls R300 and the heat will still get in (out) through "holes in the bucket." Have you priced super high R glazing options? Do you want a 8" thick front door? Even in the walls themselves, you have to worry about thermal bridging through the wood studs...all these would be problems even with some crazy aerogel insulation that is R50/inch.
The building standard is what it is for a reason. It is an engineering trade-off between cost and performance. R30 in the ceiling and either 2x6 walls with R18 or 2x4 walls with R11-12...and maybe a dense insulation board on the outside before siding is installed. Double pane insulated glass windows. Now those trade-offs were in considered with energy and HVAC hardware costs at a certainly level. And more insulation is good but only to the point. The insulation costs goes well beyond the price of the insulation bat, and a point exists where adding more makes no financial sense. If you *insist* on having windows and doors, it doesn't make engineering sense anymore either. Your recommendation is well past that and smacks of niavete. Build or remodel a house or two (especially using your OWN MONEY) and then get back to me. A home built to your bogus specifications would cost four or five times more. I doubt you could find someone to build it for you.
If you want to look into green houses, then look into earth bearmed homes, rammed earth homes...building underground, using lots and lots of earth as thermal insulation and thermal mass. Folks have been doing this since the 70s and there are books that give some good overviews. I'd like to see the building codes revised to make it easier to build some of these different "hippie" houses.
And in sunny climates, I think the best ROI would be a 100x100 white canvas tarp and support structure to shade your entire house. I'm surprised no one does that. That would effectively remove the direct radiation load from the cooling...which is significant...just ask your barefeet after a walk across sunlit asphalt.
It is a question of stages. The timescale that need to be designed for initially are based on the engine size divided by gas flow speed. That is maybe 10s of microseconds. The next timescale may have to do with longer scale oscillations in the engine structure...that is probably on the order of 1 - 100 milliseconds (10-1000 Hz). After that, you need to start worrying about heat...things melting, expanding, coating eroding...those are probably 1-100 seconds.
The smallest timescales are the hardest to fix, because they are harder to identify and control. When it comes to cooling, etc...these are easy to fix by comparison. At least in terms of making the thing function. I can't think of anything that would have a timescale on the order of seconds...unless it is a pump failure or other supporting device. I'd bet that if it would run for 200 seconds, it would probably run for much longer. It leads me to believe that they have most of the kinks worked out and can start work on developing products instead of the technology.
Ditto on the Norco. I used two Supermicro 8-port SATA PCI-X cards in a fairly cheap server motherboard (with PCI-X slots). I also use a few on-board SATA ports...one for boot and four for the other 4 bays. I think the case, PS, mobo, RAM, CPU, small boot SSD, and controllers was under $1k. And then 20 1TB WD Greens for about another $2k...this was 18 months ago. I can't be happier with the setup running Linux software RAID6.
PXE is nice if you have an entire cluster to build. We use it and it can be great to get a disk image installed on a new cluster. But honestly, I've only seen two cases were PXE really works...small "toy" setups where somebody boots this system on the left side of the desk from an PXE/TFTP/NFS server on the right side of the desk. Or using it to clone/install large blocks of systems. (That is how ROCKS works.) But I don't know of anyone using PXE to boot a significant number of systems...workstations or cluster nodes.
Instead, I just installed OpenSUSE 11.2 to a 4GB flash drive. It worked perfectly. This is not a LiveCD or something like Slax that uses filesystem trickery to maintain a persistent system image. This is vanilla OpenSUSE installed to the flash just like a HDD or SSD. It recognized it as/dev/sda and installed. Of course, I didn't allow any swap space. For fun, I then reinstalled the system using two 4GB flash drives and created a raid0 for/. It also worked great and significantly faster than the single. So for $10 per system, you can boot from a flash drive locally...and then mount your user files from a NFS server. That is exactly what I'm doing. For future clusters that don't require scratch space, we might starting using a few internally mounted flash drives instead. All those drives need to do is handle bootup...most of the commonly used files come from NFS or would be cached in RAM.
That is exactly the approach I am considering. Slax with nxclient installed will fit the bill nicely. The problem with implementing it is 10% technical and 90% political.
I second this. We have a secured LAN with several large Linux clusters and a few dozen workstations, also mostly Linux. Some of the users have been issued laptops running Windows (over our objection). We secured them and regularly update antivirus and firewall software, but since the users needs admin access (over our objections), they still carry viruses and other malware on site. It is not a constant problem, but it is a persistent one. We were considering building a DMZ for all laptop users to limit the amount of damage an infected system can do to the rest of the LAN.
Honestly, there is no way to allow personal systems on to the LAN without this sort of thing being a problem. For every cautious careful user like yourself, there are a dozen clueless ones. The same goes too for remote access. Without a remote client that is properly secured, no amount of encryption/VPN/SSL is going to keep the on-site information safe. It is inconvenient but true.
Both Avast and AVG are on that site. Using there installer avoids all of the searching through six layers of pages, and it avoids all of the crapware. And you can bundle installers for multiple apps into one file. Quick and easy. You may be able to make an installer and mail it to your relatives and have them run it. I don't know though as I haven't tried it.
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Large downloads are a potential impediment to piracy, but with the ability to run unsigned code, it can likely run backup manager with an ftp server that can be used to move games directly onto the PS3 hard drive and run from there, not unlike the current situation with JTAG 360 systems now. Therefore, bluray blank prices aren't going to be an issue.
The ace in the hole for net neutrality is the latest crop of cheap TVs with built-in Netflix and other online services. My in-laws just purchased one a few months ago and they use Netflix constantly. These are dye-in-the-wool, Ann Coulter-reading, FOXNews-watching Republicans. I mentioned to my father-in-law about net neutrality being a big issue. He had never heard of it. When I explained the ramifications for their Netflix usage, his response was to immediately support it. It will be interesting to see this shake out. This is another chance where we can see if FOX and Rush can convince more people to act against their own self interest in support of some bastardization of "freedom."
Not rosy. But I do expect CIOs to project a bit more foresight than this. But with all of the Chinese hacking and Wikileaks in the news, maybe it will fan the paranoia and knock some sense into them. I'd love to see "the cloud" go poof in a new Red cyber-scare.
Grid computing achieved buzzword status too...among suits. People dumped money into it and it fizzled. Who is still doing grid computing...except for SETI or Folding? Eventually, this will go the same way.
I suspect that it will take one thorough breach of just one of these cloud platforms to make everyone realize that this is bad bad idea. Even just one employee accessing "the cloud" from their home PC that happens to be rooted with a keylogger installed is enough. Then that delicious "access from anywhere" feature becomes a wicked liability.
What enterprise momentum in the cloud sector? What CIO is seriously going to shunt critical infrastructure into some cloud environment? Seriously? Who? Backups...maybe? Personal photos and email? Of course. But, trade secrets? Human Resources info? Salaries and performance evaluations? To the cloud? Really?
GEOS was great on the C64, but the PC version was excellent. I used Geoworks Ensemble as an undergrad on my 286. It had a functional word processor and desktop tools. And it allowed DOS applications to run under it pretty smoothly...I remember using the symbolic math program Derive under DOS and then writing up the results in the word processor. It was significantly better than Microsoft's (or even Apple's) offerings at the time. Too bad it didn't catch on.
IANAL either, but it strikes me as odd that any lawyer can purport to represent me in some legal affair without some consent from me. Pursuing legal actions on my behalf without my issuing of power of attorney is, in fact, illegal. I have to sign over power of attorney to my accountant to have him interact with the IRS on my behalf. How is this any different?
I agree completely. I think, as a group, we should OBJECT to the terms of the settlement because as the aggrieved parties, we were never in anyway contacted by the attorneys in question, never gave implicit or explicit permission for them to represent us, and are currently sharing none of the windfall. Some lawyer among us should draft and official response that we can all cut and paste. Ten or twenty objections will be blown off. Ten or Twenty thousand will not.
Google has their fingers in a lot of pies, I know. But please pull resources from this crap and get some truly useful things workings, like the ability to import an existing phone number into Google Voice! That has been "on the way" for 18 months, and many many people will jump to use it. As it sits now, my GV number is unused and that makes GV mostly unused. If I could put my home/business numbers on GV, usage (and potential data for mining) will skyrocket for me and for a lot of other people disaffected by crappy phone companies. Imagine transparently picking up incoming calls to your REAL NUMBERS via VOIP, cell, or landline and swapping out destination phone with a few clicks on the setup page rather than enduring the porting process for the n-th time.
1 Gb is 1 gigaBIT. 2 GB is 2 gigaBYTES. So, to make 2 GBs, you need 16 of those $2 chips, not two. So, ~$32 for 2 GB of RAM, just for the chips. 2 GB DIMMs/SoDIMMs are in $35-$40 range on the site you posted.
If you want to roll you own, use XBMC on an Acer Aspire Revo R1600 ($200). It uses the Nvidia ION LE chipset that supports h264 offloading. I would use these myself, but I already have three Popcorn Hours.
PCHs are nice, quiet, and cheap, but the UI is awful. It will require some tinkering to make nice. YAMJ is your friend (Yet Another Movie Jukebox).
Everyone packing up and moving their mobile homes. Yeah, that would be an interesting traffic jam a few hours ahead of the wildfire.
I've had a geothermal heatpump for almost 10 years. My parents for even longer. They are great, especially in harsh heating climates. We live near Pittsburgh, and they have proved quite affordable. Local contractors have really just started installing them...I had to really look around to find an installer. Most HVAC guys don't want to have to mess with a well-drilling sub and a maybe a backhoe sub to trench from the wells to the house. It is a lot more work, compared to an air-source unit...and far messier! Install an air-source unit, you will get a few holes in your foundation for coolant lines and power to the compressor unit...and then the normal ductwork, air handler inside and the air-source unit sitting outside on a drop-down concrete pad. If the ductwork is in place, it is a 1-2 day job.
With geothermal, (if it is done right) you will have a dozen or more holes in your foundation for the in/out of the loops from each well into a manifold in the basement. You WANT that manifold in case one of the wells dies. You will have trenches from the foundation to the wells...and the wells need to be 10-15 feet apart, so some significant part of your yard will look like hell. Mine took about two weeks to complete because the well driller broke down on the fourth well. And the backhoe operator came *this* close to putting the bucket through my foundation wall. It is a monstrous headache to do a retrofit install, but for new construction, it would be a bit easier. In any case, the cost for the loop install can be a back-breaker. The geothermal units themselves are IMO overpriced too, due to lower production volumes.
Capacity would be measured in kW or MW, not in kWh. Capacity is the amount of power that can be produced by the facility at any given time, not the total amount of energy that the facility could produce over its lifetime. Whatever the case, the numbers make no sense as listed in the OP.
I am a proponent of insulation and building a house from scratch make it possible. In fact, I'd argue FOR double framing walls with 2x4s outside and 2x3s inside with an insulation (and wiring and plumbing) gap, rather than framing with 2x6 (to code). If you stagger them, you can avoid the thermal bridging in the wall studs.
But I still insist that the doors and windows are more expensive and persistent problem, both thermally and economically. Maybe that R50/inch foam will fix the door issue. But the window problem is still there, unless you live in a cave.
And I think you will see that earth berming will help more than any of the insulation options you've mentioned. The proper goal for future housing should be figuring out how to get light and open feeling architecture that works with earth berming and working out cheap efficient dehumidification.
I disagree. Nothing said it has to be permanent. The "tarp" solution could be nothing more than a large scale version of the Sunsetter. Just reel it in when the weather sets in. The ROI for that could be quite good, especially if roof and wall insulation is not easy to improve.
Yes, I am doing wind load study. It is all about the shape. Check out the tensile roof at the Denver airport...and that is designed for wind load and snow load. It is certainly possible to build such a thing.
My pet design projects is an earth-bermed house with a very large "courtyard" that is covered with a tensile roof, likely two layers with a sandwich of R30 between and southfacing opening covered with greenhouse glazing. So, in the summer, the white canvas will reduce the radiative load, the R30 and the thermal mass of the ground will moderate the temperature year round...maybe 40-50s in winter...70-80s in the summer. Then only space condition the earth-bermed rooms around the periphery. I can design it and make sure it works...I can add a few "earth tubes" if I need additional temperature moderation. And with steel wire and proper shaping, I can make sure it holds up. The big task will be getting a building inspector to sign off on it. Of course, I've already convinced my wife that should could garden year-round (in PA) if I built it. So maybe the hard work *is* done.
Your argument is bogus. R30 fiberglass bats are 9 1/2 inches thick. Are you saying to frame the walls with 2x10s. You know the cost of dimensional lumber increases geometrically with dimension, right. Or do you stagger frame with 2x6s...basically build each wall twice and double your labor costs?
What about existing structures? Because the US market has enough backlog of existing structures. Do you build another layer of insulation INSIDE the house and lose a foot of floorspace near each exterior wall..and then pay to reframe, drywall, move out electrical outlets, etc? Or do you reframe the exterior of the house and then cover and weatherize your new outside envelope?
In either case, what about windows and doors? You do know that heat will gladly take a parallel path. Third-year ME heat transfer class...remember the resistor analogy? You can make the walls R300 and the heat will still get in (out) through "holes in the bucket." Have you priced super high R glazing options? Do you want a 8" thick front door? Even in the walls themselves, you have to worry about thermal bridging through the wood studs...all these would be problems even with some crazy aerogel insulation that is R50/inch.
The building standard is what it is for a reason. It is an engineering trade-off between cost and performance. R30 in the ceiling and either 2x6 walls with R18 or 2x4 walls with R11-12...and maybe a dense insulation board on the outside before siding is installed. Double pane insulated glass windows. Now those trade-offs were in considered with energy and HVAC hardware costs at a certainly level. And more insulation is good but only to the point. The insulation costs goes well beyond the price of the insulation bat, and a point exists where adding more makes no financial sense. If you *insist* on having windows and doors, it doesn't make engineering sense anymore either. Your recommendation is well past that and smacks of niavete. Build or remodel a house or two (especially using your OWN MONEY) and then get back to me. A home built to your bogus specifications would cost four or five times more. I doubt you could find someone to build it for you.
If you want to look into green houses, then look into earth bearmed homes, rammed earth homes...building underground, using lots and lots of earth as thermal insulation and thermal mass. Folks have been doing this since the 70s and there are books that give some good overviews. I'd like to see the building codes revised to make it easier to build some of these different "hippie" houses.
And in sunny climates, I think the best ROI would be a 100x100 white canvas tarp and support structure to shade your entire house. I'm surprised no one does that. That would effectively remove the direct radiation load from the cooling...which is significant...just ask your barefeet after a walk across sunlit asphalt.
It is a question of stages. The timescale that need to be designed for initially are based on the engine size divided by gas flow speed. That is maybe 10s of microseconds. The next timescale may have to do with longer scale oscillations in the engine structure...that is probably on the order of 1 - 100 milliseconds (10-1000 Hz). After that, you need to start worrying about heat...things melting, expanding, coating eroding...those are probably 1-100 seconds.
The smallest timescales are the hardest to fix, because they are harder to identify and control. When it comes to cooling, etc...these are easy to fix by comparison. At least in terms of making the thing function. I can't think of anything that would have a timescale on the order of seconds...unless it is a pump failure or other supporting device. I'd bet that if it would run for 200 seconds, it would probably run for much longer. It leads me to believe that they have most of the kinks worked out and can start work on developing products instead of the technology.
Ditto on the Norco. I used two Supermicro 8-port SATA PCI-X cards in a fairly cheap server motherboard (with PCI-X slots). I also use a few on-board SATA ports...one for boot and four for the other 4 bays. I think the case, PS, mobo, RAM, CPU, small boot SSD, and controllers was under $1k. And then 20 1TB WD Greens for about another $2k...this was 18 months ago. I can't be happier with the setup running Linux software RAID6.
PXE is nice if you have an entire cluster to build. We use it and it can be great to get a disk image installed on a new cluster. But honestly, I've only seen two cases were PXE really works...small "toy" setups where somebody boots this system on the left side of the desk from an PXE/TFTP/NFS server on the right side of the desk. Or using it to clone/install large blocks of systems. (That is how ROCKS works.) But I don't know of anyone using PXE to boot a significant number of systems...workstations or cluster nodes.
Instead, I just installed OpenSUSE 11.2 to a 4GB flash drive. It worked perfectly. This is not a LiveCD or something like Slax that uses filesystem trickery to maintain a persistent system image. This is vanilla OpenSUSE installed to the flash just like a HDD or SSD. It recognized it as /dev/sda and installed. Of course, I didn't allow any swap space. For fun, I then reinstalled the system using two 4GB flash drives and created a raid0 for /. It also worked great and significantly faster than the single. So for $10 per system, you can boot from a flash drive locally...and then mount your user files from a NFS server. That is exactly what I'm doing. For future clusters that don't require scratch space, we might starting using a few internally mounted flash drives instead. All those drives need to do is handle bootup...most of the commonly used files come from NFS or would be cached in RAM.
That is exactly the approach I am considering. Slax with nxclient installed will fit the bill nicely. The problem with implementing it is 10% technical and 90% political.
I second this. We have a secured LAN with several large Linux clusters and a few dozen workstations, also mostly Linux. Some of the users have been issued laptops running Windows (over our objection). We secured them and regularly update antivirus and firewall software, but since the users needs admin access (over our objections), they still carry viruses and other malware on site. It is not a constant problem, but it is a persistent one. We were considering building a DMZ for all laptop users to limit the amount of damage an infected system can do to the rest of the LAN.
Honestly, there is no way to allow personal systems on to the LAN without this sort of thing being a problem. For every cautious careful user like yourself, there are a dozen clueless ones. The same goes too for remote access. Without a remote client that is properly secured, no amount of encryption/VPN/SSL is going to keep the on-site information safe. It is inconvenient but true.
Did you even visit the site?
Both Avast and AVG are on that site. Using there installer avoids all of the searching through six layers of pages, and it avoids all of the crapware. And you can bundle installers for multiple apps into one file. Quick and easy. You may be able to make an installer and mail it to your relatives and have them run it. I don't know though as I haven't tried it.