I know you said 50" plus, but you might want to check out Westinghouse brand LCDs. They are absolutely amazing value for money. The top of the line is currently a 47" LCD panel, but they are rumored to be adding a 56" some time this year. I just picked one up and it's great - plenty bright enough even in a daylit room, good anti-glare coating on it. And best of all it's 1080P, which if you're using a PC or Mac to drive it means you get a really crisp and clear picture at a reasonable resolution!
They're relatively cheap too. Westinghouse is trying to establish itself and make a name in the consumer electronics market so they are consistently selling way under their competition. You might want to check out the AVS Forum on the topic. If you like what you see, you can pick it up from Crutchfield (30 day satisfaction guarantee and free shipping included) for $2499.
You might like to consider Stripes as the web framework for the course. One individual recently switched to using it to teach a masters level course in Java web development (at a university in Nice, France).
On the plus side it:
- Has comprehensive and easy to follow documentation
- Is much simpler to grasp for new developers than Struts, JSF etc.
- Is more OO than most MVC web frameworks, without forcing a component model on you
- Doesn't require gobs of XML (or other) configuration
The only problem I could forsee with a Oracle 8i on Linux solution is that x86 boxes don't scale very well. And the best way to scale your database is on one big box (or a pair of redundant boxes). As such, a Sun box like a 4500 or 6500 will grow (14+ cpus, 4Gb memory =) much more easily if the database is used intensively (sucking more CPU than the machine can handle). With Intel, isn't the limit still 4CPU for the latest generation? Scaling Oracle across multiple machines is usually *very* painful. What size box is the database running on now?
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I know you said 50" plus, but you might want to check out Westinghouse brand LCDs. They are absolutely amazing value for money. The top of the line is currently a 47" LCD panel, but they are rumored to be adding a 56" some time this year. I just picked one up and it's great - plenty bright enough even in a daylit room, good anti-glare coating on it. And best of all it's 1080P, which if you're using a PC or Mac to drive it means you get a really crisp and clear picture at a reasonable resolution!
They're relatively cheap too. Westinghouse is trying to establish itself and make a name in the consumer electronics market so they are consistently selling way under their competition. You might want to check out the AVS Forum on the topic. If you like what you see, you can pick it up from Crutchfield (30 day satisfaction guarantee and free shipping included) for $2499.
You might like to consider Stripes as the web framework for the course. One individual recently switched to using it to teach a masters level course in Java web development (at a university in Nice, France).
On the plus side it:
- Has comprehensive and easy to follow documentation
- Is much simpler to grasp for new developers than Struts, JSF etc.
- Is more OO than most MVC web frameworks, without forcing a component model on you
- Doesn't require gobs of XML (or other) configuration
The only problem I could forsee with a Oracle 8i on Linux solution is that x86 boxes don't scale very well. And the best way to scale your database is on one big box (or a pair of redundant boxes). As such, a Sun box like a 4500 or 6500 will grow (14+ cpus, 4Gb memory =) much more easily if the database is used intensively (sucking more CPU than the machine can handle). With Intel, isn't the limit still 4CPU for the latest generation? Scaling Oracle across multiple machines is usually *very* painful. What size box is the database running on now?