Well, the first thing I'd say is 'Don't make is compulary'.
My ISP (BT Internet) offers a program for download called 'BT Internet Dialer'. I don't use it because I can use a normal Dial-up networking connection. The dialer wouldn't offer any benefit, but it likely would pull some crap like opening a browser window for the ISP's portal when I dial up with it.
As a guide, don't make it:
Compulsary - power users will be annoyed if thier auto-redialing downloading programs stop working, or if they have to use Windows.
Large - if it's big, it will take time to download, and to update (when that is demanded). This just annoys people.
Slow to load - If to dial up you have to run a program that takes a long time to load, it will annoy people.
Incompatible - Don't only publist a Windows version, if it is compulsary. Make sure you have Mac support too.
Ugly - Don't make it a big, red and yellow comic-book-like screen because that's the ISP's colours.
Annoying - If you are instructed to make the program automatically open a web browser to a certain page, or anything like that, put an option in to turn the feature off.
The project manager called me one day out of nowhere to ask where my progress was... I started giving him percentage estimates based on feature completeness, structure completeness, etc.
So then he asks "how many lines of code do you have?"
You should of told him that just today you Enhanced Shareholder Value by rearranging your equations, converting this:
Foo:= sqrt((1/3)*(x+5))
to this:
Foo:= X + 5 Foo:= 0.333333 * Foo Foo:= sqrt(Foo)
This lead to a threefold increase in lines of code, whilst making the program clearer and easier to maintain.
Tomorrow, you should say, I plan to modify all our string-processing code to work only in the flexible and intuitive EBCDIC instead of the ASCII which we already have libraries for. Liberal use of copy and paste could lead to a 65% increase in lines of code.
I've seen (and tried) lots of peltier combinations, cases in mini-fridges, etc. ... I've cooled systems to about 30F(ambient about 70F) and fried an AMD 'cuz its pins were soaked in water.
Presumably you did this for fun. If you want a hack to get you on slashdot but don't care about practicality, you could probably get something like this working properly.
If you go to a scuba diving shop, they sell compressed oxygen with the water removed. This is because the pipes and fittings are made of rubber, and if there was water in the air, it would make them rot.
Take your bottle of air home with you, and put it beside your fridge. Get an airtight box to put your PC in, and connect it to the compressed air. Ideally, you want a fractionally higher pressure than the outside atmosphere, so if there are any leaks, air will leak out not in.
Put the whole contraption in your fridge, and set it running. The lack of water in the air around the computer should prevent condensation, allowing you to achieve lower temperatures more easily.
every student in the class, you have to check his code against everyone else's.
Maybe not.
You could create a numerical checksum that summarised the program's function, comparing the number of steps, etc. etc.
This initial checking program could make a file with the number of lines equal to the number of checksum results. If you get the checksum 12345, your filename gets put in line 12345.
All collisions could be written to another file for further analysis. Results that are very similar could also easily be flagged.
This would be a linear-complexity problem (Depending, of course, on the checksumming technique's run-time). It would also allow highly parallel processing, so you could have distributed computing by all the university's computers (Connecting to a central server to get files and post results).
To make you drool, think Athlon XP with GeForce 3 Ti500 with the stability of Linux.
That will be useful! The $300 graphics card will be ideal for all the 3D-intensive games that are only availiable for Windows!
Michael
Re:Coming from a store owner...
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
Hey,
There's a widespread assumption in the UK, and most widespread among the Euroskeptics, that we are unequivocally better than everyone else and that their ways of doing things are worse.
That's because most 'common sense good' laws have been established by government, and hence most of what we hear of getting from europe are 'non-common-sense good' laws and 'non-good' laws.
Nobody hears from the tabloid press that 'The European Parliment has done [useful thing]'. We only get stories about people being threatened with legal action because they price thier apples by the pound, or because they sell wood measured in feet and inches.
Furthermore, The Euro has a bloody awful name. It strikes anyone that hears it as boring and unimaginitive. I mean... 'Euro'? What the fuck?
Your average Joe in the street doesn't know economics - it's not a compulsary course in schools, and not many people where I went chose to pick it up at GCSE. Resultantly, people are not aware of the numerous economic benefits. They are far more easily persuaded by flag-waving and jingoistic "There'll always be an England" attitudes.
Should we adopt the Euro? Probably. Should we be part of a 'European Super-state'? Perhaps not.
Normally I would favour a referendum on questions like the former, but sadly, I don't think that 'the man on the street' is educated enough to be objective. I think the general population should be educated in Economics, enough that they can see all sides of the Euro argument.
On the whole, though, I think the Euro could be a fairly good thing.
a) Obtain an entire building for use for several months
They would only have needed to aim lights at the front windows... thehy wouldn't need the building, just to point lights at the windows.
b) Were allowed to paint 144 windows
Around christmas, stores stock that spray-on snow, which is consistent and white, but which cleans off. It wouldn't be too hard to get hold of some, I'm sure...
c) Get the money to pay for bandwidth and electricity (somebody is paying it!)
From the site: "Use your mobile phone to play the arcade classic Pong right on the house. Just dial the number 0190-987654 (DM 2.42/min)". It's the same rate for love messages.
d) Do all of this inside of four weeks
The electronics would be fairly simple... just repetitive. Good software would be harder, but the CCC have pleanty of capable programmers.
Honestly, I don't think the fault rests on these kids at all.
A quick article reference:
Once inside a user's system, it [Goner] deletes anti-virus and firewall programs, then installs scripts to allow hackers to access the computer and use it as a platform for denial-of-service attacks.
This was not a blameless accident. It wasn't a mistake, that wasn't meant to be released. It was a specially written virus designed to build a 5cr1p7 k1d33 DDOS network.
I don't think they planned to sit around with thier massive DDOS network, not doing anything. Furthermore, they certainly knew what trouble the worm could cause - there is ample precedent for this.
We won't deter future virus writers with a slap on the wrist. They need to be given a sentance that others will look at and say 'I wouldn't want that to happen to me'.
They shouldn't be given a 5-year sentancem granted. I would think that a $5,000 fine and confiscation of thier computer equiptment would to fine. But we can't say 'Blame the users; they aren't following procedure', because if it weren't for script kiddie virus writers, there would be no need for virus-stopping procedures at all.
Oh yes, heaven forbid that the user starts to pay for what they use.
Dude... you want to check your facts by laying on the sarcasm there. Look at this line:
I've never paid to receive an SMS, and I don't wish to start now.
When you send a text message, it starts at one customer's phone, then goes to the provider, then to the recipient's phone. What the poster reffers to is when the recipient uses a different provider - the message goes from sender to provider to other provider to recipient.
In the first example, the provider charges for handling the message. But what happens if both providers want to charge?
The poster comments that it would suck if the sender's provider charged the sender and the recipient's provider charged the recipient, since if you were the recipient, you would have to pay for other people sending you messages.
I may just be a wierdo for thinking so, but a big advantage of the digital device would be the ability to incorporate it into some "instant room theming" system.
Yeah. You could have a touchscreen inside your front door, so if you bring a girl home, all your porn posters are replaced by tastful modern art. That'd be useful.
Well, it would be useful if any/.ers ever had girls visiting thier homes.
On a serious note, It'd be cool if you could hack your picture frames to show streaming media (some use Linux and ethernet, no?) then you could have a TV input card on a computer, and if you went to the kitchen to get a snack, you wouldn't have to miss the program.
The price is $.50 per megabyte of email processed. This charge is asessed when a) the email is received at your SpamCop account or b) when you paste email into SpamCop's reporting form and hit "parse."
Most e-mail is checked by some filters, then forwarded to your 'real' e-mail account. Also, on the members' page, there's information on a new system that's planned:
This system is currently beta, but we will be moving to full availability quickly. We are currently soliciting beta testers. Probably the most significant change is that the new system will have unlimited use for $3/month ($36/year). People who use SpamCop only for reporting spam will not notice a change.
The new system has been totally redesigned to be easier to use and more reliable than ever. Received email is delivered into one of two folders, either your Inbox or your Held Mail folder. A full webmail system is available to view these folders, as well as others you create. With an addressbook, filters, and email sending capability, the webmail sysetm is all you need to do email. If you prefer, though, you can use your existing email program and read your mail using IMAP or POP protocols, just like most mail servers.
The main benefit of an '@spamcop.net' e-mail address is, however, that most e-mail addresses with 'spam' in thier names are filtered by spammers, assuming they are munged.
This means I can give out my e-mail (michaeltandy@spamcop.net) in web forums and such places, and nobody sends me any spam.
I think it's worth the cost, which is very reasonable.
Bindview, Foundstone, Guardent, @Stake, and Internet Security Systems joined with the software-maker to declare they would immediately begin
Wasn't @stake formed from hacker group l0pht? Yes, I think they were! They used to attend Def Con, and work on Back Orifice and L0phtCrack?? Didn't they get banned from BugTraq because they posted links to thier site in the place of good, solid descriptions?
I have a hotmail account that I had not logged into for over 6 months. On a lark, I tried to login to it, and guess what, it still worked.
I once wanted to delete an account... support said I could either (a) wait a year without loging in or (b) send details (i.e. estimated creation date) to them, and they would delete it.
Anyone know the size limit for attachments that they will accept?
On an outgoing mail, no more than 1Mb. I think your total storage space for incoming mail is around 5Mb. It's certainly finite.
Ok, say you have 1000+ cameras emitting 30 frames/second worth of 640x480 grayscale video...and you have to store it indefinitely. What do you do?
You cut down on data. First of all, you don't want 30fps. PAL video is 25fps; You don't need that sort of quality. 15fps would be more than enough, probably even less.
Second, you don't record stuff that doesn't change. You need a codec that supports 'Map identical pixels to transparent'. That way, only changed data need be recorded, cutting down on file size substantially.
Thirdly, you delete all-identical frames. For all-still areas like stairwells, this will cut right down on files.
Fourth, use a good CODEC. With greyscale and not too much data to store, you can get VERY small files.
With all these measures, you won't need as much storage space as you estimate. It would be variable though; high-activity areas with all-day traffic would still produce a lot of data. I'll assume it'll output 30 kilobytes per second, being on the pessimistic side.
To store all the resultant data, I'd use a two-tier system of PC computers. I note you havn't mentioned how you plan to digitise all this data, but that's out of the scope of this post.
Let's connect 10 cameras to each PC, and we'll have 100 PCs. 30KB/s times ten cameras is 300 kilobytes every second. That would be *easy* with Fibre Channel (2 Gbits/sec!!). 300kbps for an hour would be 1055MB/hour, about a gigabyte every hour. If we can get an IBM 73 Gig drive, that'll give us just over 3 days of storage per computer.
I'd have the computer accepting the telemetry, compressing it and writing it to the drive. Every 24 hours, we'll open a new file. Each computer connects by 100Mbps ethernet to another computer. Every day, this will copy down the 24GB file from the last day, and record it to a DAT tape. Say we get 120 Gigabyte tapes, that's a tape every five days, times 100 computers, that's 20 tapes per day.
After this, decide on a set archive time. Keep the tapes for, say, 5 years. You'll need a good indexing system and a warehouse for tape storage (You can get automated, robotic systems), but if you have 1000 cameras, I expect you have a fair budget.
Once you have seen enough "I hate your country" stickers, you start to care a little less about the "delicate sensibilities" of the illegal alien.
Some would say that saying 'I hate America' is free speech, just as saying 'I hate the American government' is free speech.
I mean, if the 'feds' can "take a non-citizen out of his I-hate-America-stickered car and sweat him for 7 days" for "Illigal posession of an un-American car window sticker", that makes expressing your disagreement with America as a whole rather difficult.
I'm not going to pretend I know everything. Hell, I don't. But I do know that reducing the civil liberties of US citizens in the search for 'safety' isn't going to prevent terrorism. It's simply going to reduce the civil liberties of US citizens.
Maybe that makes me a white racist nationalistic baby-killing seal-clubbing monster. I don't care anymore.
Some would say that if you 'don't care' about taking the time to form a well-considered opinion, whatever opinions you have are worthless.
First, what's the point of a watch whose battery life is measured in hours, as opposed to months?
Maybe they could make the watch start fast, and have a seperate clock chip. Every program that needs to do something calls a program that writes an 'on time' to the clock chip, and at that time, the chip is activated. Also, if you press any of the buttons, it is activated.
Then it would take less than the power of a normal watch, until it had to do something clever, when it could.
it really isn't very convenient to handle lots of buttons or operations
You are, of course, correct. But you could make a really cool watch by making it touchscreen, and improving the screen. If I could get an (admittedly large) watch with a 2" x 2" screen (Preferable with a nice blue backlight), then you could have an activation pen and handwriting recognition, and a nice clear readable display. Need to take a note down? Don't search around for paper and a pen - simply pull out the activation pen, hit the 'menu' on your watch, choose 'notepad' (or 'vi') and you can write directly onto the watch. That'd be cool.
It could bluetooth interact with your mobile phone, giving you a (somewhat) better screen for WAP browsing, and you could have handwriting recognition for text messages, and all sorts of things.
I think that would be cool.
Uh.. of course, it if the screen was tiny and the battery was awful, it would be silly. But it's only a development model, and it shows potential.
Still, it could go either way. But it could be very cool.
Isn't there a better way? A way that students can be taught to work as a team yet still be able to tell who is pulling their own weight and who is not?
You could put people into groups, and tell them to design code in a modular style.
That is, you could put people into groups of about five people, tell them the task, and get them to divide the task into modules themselves, documenting the modules and to whom they are assigned. You could then mark each module's functionality, and the program's functionality as a single unit.
For example, if you were designing a CGI script from scratch in Pascal, the group would divide the program into units, i.e. Get submitted data and parse into array, Convert hex-coded characters to characters and removing HTML metacharacters, designing output HTML and graphics, etc. etc. etc.
They'd need to work out interface specifications themselves, etc. but if someone didn't pull thier weight / produced bad code / whatever they could be held individually responsible, whilst still working in a team.
They could offer a 'Resume from other people' feature. Just have a 'start downloading at time x' function, convert the MP3s to waveforms, join the two files, and recompress. There are some nice algorithms out there to reduce lossage due to recompressing... I for one would really like such a feature.
Thinks like this wouldn't be easy, but they would be good.
Slashdot Mirror
My ISP (BT Internet) offers a program for download called 'BT Internet Dialer'. I don't use it because I can use a normal Dial-up networking connection. The dialer wouldn't offer any benefit, but it likely would pull some crap like opening a browser window for the ISP's portal when I dial up with it.
As a guide, don't make it:
And that's all I can think of, I'm afraid.
Michael
Hey,
:= sqrt((1/3)*(x+5))
:= X + 5 := 0.333333 * Foo := sqrt(Foo)
The project manager called me one day out of nowhere to ask where my progress was... I started giving him percentage estimates based on feature completeness, structure completeness, etc.
So then he asks "how many lines of code do you have?"
You should of told him that just today you Enhanced Shareholder Value by rearranging your equations, converting this:
Foo
to this:
Foo
Foo
Foo
This lead to a threefold increase in lines of code, whilst making the program clearer and easier to maintain.
Tomorrow, you should say, I plan to modify all our string-processing code to work only in the flexible and intuitive EBCDIC instead of the ASCII which we already have libraries for. Liberal use of copy and paste could lead to a 65% increase in lines of code.
Michael
Ever heard the expression 'buying a pig in a poke'?
Ever heard the expression "Hell hath no fury like a with a women with a collection of angry, aggressive ferrets"???
Evidently not...
-M
Hey,
I have to ask... what has North Korea and Russia been doing lately to deserve this?
And why isn't France on the list?...
(That was a joke, son.)
-M
Hey,
don't hold your breath for a Mars mission.
Unless it's from China.
Uh... I try to avoid holding my breath for an entire mission to mars even when it *is* from china.
-M
That argument is libertarian bullshit that's totally ignorant of history.
Right! America doesn't even have royalty.
Oh. Oh, I see...
Hey,
I've seen (and tried) lots of peltier combinations, cases in mini-fridges, etc.
...
I've cooled systems to about 30F(ambient about 70F) and fried an AMD 'cuz its pins were soaked in water.
Presumably you did this for fun. If you want a hack to get you on slashdot but don't care about practicality, you could probably get something like this working properly.
If you go to a scuba diving shop, they sell compressed oxygen with the water removed. This is because the pipes and fittings are made of rubber, and if there was water in the air, it would make them rot.
Take your bottle of air home with you, and put it beside your fridge. Get an airtight box to put your PC in, and connect it to the compressed air. Ideally, you want a fractionally higher pressure than the outside atmosphere, so if there are any leaks, air will leak out not in.
Put the whole contraption in your fridge, and set it running. The lack of water in the air around the computer should prevent condensation, allowing you to achieve lower temperatures more easily.
Michael
Hey,
every student in the class, you have to check his code against everyone else's.
Maybe not.
You could create a numerical checksum that summarised the program's function, comparing the number of steps, etc. etc.
This initial checking program could make a file with the number of lines equal to the number of checksum results. If you get the checksum 12345, your filename gets put in line 12345.
All collisions could be written to another file for further analysis. Results that are very similar could also easily be flagged.
This would be a linear-complexity problem (Depending, of course, on the checksumming technique's run-time). It would also allow highly parallel processing, so you could have distributed computing by all the university's computers (Connecting to a central server to get files and post results).
Just my $0.02
Michael
Hey,
To make you drool, think Athlon XP with GeForce 3 Ti500 with the stability of Linux.
That will be useful! The $300 graphics card will be ideal for all the 3D-intensive games that are only availiable for Windows!
Michael
Hey,
There's a widespread assumption in the UK, and most widespread among the Euroskeptics, that we are unequivocally better than everyone else and that their ways of doing things are worse.
That's because most 'common sense good' laws have been established by government, and hence most of what we hear of getting from europe are 'non-common-sense good' laws and 'non-good' laws.
Nobody hears from the tabloid press that 'The European Parliment has done [useful thing]'. We only get stories about people being threatened with legal action because they price thier apples by the pound, or because they sell wood measured in feet and inches.
Furthermore, The Euro has a bloody awful name. It strikes anyone that hears it as boring and unimaginitive. I mean... 'Euro'? What the fuck?
Your average Joe in the street doesn't know economics - it's not a compulsary course in schools, and not many people where I went chose to pick it up at GCSE. Resultantly, people are not aware of the numerous economic benefits. They are far more easily persuaded by flag-waving and jingoistic "There'll always be an England" attitudes.
Should we adopt the Euro? Probably. Should we be part of a 'European Super-state'? Perhaps not.
Normally I would favour a referendum on questions like the former, but sadly, I don't think that 'the man on the street' is educated enough to be objective. I think the general population should be educated in Economics, enough that they can see all sides of the Euro argument.
On the whole, though, I think the Euro could be a fairly good thing.
Michael
Hey,
a) Obtain an entire building for use for several months
They would only have needed to aim lights at the front windows... thehy wouldn't need the building, just to point lights at the windows.
b) Were allowed to paint 144 windows
Around christmas, stores stock that spray-on snow, which is consistent and white, but which cleans off. It wouldn't be too hard to get hold of some, I'm sure...
c) Get the money to pay for bandwidth and electricity (somebody is paying it!)
From the site: "Use your mobile phone to play the arcade classic Pong right on the house. Just dial the number 0190-987654 (DM 2.42/min)". It's the same rate for love messages.
d) Do all of this inside of four weeks
The electronics would be fairly simple... just repetitive. Good software would be harder, but the CCC have pleanty of capable programmers.
Michael
Hey,
Honestly, I don't think the fault rests on these kids at all.
A quick article reference:
Once inside a user's system, it [Goner] deletes anti-virus and firewall programs, then installs scripts to allow hackers to access the computer and use it as a platform for denial-of-service attacks.
This was not a blameless accident. It wasn't a mistake, that wasn't meant to be released. It was a specially written virus designed to build a 5cr1p7 k1d33 DDOS network.
I don't think they planned to sit around with thier massive DDOS network, not doing anything. Furthermore, they certainly knew what trouble the worm could cause - there is ample precedent for this.
We won't deter future virus writers with a slap on the wrist. They need to be given a sentance that others will look at and say 'I wouldn't want that to happen to me'.
They shouldn't be given a 5-year sentancem granted. I would think that a $5,000 fine and confiscation of thier computer equiptment would to fine. But we can't say 'Blame the users; they aren't following procedure', because if it weren't for script kiddie virus writers, there would be no need for virus-stopping procedures at all.
That's my opinion, anyway.
Michael
Hey,
Oh yes, heaven forbid that the user starts to pay for what they use.
Dude... you want to check your facts by laying on the sarcasm there. Look at this line:
I've never paid to receive an SMS, and I don't wish to start now.
When you send a text message, it starts at one customer's phone, then goes to the provider, then to the recipient's phone. What the poster reffers to is when the recipient uses a different provider - the message goes from sender to provider to other provider to recipient.
In the first example, the provider charges for handling the message. But what happens if both providers want to charge?
The poster comments that it would suck if the sender's provider charged the sender and the recipient's provider charged the recipient, since if you were the recipient, you would have to pay for other people sending you messages.
It would suck.
Michael
Hey,
Or a pinball machine. The best god-damn disposable income purchase I ever made.
If anyone is looking to buy one, you can learn at MIT's pinball page.
Or you could check ebay.
Michael
Hey,
IF we get in the habit or scrounging up every bit of good minerals/power from everywhere near us, we will leave a trail of trash wherever we go.
We could be like locusts. We'd go from planet to planet, consuming every natural resouce and moving on.
Kinda like the aliens in Independence Day.
Oh, except maybe with less destroying civilisations.
Michael
Hey,
/.ers ever had girls visiting thier homes.
I may just be a wierdo for thinking so, but a big advantage of the digital device would be the ability to incorporate it into some "instant room theming" system.
Yeah. You could have a touchscreen inside your front door, so if you bring a girl home, all your porn posters are replaced by tastful modern art. That'd be useful.
Well, it would be useful if any
On a serious note, It'd be cool if you could hack your picture frames to show streaming media (some use Linux and ethernet, no?) then you could have a TV input card on a computer, and if you went to the kitchen to get a snack, you wouldn't have to miss the program.
Michael
Hey,
Offers both FREE reporting, and advanced "you pay for it" filtering (which I think is based upon volume -- but still very cheap).
From the SpamCop FAQ:
The price is $.50 per megabyte of email processed. This charge is asessed when a) the email is received at your SpamCop account or b) when you paste email into SpamCop's reporting form and hit "parse."
Most e-mail is checked by some filters, then forwarded to your 'real' e-mail account. Also, on the members' page, there's information on a new system that's planned:
This system is currently beta, but we will be moving to full availability quickly. We are currently soliciting beta testers. Probably the most significant change is that the new system will have unlimited use for $3/month ($36/year). People who use SpamCop only for reporting spam will not notice a change.
And from the information page:
The new system has been totally redesigned to be easier to use and more reliable than ever. Received email is delivered into one of two folders, either your Inbox or your Held Mail folder. A full webmail system is available to view these folders, as well as others you create. With an addressbook, filters, and email sending capability, the webmail sysetm is all you need to do email. If you prefer, though, you can use your existing email program and read your mail using IMAP or POP protocols, just like most mail servers.
The main benefit of an '@spamcop.net' e-mail address is, however, that most e-mail addresses with 'spam' in thier names are filtered by spammers, assuming they are munged.
This means I can give out my e-mail (michaeltandy@spamcop.net) in web forums and such places, and nobody sends me any spam.
I think it's worth the cost, which is very reasonable.
Michael
Link you can click
Hey,
Bindview, Foundstone, Guardent, @Stake, and Internet Security Systems joined with the software-maker to declare they would immediately begin
Wasn't @stake formed from hacker group l0pht? Yes, I think they were! They used to attend Def Con, and work on Back Orifice and L0phtCrack?? Didn't they get banned from BugTraq because they posted links to thier site in the place of good, solid descriptions?
My, how times change.
-M
Hey,
Or "maybe some crazy terrorist has nuclear weapons and he's going to blow up planet Earth". Yep, could very well be.
Actually, I plan to steal a Nuclear Bomb from NATO and demand a ransom of ONE MILLION DOLLARS or I will destroy a major american city.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!
-M
Hey,
I have a hotmail account that I had not logged into for over 6 months. On a lark, I tried to login to it, and guess what, it still worked.
I once wanted to delete an account... support said I could either (a) wait a year without loging in or (b) send details (i.e. estimated creation date) to them, and they would delete it.
Anyone know the size limit for attachments that they will accept?
On an outgoing mail, no more than 1Mb. I think your total storage space for incoming mail is around 5Mb. It's certainly finite.
Michael
Hey,
Ok, say you have 1000+ cameras emitting 30 frames/second worth of 640x480 grayscale video...and you have to store it indefinitely. What do you do?
You cut down on data. First of all, you don't want 30fps. PAL video is 25fps; You don't need that sort of quality. 15fps would be more than enough, probably even less.
Second, you don't record stuff that doesn't change. You need a codec that supports 'Map identical pixels to transparent'. That way, only changed data need be recorded, cutting down on file size substantially.
Thirdly, you delete all-identical frames. For all-still areas like stairwells, this will cut right down on files.
Fourth, use a good CODEC. With greyscale and not too much data to store, you can get VERY small files.
With all these measures, you won't need as much storage space as you estimate. It would be variable though; high-activity areas with all-day traffic would still produce a lot of data. I'll assume it'll output 30 kilobytes per second, being on the pessimistic side.
To store all the resultant data, I'd use a two-tier system of PC computers. I note you havn't mentioned how you plan to digitise all this data, but that's out of the scope of this post.
Let's connect 10 cameras to each PC, and we'll have 100 PCs. 30KB/s times ten cameras is 300 kilobytes every second. That would be *easy* with Fibre Channel (2 Gbits/sec!!). 300kbps for an hour would be 1055MB/hour, about a gigabyte every hour. If we can get an IBM 73 Gig drive, that'll give us just over 3 days of storage per computer.
I'd have the computer accepting the telemetry, compressing it and writing it to the drive. Every 24 hours, we'll open a new file. Each computer connects by 100Mbps ethernet to another computer. Every day, this will copy down the 24GB file from the last day, and record it to a DAT tape. Say we get 120 Gigabyte tapes, that's a tape every five days, times 100 computers, that's 20 tapes per day.
After this, decide on a set archive time. Keep the tapes for, say, 5 years. You'll need a good indexing system and a warehouse for tape storage (You can get automated, robotic systems), but if you have 1000 cameras, I expect you have a fair budget.
That's what I'd do, anyway.
Michael
Hey,
Once you have seen enough "I hate your country" stickers, you start to care a little less about the "delicate sensibilities" of the illegal alien.
Some would say that saying 'I hate America' is free speech, just as saying 'I hate the American government' is free speech.
I mean, if the 'feds' can "take a non-citizen out of his I-hate-America-stickered car and sweat him for 7 days" for "Illigal posession of an un-American car window sticker", that makes expressing your disagreement with America as a whole rather difficult.
I'm not going to pretend I know everything. Hell, I don't. But I do know that reducing the civil liberties of US citizens in the search for 'safety' isn't going to prevent terrorism. It's simply going to reduce the civil liberties of US citizens.
Maybe that makes me a white racist nationalistic baby-killing seal-clubbing monster. I don't care anymore.
Some would say that if you 'don't care' about taking the time to form a well-considered opinion, whatever opinions you have are worthless.
Michael
Hey,
First, what's the point of a watch whose battery life is measured in hours, as opposed to months?
Maybe they could make the watch start fast, and have a seperate clock chip. Every program that needs to do something calls a program that writes an 'on time' to the clock chip, and at that time, the chip is activated. Also, if you press any of the buttons, it is activated.
Then it would take less than the power of a normal watch, until it had to do something clever, when it could.
it really isn't very convenient to handle lots of buttons or operations
You are, of course, correct. But you could make a really cool watch by making it touchscreen, and improving the screen. If I could get an (admittedly large) watch with a 2" x 2" screen (Preferable with a nice blue backlight), then you could have an activation pen and handwriting recognition, and a nice clear readable display. Need to take a note down? Don't search around for paper and a pen - simply pull out the activation pen, hit the 'menu' on your watch, choose 'notepad' (or 'vi') and you can write directly onto the watch. That'd be cool.
It could bluetooth interact with your mobile phone, giving you a (somewhat) better screen for WAP browsing, and you could have handwriting recognition for text messages, and all sorts of things.
I think that would be cool.
Uh.. of course, it if the screen was tiny and the battery was awful, it would be silly. But it's only a development model, and it shows potential.
Still, it could go either way. But it could be very cool.
Michael
Hey,
Isn't there a better way? A way that students can be taught to work as a team yet still be able to tell who is pulling their own weight and who is not?
You could put people into groups, and tell them to design code in a modular style.
That is, you could put people into groups of about five people, tell them the task, and get them to divide the task into modules themselves, documenting the modules and to whom they are assigned. You could then mark each module's functionality, and the program's functionality as a single unit.
For example, if you were designing a CGI script from scratch in Pascal, the group would divide the program into units, i.e. Get submitted data and parse into array, Convert hex-coded characters to characters and removing HTML metacharacters, designing output HTML and graphics, etc. etc. etc.
They'd need to work out interface specifications themselves, etc. but if someone didn't pull thier weight / produced bad code / whatever they could be held individually responsible, whilst still working in a team.
Just my $0.02
Michael
Hey,
some kind of value-added service
They could offer a 'Resume from other people' feature. Just have a 'start downloading at time x' function, convert the MP3s to waveforms, join the two files, and recompress. There are some nice algorithms out there to reduce lossage due to recompressing... I for one would really like such a feature.
Thinks like this wouldn't be easy, but they would be good.
Michael