My experience is much the same as yours: The folks on the phone don't know their dick from a screwdriver, but the local guys (especially the local boss-man) can be very competent with excellent attention to detail and who refuse to ever give up on solving a problem.
It's too bad that the brass at AT&T are so insistent stifling their service from the top down.
Why must the router and modem be a single bit of kit? Don't we have Ethernet to serve as a well-developed cross-connect?
What could possibly be gained from a suitably-new DOCSIS module in a Cisco 2800-series router (or, in my case, an impossibly-conformant VDSL module on aa Asus RT-N16) that cannot be accomplished with a provider-provided Ethernet-connected modem (whatever that is) and an Ethernet-connected router of my own choosing?
These Cisco 2800-series routers you speak of: They do have Ethernet, don't they? Is there magic within? Or is a local Ethernet connection taboo somehow, compared to having all physical interfaces present on one device?
It is IP, at least: Isn't it?
(If I'm worried about MITM attacks, I'll solve my quandaries in an end-to-end sort of way using well-known and secure methods. The medium, whether including a modem or carrier pigeon, does not matter.)
No. A Faraday cage need only be continuous, conductive, and with any holes that might exist being smaller than some known (if I could be bothered to look it up) fraction of a wavelength of the signal to be blocked.
Its primary function is to function as a short-circuit to RF fields, not a sink to ground (although grounding it certainly doesn't hurt).
Anecdotes from the real world: I used to have a Faraday bag for my work-provided GPS-tracking cell phone, and it worked fine. Modern wallets are sometimes function as Faraday shields, to prevent RF attacks on passports, NFC credit cards, and various other RFID wizardry that we sometimes carry on our person.
What say you if a quadcoper/"drone" had a cryptographically-secure mechanism to prevent it from flying above 500' AGL?
What if it had an active (and useful!) default LIDAR/RADAR/SONAR looking at the ground to enforce this, with complementary GPS?
Might that be OK from the non-licensed aviator perspective?
Might it be worse, from the FOSS perspective?
(and for the inevitable slippery slope argument: I'll volunteer to watch the watchers. All of them, no matter what they are watching. Nobody has anything to fear.)
Around 2003, I worked at a photo lab. We had a good Ricoh color laser AIO, a couple of different kiosk dye-subs, and a well-maintained Fuji minilab ("mini" being a relative term; there was only one size bigger as a catalog item available from Fuji at that time).
In order of color, from best to worst:
1. Wet-process minilab on photographic paper from negatives. Because, srsly: Printing with light shone through a negative that itself was impressed by the very photons bouncing off of the subject is always fucking awesome, especially so if the operator is paying attention and the chemistry is good. We were the go-to place for proofs for local photographers because we had good results, despite them having other local (including "pro") options at the time. I made several million prints with this machine. 2. The HP inkjet that I had at home at the time, loaded with 6-color ink and expensive photo paper. I still have prints from this machine, and they're still awesome despite being cheaply framed and hung on a wall in a sunny room (though I've long since given up on printing photos at home). I made dozens of high-quality prints with this machine. 3. Dye-subs. We had a Sony and another brand; the Sony was consistently both better and slower than the other. Colors seemed variously muted or overblown, given the same settings on similar source material, in a way that still seems characteristically dye-sub. I made tens of thousands of prints with this machine (dye-sub only knows one quality level). 4. Ricoh laser. Not that it was bad for a color laser printer at the time - it's just in last place. I've only recently seen laser-printed photos that have better color, especially for colors that are both dark and saturated, than that Ricoh did back then. I've made hundreds of prints with this machine.
In terms of cost, cheapest to most expensive for materials:
1. Ricoh laser. Works good on cheap-ish paper, and user-refillable supplies make for cheap color prints. 2. Minilab, by far, was the cheapest of the rest. But then it was a high-volume machine that cost a (six-figure) fortune to buy, and an ongoing fortune to regularly maintain, and fortunes were lost when it would break and require parts, which also meant that fortunes were spent flying parts in from Japan on occasion. (We kept it pretty busy 15 or 16 hours a day.) 3. Dye-sub. The materials for those things were ludicrously expensive, the machines were fickle, and to this day I'm still quite certain that money was lost for every dye-sub print they made during my tenure there, without counting paid labor to tend to the silly things. 4. OMFG, supplies for that HP inkjet were expensive. I'm sure that every high-density, wait-forever-and-hope-that-some-dust-doesn't-settle-on-it-before-it-dries 5x7 or larger cost me at least $2.50 in supplies alone -- over a decade ago...not counting the failures (minute tractor-gear marks, misplaced pet hair, etc).
Please note that in my comparisons, it's easy to see that dye-sub is a win on a cost/benefit ratio. But the very best prints I've seen, thence or since, have always been done strictly photographically, or with an inkjet.
Dye-sub, despite my color objections, also always seems blurry, while a proper inkjet can be as sharp as a tack -- better than the minilab, even (optics being what they are), if the paper and ink are well-matched.
If I had a colorimeter, I'd cheerfully back up (or even dispute!) my anecdotal claims with real data. But all I have is a few million distinct prints under my belt to calibrate my eye with, so please take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Meanwhile, please quantify your "The color reproduction of the inkjet is completely different from the dye-sub (as in; it sucks)" statement: Why does it suck? Indeed, which sucks: Dye-sub or inkjet? Your comparative statement isn't clear at all.
Easy: Develop a printer that doesn't use wet supplies, doesn't require intense heat to fuse thermoplastic resin to the paper, nor requires a photosensitive electrostatic drum to transfer toner, and you've got it licked.
This being/., I'm sure someone can whip together a design in a week or two; three, tops.
I have a cheap ($50 new at a local big-box store) Brother inkjet all-in-one. I've had it for years.
I used to have a scheduled weekly color print job that would fire off automatically, just to keep the ink fresh in the heads. But it doesn't matter (as I learned from someone else here on/.):
Once a day (at 11:00AM if it ever were to bother to set its own clock correctly, but mostly random 24-hour intervals in practice) it does a brief cleaning cycle to flush the heads. This doesn't seem to use any meaningful amount of ink, and does seem to do the job of keeping things fresh.
It spends the vast majority of its time loafing around idle on my Wifi network, waiting for something to do. And then it's happy enough to do whatever needs doing.
And since the print head is part of the machine instead of the ink cart, I can feed it the very cheapest Chinese ink and still get print quality identical to that of expensive Brother ink...which, to Brother's great credit, they say explicitly during the driver install process will not affect the warranty (unless the aftermarket ink itself causes a failure in the rest of the machine, but that's implicit and fair and legal).
I tell myself sometimes that I should get a better printer, but then years go by between having another box of multiple black and individual color refills delivered to my door for less than $15: At this rate, I can't financially justify buying a different printer, especially when:
If I need a few dozen sheets of business graphics or flashy flyers printed, I do that at work on the big color HP Laseret for free (I have a key and the boss doesn't care). If I need high-quality photos printed, I send them over the Internet to the grocery store and pick them up with my usual shopping. Huge jobs go to a local print shop, as all huge jobs should (cheaper/better/faster/easier).
I'd outsource the same way even if I had a better general-purpose home printer.
So meh: For what it gets used for (things that just plain need printing, like wiring diagrams for the car, occasional business billing and forms, stuff for the 7-year-old to color, and taxes), it works just fine.
I bought this Brother printer fully expecting to be heaving it into the dumpster after a few months or a year, but it turns out that not all inkjet printers are made in hell: I don't think about it much because it just works and does so quietly and cheaply.
I'll just add GasBuddy to Greenify's list, and not care.
Why don't I care? Because I'm already sending my GPS coordinates to GasBuddy when I use it, as part of the app's basic functionality. If it wants to gather up some more stats like nearby Bluebooth and Wifi when I use it, I don't care: They've already got the most personal of my personal data.
CD-Rs are not bin-sorted in this way. The data that differentiates a "music" CD-R from any other CD-R is mechanically molded into the disc itself at the same that the disc is manufactured.
And so, by the time the molding is done, BEFORE the dye is applied, the sputtering of the reflective coating is complete, and the protective lacquer is applied, BEFORE a batch is ready to test before (possible) batch bin-sorting and silkscreening: The music CD-Rs are already irrevocably music CD-Rs.
The designation is part of the ATIP data. It is as set in stone as any non-recordable, molded/stamped CD ever was -- despite the rest of the contents being recordable.
For mini-jack to dual RCA cable (line level audio) you can absolutely go for the cheapest cable. Sometimes a more expensive cable will have a complicated RCA connector that breaks down.
Some cables are worth more, because of reliability.
My preference is the same as the broadcast standard (where failure isn't an option): Canare. Made in Japan, generally sold in bulk lengths or reels. They've got stuff for 75-Ohm video, speaker, a couple of variations on balanced (for microphones or other), and a cable made for electric guitars which I find particularly reliable.
It terminates like a breeze, isn't alarmingly expensive (though it's certainly not cheap), and interconnects made with it (even plain-old RCAs) tend to last for decades. It survives trucks being driven over it and touring duty of being used and abused on a daily basis, and lays flat by default so that it only becomes a trip hazard if you really try to make it one.
In contrast, I recently sold for scrap a pound or two of cheap/free-in-the-box dual-RCA cables. I was doing some work on my little home theater, and needed 24 sets (12 pairs) of RCA leads to integrate a new project I'd built.
Of course, I had a box full cheap/freebie 3-foot RCA interconnects, all used but neatly-sorted and wrapped, and most of unknown heritage. I dug into that and started hooking up my new kit.
Most of them had only one channel that worked. Some didn't work at all. And most frustratingly, I found that of the many dozens (hundreds?) of feet of cheap RCA cables in front of me, I only had exactly enough that worked reliably to get things connected: Some seemed to work but only did so part of the time, which made me question my own soldering on the project and made trouble-shooting a multi-hour process instead of a hook-it-up-and-go sort of thing.
A wire that doesn't work (or worse, one that only works sometimes) is worth less than no wire at all.
And wire that tends to work tends to cost also more than wire that tends to fail, because (if for no other reason) copper is expensive.
Does that mean that one should spend $340 on an Ethernet cable? No. Does that mean that one should spend $60 or $600 on a short RCA patch cable? No. Does that mean that $10 or $20, well-placed, might garner a much more reliable solution than a freebie RCA? A thousand times, yes.
You don't need cables made out of gold, but you often do need them to conform to the specs. I've had this problem with cheap as shit HDMI cables where my components wouldn't recognize each other until I replaced the cables with monoprice cables. So it's not like I had to spend a ton, but I did have to get actual certified cables.
In days past, I've had issues with HDMI cables. And I don't mean some hodge-podge "the colors were much richer with the expensive wire, and the blacks were more black" I-just-spent-$900-on-a-bottle-of-snake-oil type of issues.
I mean real, tangible brokenness: Green screens, sparklies, failure to sync culminating in 15-minute-long cycles of hard-cycling the cable box, subsequent angry wife -- that sort of thing.
And I'm not even talking about long runs. 6 feet, tops.
So I went to Monoprice, as one does, and ordered a handful of differently-colored (because wiring is easier with colors) heavier-gauge ("premium") cables. And lo, the cables showed up and they were colorful and the wiring began.
Much to my surprise, the new Monoprice cables worked even worse than the old and crappy cables that barely worked previously.
My solution (being of an engineer's mindset) was to look at the new ones vs the old ones. The Monoprice cables were apparently well-constructed with heavy wire, and had ferrite beads. The old ones also appeared to be well-constructed, but with much smaller wire and no ferrite beads.
I decided to minimize these differences. And so, using a sharp knife and a hammer, I removed the molded-on ferrite beads from the Monoprice cables. And the thus-modified the Monoprice cables have worked marvelously and flawlessly to this day.
So is it a matter of meeting spec, or is it a matter of a product that actually works? Was the gear non-compliant, or the cable, or both? (Further: Which end, source or destination? Both ends? Which cable? Are both cables non-compliant?)
Footnote: Consequent to this, for my own purposes, I've taken to buying cheap used HDMI cables through Ebay or Amazon from folks who appear to be hard up for cash and are able to take accurate-looking photos. Haven't been let down yet, with my own pile of gear. For my day job, I order from Monoprice as a rule, and haven't had any issues with their "premium" cheap cabling outside of my own system...even for lengthy 45' runs with wire the size of a thumb. It just works, just not for me with my stuff. Deductively, my gear is the problem...but my gear is the expensive part and I'm not looking forward to replacing it any time soon.
tl;dr, If the cabling doesn't fucking work in an application, it doesn't matter how much it cost. And if it does work, it *also* doesn't matter how much it cost.
You're right; I was mistakenly conflating Wiegand (the protocol) vs Wiegand (the contact-required card format that defined the de-facto and like-named protocol).
Point remains: Yanking the biometric/Wiegand/prox/NFC/whatever reader off of the wall and poking at the wires still does not gain the attacker access, unless Hollywood.
Also: Wiegand wire (the material that allowed the card to exist) is clever stuff.
Latency isn't just a problem for gaming. Latency is a problem for even getting a mouse to work in a sensible manner, with the feedback loop between your hand and your eyes.
The issue is video. The issue is also USB (which, by virtue of being USB, is different from "keyboard/mouse").
The wireless video problem is a problem because HDMI doing 1080p is in the realm of 4Gbps, continuous. Of course it can be compressed to be transmitted without wires (hi there, ATSC!), but that always adds latency and (quite often horrific-looking) compression artifacts in the consumer realm. One can reduce the bandwidth requirements by adding latency, or reduce the latency by increasing bandwidth -- such is the nature of perceptual codecs. (There is alleged to be some existing tech from Intel that can do a fair job of this, but it requires line-of-sight. Because, you know, bandwidth.)
The wireless USB problem is a problem because USB devices expect near-zero latency -- and so do you. (Remember, old, slow USB 1.1 predates common wireless tech.)
Don't want to run wire yourself? Fine, don't. It'll be cheaper, better, and faster to hire a local AV company to pull the wire in, and a carpenter to patch up anything they disturb, and a painter to fix what the carpenter didn't do, and a cleaner to mop up whatever residual mess still remains.
Or get another computer -- I understand that some of these are even portable these days (I think they call them "laptops").
Or just muscle up and move the PC for your once-in-a-while whimsical needs.
I'll go further and wager that in an average American city, beds are used on average less than 30% of the time. Most clothes are in use less than 10% of the time.
Let's take your model to the logical extreme. We'll share our beds and housing so that we get optimum use from them, as well as share everything that is bulky and seldom used, and carry our (few) our personal possessions on our back in a duffel bag.
Move to a new city? No problem! Clean uniforms are waiting for you there, so there's no need to carry much more than the clothes on your back. Just throw the duffel into the back of the Electric Carriage and be shuffled off to a new place!
Wife and kids don't want to go? No big deal, we'll just share those, too! Just be assigned a new family at whatever sleeping tube structure you decide to call "home," and your old family will await similar and complete male utilization at their old tube structure.
Also: We don't need to own books; we have libraries! We don't need to keep pets; we have zoos! We don't need underutilized personal kitchens; we have restaurants! We don't need personal computers; we have public terminals! We don't need currency; everything is provided for you!
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!
There isn't enough bandwidth in the ISM bands to support what you want.
You'll always have to run at least one wire. And by the time you run one wire, you might as well run the rest of the wires that you need.
And then you'll wind up with a solution that always works, instead of a solution that (currently) cannot exist because wireless spectrum is a finite resource and your needs are beyond its capacity.
No, you wouldn't -- at least, not with any sensible topology.
The way it usually works is like this: You present your Wiegand card to the Wiegand reader, some magic RF resonance happens, and a stream of bits is produced on a wire.
At the other end of this wire, buried deep in the bowels of the building, is a computer (embedded or not) which verifies that your bits are the correct bits. If they are correct, it closes a relay that makes the door open, and (optionally) signals the reader to provide feedback to the user (blinking LED, sound, etc). If they are incorrect bits, it doesn't do anything with the door, and (optionally) provides feedback to that effect (in the form of a blinking LED, sound, dumping poison gas).
Getting access to the data lines at the reader does not magically equate to physical access to the building, except in Hollywood movies and horrifyingly-bad installations (whereby the insecure reader itself does the numeric verification, and/or uses its own internal relay controls the door).
IOW, you can pry the reader off of the wall and twist any wires together that you want..and nothing happens at all except perhaps a blown fuse somewhere upstream and a headache for whoever has to clean up your mess.
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My experience is much the same as yours: The folks on the phone don't know their dick from a screwdriver, but the local guys (especially the local boss-man) can be very competent with excellent attention to detail and who refuse to ever give up on solving a problem.
It's too bad that the brass at AT&T are so insistent stifling their service from the top down.
Why must the router and modem be a single bit of kit? Don't we have Ethernet to serve as a well-developed cross-connect?
What could possibly be gained from a suitably-new DOCSIS module in a Cisco 2800-series router (or, in my case, an impossibly-conformant VDSL module on aa Asus RT-N16) that cannot be accomplished with a provider-provided Ethernet-connected modem (whatever that is) and an Ethernet-connected router of my own choosing?
These Cisco 2800-series routers you speak of: They do have Ethernet, don't they? Is there magic within? Or is a local Ethernet connection taboo somehow, compared to having all physical interfaces present on one device?
It is IP, at least: Isn't it?
(If I'm worried about MITM attacks, I'll solve my quandaries in an end-to-end sort of way using well-known and secure methods. The medium, whether including a modem or carrier pigeon, does not matter.)
^^this
No. One looks at their website, as one does, and observes their business hours, which are already posted in UTC.
One then makes a plan to call during those business hours.
There is no figuring needed.
No. A Faraday cage need only be continuous, conductive, and with any holes that might exist being smaller than some known (if I could be bothered to look it up) fraction of a wavelength of the signal to be blocked.
Its primary function is to function as a short-circuit to RF fields, not a sink to ground (although grounding it certainly doesn't hurt).
Anecdotes from the real world: I used to have a Faraday bag for my work-provided GPS-tracking cell phone, and it worked fine. Modern wallets are sometimes function as Faraday shields, to prevent RF attacks on passports, NFC credit cards, and various other RFID wizardry that we sometimes carry on our person.
What say you if a quadcoper/"drone" had a cryptographically-secure mechanism to prevent it from flying above 500' AGL?
What if it had an active (and useful!) default LIDAR/RADAR/SONAR looking at the ground to enforce this, with complementary GPS?
Might that be OK from the non-licensed aviator perspective?
Might it be worse, from the FOSS perspective?
(and for the inevitable slippery slope argument: I'll volunteer to watch the watchers. All of them, no matter what they are watching. Nobody has anything to fear.)
Around 2003, I worked at a photo lab. We had a good Ricoh color laser AIO, a couple of different kiosk dye-subs, and a well-maintained Fuji minilab ("mini" being a relative term; there was only one size bigger as a catalog item available from Fuji at that time).
In order of color, from best to worst:
1. Wet-process minilab on photographic paper from negatives. Because, srsly: Printing with light shone through a negative that itself was impressed by the very photons bouncing off of the subject is always fucking awesome, especially so if the operator is paying attention and the chemistry is good. We were the go-to place for proofs for local photographers because we had good results, despite them having other local (including "pro") options at the time. I made several million prints with this machine.
2. The HP inkjet that I had at home at the time, loaded with 6-color ink and expensive photo paper. I still have prints from this machine, and they're still awesome despite being cheaply framed and hung on a wall in a sunny room (though I've long since given up on printing photos at home). I made dozens of high-quality prints with this machine.
3. Dye-subs. We had a Sony and another brand; the Sony was consistently both better and slower than the other. Colors seemed variously muted or overblown, given the same settings on similar source material, in a way that still seems characteristically dye-sub. I made tens of thousands of prints with this machine (dye-sub only knows one quality level).
4. Ricoh laser. Not that it was bad for a color laser printer at the time - it's just in last place. I've only recently seen laser-printed photos that have better color, especially for colors that are both dark and saturated, than that Ricoh did back then. I've made hundreds of prints with this machine.
In terms of cost, cheapest to most expensive for materials:
1. Ricoh laser. Works good on cheap-ish paper, and user-refillable supplies make for cheap color prints.
2. Minilab, by far, was the cheapest of the rest. But then it was a high-volume machine that cost a (six-figure) fortune to buy, and an ongoing fortune to regularly maintain, and fortunes were lost when it would break and require parts, which also meant that fortunes were spent flying parts in from Japan on occasion. (We kept it pretty busy 15 or 16 hours a day.)
3. Dye-sub. The materials for those things were ludicrously expensive, the machines were fickle, and to this day I'm still quite certain that money was lost for every dye-sub print they made during my tenure there, without counting paid labor to tend to the silly things.
4. OMFG, supplies for that HP inkjet were expensive. I'm sure that every high-density, wait-forever-and-hope-that-some-dust-doesn't-settle-on-it-before-it-dries 5x7 or larger cost me at least $2.50 in supplies alone -- over a decade ago...not counting the failures (minute tractor-gear marks, misplaced pet hair, etc).
Please note that in my comparisons, it's easy to see that dye-sub is a win on a cost/benefit ratio. But the very best prints I've seen, thence or since, have always been done strictly photographically, or with an inkjet.
Dye-sub, despite my color objections, also always seems blurry, while a proper inkjet can be as sharp as a tack -- better than the minilab, even (optics being what they are), if the paper and ink are well-matched.
If I had a colorimeter, I'd cheerfully back up (or even dispute!) my anecdotal claims with real data. But all I have is a few million distinct prints under my belt to calibrate my eye with, so please take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Meanwhile, please quantify your "The color reproduction of the inkjet is completely different from the dye-sub (as in; it sucks)" statement: Why does it suck? Indeed, which sucks: Dye-sub or inkjet? Your comparative statement isn't clear at all.
Easy: Develop a printer that doesn't use wet supplies, doesn't require intense heat to fuse thermoplastic resin to the paper, nor requires a photosensitive electrostatic drum to transfer toner, and you've got it licked.
This being /., I'm sure someone can whip together a design in a week or two; three, tops.
I have a cheap ($50 new at a local big-box store) Brother inkjet all-in-one. I've had it for years.
I used to have a scheduled weekly color print job that would fire off automatically, just to keep the ink fresh in the heads. But it doesn't matter (as I learned from someone else here on /.):
Once a day (at 11:00AM if it ever were to bother to set its own clock correctly, but mostly random 24-hour intervals in practice) it does a brief cleaning cycle to flush the heads. This doesn't seem to use any meaningful amount of ink, and does seem to do the job of keeping things fresh.
It spends the vast majority of its time loafing around idle on my Wifi network, waiting for something to do. And then it's happy enough to do whatever needs doing.
And since the print head is part of the machine instead of the ink cart, I can feed it the very cheapest Chinese ink and still get print quality identical to that of expensive Brother ink...which, to Brother's great credit, they say explicitly during the driver install process will not affect the warranty (unless the aftermarket ink itself causes a failure in the rest of the machine, but that's implicit and fair and legal).
I tell myself sometimes that I should get a better printer, but then years go by between having another box of multiple black and individual color refills delivered to my door for less than $15: At this rate, I can't financially justify buying a different printer, especially when:
If I need a few dozen sheets of business graphics or flashy flyers printed, I do that at work on the big color HP Laseret for free (I have a key and the boss doesn't care). If I need high-quality photos printed, I send them over the Internet to the grocery store and pick them up with my usual shopping. Huge jobs go to a local print shop, as all huge jobs should (cheaper/better/faster/easier).
I'd outsource the same way even if I had a better general-purpose home printer.
So meh: For what it gets used for (things that just plain need printing, like wiring diagrams for the car, occasional business billing and forms, stuff for the 7-year-old to color, and taxes), it works just fine.
I bought this Brother printer fully expecting to be heaving it into the dumpster after a few months or a year, but it turns out that not all inkjet printers are made in hell: I don't think about it much because it just works and does so quietly and cheaply.
The plugs and sockets can (and often are) rated at 30A continuous. This is plenty for what he is doing.
As to shock hazard: no, not really. Not enough surface area to be a danger at 12v, and even then it only affects the finger.
The inverter-fed 120v US plugs and sockets, however...
I'll just add GasBuddy to Greenify's list, and not care.
Why don't I care? Because I'm already sending my GPS coordinates to GasBuddy when I use it, as part of the app's basic functionality. If it wants to gather up some more stats like nearby Bluebooth and Wifi when I use it, I don't care: They've already got the most personal of my personal data.
You're full of shit.
CD-Rs are not bin-sorted in this way. The data that differentiates a "music" CD-R from any other CD-R is mechanically molded into the disc itself at the same that the disc is manufactured.
And so, by the time the molding is done, BEFORE the dye is applied, the sputtering of the reflective coating is complete, and the protective lacquer is applied, BEFORE a batch is ready to test before (possible) batch bin-sorting and silkscreening: The music CD-Rs are already irrevocably music CD-Rs.
The designation is part of the ATIP data. It is as set in stone as any non-recordable, molded/stamped CD ever was -- despite the rest of the contents being recordable.
Some cables are worth more, because of reliability.
My preference is the same as the broadcast standard (where failure isn't an option): Canare. Made in Japan, generally sold in bulk lengths or reels. They've got stuff for 75-Ohm video, speaker, a couple of variations on balanced (for microphones or other), and a cable made for electric guitars which I find particularly reliable.
It terminates like a breeze, isn't alarmingly expensive (though it's certainly not cheap), and interconnects made with it (even plain-old RCAs) tend to last for decades. It survives trucks being driven over it and touring duty of being used and abused on a daily basis, and lays flat by default so that it only becomes a trip hazard if you really try to make it one.
In contrast, I recently sold for scrap a pound or two of cheap/free-in-the-box dual-RCA cables. I was doing some work on my little home theater, and needed 24 sets (12 pairs) of RCA leads to integrate a new project I'd built.
Of course, I had a box full cheap/freebie 3-foot RCA interconnects, all used but neatly-sorted and wrapped, and most of unknown heritage. I dug into that and started hooking up my new kit.
Most of them had only one channel that worked. Some didn't work at all. And most frustratingly, I found that of the many dozens (hundreds?) of feet of cheap RCA cables in front of me, I only had exactly enough that worked reliably to get things connected: Some seemed to work but only did so part of the time, which made me question my own soldering on the project and made trouble-shooting a multi-hour process instead of a hook-it-up-and-go sort of thing.
A wire that doesn't work (or worse, one that only works sometimes) is worth less than no wire at all.
And wire that tends to work tends to cost also more than wire that tends to fail, because (if for no other reason) copper is expensive.
Does that mean that one should spend $340 on an Ethernet cable? No. Does that mean that one should spend $60 or $600 on a short RCA patch cable? No. Does that mean that $10 or $20, well-placed, might garner a much more reliable solution than a freebie RCA? A thousand times, yes.
In days past, I've had issues with HDMI cables. And I don't mean some hodge-podge "the colors were much richer with the expensive wire, and the blacks were more black" I-just-spent-$900-on-a-bottle-of-snake-oil type of issues.
I mean real, tangible brokenness: Green screens, sparklies, failure to sync culminating in 15-minute-long cycles of hard-cycling the cable box, subsequent angry wife -- that sort of thing.
And I'm not even talking about long runs. 6 feet, tops.
So I went to Monoprice, as one does, and ordered a handful of differently-colored (because wiring is easier with colors) heavier-gauge ("premium") cables. And lo, the cables showed up and they were colorful and the wiring began.
Much to my surprise, the new Monoprice cables worked even worse than the old and crappy cables that barely worked previously.
My solution (being of an engineer's mindset) was to look at the new ones vs the old ones. The Monoprice cables were apparently well-constructed with heavy wire, and had ferrite beads. The old ones also appeared to be well-constructed, but with much smaller wire and no ferrite beads.
I decided to minimize these differences. And so, using a sharp knife and a hammer, I removed the molded-on ferrite beads from the Monoprice cables. And the thus-modified the Monoprice cables have worked marvelously and flawlessly to this day.
So is it a matter of meeting spec, or is it a matter of a product that actually works? Was the gear non-compliant, or the cable, or both? (Further: Which end, source or destination? Both ends? Which cable? Are both cables non-compliant?)
Footnote: Consequent to this, for my own purposes, I've taken to buying cheap used HDMI cables through Ebay or Amazon from folks who appear to be hard up for cash and are able to take accurate-looking photos. Haven't been let down yet, with my own pile of gear. For my day job, I order from Monoprice as a rule, and haven't had any issues with their "premium" cheap cabling outside of my own system...even for lengthy 45' runs with wire the size of a thumb. It just works, just not for me with my stuff. Deductively, my gear is the problem...but my gear is the expensive part and I'm not looking forward to replacing it any time soon.
tl;dr, If the cabling doesn't fucking work in an application, it doesn't matter how much it cost. And if it does work, it *also* doesn't matter how much it cost.
You're right; I was mistakenly conflating Wiegand (the protocol) vs Wiegand (the contact-required card format that defined the de-facto and like-named protocol).
Point remains: Yanking the biometric/Wiegand/prox/NFC/whatever reader off of the wall and poking at the wires still does not gain the attacker access, unless Hollywood.
Also: Wiegand wire (the material that allowed the card to exist) is clever stuff.
Case dismissed.
Latency isn't just a problem for gaming. Latency is a problem for even getting a mouse to work in a sensible manner, with the feedback loop between your hand and your eyes.
The issue is video. The issue is also USB (which, by virtue of being USB, is different from "keyboard/mouse").
The wireless video problem is a problem because HDMI doing 1080p is in the realm of 4Gbps, continuous. Of course it can be compressed to be transmitted without wires (hi there, ATSC!), but that always adds latency and (quite often horrific-looking) compression artifacts in the consumer realm. One can reduce the bandwidth requirements by adding latency, or reduce the latency by increasing bandwidth -- such is the nature of perceptual codecs. (There is alleged to be some existing tech from Intel that can do a fair job of this, but it requires line-of-sight. Because, you know, bandwidth.)
The wireless USB problem is a problem because USB devices expect near-zero latency -- and so do you. (Remember, old, slow USB 1.1 predates common wireless tech.)
Don't want to run wire yourself? Fine, don't. It'll be cheaper, better, and faster to hire a local AV company to pull the wire in, and a carpenter to patch up anything they disturb, and a painter to fix what the carpenter didn't do, and a cleaner to mop up whatever residual mess still remains.
Or get another computer -- I understand that some of these are even portable these days (I think they call them "laptops").
Or just muscle up and move the PC for your once-in-a-while whimsical needs.
There isn't anything left to discuss here.
First-world problem.
I'll go further and wager that in an average American city, beds are used on average less than 30% of the time. Most clothes are in use less than 10% of the time.
Let's take your model to the logical extreme. We'll share our beds and housing so that we get optimum use from them, as well as share everything that is bulky and seldom used, and carry our (few) our personal possessions on our back in a duffel bag.
Move to a new city? No problem! Clean uniforms are waiting for you there, so there's no need to carry much more than the clothes on your back. Just throw the duffel into the back of the Electric Carriage and be shuffled off to a new place!
Wife and kids don't want to go? No big deal, we'll just share those, too! Just be assigned a new family at whatever sleeping tube structure you decide to call "home," and your old family will await similar and complete male utilization at their old tube structure.
Also: We don't need to own books; we have libraries! We don't need to keep pets; we have zoos! We don't need underutilized personal kitchens; we have restaurants! We don't need personal computers; we have public terminals! We don't need currency; everything is provided for you!
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!
tl;dr I like owning and driving my car.
(See also: THX-1138)
But you can't have it.
There isn't enough bandwidth in the ISM bands to support what you want.
You'll always have to run at least one wire. And by the time you run one wire, you might as well run the rest of the wires that you need.
And then you'll wind up with a solution that always works, instead of a solution that (currently) cannot exist because wireless spectrum is a finite resource and your needs are beyond its capacity.
Selective shift-lock excluding the numeric keypad?
#IT_WOULD_MAKE_THIS_EASY3513$
I know, I know: There's only so much a mechanical typewriter can accomplish.
No, you wouldn't -- at least, not with any sensible topology.
The way it usually works is like this: You present your Wiegand card to the Wiegand reader, some magic RF resonance happens, and a stream of bits is produced on a wire.
At the other end of this wire, buried deep in the bowels of the building, is a computer (embedded or not) which verifies that your bits are the correct bits. If they are correct, it closes a relay that makes the door open, and (optionally) signals the reader to provide feedback to the user (blinking LED, sound, etc). If they are incorrect bits, it doesn't do anything with the door, and (optionally) provides feedback to that effect (in the form of a blinking LED, sound, dumping poison gas).
Getting access to the data lines at the reader does not magically equate to physical access to the building, except in Hollywood movies and horrifyingly-bad installations (whereby the insecure reader itself does the numeric verification, and/or uses its own internal relay controls the door).
IOW, you can pry the reader off of the wall and twist any wires together that you want..and nothing happens at all except perhaps a blown fuse somewhere upstream and a headache for whoever has to clean up your mess.
Selling /. UIDs was a thing that was happening, particularly when karmic bonuses were potentially greater than +1.
All hail our new corporate overlords. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The king is dead, long live the king.
etc.
The writing has been on the wall for years, now: Why are we still here?