Acutaly when I was a kid I did high end finish work and we got asked to do this often enough with one way mirrors. You make a frame and build a space behind it to put a normal size tv. Philips seems to just be making it in a package. This allow a room to look good without having a big fugly TV sitting around. Granted this was the old days of 3 CRT projection TV's that were just massive but it still works even with Plasma TV's and LCD's. You do loose some brightness and viewing angle but a nicly framed mirror looks a lot better than a plasma TV over the mantle at easter dinner for some people. Add to that the fact that hit the remote and the game is on it's a win win for some people.
Think drive in 5 bucks a head and bring your own snacks for a double feature. 2.50 a head for a movie is acceptable to me at least.
Otherwise netflix or now Walmart is your friend 14 bucks a month for as many movies as you can get through the mail 2 at a time. If your a bit unsavory those 170 buck DVD-R's look more and more appatizing.
http://www.pcmx.net/dtvcon/cmds.htm is a good start the RCA models use a slightly different protcal but a quick google for directv serial channel change pops up listings and howto's. There are some premade modules floating around for lirc somewhere if your a Linux fan.
Your ISP's ISP charges flat rate by circut generaly. For the most part you have three options as an ISP pay per megabit and this is the most expensive, pay 95th percentile with a floor on a burstable this is cheapest if you have redundancy or pay flat rate sometimes cheaper than burstable but you need to know your network. I have gotten circut handoffs in the US 5 countries in Europe Japan and AU they all provided these metering options. Granted your ISP may have let the accountants mess up things with no forsite by getting the price per meg delivered as it's the cheapest to start off with but most expensive in the long run by a factor of 10 or more in my experience.
In the US were moving to flat rate phone service for residential MCI's the neighborhood for example this is a good thing for consumers as at least in my area it's very price competative. VoIP is pushing this but the normal markets are following.
Eletricity is a different subject there are VAST differences in how much is avalible to a residence to be used and how much is used. For a 4 bedroom hours my average useage is that of a handfull of 100 watt lightbulbs going 24/7 while I can potentialy use roughly 40000 watts vs the few hundred sustained I do consume thats a rough factor of 80. Remember that power, phone and water services follow the circut switches moddel they eiter work or they dont browouts are dangerious, phone service needs to work or not there is no inbetween for landlines water needs to come out of the tap reliably. IP bandwith is packet switches so if your slow duing peek or things get traffic shaped it's still functional.
BTW water around here is flat rate for residential they variance is small enough that it's less cumbersom to throw it into general taxes / have comercial pay for it then bill every residence monthly install meters would take forever to recupe the expence.
As to fiber to your house why whould any company realy bother right now. It's expensive to terminate and fragile. Copper works great in the last mile especialy coax. At 188 channels and current tech that would provide 94 houses with 45 down and 37 up if you wanted max speed per house. If you did it similar to a DSlam thats 4gigs a sec down and 3.5 up shared among 2000 end points thats sustains 2 megs sec per supscriber concurent. And all that is using the same RG6 thats going into most homes right now and is easy to work with. It's one thing if the fiber is burried but you have never seen a mess like a fiber trunk on a pole goign down and getting sheared.
It would seem that currently they have to notify somebody if they are going to investigate them unlike a normal citizen. Granted I'm sure they will make a power grab for a lot more than just using this for spammers.
Actualy netflix may come down on there pricing as WallMart is definatly a better deal. But Netflix has had an unadvertized 2 DVD's out 4 DVD a month cap for 14 a month thats fairly reasonable. I Figure thats equivalent to 2 or 3 rentals around here assuming I get them back in time now if they are the usual couple days late that fee is my once a month payment.
As far as I know and can find there is no Direct TV PCI card. Now it's potentialy possible to lift the mpeg2 datastream from a normal directtv receiver and get that stream over to a PC. At this point I have an old RCA unit open on the bench and am tracing down component pinouts.
As to changing channels this is trivialy easy on directtv receivers they have this low speed data port thats serial and you can change channels through it (series one tivo's support this method) it's easier than geting a whole IR interface up and running and provided 2 way communications I beleive.
Anyway this is just becomming a bit of a side project for me. I have a DirectTivo as it is but this might be a bit more flexable.
For a lot of phones this is easy enough you just need a data cable. Phone companies have made it VERY hard to download things via there web access except there minimal offerings. But this may just be my expereince with nextel.
I have a pile of companies I work with and exchange style shared cals is about the only reason mid to small sized business are installing outlook. ical works but isnt as intuitive as the base outlook / exchange combo.
It's all a question of having everybodies cal's show up together be seachable and exposed to each other by default.
Ok I have been in this position at 2 seperate companies. It's a pretty straight froward proccess.
If you think the company will make it and want to stay long term:
Find another job or at least a in writting long term consulting gig.
Go to your management there management generaly the first teir that you know but dont work with on a daily basis. Ask them to compensate you and get a good writting iron clad contract (think penalties) or you have a couple written offers for other companies with a better deal work whatever make sure not to go overboard they might know each other you never know.
They will generaly come back with a counter offer fairly quickly if you like it take it remember that contract length with penalties it's important the company may try and replace you asap to keep the other worker bees in line.
Otherwise work on that resume and give 2 weeks notice when the time is right. Also dont do a pile of extra work; oh yea on call hrm not getting paid for it, sorry not reachable going on vacation for the weekend. If your management depending on the state your only supposed to do 5 hours max of management related overtime a week not 20 of real work.
I beleive the Europeans have that something about DBS??? I realy dont think directtv will make something like the PCi card you describe after all there are a LOT of things you could do to the signal at that point. But this does lead me to thinking I am pretty sure that the sat receiver and decoder is discreat from the mpeg2 decoder so you could potentialy hardware hack an old school direct tv receiver and snag the mpeg2 they are easy to control via serial as to channel changing.
MythTV has one big drawback for digital sat users there is a whole recompression stage with lassy compression. DirectTivo allows a completely lossless experience. Now granted they have a lot of issues about not supporting new features in the series 2 but when it all comes down to it for me at least quality is the number one concern.
With most of my clients it's not that they need support for Rh but there add on applications are supported under RH. It's one thing to support an OS and thats pretty straight forward it's another to say support a multiuser web site provisioning and security system especialy your happy friendly closed source ones that are buggy.
ou seem to think people get billed how most hosting providers bill per meg delivered bandwith in general is baught peak rate on 95 percentile with current costs at 100mb a sec and faster running sub hundreds from everybody and priced down to ceogens crap 30 a mb with abovenet at 50 and verio at 80. So you can get a 30k cogent gigE uplink so 300k people could DL a 3 meg file in about 8000 seconds or a little over 2 hours thats not even enough to satuarate dialup.
Now lets all remember that in cable broadband your uplink to other users in your area has a good chance of being a lot faster than out to the internet proper so having people have content close to where it needs to be is more usefull than at a site that they cant get the data to the user fast enough.
As somebody that used a laptop from High School through a masters in the 90's lets say they are very usefull. I think if a Prof or a TA had the gall to eject a student for using a laptop I would be at the deans office rather quickly with potential legal filings to follow (it's college your paying for the information better make sure that the notebook ban is in paper) Granted I'm Dyslexic so paper notes are not an option and did have the curtesy to specify in writting with the school that a laptop would be allowed at all times with a computer of there choice avalible for any essay testing before I ever paid any tuition (pay for school it's frightning how much they will work with you when it's cash up front:) But I digress.
Now I went through school before laptops had exaust blowers attached to them but even now they are not that noisy. What is your issue with technology some people type significantly faster than they write, have illegible handwritting etc etc.
And of course my best teachers were the ones that would be covering the section of the assignment that I had any trouble with in lecture while I was doing it.
Your talking about two different classes of cars. Sure you can squeek 300hp out of some 2L 4 banger in an import thats al nice and they drive fairly well. Granted I smoke the little imports regularly on friday nights but with a car that wieghts twice to sometimes 3 times theres but puts out 4+ times the HP (a very modded Smokey and the Bandit limited ed TA)
But all in all you are correct go over 500hp and it's a monster to drive and generaly not street legal. The import classes make good dialy drivers / strip toys with 2-3 times the stock HP while most corvet owners etc stop at 400 - 500 HP and thats not even 2x there origional HP simply because they become monsters to drive start twisting frame members and go through tires every other week.
Can we get that down to under 4 hours it would make the news people happy with a nice 7 - 11 primetime special.
But yes you allways want to have more power but more importantly better power with larger force multipliers and lower maitnence costs thats more and more versitile. It's not a question of how dead do you want them anymore politicians are driving to more and more surgical less collateral damage so they have less political fallout. Allways remember the military is the ultimate tool for diplomacy when you can leave the table and say conceed or we send them in.
You dont need raid to get acceptable levels of reliability just SCSI. IDE is dirt cheap and you get what you pay for dirty platters apparently.
OK withoug joking do people still run single drive machines outside of specific purpose and laptops? I havent built an IDE box that wasent raid 1 or 10 in 4 years this if for home use where backups happen every now and again at best.
Now with this said persoanly my failure rate on SCSI drives is a LOT lower than IDE drives I buy but at the same time I only get SCA SCSI drives and put them in enclosures vs IDE inside the box with no active cooling specific to the hard drive.
More importantly unlike what people think a lot of broadband connections cost more than there max incomming bandwith does. I buy bandwith al the time and right now I can get sub $50 a meg from a good carrier and sub $30 from the likes of cogent. I pay $60 a month for 384k (1.5m max) incomming cogent bandwith would cost $45 assuming I max my incomming during peek wich I'm not garentted that still leave $15 for them to interconnect etc. Now yes there are a lot of ISP's out there that pay to much for bandwith and there are even more that DONT pay for bandwith and only have there own networks to pay for.
OK call me a sceptic but at a 2x to 4x throughput thats not a huge leap what would be the incentive to bother? Sure if it's pretty cost neutral install g for the new gear. Most people would seem to stick with there functional b gear and leave it at that till it natrual progresses over to a g network or someing fast comes out like a,b,g chipsets.
OK first off Ethernet works great over fiber actualy in the last two revision fiber was first (1 gig and 10gigE I'm not sure on 100mb) Fiber Channel does nothing new realy it's just another packtied network that happen to run are some pretty high speeds and support packetized SCSI and network (mostly IP) it's nice it has dynamic addressing and a lot of support for bonding channels together. Sonet realy is what you want to use for going the distance it supports very large packets something ethernet has big issuea with. You can use ethernet but it's just not that easy there are a lot of issues like delayed collisions. Ethernet has the LAN locked up it just works well enough and has been expanding at a fast enough clip. It's being expanded into the MAN where it's just so much less expansive to switch than it is to route.
I think when it realy comes down to it you can get a gigabit port on a big switch (lets say a 4k from cisco) for under 100 bucks a port easily while your paying sever thousand for the same ammount of bandwith for sonet and fiberchannel sometimes thats an addon to gigabit class switches but realy how long with it last with iSCSI comming up in the ranks.
Your right I think you could add power to GigE but I dont beleive it's part of the spec just yet. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/modules/ps4 835/ps5173/index.html is cisco's high end blade and it says gige or inline power so I think it's a choice either or. Granted technicaly it wouldent be so hard to put signal and power down the same line (I'm used to phantom power for Mic's)
Now Legacy devices are supposed to support ring signal on the center pair (yes they designed it to run phone over as well) and pins 7 and 8 might be run to chassie ground at worst and I know at least the cisco gear I have worked with have fast acting self resetting circut breakers in them that reset when link is lost.
But all in all it's sort of funny if were making this new big standard that dosent work with gige the next generation of station wiring.
OK this is a good idea from my perspective. I have used Cisco IP phones w9ith this and they work great it's a LOT easier than a UPS for every IP phone (look at a sales guy and try to explain why the phone died when they power took a hit phones need to be reliable) I have used it with 3com AP's again it works great and makes it easy to stick the AP on the drop ceiling and other hard to reach places PoE again can provided needed UPS power to the AP it also has the side benifit of the AP isn't up and running unless the network is plugged in (I have seen it happen it's not pretty)
I'm waiting for a laptop that can suplement/charge itself over PoE I have a subnotebook that only draws 14 watts charging PoE is close to that possibly enough for a trickle charge. It would seem to be a cheap addon to a laptop ethernet. A lot of people in offices hook laptops up to PSU but leave them on the wireless because it's easier this could make a one cable solution. I can see a whole line of terminals as well for POS applications. In reality on a lot of things this could replace the charger for small devices like PDA's and hook them up to the network at the same time.
Now it seems to be incompatable with GigE over copper since that uses all 8 wires.
OK lets see you want people to go on a bike to the grocery store. Lets see I get on average a full shopping cart of groceries per trip that generaly weight a couple hundred pounds. Where on a bike would this fit? A trailer perhaps. If your like me you go shopping one every couple weeks.
Now going out for food I guess bike attire is ok for your fast food chains through maybe a chain family sitdown. I guess if I limit myself to nice resteraunts that are within walking distance that would work there and in a place like manhattan thats generaly true.
Now lets look at the bad side of this concept. Cars provide needed transport for bulk goods making things more affordable. Public transportation in general is inconvient, unsanitary and potentialy dangerious (subway muggings anybody) lets also look at fields that need vehicals a carpender needs to get some heavy equipment to your residence he obvious cant take it on a train. Will getting a rotoruter guy out require a special pass? In reality you cant realy get away from having vehicular access if for nothing but emergency traffic like firetrucks and maitnece / delivery.
To make something like this work public transportation needs to be efficient to the users time if it takes an extra hour out of every workday thats a very significant time penalty that could be spent with children etc. Realy your talking about soemthing that should be done in some planned community not a retrofit to an existing city.
Slashdot Mirror
Acutaly when I was a kid I did high end finish work and we got asked to do this often enough with one way mirrors. You make a frame and build a space behind it to put a normal size tv. Philips seems to just be making it in a package. This allow a room to look good without having a big fugly TV sitting around. Granted this was the old days of 3 CRT projection TV's that were just massive but it still works even with Plasma TV's and LCD's. You do loose some brightness and viewing angle but a nicly framed mirror looks a lot better than a plasma TV over the mantle at easter dinner for some people. Add to that the fact that hit the remote and the game is on it's a win win for some people.
Think drive in 5 bucks a head and bring your own snacks for a double feature. 2.50 a head for a movie is acceptable to me at least.
Otherwise netflix or now Walmart is your friend 14 bucks a month for as many movies as you can get through the mail 2 at a time. If your a bit unsavory those 170 buck DVD-R's look more and more appatizing.
http://www.pcmx.net/dtvcon/cmds.htm is a good start the RCA models use a slightly different protcal but a quick google for directv serial channel change pops up listings and howto's. There are some premade modules floating around for lirc somewhere if your a Linux fan.
Your ISP's ISP charges flat rate by circut generaly. For the most part you have three options as an ISP pay per megabit and this is the most expensive, pay 95th percentile with a floor on a burstable this is cheapest if you have redundancy or pay flat rate sometimes cheaper than burstable but you need to know your network. I have gotten circut handoffs in the US 5 countries in Europe Japan and AU they all provided these metering options. Granted your ISP may have let the accountants mess up things with no forsite by getting the price per meg delivered as it's the cheapest to start off with but most expensive in the long run by a factor of 10 or more in my experience.
In the US were moving to flat rate phone service for residential MCI's the neighborhood for example this is a good thing for consumers as at least in my area it's very price competative. VoIP is pushing this but the normal markets are following.
Eletricity is a different subject there are VAST differences in how much is avalible to a residence to be used and how much is used. For a 4 bedroom hours my average useage is that of a handfull of 100 watt lightbulbs going 24/7 while I can potentialy use roughly 40000 watts vs the few hundred sustained I do consume thats a rough factor of 80. Remember that power, phone and water services follow the circut switches moddel they eiter work or they dont browouts are dangerious, phone service needs to work or not there is no inbetween for landlines water needs to come out of the tap reliably. IP bandwith is packet switches so if your slow duing peek or things get traffic shaped it's still functional.
BTW water around here is flat rate for residential they variance is small enough that it's less cumbersom to throw it into general taxes / have comercial pay for it then bill every residence monthly install meters would take forever to recupe the expence.
As to fiber to your house why whould any company realy bother right now. It's expensive to terminate and fragile. Copper works great in the last mile especialy coax. At 188 channels and current tech that would provide 94 houses with 45 down and 37 up if you wanted max speed per house. If you did it similar to a DSlam thats 4gigs a sec down and 3.5 up shared among 2000 end points thats sustains 2 megs sec per supscriber concurent. And all that is using the same RG6 thats going into most homes right now and is easy to work with. It's one thing if the fiber is burried but you have never seen a mess like a fiber trunk on a pole goign down and getting sheared.
It would seem that currently they have to notify somebody if they are going to investigate them unlike a normal citizen. Granted I'm sure they will make a power grab for a lot more than just using this for spammers.
Actualy netflix may come down on there pricing as WallMart is definatly a better deal. But Netflix has had an unadvertized 2 DVD's out 4 DVD a month cap for 14 a month thats fairly reasonable. I Figure thats equivalent to 2 or 3 rentals around here assuming I get them back in time now if they are the usual couple days late that fee is my once a month payment.
As far as I know and can find there is no Direct TV PCI card. Now it's potentialy possible to lift the mpeg2 datastream from a normal directtv receiver and get that stream over to a PC. At this point I have an old RCA unit open on the bench and am tracing down component pinouts.
As to changing channels this is trivialy easy on directtv receivers they have this low speed data port thats serial and you can change channels through it (series one tivo's support this method) it's easier than geting a whole IR interface up and running and provided 2 way communications I beleive.
Anyway this is just becomming a bit of a side project for me. I have a DirectTivo as it is but this might be a bit more flexable.
For a lot of phones this is easy enough you just need a data cable. Phone companies have made it VERY hard to download things via there web access except there minimal offerings. But this may just be my expereince with nextel.
I have a pile of companies I work with and exchange style shared cals is about the only reason mid to small sized business are installing outlook. ical works but isnt as intuitive as the base outlook / exchange combo.
It's all a question of having everybodies cal's show up together be seachable and exposed to each other by default.
Ok I have been in this position at 2 seperate companies. It's a pretty straight froward proccess.
If you think the company will make it and want to stay long term:
Find another job or at least a in writting long term consulting gig.
Go to your management there management generaly the first teir that you know but dont work with on a daily basis. Ask them to compensate you and get a good writting iron clad contract (think penalties) or you have a couple written offers for other companies with a better deal work whatever make sure not to go overboard they might know each other you never know.
They will generaly come back with a counter offer fairly quickly if you like it take it remember that contract length with penalties it's important the company may try and replace you asap to keep the other worker bees in line.
Otherwise work on that resume and give 2 weeks notice when the time is right. Also dont do a pile of extra work; oh yea on call hrm not getting paid for it, sorry not reachable going on vacation for the weekend. If your management depending on the state your only supposed to do 5 hours max of management related overtime a week not 20 of real work.
I beleive the Europeans have that something about DBS??? I realy dont think directtv will make something like the PCi card you describe after all there are a LOT of things you could do to the signal at that point. But this does lead me to thinking I am pretty sure that the sat receiver and decoder is discreat from the mpeg2 decoder so you could potentialy hardware hack an old school direct tv receiver and snag the mpeg2 they are easy to control via serial as to channel changing.
MythTV has one big drawback for digital sat users there is a whole recompression stage with lassy compression. DirectTivo allows a completely lossless experience. Now granted they have a lot of issues about not supporting new features in the series 2 but when it all comes down to it for me at least quality is the number one concern.
With most of my clients it's not that they need support for Rh but there add on applications are supported under RH. It's one thing to support an OS and thats pretty straight forward it's another to say support a multiuser web site provisioning and security system especialy your happy friendly closed source ones that are buggy.
For me and most people at surburban/rural post offices it gets down to a house/person my +4 is my po box number so it's unique to the box.
ou seem to think people get billed how most hosting providers bill per meg delivered bandwith in general is baught peak rate on 95 percentile with current costs at 100mb a sec and faster running sub hundreds from everybody and priced down to ceogens crap 30 a mb with abovenet at 50 and verio at 80. So you can get a 30k cogent gigE uplink so 300k people could DL a 3 meg file in about 8000 seconds or a little over 2 hours thats not even enough to satuarate dialup.
Now lets all remember that in cable broadband your uplink to other users in your area has a good chance of being a lot faster than out to the internet proper so having people have content close to where it needs to be is more usefull than at a site that they cant get the data to the user fast enough.
As somebody that used a laptop from High School through a masters in the 90's lets say they are very usefull. I think if a Prof or a TA had the gall to eject a student for using a laptop I would be at the deans office rather quickly with potential legal filings to follow (it's college your paying for the information better make sure that the notebook ban is in paper) Granted I'm Dyslexic so paper notes are not an option and did have the curtesy to specify in writting with the school that a laptop would be allowed at all times with a computer of there choice avalible for any essay testing before I ever paid any tuition (pay for school it's frightning how much they will work with you when it's cash up front :) But I digress.
Now I went through school before laptops had exaust blowers attached to them but even now they are not that noisy. What is your issue with technology some people type significantly faster than they write, have illegible handwritting etc etc.
And of course my best teachers were the ones that would be covering the section of the assignment that I had any trouble with in lecture while I was doing it.
Your talking about two different classes of cars. Sure you can squeek 300hp out of some 2L 4 banger in an import thats al nice and they drive fairly well. Granted I smoke the little imports regularly on friday nights but with a car that wieghts twice to sometimes 3 times theres but puts out 4+ times the HP (a very modded Smokey and the Bandit limited ed TA)
But all in all you are correct go over 500hp and it's a monster to drive and generaly not street legal. The import classes make good dialy drivers / strip toys with 2-3 times the stock HP while most corvet owners etc stop at 400 - 500 HP and thats not even 2x there origional HP simply because they become monsters to drive start twisting frame members and go through tires every other week.
Can we get that down to under 4 hours it would make the news people happy with a nice 7 - 11 primetime special.
But yes you allways want to have more power but more importantly better power with larger force multipliers and lower maitnence costs thats more and more versitile. It's not a question of how dead do you want them anymore politicians are driving to more and more surgical less collateral damage so they have less political fallout. Allways remember the military is the ultimate tool for diplomacy when you can leave the table and say conceed or we send them in.
You dont need raid to get acceptable levels of reliability just SCSI. IDE is dirt cheap and you get what you pay for dirty platters apparently.
OK withoug joking do people still run single drive machines outside of specific purpose and laptops? I havent built an IDE box that wasent raid 1 or 10 in 4 years this if for home use where backups happen every now and again at best.
Now with this said persoanly my failure rate on SCSI drives is a LOT lower than IDE drives I buy but at the same time I only get SCA SCSI drives and put them in enclosures vs IDE inside the box with no active cooling specific to the hard drive.
More importantly unlike what people think a lot of broadband connections cost more than there max incomming bandwith does. I buy bandwith al the time and right now I can get sub $50 a meg from a good carrier and sub $30 from the likes of cogent. I pay $60 a month for 384k (1.5m max) incomming cogent bandwith would cost $45 assuming I max my incomming during peek wich I'm not garentted that still leave $15 for them to interconnect etc. Now yes there are a lot of ISP's out there that pay to much for bandwith and there are even more that DONT pay for bandwith and only have there own networks to pay for.
OK call me a sceptic but at a 2x to 4x throughput thats not a huge leap what would be the incentive to bother? Sure if it's pretty cost neutral install g for the new gear. Most people would seem to stick with there functional b gear and leave it at that till it natrual progresses over to a g network or someing fast comes out like a,b,g chipsets.
OK first off Ethernet works great over fiber actualy in the last two revision fiber was first (1 gig and 10gigE I'm not sure on 100mb) Fiber Channel does nothing new realy it's just another packtied network that happen to run are some pretty high speeds and support packetized SCSI and network (mostly IP) it's nice it has dynamic addressing and a lot of support for bonding channels together. Sonet realy is what you want to use for going the distance it supports very large packets something ethernet has big issuea with. You can use ethernet but it's just not that easy there are a lot of issues like delayed collisions. Ethernet has the LAN locked up it just works well enough and has been expanding at a fast enough clip. It's being expanded into the MAN where it's just so much less expansive to switch than it is to route.
I think when it realy comes down to it you can get a gigabit port on a big switch (lets say a 4k from cisco) for under 100 bucks a port easily while your paying sever thousand for the same ammount of bandwith for sonet and fiberchannel sometimes thats an addon to gigabit class switches but realy how long with it last with iSCSI comming up in the ranks.
Your right I think you could add power to GigE but I dont beleive it's part of the spec just yet. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/modules/ps4 835/ps5173/index.html is cisco's high end blade and it says gige or inline power so I think it's a choice either or. Granted technicaly it wouldent be so hard to put signal and power down the same line (I'm used to phantom power for Mic's)
Now Legacy devices are supposed to support ring signal on the center pair (yes they designed it to run phone over as well) and pins 7 and 8 might be run to chassie ground at worst and I know at least the cisco gear I have worked with have fast acting self resetting circut breakers in them that reset when link is lost.
But all in all it's sort of funny if were making this new big standard that dosent work with gige the next generation of station wiring.
OK this is a good idea from my perspective. I have used Cisco IP phones w9ith this and they work great it's a LOT easier than a UPS for every IP phone (look at a sales guy and try to explain why the phone died when they power took a hit phones need to be reliable) I have used it with 3com AP's again it works great and makes it easy to stick the AP on the drop ceiling and other hard to reach places PoE again can provided needed UPS power to the AP it also has the side benifit of the AP isn't up and running unless the network is plugged in (I have seen it happen it's not pretty)
I'm waiting for a laptop that can suplement/charge itself over PoE I have a subnotebook that only draws 14 watts charging PoE is close to that possibly enough for a trickle charge. It would seem to be a cheap addon to a laptop ethernet. A lot of people in offices hook laptops up to PSU but leave them on the wireless because it's easier this could make a one cable solution. I can see a whole line of terminals as well for POS applications. In reality on a lot of things this could replace the charger for small devices like PDA's and hook them up to the network at the same time.
Now it seems to be incompatable with GigE over copper since that uses all 8 wires.
OK lets see you want people to go on a bike to the grocery store. Lets see I get on average a full shopping cart of groceries per trip that generaly weight a couple hundred pounds. Where on a bike would this fit? A trailer perhaps. If your like me you go shopping one every couple weeks.
Now going out for food I guess bike attire is ok for your fast food chains through maybe a chain family sitdown. I guess if I limit myself to nice resteraunts that are within walking distance that would work there and in a place like manhattan thats generaly true.
Now lets look at the bad side of this concept. Cars provide needed transport for bulk goods making things more affordable. Public transportation in general is inconvient, unsanitary and potentialy dangerious (subway muggings anybody) lets also look at fields that need vehicals a carpender needs to get some heavy equipment to your residence he obvious cant take it on a train. Will getting a rotoruter guy out require a special pass? In reality you cant realy get away from having vehicular access if for nothing but emergency traffic like firetrucks and maitnece / delivery.
To make something like this work public transportation needs to be efficient to the users time if it takes an extra hour out of every workday thats a very significant time penalty that could be spent with children etc. Realy your talking about soemthing that should be done in some planned community not a retrofit to an existing city.