Remember it? Hell, I bought it on DVD! That movie rocks! I think just about any kid would love to play that role (in real life of course!)
I bought it about a week ago and I hadn't seen it for over a decade before that. It's amazing to see that movie today and see just how good those graphics were! Holy cow! They're damn good even by today's standards!
I saw that within the last year or so, Tron 2.0 came out. I would love to see a modern game version of The Last Starfighter. Think about it. Multiplayer mode would rock! When I pick up the Death Blossom upgrade and you better just run, bitch!
This is nothing new. We have seen games used in this way for other fields. For instance, training soldiers and teaching kids (anyone remember Math Fun on the Intellivision?)
While it's great to see new fields opening up to the idea of game-based training, I wonder just how effective it could be. It's easy to see how video game training could benefit soldiers, affecting things like awareness, when and how to hide, move, shoot, etc... It's also a no-brainer to see how it can be used to teach children. But, when we're looking at doctors, it starts to get a little blurry to me how this can help. It just seems to me that a game that would be capable of teaching a medical doctor would have to be so complex that it just wouldn't be a fun game. If you simplify it too much, the doctors would start to overlook certain possibilities in treatments because the simulators never covered it. That could be a bad thing.
Then again, maybe I'm biased by the fact that I grew up playing games that taught children and yet have never seen one for teaching doctors or professions of that caliber/genre. I hope my skepticism is proven wrong because if it's possible, I think game-based training is a great way to train. If it can keep you interested and at the same time teach you, then it's a good thing all around.
So, are they going to be putting gameboy versions of "Operation" in ERs now?
But that's ok. Riding on the work of others is done by everyone. Do you know Ohm's Law? If you do, did you develop it yourself? How about Calculus or, computers. Did you invent the microproccesor? If you are using these tools to make a living, then you are also riding on the effort of others. This is why humans form societies. It makes life easier for each individual and for the whole collective.
As for helping people, by merely helping linux grow in popularity in businesses willing to spend money on Linux, he is helping the linux community grow. Let's face it, while Linux can do just fine on it's own, it can do even better wth money. If I didn't have to worry about money, I would contribute a lot of time to Linux. So, if I can make money while helping Linux, both I and Linux win. By helping Linux in this way, the demand for Linux and Linux apps grows. The more this demand grows, the better the product will get due to more development. He IS helping the community and like everyone else, he is riding on the effort and work of others but still contributing to that effort and work.
LOL!!! No, I don't have a problem with that!:) Hahahaha! It's a good thing I don't have morals to trade or you might be right about me!:) Still LOL!!!
But, I would like an answer to my question, but I'm going to rephrase it after your last post. Do you have a problem with a man making a living from doing consulting, especially with regards to Linux? If not, then I don't understand what the problem is. I guess what I'm really trying to say is: please verify what you really mean by your statements.
And thanks. I'm not being sarcastic. Your last post made me laugh and made my day a lot better!! Despite not liking your point, it's funny nonetheless! If I were a moderator I would give you a 1: Funny
Yep, looks like yet another "Don't blame me for my own problems" epidemics is about to sweep the nation. Maybe there is a medical reason as to why I'm such an asshole. I could blame it on magnetic fields from electrical wires magnetizing my right ear lobe's hair. That's it!
I find it interesting that the poster put a disclaimer in there. "Don't tag me as a troll, I'm one of the guys I'm trolling so it's OK!" Does this make it OK to troll? If so, I might start doing that. Make fun of people who own Nintendos while adding a disclaimer (It's ok, I own one too. I'm allowed to troll these people!)
I also find it interesting that liberals are now trying to find excuses as to why they are they way they are. Is this an admission that they are wrong?
(DISCLAIMER: I'm not trolling the liberals. I'm not conservative and I'm not liberal and I don't give enough of a damn to troll!)
It's ridiculous that any entity would do this to another on this level. Look at all the child rapists in the world. Go DDOS them instead. Do something worthwhile. DDOSing politicians when there are better targets is like a cop driving down the street, seeing 20 people shot, and instead of going after the murderers, he pulls over a guy that has a tail light out. Seriously! Go make life difficult for the ones who really need it. While I understand that politicians can be crooked, they're not more crooked than most, they just happen to be better at it and in the spotlight. And, not all politicians are crooked so DDOSing this group will be making things difficult for the good guys who will now be lured to the dark side because of your actions. Way to go, hippies!
No offense to TransGaming, but hopefully their services wont be required in the future, thus nullifying this problem, at least from TransGaming. It is my hope that gaming companies will start releaseing more and more titles that run natively on Linux as well as Windows. If this happens as it has already started, then TransGaming's product will be obsolete. PLEASE NOTE: I am not trying to knock TransGaming, I think they are a great company doing great things. I just think it is inevitable that Linux will eventually be a fully supported gaming platform by the big dogs.
It's the worst because there are no other movies I would walk out on. Unless the helicopter scene is playing, I am out of the room, period. Since I will do that for no other movie, I have to rate this the lowest. Even other movies with no good scenes are not as bad as the non-heli scenes in this movie.
This is the only movie I will get up and walk out of the room for just because someone is watching it. The only scene that keeps me from buying every instance of this movie and burning it is the helicopter/surf scene. That scene in itself is a classic. I would actually buy a DVD of just that scene if it were available. The rest of the movie is napalm bait.
I have read a lot of different definitions of what 'thin clients' are in this thread. Actually, they are all right and wrong. 'Thin client' has quite a few definitions and the definition that applies to you depends on your appliction. For this application, I think we can assume that 'thin client' means a computer without a natively installed OS. In reality, what you want is a standard run of the mill PC for each terminal. There is no need to get exotic towards either end of the spectrum.
For arguments sake, lets assume you want 5 terminals throughout your library. If money were no object, I would order 5 standard PCs from your favorite computer manufacturer (this could be a big dog like Dell or HP or a local computer store.) The only things you want to pay special attention to are warranties. Get the best warranty you can get your hands on. Not to be an advertisement for Dell, but they do have a nice 4year/4hour on site warranty. Once you call in a hardware problem, within 4 hours there will be a tech there to work on it and they'll do this for 4 years. That's hard to beat. One nice thing about buying a standard PC instead of one designed to be the minimum thin client configuration is that if you change your mind later, you can always use a non-thin client solution. I would also consider buying an extra PC. Depending on how busy your terminals will be, you may not get enough time on one of them to update your deploy image. You will need to do things like perform virus scan updates and apply security patches and bug fixes. If taking over a terminal every once in a while is no bigge, don't worry about the extra PC.
Once you have your 5 terminals you should set them up with the standard OS and software you intend to support. I see a lot of Linux suggestions here and Linux could very easily pull it off. But, for a public library, Windows will easily work as well. It is really up to you and which OS you want to support. Whatever you do, make sure you have Mozilla, an office suite, and a virus scanner. If you run Linux, this should be Open Office and if you run Windows, it should be open office AND Microsoft Office. Once you have decided that, I think the idea of bootstrapping over the network is a good idea, but there are other options. Wether you choose Linux or Windows XP, both are capable of firewalling and you should definitely use that feature on the clients and it probably wouldn't hurt to have a firewall protecting your entire building too. But that's just my paranoia kicking in.
First, the drawbacks of net bootstrapping. If you do this, you will either be loading an entire OS and it's apps onto the client hard drive which would take a long time and every reboot of the machine would have that minimum as a downtime. Or, you could just load the base OS onto the machine and have all the apps installed on a server via a mapped drive. This would require less downtime at boot, but your network and server become single points of failure for your clients and you would have long application load times. I would recommend a daily reboot. If you do this when the library opens, then the downtime is not a problem. I would snag the whole OS over the network. This way, regardless of who walks in and out of your library, at least once a day you have cleaned up their messes and you will only have to maintain a single deploy image for all of your terminals. Also, if a computer has trouble and you are too busy to spend time troubleshooting or if you're out and a non-techy person is there, all that is needed is a reboot to take care of the problem.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind. I assume your computer will be capable of searching some sort of database to let patrons search for books and what not. If this is so, you might also want to consider having the terminals have their own databases that snag a copy of the database data from the server at boot time. Every 15 minutes or 30 minutes or so, the clients can request updates. This way, you still only have to u
It's not always about the user doing something wrong. I think you're closed to the concept the the OS could be doing something wrong. I am a sysadmin and manage over 300+ computers with Windows installed on them. The number of reinstalls I do for Windows is very low considering those numbers. But, for the 50+ *nix machines I also admin, I do even fewer reinstalls percentage wise. In fact, I have only ever done and OS reinstall on a *nix box because I was installing a different OS/distro.
I am not one of those mindless guys that says Windows is not "stable", I am one of those guys that says I am sick of coming into work and at least once a month finding a machine that hasn't been touched in a month (except for critical updates and virus scan def updates) in a BSOD and BSODs on reboot. I have never had this happen on a *nix machine and I have more experience with Widows sysadmin than I do with *nix so blaming it on in-experience with Windows is not an option here.
Your blanket statement that says "you're doing something wrong... it's as simple as that" is ignorant and absent minded to say the least. Everyone who had a Fiero that had an engine fire must have been doing something wrong. Nevermind that after a rash of problems, those Fieros got recalled over 6 years after the first one rolled off the assembly line.
What are you not doing to it? Using it? If you don't use your computer, yeah, you wont have to reinstall your OS. However, those of us that use our machines find that Windows typically needs a reinstall for no apparent reason what-so-ever. This happens even if you are not on the network so spyware is not an issue. Sometimes, just installing 3rd party software can cause Windows to flip out. I have never seen this happen in any *nix.
There are a thousand and one reasons Windows can flip out. The first one being using it. Don't use it and it wont flip out. Use it and you're just asking for a flipping.
I don't buy this optical storage crap. They said my Commodore 64 5.25" floppies had a maximum life of ten years and that after that the data would be too corrupt to read. I just pulled out my C64 again a couple of years ago. Today, I put in my old Telengard disk from 1983 (haven't used it since about 1986-7) and damn if that bitch still loads! Granted, for my inner paranoid dillusional side, I do make duplicates, but the short lifespan we're hearing about with optical media sounds bogus to me. The only problem I have had with CD-Rs in the past ten years is the flaking off of the non-write side off the CD. That makes those suckers un-readable. To avoid that, just don't buy el-cheapo CD-Rs or if you do, put a label on the non-write side to help keep the surface from flaking off. OR, buy a decent name brand and you wont have to worry about it.
You guys are not paying attention. He did not ask you how to spend the money. That has already been decided. What he wants is help on how to effectively do the job he wants to do.
I would say that you have not provided enough information. We need square footage of each apartment and the layout of the apartments. What you have to pay attention to is the INDOOR range of your wireless access points. In this situation, I would say you don't need to heavily overlap the access points' signals for redundancy sake since this isn't what I would consider mission-critical. Normal access points can cross over more than one floor. For instance, my roommate has a D-Link cable router on the first floor of our house and we get signal in the basement and on the second floor just fine. So, you could probably put an access point on the second and fourth floors and be good to go. If you find you need two access points per floor to cover the square footage effectively, I would put the second and fourth floor access points on one side of the building and put the other two access points on the other side of the building on the first and third floors.
You will need two to four access points (maybe more depending on square footage) and you will need to measure the footage of ethernet cable you will need. I would buy a 1000ft spool of cat5e. You can usually get that for around $40 or so. Of course, you will have to buy RJ45 ends. Make sure they're rated for cat5e. They should only run you about $0.40 - 0.60 each and you'll probably have to buy them in a small bulk amount like 25 or 50, maybe 100. You will probably need some sort of fastener that that will hold the cable in place once it is run. I can't remember what they're called but you can get little plastic u shaped clips that nail into the wall. That will work for you. You will want to check with your state laws. Some states or counties or cities may have regulations about running all cables through conduit. Make sure you look into that.
You will also need some sort of NAT machine. Wether this is a linux PC or a little black box cable router is up to you. In the end, I don't think you'll spend more than a few hundred dollars. Of course, this is assuming that you have permission to do this. It may be possible to make wireless access points talk to each other via a wireless connection, but I haven't tried that. If you can make it work, it will help you avoid the hassle of wiring. It wont be high performance, but it will be more than enough for gaming.
No, really, in all honesty, Linux running as a command-line-only OS on a small device would not be that bad of an idea. Actually, in order to be effective, it would definitely have to be streamlined, but still, command-line-only OS's have a lot of potential in a small amount of computing power. Think about it, using a command-line-only version of Linux still gives you access to news groups, email, text editing (for notes), security, and compatibility with a full blown operating system for easy file transfer. Assuming there were a specialized Linux made to run on these little guys, I think it would be great.
The Palm Pilot example shows that you would need a graphical interface of some sort, but it would be very easy to do. Since Palm Pilot grpahics are black and white anyway, it's no big deal and requires very little memory. I say go for it.
Eric
By the way, I honestly believe the commodore 64 could do a decent job of running Linux provided it's graphical and sound capabilites are limited and ethernet is gonna have to be an engineering feat of its own. Still, you can operate modems just as fast with the C64 as you can with a PC and if Linux can provide a TCP/IP stack for the Commy, then you will sitll have access to networking. And, another engineering feat, but possible, would be to adapt a PCI bus to the commy and use video cards from the PC. Quite a novel little project really. Good for few sundays when there is nothing else to do . . .
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Yeah, but scars are sexy.
Remember it? Hell, I bought it on DVD! That movie rocks! I think just about any kid would love to play that role (in real life of course!)
I bought it about a week ago and I hadn't seen it for over a decade before that. It's amazing to see that movie today and see just how good those graphics were! Holy cow! They're damn good even by today's standards!
I saw that within the last year or so, Tron 2.0 came out. I would love to see a modern game version of The Last Starfighter. Think about it. Multiplayer mode would rock! When I pick up the Death Blossom upgrade and you better just run, bitch!
This is nothing new. We have seen games used in this way for other fields. For instance, training soldiers and teaching kids (anyone remember Math Fun on the Intellivision?)
While it's great to see new fields opening up to the idea of game-based training, I wonder just how effective it could be. It's easy to see how video game training could benefit soldiers, affecting things like awareness, when and how to hide, move, shoot, etc... It's also a no-brainer to see how it can be used to teach children. But, when we're looking at doctors, it starts to get a little blurry to me how this can help. It just seems to me that a game that would be capable of teaching a medical doctor would have to be so complex that it just wouldn't be a fun game. If you simplify it too much, the doctors would start to overlook certain possibilities in treatments because the simulators never covered it. That could be a bad thing.
Then again, maybe I'm biased by the fact that I grew up playing games that taught children and yet have never seen one for teaching doctors or professions of that caliber/genre. I hope my skepticism is proven wrong because if it's possible, I think game-based training is a great way to train. If it can keep you interested and at the same time teach you, then it's a good thing all around.
So, are they going to be putting gameboy versions of "Operation" in ERs now?
But that's ok. Riding on the work of others is done by everyone. Do you know Ohm's Law? If you do, did you develop it yourself? How about Calculus or, computers. Did you invent the microproccesor? If you are using these tools to make a living, then you are also riding on the effort of others. This is why humans form societies. It makes life easier for each individual and for the whole collective.
As for helping people, by merely helping linux grow in popularity in businesses willing to spend money on Linux, he is helping the linux community grow. Let's face it, while Linux can do just fine on it's own, it can do even better wth money. If I didn't have to worry about money, I would contribute a lot of time to Linux. So, if I can make money while helping Linux, both I and Linux win. By helping Linux in this way, the demand for Linux and Linux apps grows. The more this demand grows, the better the product will get due to more development. He IS helping the community and like everyone else, he is riding on the effort and work of others but still contributing to that effort and work.
LOL!!! No, I don't have a problem with that! :) Hahahaha! It's a good thing I don't have morals to trade or you might be right about me! :) Still LOL!!!
But, I would like an answer to my question, but I'm going to rephrase it after your last post. Do you have a problem with a man making a living from doing consulting, especially with regards to Linux? If not, then I don't understand what the problem is. I guess what I'm really trying to say is: please verify what you really mean by your statements.
And thanks. I'm not being sarcastic. Your last post made me laugh and made my day a lot better!! Despite not liking your point, it's funny nonetheless! If I were a moderator I would give you a 1: Funny
You have a problem with a man making money?
Yep, looks like yet another "Don't blame me for my own problems" epidemics is about to sweep the nation. Maybe there is a medical reason as to why I'm such an asshole. I could blame it on magnetic fields from electrical wires magnetizing my right ear lobe's hair. That's it!
I find it interesting that the poster put a disclaimer in there. "Don't tag me as a troll, I'm one of the guys I'm trolling so it's OK!" Does this make it OK to troll? If so, I might start doing that. Make fun of people who own Nintendos while adding a disclaimer (It's ok, I own one too. I'm allowed to troll these people!)
I also find it interesting that liberals are now trying to find excuses as to why they are they way they are. Is this an admission that they are wrong?
(DISCLAIMER: I'm not trolling the liberals. I'm not conservative and I'm not liberal and I don't give enough of a damn to troll!)
It's ridiculous that any entity would do this to another on this level. Look at all the child rapists in the world. Go DDOS them instead. Do something worthwhile. DDOSing politicians when there are better targets is like a cop driving down the street, seeing 20 people shot, and instead of going after the murderers, he pulls over a guy that has a tail light out. Seriously! Go make life difficult for the ones who really need it. While I understand that politicians can be crooked, they're not more crooked than most, they just happen to be better at it and in the spotlight. And, not all politicians are crooked so DDOSing this group will be making things difficult for the good guys who will now be lured to the dark side because of your actions. Way to go, hippies!
No offense to TransGaming, but hopefully their services wont be required in the future, thus nullifying this problem, at least from TransGaming. It is my hope that gaming companies will start releaseing more and more titles that run natively on Linux as well as Windows. If this happens as it has already started, then TransGaming's product will be obsolete. PLEASE NOTE: I am not trying to knock TransGaming, I think they are a great company doing great things. I just think it is inevitable that Linux will eventually be a fully supported gaming platform by the big dogs.
It's the worst because there are no other movies I would walk out on. Unless the helicopter scene is playing, I am out of the room, period. Since I will do that for no other movie, I have to rate this the lowest. Even other movies with no good scenes are not as bad as the non-heli scenes in this movie.
This is the only movie I will get up and walk out of the room for just because someone is watching it. The only scene that keeps me from buying every instance of this movie and burning it is the helicopter/surf scene. That scene in itself is a classic. I would actually buy a DVD of just that scene if it were available. The rest of the movie is napalm bait.
I have read a lot of different definitions of what 'thin clients' are in this thread. Actually, they are all right and wrong. 'Thin client' has quite a few definitions and the definition that applies to you depends on your appliction. For this application, I think we can assume that 'thin client' means a computer without a natively installed OS. In reality, what you want is a standard run of the mill PC for each terminal. There is no need to get exotic towards either end of the spectrum.
For arguments sake, lets assume you want 5 terminals throughout your library. If money were no object, I would order 5 standard PCs from your favorite computer manufacturer (this could be a big dog like Dell or HP or a local computer store.) The only things you want to pay special attention to are warranties. Get the best warranty you can get your hands on. Not to be an advertisement for Dell, but they do have a nice 4year/4hour on site warranty. Once you call in a hardware problem, within 4 hours there will be a tech there to work on it and they'll do this for 4 years. That's hard to beat. One nice thing about buying a standard PC instead of one designed to be the minimum thin client configuration is that if you change your mind later, you can always use a non-thin client solution. I would also consider buying an extra PC. Depending on how busy your terminals will be, you may not get enough time on one of them to update your deploy image. You will need to do things like perform virus scan updates and apply security patches and bug fixes. If taking over a terminal every once in a while is no bigge, don't worry about the extra PC.
Once you have your 5 terminals you should set them up with the standard OS and software you intend to support. I see a lot of Linux suggestions here and Linux could very easily pull it off. But, for a public library, Windows will easily work as well. It is really up to you and which OS you want to support. Whatever you do, make sure you have Mozilla, an office suite, and a virus scanner. If you run Linux, this should be Open Office and if you run Windows, it should be open office AND Microsoft Office. Once you have decided that, I think the idea of bootstrapping over the network is a good idea, but there are other options. Wether you choose Linux or Windows XP, both are capable of firewalling and you should definitely use that feature on the clients and it probably wouldn't hurt to have a firewall protecting your entire building too. But that's just my paranoia kicking in.
First, the drawbacks of net bootstrapping. If you do this, you will either be loading an entire OS and it's apps onto the client hard drive which would take a long time and every reboot of the machine would have that minimum as a downtime. Or, you could just load the base OS onto the machine and have all the apps installed on a server via a mapped drive. This would require less downtime at boot, but your network and server become single points of failure for your clients and you would have long application load times. I would recommend a daily reboot. If you do this when the library opens, then the downtime is not a problem. I would snag the whole OS over the network. This way, regardless of who walks in and out of your library, at least once a day you have cleaned up their messes and you will only have to maintain a single deploy image for all of your terminals. Also, if a computer has trouble and you are too busy to spend time troubleshooting or if you're out and a non-techy person is there, all that is needed is a reboot to take care of the problem.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind. I assume your computer will be capable of searching some sort of database to let patrons search for books and what not. If this is so, you might also want to consider having the terminals have their own databases that snag a copy of the database data from the server at boot time. Every 15 minutes or 30 minutes or so, the clients can request updates. This way, you still only have to u
It's not always about the user doing something wrong. I think you're closed to the concept the the OS could be doing something wrong. I am a sysadmin and manage over 300+ computers with Windows installed on them. The number of reinstalls I do for Windows is very low considering those numbers. But, for the 50+ *nix machines I also admin, I do even fewer reinstalls percentage wise. In fact, I have only ever done and OS reinstall on a *nix box because I was installing a different OS/distro.
h tml
I am not one of those mindless guys that says Windows is not "stable", I am one of those guys that says I am sick of coming into work and at least once a month finding a machine that hasn't been touched in a month (except for critical updates and virus scan def updates) in a BSOD and BSODs on reboot. I have never had this happen on a *nix machine and I have more experience with Widows sysadmin than I do with *nix so blaming it on in-experience with Windows is not an option here.
Your blanket statement that says "you're doing something wrong... it's as simple as that" is ignorant and absent minded to say the least. Everyone who had a Fiero that had an engine fire must have been doing something wrong. Nevermind that after a rash of problems, those Fieros got recalled over 6 years after the first one rolled off the assembly line.
http://www.alldata.com/recall/make/Pontiac/Fiero.
While it's wrong to mindlessly place the blame on the OS, it's just as wrong to mindlessly place the blame on the user too.
What are you not doing to it? Using it? If you don't use your computer, yeah, you wont have to reinstall your OS. However, those of us that use our machines find that Windows typically needs a reinstall for no apparent reason what-so-ever. This happens even if you are not on the network so spyware is not an issue. Sometimes, just installing 3rd party software can cause Windows to flip out. I have never seen this happen in any *nix.
There are a thousand and one reasons Windows can flip out. The first one being using it. Don't use it and it wont flip out. Use it and you're just asking for a flipping.
I don't buy this optical storage crap. They said my Commodore 64 5.25" floppies had a maximum life of ten years and that after that the data would be too corrupt to read. I just pulled out my C64 again a couple of years ago. Today, I put in my old Telengard disk from 1983 (haven't used it since about 1986-7) and damn if that bitch still loads! Granted, for my inner paranoid dillusional side, I do make duplicates, but the short lifespan we're hearing about with optical media sounds bogus to me. The only problem I have had with CD-Rs in the past ten years is the flaking off of the non-write side off the CD. That makes those suckers un-readable. To avoid that, just don't buy el-cheapo CD-Rs or if you do, put a label on the non-write side to help keep the surface from flaking off. OR, buy a decent name brand and you wont have to worry about it.
Damn! I was going to say that! Yep, Pine is your friend!
No no no my friend. She already has the access points.
You guys are not paying attention. He did not ask you how to spend the money. That has already been decided. What he wants is help on how to effectively do the job he wants to do.
I would say that you have not provided enough information. We need square footage of each apartment and the layout of the apartments. What you have to pay attention to is the INDOOR range of your wireless access points. In this situation, I would say you don't need to heavily overlap the access points' signals for redundancy sake since this isn't what I would consider mission-critical. Normal access points can cross over more than one floor. For instance, my roommate has a D-Link cable router on the first floor of our house and we get signal in the basement and on the second floor just fine. So, you could probably put an access point on the second and fourth floors and be good to go. If you find you need two access points per floor to cover the square footage effectively, I would put the second and fourth floor access points on one side of the building and put the other two access points on the other side of the building on the first and third floors.
You will need two to four access points (maybe more depending on square footage) and you will need to measure the footage of ethernet cable you will need. I would buy a 1000ft spool of cat5e. You can usually get that for around $40 or so. Of course, you will have to buy RJ45 ends. Make sure they're rated for cat5e. They should only run you about $0.40 - 0.60 each and you'll probably have to buy them in a small bulk amount like 25 or 50, maybe 100. You will probably need some sort of fastener that that will hold the cable in place once it is run. I can't remember what they're called but you can get little plastic u shaped clips that nail into the wall. That will work for you. You will want to check with your state laws. Some states or counties or cities may have regulations about running all cables through conduit. Make sure you look into that.
You will also need some sort of NAT machine. Wether this is a linux PC or a little black box cable router is up to you. In the end, I don't think you'll spend more than a few hundred dollars. Of course, this is assuming that you have permission to do this. It may be possible to make wireless access points talk to each other via a wireless connection, but I haven't tried that. If you can make it work, it will help you avoid the hassle of wiring. It wont be high performance, but it will be more than enough for gaming.
Good luck!
You got something to say about the Commodore 64?
That's what I thought!
No, really, in all honesty, Linux running as a command-line-only OS on a small device would not be that bad of an idea. Actually, in order to be effective, it would definitely have to be streamlined, but still, command-line-only OS's have a lot of potential in a small amount of computing power. Think about it, using a command-line-only version of Linux still gives you access to news groups, email, text editing (for notes), security, and compatibility with a full blown operating system for easy file transfer. Assuming there were a specialized Linux made to run on these little guys, I think it would be great.
The Palm Pilot example shows that you would need a graphical interface of some sort, but it would be very easy to do. Since Palm Pilot grpahics are black and white anyway, it's no big deal and requires very little memory. I say go for it.
Eric
By the way, I honestly believe the commodore 64 could do a decent job of running Linux provided it's graphical and sound capabilites are limited and ethernet is gonna have to be an engineering feat of its own. Still, you can operate modems just as fast with the C64 as you can with a PC and if Linux can provide a TCP/IP stack for the Commy, then you will sitll have access to networking. And, another engineering feat, but possible, would be to adapt a PCI bus to the commy and use video cards from the PC. Quite a novel little project really. Good for few sundays when there is nothing else to do . . .