We do some work for various security camera type installations. I have a camera lense sitting behind me that costs 25,000$. Supposedly, the optics are good enough to read license plates from a mile away. The CCD supports full NTSC resolution.
This isn't equipment most companies are likely to own, but the stuff does exist and is used.
Yes, it supports multicasting. It's a full image, up to 4 GB loaded onto the clients. The hour is a maximum time for the slowest machines and takes into account the time to shutdown from windows, reimage, rename, re-add to domain, etc...
For new machines, it's obviously much faster.
The school I consult for will be purchasing over 1000 PCs (with monitor) for 750$ each. Per seat costs for anti-virus and remote imaging bring the price up to 780$ per machine.
We manage spyware and patches by remotly reimaging the machines. It's scheduled and completely hands-off. I can reimage a lab of 30 machines in an hour. As long as everyone remembers to save their files to their network drive, they'll never know anything happened to the PC.
Schools generally get grants and capital project money which they can use to purchase NEW stuff. Rarely will they get money to maintain the old. This means the primary educational app my 1000 new 3 Ghz PCs will run was written for a Windows 3.11 peer to peer network, and it shows.
As a result, you can imagine how very pleased I am to see students running knoppix or lugging in their own laptops or anything else that threatens the pathetic security I'm forced to setup just to make some of these apps work.
Finally, I've worked with a fair number of students, including the smart ones who were permitted to take the cisco academy course. The vast majority have never even attempted to manage a network of a dozen PCs, let alone several hundred or thousand. I can only see huge problems with a classroom of kids playing BOFH on a production network they barely understand.
Back in the day, you could edit the win.ini or system.ini and change shell=explorer.exe to shell=myapp.exe. I don't know if this still works, though I know you can do it with a terminal services session, so I'm assuming some googling will help you out.
Once windows loaded, it would run your app, and unless your app has the ability to launch other programs, nothing else. You can lock out task manager and whatnot with windows policies.
Between those 2 things, you should be in pretty good shape.
You might also think about deep-freeze. It locks out the disk such that a user can change anything, and I mean anything, and a reboot will bring it back to a default state.
Smartsight Networks has a product called nDVR. It's designed as a digital security camera system, but offers encrypted video multicasted from a central server.
I've installed the units from VBrick, they are in fact used by cable companies to do just what you are attempting.
You might need to check with the network admins to look at QoS settings to make sure you get the best signal you can.
After reading about the problems Carmack and Armadillo Aerospace encountered trying to get H2O2, I don't think you'd be able to get enough fuel or parts to build anything un-noticed.
Similar to GFI is HFNetCheck, which offers a 50 node demo that never expires. Works great for small networks or if you just want to manage your servers.
I worked at a place that leased 4 of these things for like 5 years. They were pretty rough. They broke all the time. Eventually the company we leased them from went out of business. We were left trying to get custom made cables to get them working again.
The company I worked for was in a mall, they went out of business, probably for spending thousands of dollars and stupid stuff like this.
As I recall, the system was basically a 486 with 2 big video cards, they had something like 4 40mm fans on each card.
Eventually we had 4 machines, with 2 sitting never used because we scavenged them for parts.
Personally I could never use the thing. The way the headset fit on me I could never get the proper 3D view.
Foresite Accustream 170 About 2900$ though.
I don't work for them and have no experience with the card, but this is what I came up with when trying to google for the old Cybex (now avocent) Keyview II, which had a similar, though much cheaper kind of card.
Folks looking for a decent spam filter should check out ASSP.
It's a SMTP proxy written in perl. I've got it up and running on my MS Exchange server, but apparently it supports virtually any platform that supports Perl. It has a good web based interface that makes configuration a snap.
It's a Real Time Strategy game, came out around 1999. We played this for hours. You can have teams anywhere from 2 to 8 players and play against each other, in 2 or more teams or against the computer. We played on pentium 200's at work.
I'm sure you can find copies someplace.
I at a k-12 school. Over 70% of our incoming email is spam. One user went on a 6 month sabatical and came back to find 35,000 spams in his inbox. But more important than the storage, bandwidth and PITA issues with spam is the content.
In a sue-happy world you simply cannot have teachers in a classroom using email when it might contain porn, racist humor or anything else you wouldn't want a 6 year old to see.
A palm PDA, plus NAV with GPS all built into a normal PDA sized box. It even talks to you and tells you to turn around when you've gone the wrong way. About 475$.
I had a subscription to Emusic.com. I have loads of MP3s I bought and downloaded.
The songs are standard MP3s, no DRM. As far as I can tell, I own them just as much as I own CDs I've bought. A quick glance of their terms of use reveals no restrictions on buying and selling.
I would think selling an Emusic MP3 would be much simpler, and avoid the issues of how to transfer an iTunes file and the problems associated with the DRM.
My company works in schools supporting networks and anything technology related. We installed a system similar to this with 35 cameras in a school. The cameras had to specifically be located such that they would never be able to see into a classroom.
The contract the Teachers Union has specifically forbids footage from security cameras being used in any fashion to monitor teachers or at job reviews.
At most schools I have worked in, the teachers hate the administration and the administration hates them right back. I'd expect the teachers unions to fight tooth and nail against this.
I live nearby, the address of the company is a residential subdivision in a small town nearby. The site also fails several of the test from the recent Seven Rules for Spotting Bogus Science article.
Slashdot Mirror
We do some work for various security camera type installations. I have a camera lense sitting behind me that costs 25,000$. Supposedly, the optics are good enough to read license plates from a mile away. The CCD supports full NTSC resolution. This isn't equipment most companies are likely to own, but the stuff does exist and is used.
Yes, it supports multicasting. It's a full image, up to 4 GB loaded onto the clients. The hour is a maximum time for the slowest machines and takes into account the time to shutdown from windows, reimage, rename, re-add to domain, etc... For new machines, it's obviously much faster.
The school I consult for will be purchasing over 1000 PCs (with monitor) for 750$ each. Per seat costs for anti-virus and remote imaging bring the price up to 780$ per machine.
We manage spyware and patches by remotly reimaging the machines. It's scheduled and completely hands-off. I can reimage a lab of 30 machines in an hour. As long as everyone remembers to save their files to their network drive, they'll never know anything happened to the PC.
Schools generally get grants and capital project money which they can use to purchase NEW stuff. Rarely will they get money to maintain the old. This means the primary educational app my 1000 new 3 Ghz PCs will run was written for a Windows 3.11 peer to peer network, and it shows.
As a result, you can imagine how very pleased I am to see students running knoppix or lugging in their own laptops or anything else that threatens the pathetic security I'm forced to setup just to make some of these apps work.
Finally, I've worked with a fair number of students, including the smart ones who were permitted to take the cisco academy course. The vast majority have never even attempted to manage a network of a dozen PCs, let alone several hundred or thousand. I can only see huge problems with a classroom of kids playing BOFH on a production network they barely understand.
Back in the day, you could edit the win.ini or system.ini and change shell=explorer.exe to shell=myapp.exe. I don't know if this still works, though I know you can do it with a terminal services session, so I'm assuming some googling will help you out. Once windows loaded, it would run your app, and unless your app has the ability to launch other programs, nothing else. You can lock out task manager and whatnot with windows policies. Between those 2 things, you should be in pretty good shape. You might also think about deep-freeze. It locks out the disk such that a user can change anything, and I mean anything, and a reboot will bring it back to a default state.
Smartsight Networks has a product called nDVR. It's designed as a digital security camera system, but offers encrypted video multicasted from a central server.
I've installed the units from VBrick, they are in fact used by cable companies to do just what you are attempting. You might need to check with the network admins to look at QoS settings to make sure you get the best signal you can.
After reading about the problems Carmack and Armadillo Aerospace encountered trying to get H2O2, I don't think you'd be able to get enough fuel or parts to build anything un-noticed.
Similar to GFI is HFNetCheck, which offers a 50 node demo that never expires. Works great for small networks or if you just want to manage your servers.
I worked at a place that leased 4 of these things for like 5 years. They were pretty rough. They broke all the time. Eventually the company we leased them from went out of business. We were left trying to get custom made cables to get them working again.
The company I worked for was in a mall, they went out of business, probably for spending thousands of dollars and stupid stuff like this.
As I recall, the system was basically a 486 with 2 big video cards, they had something like 4 40mm fans on each card.
Eventually we had 4 machines, with 2 sitting never used because we scavenged them for parts.
Personally I could never use the thing. The way the headset fit on me I could never get the proper 3D view.
I read this piece earlier today there and they went on and on about the site, but never mentioned the URL.
Foresite Accustream 170 About 2900$ though. I don't work for them and have no experience with the card, but this is what I came up with when trying to google for the old Cybex (now avocent) Keyview II, which had a similar, though much cheaper kind of card.
Folks looking for a decent spam filter should check out ASSP. It's a SMTP proxy written in perl. I've got it up and running on my MS Exchange server, but apparently it supports virtually any platform that supports Perl. It has a good web based interface that makes configuration a snap.
It's a Real Time Strategy game, came out around 1999. We played this for hours. You can have teams anywhere from 2 to 8 players and play against each other, in 2 or more teams or against the computer. We played on pentium 200's at work. I'm sure you can find copies someplace.
I at a k-12 school. Over 70% of our incoming email is spam. One user went on a 6 month sabatical and came back to find 35,000 spams in his inbox. But more important than the storage, bandwidth and PITA issues with spam is the content. In a sue-happy world you simply cannot have teachers in a classroom using email when it might contain porn, racist humor or anything else you wouldn't want a 6 year old to see.
I'd have to go with the Garmin ique3600.
A palm PDA, plus NAV with GPS all built into a normal PDA sized box. It even talks to you and tells you to turn around when you've gone the wrong way. About 475$.
ique 3600
I had a subscription to Emusic.com. I have loads of MP3s I bought and downloaded. The songs are standard MP3s, no DRM. As far as I can tell, I own them just as much as I own CDs I've bought. A quick glance of their terms of use reveals no restrictions on buying and selling. I would think selling an Emusic MP3 would be much simpler, and avoid the issues of how to transfer an iTunes file and the problems associated with the DRM.
My company works in schools supporting networks and anything technology related. We installed a system similar to this with 35 cameras in a school. The cameras had to specifically be located such that they would never be able to see into a classroom. The contract the Teachers Union has specifically forbids footage from security cameras being used in any fashion to monitor teachers or at job reviews. At most schools I have worked in, the teachers hate the administration and the administration hates them right back. I'd expect the teachers unions to fight tooth and nail against this.
I live nearby, the address of the company is a residential subdivision in a small town nearby. The site also fails several of the test from the recent Seven Rules for Spotting Bogus Science article.