Have you tried placing a powered hub in the middle of two cables? I've successfully run 2 15' usb (and firewire as well) cables with a hub in the middle to peripherals like printers (and a DV tape deck with firewire) across the room.
Check out the Project for Open Source Media(POSM) as they are developing a Linux run set-top HTPC box. I've actually got an alpha version in my living room right now. At the moment it is proof of concept using some 5 year old whiteboxes (with new video card and 200GB HD), Azureus, Gnome Nautilus, some shell scripts and a Packard Bell remote control, but it looks and works great.
In addition to all the standard HTPC features, the POSM box uses RSS feeds with bittorrent enclosures like the awesome Pep Del.icio.us feed) to download great looking video automatically. Plus the POSM guys have gone to trouble of fine tuning the outputs (an Nvidia MX4000, ~$30) so they are nearly broadcast quality with proper whites and overscan.
With a high quality MP4 file (like I'm pulling from the DigitalBicycle Project (I'm a developer on the project) you seriously can't tell the difference between that and television.
This reminds me of back when I was younger. My dad and I would go down to the Software Depot with a big pack of floppy disks.
They had a big catalog of shareware games: Duke Nukem, Commander Keen, Secret Agent. They were free to copy--though if you didn't bring your own floppies, you had to pay for those.
This concept of bringing your own CD-Rs doesn't sound any different, just an update of the times when software programs won't fit on a flopy disk.
I hope they are offering some open source games. I'm looking forward to whooping some South Africans in FreeCiv, dialups be damned.
Now I understand what the point of this is, that if you have some room with dimensions W*L*H you can definitely fit more space into it if you fill the entire room with cubes, as opposed to just covering the walls with racks.
But as a people are mentioning, what about maintenance. You have a big stack of cubes, with something wrong in the middle, you have to dissassemble a bunch to get at it. And even if the data is mirrored on another brick, what happens when you have to remove that brick to get at the dead one.
Seems to me the most efficient manner is a two dimensional spread, i.e. cover one wall with cubes to a depth of only one cube. But then in that case, you migh as well go with a traditional rack server.
Cubes are stupid especially because (think about this) even if you have a wall of cubes stacked up, if you remove one, you may have to remove all of them on top of eachother (how are these things affixed?) Wouldn't it be smarter to have it be hexagonal? Removing one wouldn't collapse a column. There are more networking connections too.
Seems like a gimmick to me. Play tetris with your SAN!
How does the camera figure out whether the picture has been "compromised." Is this just as simple as determing the alpha value of the snapped photo to see if you put your hat over the lens?
Could there be a locator behind you on the wall that the camera looks for to make sure it isn't compromised? If not, why not hold up a magazine picture or almost anything that has some contrast with different shaped objects and such.
Maybe they have a running video that only saves the frames when you run the transaction. That way it could constantly process the images and if something funny starts happening. Like a major image change from a parking lot to the cover of Seventeen being held in front of it (not that the Tween crowd uses stamps, that's saved for old South Koreans), the camera could lock the kiosk for a certain period of time.
It might stop a fast moving fat person (they could roll) from buying stamps. No more renewing your subscriptions to Pie of the Month Club.
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Have you tried placing a powered hub in the middle of two cables? I've successfully run 2 15' usb (and firewire as well) cables with a hub in the middle to peripherals like printers (and a DV tape deck with firewire) across the room.
Check out the Project for Open Source Media(POSM) as they are developing a Linux run set-top HTPC box. I've actually got an alpha version in my living room right now. At the moment it is proof of concept using some 5 year old whiteboxes (with new video card and 200GB HD), Azureus, Gnome Nautilus, some shell scripts and a Packard Bell remote control, but it looks and works great.
In addition to all the standard HTPC features, the POSM box uses RSS feeds with bittorrent enclosures like the awesome Pep Del.icio.us feed) to download great looking video automatically. Plus the POSM guys have gone to trouble of fine tuning the outputs (an Nvidia MX4000, ~$30) so they are nearly broadcast quality with proper whites and overscan.
With a high quality MP4 file (like I'm pulling from the DigitalBicycle Project (I'm a developer on the project) you seriously can't tell the difference between that and television.
This reminds me of back when I was younger. My dad and I would go down to the Software Depot with a big pack of floppy disks.
They had a big catalog of shareware games: Duke Nukem, Commander Keen, Secret Agent. They were free to copy--though if you didn't bring your own floppies, you had to pay for those.
This concept of bringing your own CD-Rs doesn't sound any different, just an update of the times when software programs won't fit on a flopy disk.
I hope they are offering some open source games. I'm looking forward to whooping some South Africans in FreeCiv, dialups be damned.
But as a people are mentioning, what about maintenance. You have a big stack of cubes, with something wrong in the middle, you have to dissassemble a bunch to get at it. And even if the data is mirrored on another brick, what happens when you have to remove that brick to get at the dead one.
Seems to me the most efficient manner is a two dimensional spread, i.e. cover one wall with cubes to a depth of only one cube. But then in that case, you migh as well go with a traditional rack server.
Cubes are stupid especially because (think about this) even if you have a wall of cubes stacked up, if you remove one, you may have to remove all of them on top of eachother (how are these things affixed?) Wouldn't it be smarter to have it be hexagonal? Removing one wouldn't collapse a column. There are more networking connections too.
Seems like a gimmick to me. Play tetris with your SAN!
How does the camera figure out whether the picture has been "compromised." Is this just as simple as determing the alpha value of the snapped photo to see if you put your hat over the lens? Could there be a locator behind you on the wall that the camera looks for to make sure it isn't compromised? If not, why not hold up a magazine picture or almost anything that has some contrast with different shaped objects and such. Maybe they have a running video that only saves the frames when you run the transaction. That way it could constantly process the images and if something funny starts happening. Like a major image change from a parking lot to the cover of Seventeen being held in front of it (not that the Tween crowd uses stamps, that's saved for old South Koreans), the camera could lock the kiosk for a certain period of time. It might stop a fast moving fat person (they could roll) from buying stamps. No more renewing your subscriptions to Pie of the Month Club.