Technology

This is a continuation of an earlier post. It will likely not make much sense. You have been warned.

Okay, so say we want to cause the television in room A to play a video thats on a PC in room B. Lets say that the video is on the hard drive (which means we've skipped the illegal but perfectly reasonable step of copying it to the hard drive; it just magically appeared there, and will of course, oh gods of RIAA, be there only until it is viewed).

How do we make this happen?

Well, we need to turn do a couple of things in any order. When we have all of them, we have a system that will do this for us.

We need to make sure that the hard drive is on.
We need to be able to issue commands to the hard drive to start and stop the video.
We need to make sure that there is some kind of command path and a communications path between the hard drive and the television.

The first one -- maybe the hard drive is always on, but maybe it isn't. Or maybe its supposed to be on, but every so often, it gets turned off by gremlins, cleaners, or kids wondering what that button does. We need to be able to say 'Turn on', and if it isn't already, it does. So we need some device that can send a signal to the hard drive that it will recognize as 'turn on'. This means we need to know what that signal is, or we need some kind of interface that will pass on such a command for us -- ie, we tell the interface Hey, Make Sure The Hard Drive Is On, and it sends the command and checks the response.

The second one -- once the hard drive is on, you need to be able to tell it what to do -- and when you issue the commands, you have to get some kind of indicator back that says Okay, Chief, I got that, starting now, stopping now, whatever. It can't be a Yeah response. Its actually got to be the hard drive controller telling you that Things Are Happening. It would also probably be a good idea if it gave you a HOLY CRAP!!! indicator... for what IBM likes to call Unexpected Events. So this means we need to know what those signals would look like, or we need to be able to tell an interface. My guess is, we'd need to do it directly.

The third one -- I'm thinking a hard-wired connection here. I know, wireless connections are all the rage, the bees knees, and all that hep cat stuff. Its also slower than a hard wired connection. You can get a megagihugically fast wireless connection, if its that big a deal to you, or you can run CAT5 cable. Or thicker. Its kind of the difference between the flexibility of a bus and the economies of light rail. You can have wireless for short distances or lightweight transmissions, though.

And thats it.

Yeah, right. What am I missing?