Re: Function key press across network, how?
From: Arthur J. O'Dwyer (ajo_at_nospam.andrew.cmu.edu)
Date: 10/19/03
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Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 01:58:01 -0400 (EDT)
On Sun, 19 Oct 2003, Larry L wrote:
>
(Just in case it was unclear, I was being very slightly
tongue-in-cheek with my previous post. :)
> Thanks for trying, but this is exactly what I meant by extraneous
> information sending people off on the wrong path. "People" are not an
> option. Those wearing the headphones can't do it, and this is a business,
> where the computers must be started and stopped about 40 times a day, in
> each location, and as I said in an earlier post it's running in numerous
> locations.
Immediately before my post, you'd said it was a program running on
four (4) laptops connected to a network. Now we learn that these
laptops must be rebooted more often than once an hour; that they
run in "numerous locations" (do you mean they move around? or that
they're not all in the same room? or that you have multiple four-laptop
sites around the globe?); and that the headphone wearers can't push
buttons (are they otherwise occupied? or are they not physically
near enough to the computers? or is button-pushing just not in their
job descriptions?).
> Hiring a 100 people to stand around and occassionally press
> a button is not, shall we say, practical, and I don't have that many
> friends with nothing to do! :-)
How did we get from four to 100?
I think the problem here is not "extraneous information"; I think
you're not giving nearly *enough* information. Think of this as
the programming problems we get here from time to time -- you need
to describe:
What do you need to do? (Not "what do *you* think the problem
is," but what you *actually* *need* to get done.)
Under what constraints are you operating? (Don't wait for
incomplete answers, and then spring new constraints on us.
Give the full specification up front, so *we* can weed out
the stupid answers before we even think of them.)
So far, I have gleaned the following information:
You need to send a signal to four computers simultaneously.
And by "simultaneously," you mean "within a few milliseconds
of each other" -- human time, not small enough to be measured in
CPU cycles.
These computers are on a local network of some sort.
These computers are all running the same version of Windows
(gratuitous assumption on my part -- but obviously if they're all
running different OSes, it makes it harder).
The signal needs to go to a particular program, the same
program on each machine.
The program currently gets the signal from a function key press
on the individual machines' keyboards.
The signal is sent only "occasionally"; it is not a frequent
occurrence. (Whether "occasionally" means "once per ten minutes"
or "once per day" is not yet known.)
When the signal is received, each machine emits an audible tone;
these tones should be synchronized so as not to sound bad or
distracting. The tones will be played through headphones (so
perhaps simply buying better-insulated headphones will deal with
this constraint).
The network and the computers on it get moved around in the
physical world quite often, so any solution must be portable in
the physical sense.
The computers get rebooted very frequently, for reasons as yet
unexplained; the solution must be able to handle this. (What
happens to a computer's network connection during the reboot
cycle? Are the reboots synchronized?)
The headphone wearers are perhaps not able to use the computers
directly; maybe they are telephone operators?
Is there anything more we need to know to solve the problem?
-Arthur,
seriously considering a cross-post to rec.puzzles
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