James T's questions

I'm going to need to set up video conferencing between Hawaii and Seattle for a small business.

They would like to use a mounted TV to do the video conferencing. It will be one TV to one TV communication.

One option would be to go with Polycom's HDX 6000 series telepresence solutions. I think this device needs a server like Microsoft Lync.

They don't seem to list their prices on Polycom but a google search says the hardware costs about $5000. Lync standard editon costs $699. Total cost for two Polycom's and one Lync server: $10,699

This would be secure, HD, and would offer more features than we need.

Another option would be to use Skype enabled TV's or blu-ray players, which would cost a total of $600 for two sets.

This would also be secure, and HD.

Is the obvious answer to use Skype? Am I missing anything?

I know that doing a dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb does a deep hard drive copy. I've heard that people have been able to speed up the process by increasing the number of bytes that are read and written at a time (default: 512) with the bs option.

My question is:

• What determines the ideal byte size for copying from a hard drive?

and

• Why does that determine the ideal byte size?