Generally speaking, these kinds of leeks (if it's even true) come from the gov't.
Although Gov't work does pay off, software companies get screwed all the time. Basically, the gov't doesn't have to have any accountibility to with these types of products. They can even go so far as to call tech support and when questions on who and where they are refuse to answer and demand support. Not a lot you can do if you want to keep your contract. This fosters some pretty lax standards.
Again, this story has a 50-50 chance of ending up in the Hoax category like the "spy satilite" taken over bit last year.
System is only as good as the sysadmin
on
HP Ending OpenMail
·
· Score: 2
I don't want to light you up here. But, there is a well documented single user restore method. You just need to set the system up correctly ahead of time. See HP documents titled "Single User Restore".
I think people expect a lot of HP openmail, and don't consider that you're running many more accounts per server than exchange. Things take time. If you attach a V-series HP-9000 to a EMC, plug in Omni back you've now created a e-mail system that requires no down time for back-up. Create a temp third mirror, run OM suspend, break the mirror off, start backing up. All the uses notice was a 15 second pause. A system like that could support at least 8000 connections, and most likely a user base of 14,000+.
Mail forwarding is based on a simple file. You can turn it off and on with about 15 lines of code to figure out where the files are kept and single SED command to flip around the auto actions.
This is not to say it's for the faint of heart, but since it's Unix based there isn't a lot you can't do. Writing scripts to automate you're daily proccess is a big deal for a good system. You have to be willing to read the all the docs (between the manual and the OTNs you're looking at 1000+ pages of stuff. But hey, that's what flexible monolithic email systems are all about.
HP OM does have bugs in it certainly, and it doesn't walk on water. But the issues you listed can be overcome. Some of them are even well documented.
--
It's really the poor craftsman who blames his tools.
Yeah, the US Openmail product manager at the time, a developer for the product and an internal trainer at the Pinewood UK development centre.
HP had no issue with telling large Openmail install bases like Amaco and Fuji why they dumped the NT release they had been hyping for the last year. This of course this is hearsay, but too many HP employees from different parts of the world have came out and said it. I see no reason to disbelieve it.
It's my OPINION MS played some role in the the final decision to ax Openmail. This s not to say a lot of presure had to be put out. It's not like the product lost money, but it certainly wasn't a profit centre for HP. I could see a little hinting from MS about a Free 50 seat OpenMail distro on a free RedHat box that talks MAPI and supports most of the outlook feature set may cause a little bit of friction.
You can get the source code to OpenMail by paying some large sum of cash and signing a NDA. But that's only part of the problem.
The real issue is Openmail is a 12 year old product. And at the very base of the is a DB server that was produced by a company that's no longer in existance. It's kind of like the movie "Buckaroo Banzai". The priduction company went under, and no one knows who really has the rights to the film. Hence no DVD version.
This is not to say that a source distro couldn't be made. However, someone would have to sign an agreement with HP to take responcibility to remove the items HP doesn't have the rights too and replace them with GNU/GLP/Whatever items.
Really, a RedHat or a Suse would need to step in I think in order to get this done. Most likely redhat because that's what the current Linux version is written to.
Couple things to keep in mind about OpanMail. It's not a US HP product. It's a UK HP product. The developers there do things very well, but aren't always thought of well by the US team. That being said here's how MS crushed OpenMail.
Back in the day before lotus alienated the cc:Mail user base OpenMail was the king of cross platform e-mail systems. It could talk to cc:Mail Clients, Lotus Notes, MS Mail, and Exchange (Back when exchange was a very young and imature product). IBM even resold OpenMail with an IBM label on it. Openmail ran on the three major Unix platforms of the day. HP, Sun, IBM. One day the engineers at pinewood had a great idea. Let's do an NT port.
And so it began. HP went through the normal product life cycle and actually sold a production NT version...for exactly one quarter.
So what happened to that version? Ahh, here in lies the monopoly play. See, MS got wind of Openmail for NT. While it was still a rev 1 product and had several bugs, there was no doubt the feature set was there and with in a year HP would have a product that would crush exchange with a decent price and a feature set MS wouldn't have for another three years.
So, the story told by the engineers at pinewood is basically this. MS goes to HP and says if you continue with the product you're out compedition and we will no longer be including you in any partner programs. Now HP makes far more money on selling NT based servers, Raids, and all the service and support that goes with the products then it does on one software product. And being cut out of early releases and not having drivers and hardware certified would kill the business.
So, HP, after investing a lot of time and money into a port, kills it. And thus loses a major market. If you don't think that's abusing monopoly power, I don't know what is.
The EFF is currently fighting a case just like this. In this case Yahoo is being compeled to disclose the identity of anonymous posters to message boards.
This is a big consitution question since the framers were very big on being able to anonymously write about the crown. In fact is was British law that forbid writing anonymously.
However, in the legal system, if you're not named, you're a Doe (as in John Doe), and as a Doe you don't have much in the light of legal representation. So, Yahoo gets slapped with this thing and the EFF is involved.
Basically, at issue is this. Every message on the Yahoo boards has a disclaimer that the the message should not be taken as fact. Even with that, a company *should* have to prove they incurred damages and that the statements were lies before a Judge would compel Yahoo to disclose the source (Although with Doe cases this usually doesn't happen.)
The Tech was neat, but the production values of the game is self were very poor. It nice to have 27 cameras running around the field, but you need a good director and production crew to choose the shots that actually look good.
I think a lot of this had to do with the fact that they were playing on what looked like a converted track field or some kind of small stadium. All the shots were really grounded. It seemed to me that there was an effort not to show too much of the statium in the shot because it showed what a small opertaion it was. This created issues with the coverage. And the entire production suffered because of it.
Beyond that the Players were poor. International American Football has better quality of players. I'm willing to be better coaching too. This was like watching a company football game.
I just didn't get it. NBC knows how to put on a sporting event. This just wasn't up to par.
Are they going to close down the border? Really, I doubt that SF is going to pay to send cops to another country to investigate a prank. Let alone pay to send an lawyer to Canada to get them extradited? The prank is funny, but the cops commenting in the story are smoking crack.
As I understood it the Pinewood office did localized HP/UX devel for Europe and all the devel on Openmail and Change Engine. At least until 99 or so, then a lot of odd and ends seemed to be going to India.
I thought the training staff there was pretty bright too. Far more involved with the product then I saw with the US trainers (Dallas and Minneapolis).
HP-UX has it's quirks like any OS, but it also has a very good set of unix developers. If you ever go to a HP/UX class held in the Pinewood (U.K) training and development centre you'd hear a lot of interesting stories. The developers have been pro-linux for a very long time.
One little note is that Elm was originally created by an HP engineer, although it was a long time until it made it's way into HP/UX.
Okay, I normally don't flame, but whoever lowered that down as "off-topic" was the bigest gaylord focher I've ever seen. The Committee on Energy and Commerce specifically deals with this. I even said so in the message. They already have several HDTV issues on the docket relating to fee based Datacasting over free air bandwidth. The FCC has already rubber stamped these content control systems. This is the last chance for oversight. This is how things like the DMCA get passed!
If we don't make the stand here it's "Game Over Man!" This isn't a market acceptence issue since the turn over to HD is not optional. Prices will go down and consumers will be lead into virtual slaughter house we know as Content Control.
Write a letter and get it there before the 30th:
Committee on Energy and Commerce
U.S. House of Representatives
2125 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington DC 20515
Also go here: http://www.house.gov/commerce/ and see if any of the goonies on the list are your bitch!
Prices are falling dude. Adding Over the Air HDTV reception to my turner was $99. The displays are now under 2K. Even watching the content downconverted to 480i is great. The local reception is cystal clear with nothing more than some rabit ears.
Two years ago 32 inch TV's were floating around $1000-$1200, now they are in the $500 range. Same thing is happening with HD.
From a consumer standpoint content really makes this work. PBS does such a great job with HD content I can't believe how bad the big three are.
The PBS station delivers 4 subchannels, One has weather, one does the normal PBS content, a third does PBS kids, and the last does PBS-U.
The Committee on Energy and Commerce which is handling FCC issues is meeting on the 30th to set their agenda for the 107th congress. The committee is lead by Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La. Now Billy's second largest compain donation was from Disney, so I think a lot of presure will be needed.
I recommend writing the committee directly about how your right to timeshift if being taken away.
Committee on Energy and Commerce
U.S. House of Representatives
2125 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington DC 20515
Also, you can go to http://www.house.gov/commerce/ to get the names of the memebers.
I think you'd be better off using an IDE hard drive for swap rather than NFS. The whole reason why you don't see more NT 150 deployed out there is because running you swap space off a WAN enviroment slows the whole thing down. Don't get me wrong, you can certainly use this for linux alright, but I wouldn't pay more than 99 bucks for the box.
Since I actually own one of these things and have been able to get linux to run on it. I thought I'd share some of my insights on this.
Basically, the units are shipped in many different configs. In fact many times it's custom to the buyer. Typical config is a 150Mhz Intel Clone (usually cyrix) proccessor and about 4-8 megs of RAM. There is also some flash RAM for the OS/Liberate stuff.
The reason there are a lot of these boxes out on the market is the lack of RAM. The liberate software stores a lot of information on a central server that would normally be stored locally (such as cookies). This made the browser very slow on high load systems.
Also, because of the limited RAM, there really isn't anywhere to go with the box. It's never going to play real video or the ilk. Almost everything is SMT on the mainboard. You COULD upgrade the memory if you had the correct tools. People have done this their palms and tivo's. Although at some point I'd question just buying a normal PC.
The video chipset is an older Trident type. You could probally get the box to use the Video Features under 95 assuming you could still find the drivers, but none of the video overlay is supported in Linux right now, and the chipset was really only used in a few notebook computers and the NT 150. I doubt anyone is working on this.
The modem is an ISA slot. You can use a NE2000 nic is this slot just fine. Some of the older linksys cards actually line up rather well.
Some of the NT 150's had built in smart card reader/writters. It's not clear from the picture if the model has the hardware. This is really what the box would be most useful for. Assuming someone could scratch together a linux driver for the smartcard device you could use it to clone smartcards.
In general the Liberate stuff can be removed if they have the liberate flashing utilities. The ISP generally had some utilities to configure the hardware type. Usually to config if the box had a modem, DSL, or ethernet. You should be abel to erase it with those.
In general it's an okay set top box, but the lack of support for the video chipset and lack of memory does present a barrier to being a good linux box.
I think the new Tenchi OVA is going to prove an interesting challenge to Pioneer. Back in the day Tenchi could be fairly un-family like. In fact if you look at "The night before the Carnival" special (I think it was only released on LD), there is a scene where Washu needs a sperm sample from tenchi. I thought the dubbing handled the scene pretty well...until that is until I turned on the subtitle and saw washu's dialog was pretty much outright offering to suck tenchi off.
Either way, I thought the dialog was well done, and fine for anyone who was used to watching HBO. However, times have changed since the mid 90's, and Pioneer is making it's bread and butter in family Anime. If we get to an story where Tenchi get's it on it should be interesting to see if anything gets left on the cutting room floor.
Odd he wasn't aware of how popular it is in the US. In the 2nd OVA LD liner notes they talk about the US sales, and even show a picture of the US translation.
Like any cable there are quality control concerns. But from what I've seen there wasn't much difference in build quality with the monster brand VS a generic.
The problem is really in transmission. A cheap LED system like TOS can have issues with minor power surges and spikes. In a big AV system there can be a lot of different compoents pulling large power loads at various times. A Laser system generally is better regulated, and has a very constant wavelength. Cheaper LEDs do not. You have to understand that most of the TOS transmitters cost about a dollar each in mass. You're not looking at a high quality, over engineered part. It does what it does and generally it does is well enough. But I wouldn't stake my life on all the bits getting to the destination in tact. Just the majority of them.
A store like the GAP makes their own cloths. They have over 300 contract factories in Asia. It costs less than 5 dollars to make and import a pair of pants then sell for over 40 bucks.
I'd go with the Onkyo DS989, it lists at $2999, but street is about $2200. Alright, so what makes this one special?
First, it's got all the in's and outs you need. RCA Audio, TOS Digital, Coax Digital, S-Video, Composite and Compoent video switching. Plus it's got all the THX stuff. But that's not the $2200 reason to buy this thing. It has an RS-232 port on it, and 4 Megs of Flash memory. Onkyo will put out new sound standards when they hit market. This summer they will have a new patch for DTS-ES sound. In addition, they have a hardware expanion port for a firewire card (Which will probally be the defacto standard for HDTV). It's going to be a while until you have to upgrade this mother.
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Generally speaking, these kinds of leeks (if it's even true) come from the gov't.
Although Gov't work does pay off, software companies get screwed all the time. Basically, the gov't doesn't have to have any accountibility to with these types of products. They can even go so far as to call tech support and when questions on who and where they are refuse to answer and demand support. Not a lot you can do if you want to keep your contract. This fosters some pretty lax standards.
Again, this story has a 50-50 chance of ending up in the Hoax category like the "spy satilite" taken over bit last year.
I don't want to light you up here. But, there is a well documented single user restore method. You just need to set the system up correctly ahead of time. See HP documents titled "Single User Restore".
I think people expect a lot of HP openmail, and don't consider that you're running many more accounts per server than exchange. Things take time. If you attach a V-series HP-9000 to a EMC, plug in Omni back you've now created a e-mail system that requires no down time for back-up. Create a temp third mirror, run OM suspend, break the mirror off, start backing up. All the uses notice was a 15 second pause. A system like that could support at least 8000 connections, and most likely a user base of 14,000+.
Mail forwarding is based on a simple file. You can turn it off and on with about 15 lines of code to figure out where the files are kept and single SED command to flip around the auto actions.
This is not to say it's for the faint of heart, but since it's Unix based there isn't a lot you can't do. Writing scripts to automate you're daily proccess is a big deal for a good system. You have to be willing to read the all the docs (between the manual and the OTNs you're looking at 1000+ pages of stuff. But hey, that's what flexible monolithic email systems are all about.
HP OM does have bugs in it certainly, and it doesn't walk on water. But the issues you listed can be overcome. Some of them are even well documented.
--
It's really the poor craftsman who blames his tools.
Yeah, the US Openmail product manager at the time, a developer for the product and an internal trainer at the Pinewood UK development centre.
HP had no issue with telling large Openmail install bases like Amaco and Fuji why they dumped the NT release they had been hyping for the last year. This of course this is hearsay, but too many HP employees from different parts of the world have came out and said it. I see no reason to disbelieve it.
It's my OPINION MS played some role in the the final decision to ax Openmail. This s not to say a lot of presure had to be put out. It's not like the product lost money, but it certainly wasn't a profit centre for HP. I could see a little hinting from MS about a Free 50 seat OpenMail distro on a free RedHat box that talks MAPI and supports most of the outlook feature set may cause a little bit of friction.
But that's just my OPINION.
You can get the source code to OpenMail by paying some large sum of cash and signing a NDA. But that's only part of the problem.
The real issue is Openmail is a 12 year old product. And at the very base of the is a DB server that was produced by a company that's no longer in existance. It's kind of like the movie "Buckaroo Banzai". The priduction company went under, and no one knows who really has the rights to the film. Hence no DVD version.
This is not to say that a source distro couldn't be made. However, someone would have to sign an agreement with HP to take responcibility to remove the items HP doesn't have the rights too and replace them with GNU/GLP/Whatever items.
Really, a RedHat or a Suse would need to step in I think in order to get this done. Most likely redhat because that's what the current Linux version is written to.
Couple things to keep in mind about OpanMail. It's not a US HP product. It's a UK HP product. The developers there do things very well, but aren't always thought of well by the US team. That being said here's how MS crushed OpenMail.
Back in the day before lotus alienated the cc:Mail user base OpenMail was the king of cross platform e-mail systems. It could talk to cc:Mail Clients, Lotus Notes, MS Mail, and Exchange (Back when exchange was a very young and imature product). IBM even resold OpenMail with an IBM label on it. Openmail ran on the three major Unix platforms of the day. HP, Sun, IBM. One day the engineers at pinewood had a great idea. Let's do an NT port.
And so it began. HP went through the normal product life cycle and actually sold a production NT version...for exactly one quarter.
So what happened to that version? Ahh, here in lies the monopoly play. See, MS got wind of Openmail for NT. While it was still a rev 1 product and had several bugs, there was no doubt the feature set was there and with in a year HP would have a product that would crush exchange with a decent price and a feature set MS wouldn't have for another three years.
So, the story told by the engineers at pinewood is basically this. MS goes to HP and says if you continue with the product you're out compedition and we will no longer be including you in any partner programs. Now HP makes far more money on selling NT based servers, Raids, and all the service and support that goes with the products then it does on one software product. And being cut out of early releases and not having drivers and hardware certified would kill the business.
So, HP, after investing a lot of time and money into a port, kills it. And thus loses a major market. If you don't think that's abusing monopoly power, I don't know what is.
I have no idea why they would choose that name. Didn't they ever see that ABC afterschool special about "The Wave"?
The EFF is currently fighting a case just like this. In this case Yahoo is being compeled to disclose the identity of anonymous posters to message boards.
2 07 _eff_pressrel.html
This is a big consitution question since the framers were very big on being able to anonymously write about the crown. In fact is was British law that forbid writing anonymously.
However, in the legal system, if you're not named, you're a Doe (as in John Doe), and as a Doe you don't have much in the light of legal representation. So, Yahoo gets slapped with this thing and the EFF is involved.
Basically, at issue is this. Every message on the Yahoo boards has a disclaimer that the the message should not be taken as fact. Even with that, a company *should* have to prove they incurred damages and that the statements were lies before a Judge would compel Yahoo to disclose the source (Although with Doe cases this usually doesn't happen.)
Check out the EFF press release:
http://www.eff.org/Legal/Cases/RMC_v_Does/20010
No, don't watch wrestling. I feel my intelligence is being insulted when I watch. Nothing personal, just not my bag.
The Tech was neat, but the production values of the game is self were very poor. It nice to have 27 cameras running around the field, but you need a good director and production crew to choose the shots that actually look good.
I think a lot of this had to do with the fact that they were playing on what looked like a converted track field or some kind of small stadium. All the shots were really grounded. It seemed to me that there was an effort not to show too much of the statium in the shot because it showed what a small opertaion it was. This created issues with the coverage. And the entire production suffered because of it.
Beyond that the Players were poor. International American Football has better quality of players. I'm willing to be better coaching too. This was like watching a company football game.
I just didn't get it. NBC knows how to put on a sporting event. This just wasn't up to par.
Are they going to close down the border? Really, I doubt that SF is going to pay to send cops to another country to investigate a prank. Let alone pay to send an lawyer to Canada to get them extradited? The prank is funny, but the cops commenting in the story are smoking crack.
As I understood it the Pinewood office did localized HP/UX devel for Europe and all the devel on Openmail and Change Engine. At least until 99 or so, then a lot of odd and ends seemed to be going to India.
I thought the training staff there was pretty bright too. Far more involved with the product then I saw with the US trainers (Dallas and Minneapolis).
HP-UX has it's quirks like any OS, but it also has a very good set of unix developers. If you ever go to a HP/UX class held in the Pinewood (U.K) training and development centre you'd hear a lot of interesting stories. The developers have been pro-linux for a very long time.
One little note is that Elm was originally created by an HP engineer, although it was a long time until it made it's way into HP/UX.
Okay, I normally don't flame, but whoever lowered that down as "off-topic" was the bigest gaylord focher I've ever seen. The Committee on Energy and Commerce specifically deals with this. I even said so in the message. They already have several HDTV issues on the docket relating to fee based Datacasting over free air bandwidth. The FCC has already rubber stamped these content control systems. This is the last chance for oversight. This is how things like the DMCA get passed!
If we don't make the stand here it's "Game Over Man!" This isn't a market acceptence issue since the turn over to HD is not optional. Prices will go down and consumers will be lead into virtual slaughter house we know as Content Control.
Write a letter and get it there before the 30th:
Committee on Energy and Commerce
U.S. House of Representatives
2125 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington DC 20515
Also go here: http://www.house.gov/commerce/ and see if any of the goonies on the list are your bitch!
Prices are falling dude. Adding Over the Air HDTV reception to my turner was $99. The displays are now under 2K. Even watching the content downconverted to 480i is great. The local reception is cystal clear with nothing more than some rabit ears.
Two years ago 32 inch TV's were floating around $1000-$1200, now they are in the $500 range. Same thing is happening with HD.
From a consumer standpoint content really makes this work. PBS does such a great job with HD content I can't believe how bad the big three are.
The PBS station delivers 4 subchannels, One has weather, one does the normal PBS content, a third does PBS kids, and the last does PBS-U.
The Committee on Energy and Commerce which is handling FCC issues is meeting on the 30th to set their agenda for the 107th congress. The committee is lead by Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La. Now Billy's second largest compain donation was from Disney, so I think a lot of presure will be needed.
I recommend writing the committee directly about how your right to timeshift if being taken away.
Committee on Energy and Commerce
U.S. House of Representatives
2125 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington DC 20515
Also, you can go to http://www.house.gov/commerce/ to get the names of the memebers.
Question: How do you play back HDTV content on DirectTivo? I didn't think it had a RGB or VGA output. Only S-Vid and Composite.
"You know, for Kids."
Alright, now if any of the five people on slashdot who got that have mod points hand em over!
I think you'd be better off using an IDE hard drive for swap rather than NFS. The whole reason why you don't see more NT 150 deployed out there is because running you swap space off a WAN enviroment slows the whole thing down. Don't get me wrong, you can certainly use this for linux alright, but I wouldn't pay more than 99 bucks for the box.
Since I actually own one of these things and have been able to get linux to run on it. I thought I'd share some of my insights on this.
Basically, the units are shipped in many different configs. In fact many times it's custom to the buyer. Typical config is a 150Mhz Intel Clone (usually cyrix) proccessor and about 4-8 megs of RAM. There is also some flash RAM for the OS/Liberate stuff.
The reason there are a lot of these boxes out on the market is the lack of RAM. The liberate software stores a lot of information on a central server that would normally be stored locally (such as cookies). This made the browser very slow on high load systems.
Also, because of the limited RAM, there really isn't anywhere to go with the box. It's never going to play real video or the ilk. Almost everything is SMT on the mainboard. You COULD upgrade the memory if you had the correct tools. People have done this their palms and tivo's. Although at some point I'd question just buying a normal PC.
The video chipset is an older Trident type. You could probally get the box to use the Video Features under 95 assuming you could still find the drivers, but none of the video overlay is supported in Linux right now, and the chipset was really only used in a few notebook computers and the NT 150. I doubt anyone is working on this.
The modem is an ISA slot. You can use a NE2000 nic is this slot just fine. Some of the older linksys cards actually line up rather well.
Some of the NT 150's had built in smart card reader/writters. It's not clear from the picture if the model has the hardware. This is really what the box would be most useful for. Assuming someone could scratch together a linux driver for the smartcard device you could use it to clone smartcards.
In general the Liberate stuff can be removed if they have the liberate flashing utilities. The ISP generally had some utilities to configure the hardware type. Usually to config if the box had a modem, DSL, or ethernet. You should be abel to erase it with those.
In general it's an okay set top box, but the lack of support for the video chipset and lack of memory does present a barrier to being a good linux box.
And does the US Embasy really have really have a machine that makes the toilet flush the correct way?
I think the new Tenchi OVA is going to prove an interesting challenge to Pioneer. Back in the day Tenchi could be fairly un-family like. In fact if you look at "The night before the Carnival" special (I think it was only released on LD), there is a scene where Washu needs a sperm sample from tenchi. I thought the dubbing handled the scene pretty well...until that is until I turned on the subtitle and saw washu's dialog was pretty much outright offering to suck tenchi off.
Either way, I thought the dialog was well done, and fine for anyone who was used to watching HBO. However, times have changed since the mid 90's, and Pioneer is making it's bread and butter in family Anime. If we get to an story where Tenchi get's it on it should be interesting to see if anything gets left on the cutting room floor.
Odd he wasn't aware of how popular it is in the US. In the 2nd OVA LD liner notes they talk about the US sales, and even show a picture of the US translation.
Like any cable there are quality control concerns. But from what I've seen there wasn't much difference in build quality with the monster brand VS a generic.
The problem is really in transmission. A cheap LED system like TOS can have issues with minor power surges and spikes. In a big AV system there can be a lot of different compoents pulling large power loads at various times. A Laser system generally is better regulated, and has a very constant wavelength. Cheaper LEDs do not. You have to understand that most of the TOS transmitters cost about a dollar each in mass. You're not looking at a high quality, over engineered part. It does what it does and generally it does is well enough. But I wouldn't stake my life on all the bits getting to the destination in tact. Just the majority of them.
A store like the GAP makes their own cloths. They have over 300 contract factories in Asia. It costs less than 5 dollars to make and import a pair of pants then sell for over 40 bucks.
I'd go with the Onkyo DS989, it lists at $2999, but street is about $2200. Alright, so what makes this one special?
First, it's got all the in's and outs you need. RCA Audio, TOS Digital, Coax Digital, S-Video, Composite and Compoent video switching. Plus it's got all the THX stuff. But that's not the $2200 reason to buy this thing. It has an RS-232 port on it, and 4 Megs of Flash memory. Onkyo will put out new sound standards when they hit market. This summer they will have a new patch for DTS-ES sound. In addition, they have a hardware expanion port for a firewire card (Which will probally be the defacto standard for HDTV). It's going to be a while until you have to upgrade this mother.
My $.02