AMD 1.2Ghz Tbird cpu, Abit KT7a motherboard, 256 megs of PC133 cas2 crucual memory and 2 80gig drives (spanned volume). I would recommend a faster cpu, but this setup is VERY acceptable for sure (my wife loves it). As for the tuner, I use a PVR-250 (not the MCE version) video capture card, probably the best you can get, and an ATI Radeon 7000 series for the video out. I use a cheap PCTV pinnacle remote and Girder to take care of the IR part (also allows me to interact with my home automation when I hit certain buttons on the remote, i.e. dim lights when I hit play).
I haven't seen a post yet where a person complained their MCE based machine shows funny pictures;) The only reason MCE should get to the internet is for the Guide update (which is free btw, unlike with Tivo), and windows updates. If you run a hardware/software firewall, or turn on the internal firewall, you will be just fine, even if you don't patch. If you decide to use the machine as a regular PC, well then you can't compare the Tivo and PC as they both are meant to do different things in that case, which is a different topic.
There is a reason Microsoft does not sell MCE over the counter, it's to avoid experiences such as yours. In order to provide a good experience, Microsoft provides minimum requirements to the OEM's in order to have a very optimized machine.
If you were truly interested in giving MCE a try, you would have found that some of the bigger sites dedicated to this OS have articles/posts telling you how to disable this movie preview and how to deal with some of the other issues. Since you had this problem, I assume you downloaded a copy yourself, and didn't actually buy/test an OEM machine with MCE preconfigured.
Last time I checked (few months ago), MythTV didn't support the FM tuner in the PVR series cards, Linux didn't support the RCA output on my Radeon 7000 series card (plenty of people use these cards in windows machines, including myself, without any problems), the remote was really hard to configure due to the lack of drivers, and the machine could not run 24/7 for more than a few days without running into some sort of problems.
MythTV is a great application (I will be building another MythTV machine once I have more hardware), but unlike MCE, it isn't meant for the average consumer (which obviously you aren't, as you like to tinker), who in the end will determine which DVR/PVR 'OS' will become the dominant platform.
As someone who built his own MCE 2004 based machine, I have to admit I am VERY impressed with this OS. There is no way I would buy a TIVO now as I can customize this machine with any codecs and plugins I want and do as I please. People who say that the PC doesn't belong in the living room will have to wake up, Microsoft has figured this out a long time ago and are on the right track (there is still lots of room for improvement of course).
My MCE 2004 machine (which runs 24/7) is 100% stable (the OS is based on XP sp1), even when keeping up to date with all the patches out there. I ended up getting rid of my SA8000 DVR from time warner because it is so reliable. There are addons out there such as the plugin which provides a nice interface to the video library (you pick the movie by clicking the 'cover', and it will automatically mount the ISO), or the web based interface. Add the fact that you can listen to FM radio using a PVR250MCE or PVR350 series TV tuner card, and you have a very nice entertainment machine. The only thing which comes close to this setup is MythTV (which I do like), but has some reliability & configuration issues which aren't user friendly.
Since MCE can't be bought legally (you can only download it when you have a MSDN license), I will be 'buying' a second MCE machine once the next release comes out, and network the 2 machines (and other custom PVR machines which can share video data) so I can watch my video/dvd/broadcast anywhere in the house.
The MPAA is going to love this, NOT. I can imagine the day already where they will convince ISP's (or lobby the right people) to slow down network speeds in order to curb piracy (just like most cars have speed governors, eventho it is mostly for safety reasons).
While not directly commenting on the article (which I did read), I do have an issue with all these online video services which only seem to carry the older releases. If these people want to replace 'my' trip to the video store, that would mean they would have to carry the new releases. I understand that in this case, they are just putting the movies online they usually broadcast, which are in general older releases, but why is it that no company will put new releases online?
If you want my money or replace my trip to the video store, offer new releases the day they are releases in the video stores, it's that easy!
I am waiting for the day when people start sending(read: abusing) these kind of take down notices in order to shut down a site they don't like, or even worse, competition.
Granted, he tested only 2 Internet Providers, but this could become a new form of DoS if providers just started shutting down sites without doing some research. The provider should follow up as the US provider did, give the site owner a chance to defend his/her work.
Actually, the rating means how fast the AMD XP cpu is compared with the original Athlon series, not the speed of the P4 counterpart it can compete with. You can read more about the XP rating in the AMD press releases when they first introduced it, search their site or use google.
What's the difference between a darknet and a honeypot/net setup? Both seem to have the same goals, and both use some IP space to detect potential attacks.
I just tried the festvox.org site, I am surprised the movie directory didn't consider using something like the AT&T voices or the Neospeech voices, both which are much more advanced and natural, and are frequently used in Home automation environments (I use them myself).
I can see this work out if they apply some serious security mechanism, to prevent people from posting all the results on 1 single site to get sneak previews, and to make sure that malicious people aren't sending data back with some hidden 'messages' embedded in the background (but I guess they could have more than 1 machine render the same scene, and compared i.e. the md5 hashes) and such.
On the other hand, I can also see why this won't work, as this would be a huge technical support nightmare, the potential security issues, more overhead staff wise in order to deal with incoming results etc...
W32.Blaster.Worm does reboot the system (as shown in the screenshot posted on Symantec and based on my experience).
The firewall statement was regarding to him thinking things will be easier if he has them install this software. A software firewall is false sense of security to start with, and if not configured correctly (he obviously isn't flying to them to set it up himself) will do more harm than good.
'Please mod the parent down' is more wreckless than my firewall statement as the shutdown -a command is pretty important when trying to troubleshoot an infected system remotely;)
actually, I can think of several people in my immediate area (eventho the job market sucks here in upstate NY) who are making close to what unix admins 'used' to make.
A high paying windows admin job is almost the opposite of an MCSE position. I know plenty of companies which just keep a MCSE onboard just so they can meet contract requirements with other vendors/manufactures. But how many Mac admin jobs do you see?;) I understand your situation, just have an open mind, it's experience that might be valuable someday.
Unfortunately, most people can't get away with that attitude, that's almost as bad as burning bridges. Someday your friend/family member will be asked if they know anyone who is willing to accept a high paying Windows admin job, and your friend/family member will say "No, the only person I know doesn't do windows". Instead, refer them to websites where they can download anti-spyware software, anti-virus software and such, you have nothing to lose, and while you give them this information, you can tell them there is not much else you can do, but at least you tried.
was have them type 'shutdown -a' at the command prompt and the rebooting would have stopped. I have helped people remove this worm many times using Remote Assistance, over dialup without any issues.
The firewall software is going to cause more problems in the long run as it will block some of their games, or even him remotely accessing the machines in emergencies.
Still a different concept, but I do know what you are talking about. Boeing is working on a vehicle (the X50A CRW canard rotor/wing) which is almost identical in design;)
No, the plane I am talking about has stationary engines just like a regular plane, but also has the rotors like a helicopter. If I remember correctly, the plane was manufactured by a company in the Netherlands (I remember seeing the.nl TLD).
One of the latest Popular Science articles talked about a new(?) type of plane which is a combination of a helicopter and a jet (so it has rotors and jet engines), so it can take off almost anywhere, but get up to almost mach 1 if I remember correctly. The hauling capacity is enormous, one of the scenarios they showed was for fire fighting. Unfortunately, I was unable to remember the url of the manufacture, or find the article on popsci.com, I am sure someone else here knows the model name.
Am I the only one who thinks this 'might' be a good thing? Cisco now has incentives to give their code another look and hunt down any serious bugs they might not know about yet, resulting in a more secure OS. I doubt it would happen, but it's what I would do if my source code was stolen.
Most people in the HA community use 1-wire sensors (you can get a few free samples from the Dallas Maxim site) as they are very cheap. You can interface them with a system using the serial port for a relatively low price too. Check out this thread on CocoonTech.com, it's discussing this technology, and all the interface available: 1-wire thread.
As for your lights/appliances, I recommend good quality x10 switches (such as SmartLinc or Lightolier), or you can go with Z-Wave, which is similar to ZigBee, it's wireless, and each switch can act as an RF router to get the signal as far as possible. Pretty cool stuff.
My entire house is automated this way, I can even start my car using voice, phone, web, email, you name it (right now it does it when I wake up in the morning). Doesn't have to be expensive either. If you do insist on still going with Ethernet, You would probably want to use a Global Cache device, which can process inputs, control outputs, IR and more all over IP.
I suggest you check out CocoonTech.com, it's a site dedicated to Home Autmation, Theaters and Security, This article got posted there this morning before it appeared on slashdot;) Z-wave, which is 'similar' to ZigBee is one of the newer but fast growing protocols in the HA world. There have been many times where manufactures have said they have developped an x-10 killer protocol, but so far ZigBee & Z-wave seem to be ones of the few which might actually become widely accepted (or in some cases is being deployed already). Home Automation for the masses!
Slashdot Mirror
AMD 1.2Ghz Tbird cpu, Abit KT7a motherboard, 256 megs of PC133 cas2 crucual memory and 2 80gig drives (spanned volume). I would recommend a faster cpu, but this setup is VERY acceptable for sure (my wife loves it). As for the tuner, I use a PVR-250 (not the MCE version) video capture card, probably the best you can get, and an ATI Radeon 7000 series for the video out. I use a cheap PCTV pinnacle remote and Girder to take care of the IR part (also allows me to interact with my home automation when I hit certain buttons on the remote, i.e. dim lights when I hit play).
I haven't seen a post yet where a person complained their MCE based machine shows funny pictures ;) The only reason MCE should get to the internet is for the Guide update (which is free btw, unlike with Tivo), and windows updates. If you run a hardware/software firewall, or turn on the internal firewall, you will be just fine, even if you don't patch. If you decide to use the machine as a regular PC, well then you can't compare the Tivo and PC as they both are meant to do different things in that case, which is a different topic.
There is a reason Microsoft does not sell MCE over the counter, it's to avoid experiences such as yours. In order to provide a good experience, Microsoft provides minimum requirements to the OEM's in order to have a very optimized machine.
If you were truly interested in giving MCE a try, you would have found that some of the bigger sites dedicated to this OS have articles/posts telling you how to disable this movie preview and how to deal with some of the other issues. Since you had this problem, I assume you downloaded a copy yourself, and didn't actually buy/test an OEM machine with MCE preconfigured.
Last time I checked (few months ago), MythTV didn't support the FM tuner in the PVR series cards, Linux didn't support the RCA output on my Radeon 7000 series card (plenty of people use these cards in windows machines, including myself, without any problems), the remote was really hard to configure due to the lack of drivers, and the machine could not run 24/7 for more than a few days without running into some sort of problems.
MythTV is a great application (I will be building another MythTV machine once I have more hardware), but unlike MCE, it isn't meant for the average consumer (which obviously you aren't, as you like to tinker), who in the end will determine which DVR/PVR 'OS' will become the dominant platform.
As someone who built his own MCE 2004 based machine, I have to admit I am VERY impressed with this OS. There is no way I would buy a TIVO now as I can customize this machine with any codecs and plugins I want and do as I please. People who say that the PC doesn't belong in the living room will have to wake up, Microsoft has figured this out a long time ago and are on the right track (there is still lots of room for improvement of course).
My MCE 2004 machine (which runs 24/7) is 100% stable (the OS is based on XP sp1), even when keeping up to date with all the patches out there. I ended up getting rid of my SA8000 DVR from time warner because it is so reliable. There are addons out there such as the plugin which provides a nice interface to the video library (you pick the movie by clicking the 'cover', and it will automatically mount the ISO), or the web based interface. Add the fact that you can listen to FM radio using a PVR250MCE or PVR350 series TV tuner card, and you have a very nice entertainment machine. The only thing which comes close to this setup is MythTV (which I do like), but has some reliability & configuration issues which aren't user friendly.
Since MCE can't be bought legally (you can only download it when you have a MSDN license), I will be 'buying' a second MCE machine once the next release comes out, and network the 2 machines (and other custom PVR machines which can share video data) so I can watch my video/dvd/broadcast anywhere in the house.
The MPAA is going to love this, NOT. I can imagine the day already where they will convince ISP's (or lobby the right people) to slow down network speeds in order to curb piracy (just like most cars have speed governors, eventho it is mostly for safety reasons).
While not directly commenting on the article (which I did read), I do have an issue with all these online video services which only seem to carry the older releases. If these people want to replace 'my' trip to the video store, that would mean they would have to carry the new releases. I understand that in this case, they are just putting the movies online they usually broadcast, which are in general older releases, but why is it that no company will put new releases online? If you want my money or replace my trip to the video store, offer new releases the day they are releases in the video stores, it's that easy!
I am waiting for the day when people start sending(read: abusing) these kind of take down notices in order to shut down a site they don't like, or even worse, competition. Granted, he tested only 2 Internet Providers, but this could become a new form of DoS if providers just started shutting down sites without doing some research. The provider should follow up as the US provider did, give the site owner a chance to defend his/her work.
Actually, the rating means how fast the AMD XP cpu is compared with the original Athlon series, not the speed of the P4 counterpart it can compete with. You can read more about the XP rating in the AMD press releases when they first introduced it, search their site or use google.
What's the difference between a darknet and a honeypot/net setup? Both seem to have the same goals, and both use some IP space to detect potential attacks.
I just tried the festvox.org site, I am surprised the movie directory didn't consider using something like the AT&T voices or the Neospeech voices, both which are much more advanced and natural, and are frequently used in Home automation environments (I use them myself).
Check out www.blackviper.com, it's one of the better sites dedicated to tuning and increasing performance of Windows 2000/XP
link to a copy of this article hosted by Information Week
I can see this work out if they apply some serious security mechanism, to prevent people from posting all the results on 1 single site to get sneak previews, and to make sure that malicious people aren't sending data back with some hidden 'messages' embedded in the background (but I guess they could have more than 1 machine render the same scene, and compared i.e. the md5 hashes) and such.
...
On the other hand, I can also see why this won't work, as this would be a huge technical support nightmare, the potential security issues, more overhead staff wise in order to deal with incoming results etc
it works on 2000 if you have the resource kit installed, but since the article was about XP, the advice was accurate ;)
W32.Blaster.Worm does reboot the system (as shown in the screenshot posted on Symantec and based on my experience).
;)
The firewall statement was regarding to him thinking things will be easier if he has them install this software. A software firewall is false sense of security to start with, and if not configured correctly (he obviously isn't flying to them to set it up himself) will do more harm than good.
'Please mod the parent down' is more wreckless than my firewall statement as the shutdown -a command is pretty important when trying to troubleshoot an infected system remotely
Now where is that 'purge karma' button.
actually, I can think of several people in my immediate area (eventho the job market sucks here in upstate NY) who are making close to what unix admins 'used' to make.
A high paying windows admin job is almost the opposite of an MCSE position. I know plenty of companies which just keep a MCSE onboard just so they can meet contract requirements with other vendors/manufactures. But how many Mac admin jobs do you see? ;) I understand your situation, just have an open mind, it's experience that might be valuable someday.
Unfortunately, most people can't get away with that attitude, that's almost as bad as burning bridges. Someday your friend/family member will be asked if they know anyone who is willing to accept a high paying Windows admin job, and your friend/family member will say "No, the only person I know doesn't do windows". Instead, refer them to websites where they can download anti-spyware software, anti-virus software and such, you have nothing to lose, and while you give them this information, you can tell them there is not much else you can do, but at least you tried.
was have them type 'shutdown -a' at the command prompt and the rebooting would have stopped. I have helped people remove this worm many times using Remote Assistance, over dialup without any issues. The firewall software is going to cause more problems in the long run as it will block some of their games, or even him remotely accessing the machines in emergencies.
Still a different concept, but I do know what you are talking about. Boeing is working on a vehicle (the X50A CRW canard rotor/wing) which is almost identical in design ;)
Press release
pictures
No, the plane I am talking about has stationary engines just like a regular plane, but also has the rotors like a helicopter. If I remember correctly, the plane was manufactured by a company in the Netherlands (I remember seeing the .nl TLD).
One of the latest Popular Science articles talked about a new(?) type of plane which is a combination of a helicopter and a jet (so it has rotors and jet engines), so it can take off almost anywhere, but get up to almost mach 1 if I remember correctly. The hauling capacity is enormous, one of the scenarios they showed was for fire fighting. Unfortunately, I was unable to remember the url of the manufacture, or find the article on popsci.com, I am sure someone else here knows the model name.
Am I the only one who thinks this 'might' be a good thing? Cisco now has incentives to give their code another look and hunt down any serious bugs they might not know about yet, resulting in a more secure OS. I doubt it would happen, but it's what I would do if my source code was stolen.
Most people in the HA community use 1-wire sensors (you can get a few free samples from the Dallas Maxim site) as they are very cheap. You can interface them with a system using the serial port for a relatively low price too. Check out this thread on CocoonTech.com, it's discussing this technology, and all the interface available: 1-wire thread. As for your lights/appliances, I recommend good quality x10 switches (such as SmartLinc or Lightolier), or you can go with Z-Wave, which is similar to ZigBee, it's wireless, and each switch can act as an RF router to get the signal as far as possible. Pretty cool stuff. My entire house is automated this way, I can even start my car using voice, phone, web, email, you name it (right now it does it when I wake up in the morning). Doesn't have to be expensive either. If you do insist on still going with Ethernet, You would probably want to use a Global Cache device, which can process inputs, control outputs, IR and more all over IP.
I suggest you check out CocoonTech.com, it's a site dedicated to Home Autmation, Theaters and Security, This article got posted there this morning before it appeared on slashdot ;) Z-wave, which is 'similar' to ZigBee is one of the newer but fast growing protocols in the HA world. There have been many times where manufactures have said they have developped an x-10 killer protocol, but so far ZigBee & Z-wave seem to be ones of the few which might actually become widely accepted (or in some cases is being deployed already). Home Automation for the masses!