Ok, you'll all turn this into a "Install MythTV" thread, but...
I've built several MCE machines. Here's what you need to know.
An Athlon 1700+ is overkill for a three-tuner (dual analog + OTA HD) setup. Encoding is done on the card. They suggest a $500 CPU/motherboard combination. A Sempron 2600+ on a motherboard is at Fry's for $69, and is boxed with a fairly quiet fan on a cool-and-quiet supported motherboard.
1g of memory is overkill. 512M of Corsair Value RAM costs $38 at NewEgg. That's about $150 cheaper than their suggestion of 2G of CVR.
A "fancy" sound card is useless if you simply intend to go out to your stereo. Optical out is available for a couple of bucks, and the stereo out on any newer piece-of-junk AC97 audio sounds just fine through my stereo.
Their tuners are "fine", but the standard configuration for MCE is almost always a single MCE500 from Hauppauge and a combo of an ATI HD Wonder (no broadcast flag support) and an AverMedia A180. About $400 for this - and it'll be your biggest purchase.
You do not need a keyboard except in the closet; and yes the remote is $35 from NewEgg.
250gig drives run $75 or cheaper after rebates and other "scams." I bought a pair of Hitachi "Deathstar" 250's at $49 each at Fry's. We'll pretend though that you'll have to spend $100 for a solid 300 gigger.
Cost for a four-tuner setup including dual-HTDV dual-analog tuners and plenty of storage? http://www.powercompress.com/product.htm
It's also available by Graphedit add-ons and an AT job if you can live without a fancy front-end.
(a) There is no telling how many remain. Windows may be getting close to "tight" in terms of remote exploitability, or it may still have several gaping holes. RPC-based exploits (the "real" dangerous ones) seem to have been closed for a while. It's mostly overflows and breakouts now, and mostly on user-initiated processes. [User-initiated processes don't spread like wildfire inside of corporate networks, like RPC-type flaws. Dangerous, but not panic-level stuff...]
(b) People pay for these exploits because if they can take advantage of them, they can continue to spread their spam and malware from and to unwitting, unwilling and unaware people. Turning thousands of PCs into your own private email relay stations is motivation. Installing scumware/adware/spyware on thousands more is motivation.
The problem with cameras in phones is the size and quality of the CCD sensor - not the size of the rest of the electronics necessary. I already cary a 1.3MP camera, and it's a vast improvement over the.3MP cameras on most "old" phones -- but they're nothing near a good 5+MP camera with a good (read: "large") CCD. You also need space and battery for a flash. Those blinking white LEDs don't cut it.
The larger combo-everything phones made by HTC (top end Audiovoxes, iPaq's, iMate) all have this small sensor, no-flash 1.3MP camera. It's useless.
You could easily put my 68 gram Panasonic phone into a Sony Cybershot and have a device smaller than my PDA-style phone -- but it's honestly not available yet.
You may never see this reply. Perhaps you check your home-page.
If you pick every conceivable option in XPe, you end up with XP Professional with all the bells and whistles. You'd get Home or MCE or Tablet, but those variances are determined by your product key. (EG. Tablet is Home/Pro with an additional CAB installed, and installing that CAB or not is determined by your product key. Ditto for Media Center Edition).
To the best of my knowledge, XPe isn't sold a la carte, and you can't buy a license from NewEgg. You might have to be a ODM or OEM. You can 120-day-trial XPe as a download from Microsoft. You need their download and possibly your XP disc -- although, honestly, I think you get it ALL from the download (IIRC). You can then build your very own XPe machine. You'll just need to supply drivers for the hardware that you're putting it on - as there's no setup process on first-run.
Also, to be clear, it's not just like leaving off Calculator and Wordpad. You can, for example, leave off support for FAT if you're NTFS only - leave out all networking components - leave out the GUI if you want.
When you build with XPe, you simply pick an item you want, and dependancies are resolved. If you select HTML Help, for example, you'll end up with an entire build that does everything necessary to run HTML Help (including a GUI and file system) but does nearly nothing else.
You can then go and trim some of the fat from the "necessary" components.
XPe (embedded) [or XP a'le carte] specifically has support for non-writable and limited-writable OS partitions, and cam be engineered to fit nicely on modern DOCs.
I've done several builds myself.
Re:Spam is dead for me.
on
Spam is Dead
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It's also pretty bad for their business, as Google gets to read all of their business mail, they can never delete any, and even if they have a data retention policy, Google's superceeds it.
It's a pretty phenoninally stupid idea, and I can't belive any legal department worth its salt would agree to allow that to happen.
Also, as others have pointed out - your mail will seem...unofficial. Any fool can get a *real* gmail address. You can't get a real email address on my domain without a little work.
How will your companies -- who already have working Exchange infrastructures and EXISTING KNOWN EMAIL ADDRESSES -- maintain any confidence in their email transactions.
Windows doesn't just randomly switch focus to other windows. You might have some program that is set to take focus (my VPN software will pop itself into the foreground), but the Explorer shell of windows does no such thing as you describe.
The behavior you describe "dialogs flashing wildly" is probably caused by something less sinister -- a bad keyboard. It's fairly common to have a stuck CTRL or ALT key, or a keyboard driver that has failed to recognize that the CTRL or ALT key is depressed, that will cause exactly the behavior you describe.
Also, feel free to write your own windows manager. Replacing explorer is, honestly, pretty trivial. You can replace it with any executable you want -- and making one that launches other programs is a fairly simple windows programming excercise.
Finally, if you do write your own windows manager - I assure you, I won't be using it, because, three seconds of typing or not, there are certainly times that something should appear in the foreground - and might even require focus.
XPE and CE don't come with source. They are, however, modular. If you don't need networking, you don't include networking. If you don't need fonts, you don't include fonts. If you don't need WINLOGON, you don't include WINLOGON. Once you've selected everything you want, a dependancy checker adds everything you need. If you've chosen Firewall, you get TCP/IP. You can pick FAT or NTFS, etc, etc...
AllofMp3 claims that it is legal in Russia and that the music it distributes is licensed.
The legality of AllofMP3 continues to be argued in Russia. According to a report in The Register, a preliminary Moscow City Police investigation resulted in a February 8, 2005 recommendation that AllofMP3 be prosecuted. The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) also filed a formal complaint on February 8. However, IFPI's Russian legal advisor, Vladimir Dragunov, admitted in an interview with The Register that because of the structure of Russian copyright law, successful litigation against AllofMP3 appears unlikely.
In March 2005 the Moscow City Prosecutor's office decided that Russian copyright laws do not cover online distribution of creative works, and refused to bring a criminal suit against AllofMP3 because of the lack of corpus delicti. The copyright holders can still file a civil suit, though. [1]
Disney knows that this doesn't stop things from ULTIMATELY being leaked, but it does slow down releases. Most leaks, I assume, since I'm guilty of EXACTLY this, come from people like me. I have a family member who is a reviewer. Every year around this time EVERY movie worth ANY Oscar consideration (and quite a few that aren't) get dropped on my family member's desk in a nice studio-copy DVD. Some silver pressed, early store copies - some DVD-Rs, but still from the studio.
I watch these moves. I take these movies home. I even show them to my friends. In the case of movies with "Christmas" release dates (which exist only to get them in this year's Oscar consideration - like last year's Million Dollar Baby and Life Aquatic), I've been known to keep a copy for myself.
While this new method probably wouldn't stop me, it is going to stop a lot of casual one-off DVD pre-release pirates from getting movies onto ye ole intraweb. It might even slow down one of the big release groups because their "inside guy" who's too cool to list in the.NFO file doesn't give his copy to someone like me this year...and I've got better things to do with my time than upload DVDs to Usenet.
This year, nobody gets one of my Disney movies and posts it - because I won't be watching one, because it's too much of a PITA. It'll still get reviewed by my reviewer family member though - if they send 'em one of them thar fancy players, that is.
What you're seeing is your basic Macrovision protection. Macrovision fools with the automatic gain, and different televisions respond in different ways. While most televisions experience an "ebb and tide" of fading, some televisions respond by only showing distortions at the high and low ends -- e.g. your black bars every few minutes.
The NTSC video standard (the broadcast standard used in North America and Japan) is defined with a 525-line vertical resolution. However, only 480 of those lines are used for transmitting video information. The extra 45 lines are used to carry control codes (such as interlace information), closed captions, and other similar non-video content. Macrovision copy protection works by adding certain codes to these control lines that are interpreted by an Automatic Gain Control chip in a VCR to scramble the video signal if the video is being recorded. Videocassettes that are copied from Macrovision-encoded source material will frequently exhibit color loss, image tearing, variable brightness, and picture instability. Since TVs and video switch boxes do not have Automatic Gain Control circuitry, the Macrovision signals are ignored when the DVD player is connected directly to the television, or indirectly through an A/V switching receiver or switchbox.
If the process is running, it can always reinject itself. Especially if it's someplace hidden like AppInitDLLs that you can't actually see from regedit. Shouting "It's a rootkit! It's a rootkit!" while you have no idea how it works isn't exactly helpful.
As you'll need administrative rights to schedule the AT job, your entire script is a useless waste of keystrokes that can simply be replaced with running the executable -- as you're already an administrator on the machine.
If you're not already an admin, asking the AT job to run in the near future isn't that impressive.
No. Despite the fact that IANAL, they don't have to prove things beyond a reasonable doubt. They have to prove their case to a preponderance of doubt. There is a significantly lower standard.
Also, FWIW, Slashdot posters take such glee in describing the whole "Copyright infringement isn't theft" thing ad nauseum. Look, we get it -- but it doesn't make it any less of a crime. A different crime, sure - but a criminal act nonetheless.
The vast majority of P2P traffic (at least under our current argubly draconian system) is in violation of people's copyrights. The people engaging in the vast majority of P2P traffic are engaging - willfully - in criminal acts. All of the replies to this post that scream "But I download my Linux ISOs with P2P," and "Lets ban TCP/IP, because it's the problem" aren't helping the situation.
All of the major file sharing P2P systems (eMule/Donkey, Kazaa, LimeWhatever) exist for the primary purpose of violating people's copyrights. They're 98% music, movies and warez and 2% legitimate content. You can sream "The RIAA is teh evil1!!one" all you want, but it don't make the acts of these people any more justified.
They can buy copies of music, listen to RIAA artists on the radio, or choose to listen to artists who haven't sold their souls to the devil. They're not Ghandi, making some sort of selfless demonstration. They're people who take the easy path to free downloads, because a buck a song at any of a half a dozen legitimate download sources is too much for them....but it's not stealing. You're so insightful!
Most large companies are on 3-year PC refresh cycles already anyway. 3 years is a reasonable time to depreciate them off their books, and it's exactly how long Dell's extended warranty lasts on them.
When you want "a new PC" for an employee at any sufficiently large company, you place a request for the standard model. That standard model is "whatever Dell is selling this month, bundled with a license for whatever OS Microsoft is selling this year."
In our case, it just moved from the GX280 to the GX620. Next year, it'll be a machine that runs Vista just fine, and it'll cost almost exactly the same as the 280's from last quarter and the 620's from this quater....and they all pretty much cost the same as the GX1's that we bought to upgrade people to back at Y2K.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, you'll all turn this into a "Install MythTV" thread, but...
I've built several MCE machines. Here's what you need to know.
An Athlon 1700+ is overkill for a three-tuner (dual analog + OTA HD) setup. Encoding is done on the card. They suggest a $500 CPU/motherboard combination. A Sempron 2600+ on a motherboard is at Fry's for $69, and is boxed with a fairly quiet fan on a cool-and-quiet supported motherboard.
1g of memory is overkill. 512M of Corsair Value RAM costs $38 at NewEgg. That's about $150 cheaper than their suggestion of 2G of CVR.
A "fancy" sound card is useless if you simply intend to go out to your stereo. Optical out is available for a couple of bucks, and the stereo out on any newer piece-of-junk AC97 audio sounds just fine through my stereo.
Their tuners are "fine", but the standard configuration for MCE is almost always a single MCE500 from Hauppauge and a combo of an ATI HD Wonder (no broadcast flag support) and an AverMedia A180. About $400 for this - and it'll be your biggest purchase.
You do not need a keyboard except in the closet; and yes the remote is $35 from NewEgg.
250gig drives run $75 or cheaper after rebates and other "scams." I bought a pair of Hitachi "Deathstar" 250's at $49 each at Fry's. We'll pretend though that you'll have to spend $100 for a solid 300 gigger.
Cost for a four-tuner setup including dual-HTDV dual-analog tuners and plenty of storage? http://www.powercompress.com/product.htm
It's also available by Graphedit add-ons and an AT job if you can live without a fancy front-end.
(a) There is no telling how many remain. Windows may be getting close to "tight" in terms of remote exploitability, or it may still have several gaping holes. RPC-based exploits (the "real" dangerous ones) seem to have been closed for a while. It's mostly overflows and breakouts now, and mostly on user-initiated processes. [User-initiated processes don't spread like wildfire inside of corporate networks, like RPC-type flaws. Dangerous, but not panic-level stuff...]
(b) People pay for these exploits because if they can take advantage of them, they can continue to spread their spam and malware from and to unwitting, unwilling and unaware people. Turning thousands of PCs into your own private email relay stations is motivation. Installing scumware/adware/spyware on thousands more is motivation.
The problem with cameras in phones is the size and quality of the CCD sensor - not the size of the rest of the electronics necessary. I already cary a 1.3MP camera, and it's a vast improvement over the .3MP cameras on most "old" phones -- but they're nothing near a good 5+MP camera with a good (read: "large") CCD. You also need space and battery for a flash. Those blinking white LEDs don't cut it.
The larger combo-everything phones made by HTC (top end Audiovoxes, iPaq's, iMate) all have this small sensor, no-flash 1.3MP camera. It's useless.
You could easily put my 68 gram Panasonic phone into a Sony Cybershot and have a device smaller than my PDA-style phone -- but it's honestly not available yet.
Rogers and Shaw are Canadian, eh.
You may never see this reply. Perhaps you check your home-page.
If you pick every conceivable option in XPe, you end up with XP Professional with all the bells and whistles. You'd get Home or MCE or Tablet, but those variances are determined by your product key. (EG. Tablet is Home/Pro with an additional CAB installed, and installing that CAB or not is determined by your product key. Ditto for Media Center Edition).
To the best of my knowledge, XPe isn't sold a la carte, and you can't buy a license from NewEgg. You might have to be a ODM or OEM. You can 120-day-trial XPe as a download from Microsoft. You need their download and possibly your XP disc -- although, honestly, I think you get it ALL from the download (IIRC). You can then build your very own XPe machine. You'll just need to supply drivers for the hardware that you're putting it on - as there's no setup process on first-run.
Enjoy.
Yes, you can pay to have your competitor's service be slow. Just pay a lordly sum to have everyone else's service be faster.
Also, to be clear, it's not just like leaving off Calculator and Wordpad. You can, for example, leave off support for FAT if you're NTFS only - leave out all networking components - leave out the GUI if you want.
When you build with XPe, you simply pick an item you want, and dependancies are resolved. If you select HTML Help, for example, you'll end up with an entire build that does everything necessary to run HTML Help (including a GUI and file system) but does nearly nothing else.
You can then go and trim some of the fat from the "necessary" components.
Incorrect.
XPe (embedded) [or XP a'le carte] specifically has support for non-writable and limited-writable OS partitions, and cam be engineered to fit nicely on modern DOCs.
I've done several builds myself.
It's also pretty bad for their business, as Google gets to read all of their business mail, they can never delete any, and even if they have a data retention policy, Google's superceeds it.
:)
It's a pretty phenoninally stupid idea, and I can't belive any legal department worth its salt would agree to allow that to happen.
Also, as others have pointed out - your mail will seem...unofficial. Any fool can get a *real* gmail address. You can't get a real email address on my domain without a little work.
How will your companies -- who already have working Exchange infrastructures and EXISTING KNOWN EMAIL ADDRESSES -- maintain any confidence in their email transactions.
Wait...I know the answer
Oh, snap! You said Internet EXPLODER instead of EXPLORER! Man that's rich. Can I write that down and use it later? That's a real hoot.
The right price? It's not $100 a month.
:)
Heck, I'll sell you my old phone bills for half that
There's no such thing as bad press.
Enter your ZIP CODE to see the final cost Pricegrabber from top rated online merchants.
Sir, you're mistaken.
Windows doesn't just randomly switch focus to other windows. You might have some program that is set to take focus (my VPN software will pop itself into the foreground), but the Explorer shell of windows does no such thing as you describe.
The behavior you describe "dialogs flashing wildly" is probably caused by something less sinister -- a bad keyboard. It's fairly common to have a stuck CTRL or ALT key, or a keyboard driver that has failed to recognize that the CTRL or ALT key is depressed, that will cause exactly the behavior you describe.
Also, feel free to write your own windows manager. Replacing explorer is, honestly, pretty trivial. You can replace it with any executable you want -- and making one that launches other programs is a fairly simple windows programming excercise.
Finally, if you do write your own windows manager - I assure you, I won't be using it, because, three seconds of typing or not, there are certainly times that something should appear in the foreground - and might even require focus.
You still can. Registration takes only seconds.
The full wikipedia article is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allofmp3
Disney knows that this doesn't stop things from ULTIMATELY being leaked, but it does slow down releases. Most leaks, I assume, since I'm guilty of EXACTLY this, come from people like me. I have a family member who is a reviewer. Every year around this time EVERY movie worth ANY Oscar consideration (and quite a few that aren't) get dropped on my family member's desk in a nice studio-copy DVD. Some silver pressed, early store copies - some DVD-Rs, but still from the studio.
I watch these moves. I take these movies home. I even show them to my friends. In the case of movies with "Christmas" release dates (which exist only to get them in this year's Oscar consideration - like last year's Million Dollar Baby and Life Aquatic), I've been known to keep a copy for myself.
While this new method probably wouldn't stop me, it is going to stop a lot of casual one-off DVD pre-release pirates from getting movies onto ye ole intraweb. It might even slow down one of the big release groups because their "inside guy" who's too cool to list in the .NFO file doesn't give his copy to someone like me this year...and I've got better things to do with my time than upload DVDs to Usenet.
This year, nobody gets one of my Disney movies and posts it - because I won't be watching one, because it's too much of a PITA. It'll still get reviewed by my reviewer family member though - if they send 'em one of them thar fancy players, that is.
Man, I've heard of some crazy stunts for free advertising, but this is crazy.
So. Send them anyway.
If the process is running, it can always reinject itself. Especially if it's someplace hidden like AppInitDLLs that you can't actually see from regedit. Shouting "It's a rootkit! It's a rootkit!" while you have no idea how it works isn't exactly helpful.
As you'll need administrative rights to schedule the AT job, your entire script is a useless waste of keystrokes that can simply be replaced with running the executable -- as you're already an administrator on the machine.
If you're not already an admin, asking the AT job to run in the near future isn't that impressive.
No. Despite the fact that IANAL, they don't have to prove things beyond a reasonable doubt. They have to prove their case to a preponderance of doubt. There is a significantly lower standard.
...but it's not stealing. You're so insightful!
Also, FWIW, Slashdot posters take such glee in describing the whole "Copyright infringement isn't theft" thing ad nauseum. Look, we get it -- but it doesn't make it any less of a crime. A different crime, sure - but a criminal act nonetheless.
The vast majority of P2P traffic (at least under our current argubly draconian system) is in violation of people's copyrights. The people engaging in the vast majority of P2P traffic are engaging - willfully - in criminal acts. All of the replies to this post that scream "But I download my Linux ISOs with P2P," and "Lets ban TCP/IP, because it's the problem" aren't helping the situation.
All of the major file sharing P2P systems (eMule/Donkey, Kazaa, LimeWhatever) exist for the primary purpose of violating people's copyrights. They're 98% music, movies and warez and 2% legitimate content. You can sream "The RIAA is teh evil1!!one" all you want, but it don't make the acts of these people any more justified.
They can buy copies of music, listen to RIAA artists on the radio, or choose to listen to artists who haven't sold their souls to the devil. They're not Ghandi, making some sort of selfless demonstration. They're people who take the easy path to free downloads, because a buck a song at any of a half a dozen legitimate download sources is too much for them.
The AC gets *most* of the issue.
...and they all pretty much cost the same as the GX1's that we bought to upgrade people to back at Y2K.
Most large companies are on 3-year PC refresh cycles already anyway. 3 years is a reasonable time to depreciate them off their books, and it's exactly how long Dell's extended warranty lasts on them.
When you want "a new PC" for an employee at any sufficiently large company, you place a request for the standard model. That standard model is "whatever Dell is selling this month, bundled with a license for whatever OS Microsoft is selling this year."
In our case, it just moved from the GX280 to the GX620. Next year, it'll be a machine that runs Vista just fine, and it'll cost almost exactly the same as the 280's from last quarter and the 620's from this quater.
MS05-039 exploited the oh-so-frivilous service that handles plug-and-play hardware.