The piece you need to handle those plugs is an AV receiver. I have a HarmanKardon AVR-500. A buddy of mine picked up a Marantz (very similar to the AVR-500 and looked to me like a better deal). This class of receiver is ~70-100watts/for the 5 channels and a.1 output for the subwoofer. Unlike older gear these boxes mux video so it is the centerpiece of your system. They handle the optical out from the DVD (typically 1-3 optical inputs). They can output 5.1 via jacks in the back (like pre-out on old receivers). Cable boxes, vcrs, all send video and stereo audio to the unit, on the remote you select the source and you tv takes the monitor output signal. Route the speaker cables to the 5.1 speaker system and you are in business. If your DVD has component out and you tv takes it, that does not go through the receiver it is a direct connect, the receiver needs to be switched to DVD to pick up the audio decode. In my case I use an Apex PCM/raw comes out on the optical and the AVR500 has DTS 5.1 decoding.
One downside is the HK remote seems to be designed by an alien race whose sustinance is complexity. This is by far the most unintuitive remote I have ever used. Maybe the Marantz is better.
All in all it is a fantastic and necessary component in your system.
Speakers are key as well but I will leave that topic for someone else to plug, other than I have a 100watt Yamaha tower subwoofer (apartment living) an it does a nice job for the space.
Thanks for mentioning that. I just ordered the 5 disc box set from blackstar.co.uk. Amazon US does not have the boxed set and some of the discs are not out yet. Amazon UK though does have the boxed set for 8 pounds less than the blackstar site (damn). Of course you need a region 2 player for the UK release (Apex anyone:) ).
I find a balance is good. Being proud and saying "I have lived like a hermit and n years later I have X$'s" can take away the pleasure of living. Trips/cars/homes/entertainment can bring pleasure to the human experience. One can always make more money, time cannot be brought back. I don't recommend live for the moment to the exclusion of some sound saving policies but by the same token don't deny yourself pleasure as you save. Nothing worse than some wealthy duffer filled with regret later in life musing about the pleasures he passed up on to amass a pile of cash. As my mother always used to say: "You never see an armored car at a funeral".
Remember Chromatic? They had a media processor that did all these wonderful things. Then Intel announced MMX and confused all the box makers. The box makers decided to wait to see what Intel had. (This wasn't Chromatics only problem but it was a significant one).
You don't think Intel is sending a message to the machine manufacturers do you?
You have to wonder if mankinds collective intellect has "peaked" since the Apollo days. It strikes me that knowledge and know-how are very much a momentum issue. As we get more and more dependant on instrumentalites to create these large systems we become less able to conceive, analyze and maintain them as time goes forwards. Perhaps there is a limit to how far we will get in these endeavours without suffering large costly setbacks. There is only so much scientific reasoning you can fit in a human brain and we don't network that well.
Of course one of the real CYA's can come from this situation:
Cracker Bill goes into the library with some source to a program to bypass copy protection in and he inserts this code into the net from the library.
Irked company C, sees his usenet missive posted from the library and tries to find out who posted the offending item. The library indicates it was some John Doe who just paid cash to use the station for 5 minutes.
Repeat as necessary for CyberCafe's. They will be next I am sure. Soon they will want verifiable ID before you can use a station.
The golden days of privacy on the internet are gone I am afraid.
I got hacked about a month ago and my machine (a RH 6.0 box) was made some hax0rs bitch for an mstream DDoS. I caught the problem about one 1/2 day after the attack. I now use the TrinityOS ipchains script on a RH 6.2 installation with the rpc.stats patch (enven though it is not needed) and have had no problems since with only ssh and AUTH open. I get probed all the time on these ports 21 23 111 137 139 143 27343. Interestingly
the hax0rs left behind their 3l337 script that copied over a compromised sshd etc and the server for the mstream agent.
1) Use a morphing chip. Transmeta could make a package for server builders that makes a unique assembler/microcode for you, you build the server source and presto no buffer overrun will get you since this is your isa not someone elses. The payload will dump core and the intrusion will be short lived.
2) Use a vmware and a linux guest as the portal to the DSL/cable modem with a linux host monitoring the md5 tripwire results of the guest. Should the results change, kill the vmware process and start a new one from a fresh copy of the virtual image. The masq'd VPN on the host is not penetrated and script kiddies get limited fun. This is what I call an Etch'a'sketch server.
Saw this up by Columbia U in NYC. The entire theater started to yell "REFUND!!" almost a complete riot. Movie somewhat revolved around a flash in the pan tennis star turned moviefunder/ actor Vijay Amritraj. This is on the web as one of the worst ever. Just as people slow for a car crash, morbid curiosity should get the better of you and if it should be on you should look and behold the horror.
In 1988 I was obsessed with what I termed, "the perfect port". My game of choice was Gravitar. I had a Gravitar PCB + rom dumps. I began typing in a 6502 sim. Soon I had the sim working on a Sun3 and also my Atari ST Mega4. I was running the Gravitar code and I could see writes to the VGO port but I did not know how the AVG ASIC worked. So I wrote a 6502 assembler and made a boot rom for the Gravitar PCB this boot rom would receive nibbles from one of the other rom sockets (attached to a ribbon to the parallel port on the ST) (Doug Neubauer of StarRaiders fame helped me with the hw here:) ). I could then feed in AVG data (peek/poke fashion) into the vector ram. Then I could send VGO and see the result. Finally I ran a sim on the Sun3 of Gravitar saved all the data going to the vector ram and then moved the data to the ST and nibbled it over, hit VGO and boom, out popped the High Score list!!! I was in. About a year went by until I met Eric Smith via a usenet posting. Via a critical "hint" we were able to totally figure out the AVG. Eric then steamed on with other games and that is how the VECSIM part of MAME began:) Later Al Kossow and Eric cracked the mathbox for Tempest and Battlezone. I am sure I can speak for them in saying that we are amazed at MAME and just how fast and well new games are adopted into the system. It makes our early efforts look like watching grass grow. Also I would like to make a comment or two about how lucky we are today to have these fast computers. In 1988 the Sun3 could not run the simulator in real time. Today it is easy for a P6 to do the sim (possibly multi cpu) and the audio + graphics. It strikes me that if you add about 10years to any arcade machine, that is the time that an emulator of that machine will be real-time. Nowadays it doesn't seem too feasable to do emulators of the current crop of games since many of them have 400pin asics in them. Good luck busting these games (and who really cares about them anyway:) ).
Yes those DDoS attacks are malicious. Did you see that the MPAA has been hit over the past few days? Zdnet article What a shame. It's sad when bad things happen to good people:)
It's a misnomer to call it a "menu chip" the chip in question is an ESS 4308 Videodrive chip. This is a 32bit risc (MipsX) + 64bit SIMD microcoded core. The code that presents the menu in question is risc code and an OSD ciruit in the device that overlays a region of the sdram onto the main display buffer. I would never advise it of course but an inspection of the firmware shows a string -- LOOPHOLES -- in the rom. Interestingly, the feature many like (the 3/2 pulldown PALNTSC) is done totally in microcode. There are many things that chip can do in software that were not contemplated when it was designed (i.e. MP3). Cool part and really well programmed by the ESS engineers.
That time slot is a black hole. Right next to 60 minutes. I happen to be a crossover viewer and I like to watch 60minutes and Simpsons/Futurama. I am very unhappy with the Futurama move and from an article I read MattG ain't too pleased either. Given Futurama is 1.5 years old and has plenty of virtual life in it, I am sure that MattG worked an escape clause into the contract to eject Futurama from Fox if it gets ugly. Could be a shot in the arm for a major network or... the WB:) This web site is a *must* for futurama fans. http://www.futuramaoutlet.com/
Make a site and browser plugin software that manages users bookmarks accross the web. I have 4 browsers each with their own bookmarks. The user logs into your "Portal" sees ads ($$$) and gets his/her bookmarks centrally located. As extra $$$, (and a privacy taboo) data mine the users bookmarks and sell the info for demographic moolah.
We (the Linux community) are like a benign Borg race. We communicate in a mesh, if one group stumbles, others step up and continue. If the FUD factory generates a list, we assimilate the list in time, the technology we can use of course. Not all technology from the factory is useful (ActiveX).
There is *No stopping* the Linux community, no amount of Microsoft FUD is going to turn this back. Wriggling only makes the noose tighter.
I would like to use something small like this in the car. Use a wireless lan to dl MP3's via a cron job to the car overnight. Never have to futz with carrying disks to the vehicle. Power drain is an issue for the car though. Perhaps APM can idle it nicely, I don't want a dead battery after leaving the car at the airport for a week or two.
Don't work so hard, just boot the new kernel under VMware and try it out. Your uptime will be fine and you will be able to enjoy the new code without a reboot.
Yeah you could skew the #'s easily. I notice that National Semi's 10th book is:
10. 101 Nights of Grrreat Sex : Secret Sealed Seductions for Fun Loving Couples by Laura Corn
It's a good thing the Christian Right won't use any of these data on the companies in that list. Whew I was beginning to think there was a privacy problem:)
Brave man. If I was in marketing I wouldn't want to depend on the coders to dictate my diet. On the flip side, the coders have to deal with a pushy "hey no bugs, guy" marketing suit hovering behind them until after this charade is over. Nice gimmick, makes you look but it is not an earth shattering statement as presented in the release. Nothing will change. Besides I like the old days better where you could get a check for a power of 2 for a bug rather than watch some hypemasta eat a staple foodsource of some nations.
When PC's first came out I was a univ "helper" and had to help a person who had got a abort/retry error on a disk write. They placed their only backup in the drive and pressed retry. In Dos1 days, there was no media change check so the FAT of the bad now was copied to the good. Total loss of a year of research for that person. Computers are difficult to use, what may be perceived as stupidity is often lack of knowledge. I think things are getting better, GUI's have helped people by reducing the machine-human barrier somewhat.
I ended up getting a Maxiswitch Maxipro2 keyboard some years ago. This is the full kbd 104+ keys. Caps lock and esc are in the "wrong place" as shipped but... you can remap any pair of keys and then it gets stored in the novram of the kbd. I popped the plastic for ESC and ~ after I remapped them. Now ESC is correct, next I remapped caps lock and control, now caps lock does "the right thing". The only thing is the silk screen is wrong for caps lock (confuses people who use my workstation). The caps lock key itself doesn't mech lock like some so it has the crisp feel that control should have anyway.
I have two of these keyboards, one at home and one at work. Touch wood no carpal tunnel after 18 years of using the CTL-META-COKEBOTTLE editor with keyboards that used to be "correct" such as the Ann Arbor ambassador, the Concept terminal and a host of early 80's TTYs that had the KBD right until ~ and ESC got flipped via some misdirected global standardization mush and then my world began to change...
Slashdot Mirror
The piece you need to handle those plugs is an AV receiver. I have a HarmanKardon AVR-500. A buddy of mine picked up a Marantz (very similar to the AVR-500 and looked to me like a better deal). This class of receiver is ~70-100watts/for the 5 channels and a .1 output for the subwoofer. Unlike older gear these boxes mux video so it is the centerpiece of your system. They handle the optical out from the DVD (typically 1-3 optical inputs). They can output 5.1 via jacks in the back (like pre-out on old receivers). Cable boxes, vcrs, all send video and stereo audio to the unit, on the remote you select the source and you tv takes the monitor output signal. Route the speaker cables to the 5.1 speaker system and you are in business. If your DVD has component out and you tv takes it, that does not go through the receiver it is a direct connect, the receiver needs to be switched to DVD to pick up the audio decode. In my case I use an Apex PCM/raw comes out on the optical and the AVR500 has DTS 5.1 decoding.
One downside is the HK remote seems to be designed by an alien race whose sustinance is complexity. This is by far the most unintuitive remote I have ever used. Maybe the Marantz is better.
All in all it is a fantastic and necessary component in your system.
Speakers are key as well but I will leave that topic for someone else to plug, other than I have a 100watt Yamaha tower subwoofer (apartment living) an it does a nice job for the space.
Thanks for mentioning that. I just ordered the 5 disc box set from blackstar.co.uk. Amazon US does not have the boxed set and some of the discs are not out yet. Amazon UK though does have the boxed set for 8 pounds less than the blackstar site (damn). Of course you need a region 2 player for the UK release (Apex anyone :) ).
Hedley
I find a balance is good. Being proud and saying "I have lived like a hermit and n years later I have X$'s" can take away the pleasure of living. Trips/cars/homes/entertainment can bring pleasure to the human experience. One can always make more money, time cannot be brought back. I don't recommend live for the moment to the exclusion of some sound saving policies but by the same token don't deny yourself pleasure as you save. Nothing worse than some wealthy duffer filled with regret later in life musing about the pleasures he passed up on to amass a pile of cash. As my mother always used to say: "You never see an armored car at a funeral".
Hedley
Maybe TMTA can get toilet seat prices for the device, limit up at that point :)
Remember Chromatic? They had a media processor that did all these wonderful things. Then Intel announced MMX and confused all the box makers. The box makers decided to wait to see what Intel had. (This wasn't Chromatics only problem but it was a significant one).
You don't think Intel is sending a message to the machine manufacturers do you?
You have to wonder if mankinds collective intellect has "peaked" since the Apollo days. It strikes me that knowledge and know-how are very much a momentum issue. As we get more and more dependant on instrumentalites to create these large systems we become less able to conceive, analyze and maintain them as time goes forwards. Perhaps there is a limit to how far we will get in these endeavours without suffering large costly setbacks. There is only so much scientific reasoning you can fit in a human brain and we don't network that well.
Need to have a box answer the phone when there is no caller ID and say "I'm sorry, this number does not accept calls from blocked callers".
Now if we could just work a micropayment scheme in like what was proposed by Eric Allman for Spam we will be all set.
Actually Andy Rooney suggested that on 60minutes. "Mr Rooney charges X$ for unsolicited calls".
I like that a lot!!!
Hedley
Of course one of the real CYA's can come from this situation:
Cracker Bill goes into the library with some source to a program to bypass copy protection in and he inserts this code into the net from the library.
Irked company C, sees his usenet missive posted from the library and tries to find out who posted the offending item. The library indicates it was some John Doe who just paid cash to use the station for 5 minutes.
Repeat as necessary for CyberCafe's. They will be next I am sure. Soon they will want verifiable ID before you can use a station.
The golden days of privacy on the internet are gone I am afraid.
Hedley
I got hacked about a month ago and my machine (a RH 6.0 box) was made some hax0rs bitch for an mstream DDoS. I caught the problem about one 1/2 day after the attack. I now use the TrinityOS ipchains script on a RH 6.2 installation with the rpc.stats patch (enven though it is not needed) and have had no problems since with only ssh and AUTH open. I get probed all the time on these ports 21 23 111 137 139 143 27343. Interestingly
the hax0rs left behind their 3l337 script that copied over a compromised sshd etc and the server for the mstream agent.
Hedley
Me too about 5 times a day from SK's on my DSL. I got one of the SK's shutdown by pacbell for repeated subseven scans over labour day weekend.
I secured RH 6.2 with ipchains + MASQ using the
TrinityOS firewall script.
TrinityOS-security.tgz
I tested the rules from another IP using nmap and I leave only SSH and AUTH open.
Typical attacks over the past weeks have been:
netbios 137 & 139
ftp 21
telnet 23
SubSeven 27374 (pc anywhere lookalike virus! glad I use linux).
SunRpc 111
Hedley
There are two approaches to this I feel:
1) Use a morphing chip. Transmeta could make a package for server builders that makes a unique assembler/microcode for you, you build the server source and presto no buffer overrun will get you since this is your isa not someone elses. The payload will dump core and the intrusion will be short lived.
2) Use a vmware and a linux guest as the portal to the DSL/cable modem with a linux host monitoring the md5 tripwire results of the guest. Should the results change, kill the vmware process and start a new one from a fresh copy of the virtual image. The masq'd VPN on the host is not penetrated and script kiddies get limited fun. This is what I call an Etch'a'sketch server.
Hedley
Nine deaths of the Ninja
Saw this up by Columbia U in NYC. The entire theater started to yell "REFUND!!" almost a complete riot. Movie somewhat revolved around a flash in the pan tennis star turned moviefunder/ actor Vijay Amritraj. This is on the web as one of the worst ever. Just as people slow for a car crash, morbid curiosity should get the better of you and if it should be on you should look and behold the horror.
In 1988 I was obsessed with what I termed, "the perfect port". My game of choice was Gravitar. I had a Gravitar PCB + rom dumps. I began typing in a 6502 sim. Soon I had the sim working on a Sun3 and also my Atari ST Mega4. I was running the Gravitar code and I could see writes to the VGO port but I did not know how the AVG ASIC worked. So I wrote a 6502 assembler and made a boot rom for the Gravitar PCB this boot rom would receive nibbles from one of the other rom sockets (attached to a ribbon to the parallel port on the ST) (Doug Neubauer of StarRaiders fame helped me with the hw here :) ). I could then feed in AVG data (peek/poke fashion) into the vector ram. Then I could send VGO and see the result. Finally I ran a sim on the Sun3 of Gravitar saved all the data going to the vector ram and then moved the data to the ST and nibbled it over, hit VGO and boom, out popped the High Score list!!! I was in. About a year went by until I met Eric Smith via a usenet posting. Via a critical "hint" we were able to totally figure out the AVG. Eric then steamed on with other games and that is how the VECSIM part of MAME began :) Later Al Kossow and Eric cracked the mathbox for Tempest and Battlezone. I am sure I can speak for them in saying that we are amazed at MAME and just how fast and well new games are adopted into the system. It makes our early efforts look like watching grass grow. Also I would like to make a comment or two about how lucky we are today to have these fast computers. In 1988 the Sun3 could not run the simulator in real time. Today it is easy for a P6 to do the sim (possibly multi cpu) and the audio + graphics. It strikes me that if you add about 10years to any arcade machine, that is the time that an emulator of that machine will be real-time. Nowadays it doesn't seem too feasable to do emulators of the current crop of games since many of them have 400pin asics in them. Good luck busting these games (and who really cares about them anyway :) ).
Hedley Rainnie
Yes those DDoS attacks are malicious. Did you see that the MPAA has been hit over the past few days? Zdnet article What a shame. It's sad when bad things happen to good people :)
It's a misnomer to call it a "menu chip" the chip in question is an ESS 4308 Videodrive chip. This is a 32bit risc (MipsX) + 64bit SIMD microcoded core. The code that presents the menu in question is risc code and an OSD ciruit in the device that overlays a region of the sdram onto the main display buffer. I would never advise it of course but an inspection of the firmware shows a string -- LOOPHOLES -- in the rom. Interestingly, the feature many like (the 3/2 pulldown PALNTSC) is done totally in microcode. There are many things that chip can do in software that were not contemplated when it was designed (i.e. MP3). Cool part and really well programmed by the ESS engineers.
That time slot is a black hole. Right next to 60 minutes. I happen to be a crossover viewer and I like to watch 60minutes and Simpsons/Futurama. I am very unhappy with the Futurama move and from an article I read MattG ain't too pleased either. Given Futurama is 1.5 years old and has plenty of virtual life in it, I am sure that MattG worked an escape clause into the contract to eject Futurama from Fox if it gets ugly. Could be a shot in the arm for a major network or... the WB :) This web site is a *must* for futurama fans. http://www.futuramaoutlet.com/
Fujitsu Radar http://www.fujitsu-ten.co.jp/release/1999/0517e.ht ml Hedley
Make a site and browser plugin software that manages users bookmarks accross the web. I have 4 browsers each with their own bookmarks. The user logs into your "Portal" sees ads ($$$) and gets his/her bookmarks centrally located. As extra $$$, (and a privacy taboo) data mine the users bookmarks and sell the info for demographic moolah.
Hedley
We (the Linux community) are like a benign Borg race. We communicate in a mesh, if one group stumbles, others step up and continue. If the FUD factory generates a list, we assimilate the list in time, the technology we can use of course. Not all technology from the factory is useful (ActiveX).
There is *No stopping* the Linux community, no amount of Microsoft FUD is going to turn this back. Wriggling only makes the noose tighter.
I would like to use something small like this in the car. Use a wireless lan to dl MP3's via a cron job to the car overnight. Never have to futz with carrying disks to the vehicle. Power drain is an issue for the car though. Perhaps APM can idle it nicely, I don't want a dead battery after leaving the car at the airport for a week or two.
Don't work so hard, just boot the new kernel under VMware and try it out. Your uptime will be fine and you will be able to enjoy the new code without a reboot.
:)
Hedley
Yeah you could skew the #'s easily. I notice that National Semi's 10th book is:
:)
10. 101 Nights of Grrreat Sex : Secret Sealed
Seductions for Fun Loving Couples
by Laura Corn
It's a good thing the Christian Right won't use any of these data on the companies in that list. Whew I was beginning to think there was a privacy problem
Brave man. If I was in marketing I wouldn't want to depend on the coders to dictate my diet. On the flip side, the coders have to deal with a pushy "hey no bugs, guy" marketing suit hovering behind them until after this charade is over. Nice gimmick, makes you look but it is not an earth shattering statement as presented in the release. Nothing will change. Besides I like the old days better where you could get a check for a power of 2 for a bug rather than watch some hypemasta eat a staple foodsource of some nations.
When PC's first came out I was a univ "helper" and had to help a person who had got a abort/retry error on a disk write. They placed their only backup in the drive and pressed retry. In Dos1 days, there was no media change check so the FAT of the bad now was copied to the good. Total loss of a year of research for that person. Computers are difficult to use, what may be perceived as stupidity is often lack of knowledge. I think things are getting better, GUI's have helped people by reducing the machine-human barrier somewhat.
I ended up getting a Maxiswitch Maxipro2 keyboard some years ago. This is the full kbd 104+ keys. Caps lock and esc are in the "wrong place" as shipped but... you can remap any pair of keys and then it gets stored in the novram of the kbd. I popped the plastic for ESC and ~ after I remapped them. Now ESC is correct, next I remapped caps lock and control, now caps lock does "the right thing". The only thing is the silk screen is wrong for caps lock (confuses people who use my workstation). The caps lock key itself doesn't mech lock like some so it has the crisp feel that control should have anyway.
I have two of these keyboards, one at home and one at work. Touch wood no carpal tunnel after 18 years of using the CTL-META-COKEBOTTLE editor with
keyboards that used to be "correct" such as the Ann Arbor ambassador, the Concept terminal and a host of early 80's TTYs that had the KBD right until ~ and ESC got flipped via some misdirected global standardization mush and then my world began to change...