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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stoctrash who wrote (34093)	6/30/1998 2:14:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

cabledescramblers.com

To: Stoctrash who wrote (34093)	6/30/1998 10:29:00 PM
From: DiViT	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Chinese Baobei Group joins Cuban firm to produce home electronics 06/24/98 China Business Information Network Copyright(C) 1998 CHINA BUSINESS INFORMATION NETWORK (CBNet) The Baobei Group of China will join hands with a Cuban electronics industrial group to produce TV sets, radio-tape recorders, cameras, computers and VCD players. The products will be sold in Cuba and exported to other countries, said Bian Hongdeng, chairman and general manager of the Baobei Group, at a trade and investment discussion held in Beijing recently. Cuban Economic Counselor Lila Concepcion Rodriguez said at the discussion that there is a wide range of scope for economic cooperation between the two countries in such fields as light industry, household electrical appliances, agriculture, food processing, fishery, and tourism. Enterprises on both sides should profit from bilateral economic cooperation, she said. Cuba welcomes Chinese enterprises to build joint ventures or processing bases in Cuba, Rodriguez said, adding the Cuban Embassy in China will help them obtain travel documents.

To: Stoctrash who wrote (34093)	7/4/1998 9:45:00 AM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Nokia's d-box family. And remember Bakker Boxes??????????????????? coolstf.com Nokia Mediamaster Specific Information The Nokia Mediamaster is the generic name for a series of digital MPEG-2 receivers made by the Finish company, Nokia. Many people refer to this type of receiver as a d-box, but that's really a confusing because there are so many variations of this type of receiver. The d-box and dreambox The d-box is a receiver sold in Germany for the DF-1 package. It contains a Conditional Access Module (CAM), which is a descrambler along with a card slot which uses a card that gets married to the CAM. Echostar receivers also have a CAM, however, theirs is built directly onto the main receiver board. If you have a look at an AlphaStar receiver, you can see the CAM - it's a seperate board that connects between the QPSK receiver and main board. The d-box also contains a modem for PPV reporting (it also does faxing, but I'd probably never want to send a fax from my d-box!). When the d-box was introduced, DF-1 subsidized it's price in Germany in exactly the same way that DirecTV and Echostar subsidize the prices of MPEG-2 receivers here in North America. People in Holland found out that if you took a standard d-box and added a Multichoice card (Multichoice is a Dutch pay TV service), it would work fine. The result was that suddenly a lot of German d-boxes were showing up in Holland which was costing DF-1 plenty of money as they never received a subscription to the DF-1 pay TV service. When the situation got too much for DF-1 they upgraded the firmware of all d-boxes to stop them from receiving Multichoice, which obviously left a lot of people in Holland very unhappy. Because the Nokia box is based on the Motorola 68340 processor and it has a debugging tool built directly into the chip (and a connector on the Nokia motherboard for the debug tool), some enterprising engineers in Holland figured out how to extract the old firmware from d-boxes that worked with Multichoice and re-programmed it (for a fee of course) into the d-boxes that had been in-effect switched off by DF-1. They also patched the code to prevent any future updates from the satellite, while preserving it's ability to be upgraded via the serial port. This receiver is called a "dreambox" from C&J Electronics. It receives all IRDETO scrambled signals (with the correct smart card of course) and also all FTA SCPC and MCPC signals without or without a smart card. Another modified Nokia receiver receiver is available from Bentley Walker and is based on firmware from Bakker Electronics, also in Holland. Since I don't have one of these types of receivers, I can't comment on the firmware, however, I've heard favorable reports about it's operation. Their technical support, however, is somewhat lacking in comparison with C&J Electronics though. Links for all of these companies are at the bottom of the page. Nokia Official FTA receivers Nokia also realized the need for a pan-European (meaning usable all over Europe) FTA MPEG-2 receiver and introduced their 9200S model. This is exactly the same as the 9500S platform that's used by DF-1 (and Telepiu in Italy) except that it is missing the CAM connector and the modem. After all, neither of these would be needed for a FTA receiver. Nokia later revised the 9200S model and introduced the 9600S which in theory works with both FTA and encrypted MPEG-2 signals. It contains two CAM connectors (so that it can be used with multiple scrambling systems) and uses the new Common Access type of CAMs that include the card-reader in the CAM (CAMs are the same size as a type-3 PCMCIA card). The 9600S also included much improved software that does a much better job finding and storing signals than the 9200S.