Yeah, seconded. As a wonderful example of this...

Like most games, the Colin McRae Rally series include cheat codes. Sometimes it's fun to play with these cheats -- the PSone version had the cheatcode "blancmange", which turned your chosen car into a large, lime-green jelly. In some ways it was more fun to play with the cheats than without!

Codemasters decided to capitalise on this.

By generating a random "installation key" every time you install the game, and generate the cheat codes from that key. To get the cheat codes, you have to call a premium rate phone line (£2/minute if memory serves, minimum call length 5 minutes). If you reinstall the game or want to install it on your laptop... you get to pay again.

The words "taking the piss" spring to mind.

If you've got a steel-backed IBM Model M, it already is.

Well just for fun, let's crunch some numbers.

Ref: The Highway Code, HMSO. Sections 117 to 126, "Control of the Vehicle", subsection 126 "Stopping Distances".
Disclaimer: some calculations done with WolframAlpha.

Let's assume the posted limit is 40MPH. That means that in each second, the vehicle will travel 17.88 metres, or 58.67 feet.
Now let's assume the vehicle is travelling at 60MPH. 26.82 metres per second, or 88ft/sec.
In order to fool the GATSO, we have to be travelling at or below 40. That means we need to lose 20MPH.

Thinking time at 60MPH is 18 metres, plus 55 metres for the vehicle to come to a complete stop.
This means the assumed reaction time is about 0.67 seconds.

The camera is 50ft down the road from the RADAR speed sensor (the GATSO itself).
This means that in 50 feet (15.24 metres), we have to:
    * Realise the camera is there
    * Pull off what amounts to an all-out emergency stop (brakes hard down and fight against the Anti-Lock Braking system)
    * Lose 20MPH of speed
    * Release the brake before the camera goes off

Let's say it actually takes 60 metres to stop the car. That means we lose 1MPH for every metre travelled. Thus, 20 metres travelled. 0.75 seconds.

So if it takes a human 0.67 seconds to realise "Aargh, that's a GATSO" and slam the anchors on, plus a further 0.75 seconds to slow down sufficiently, the vehicle needs to be at least (0.67 + 0.75) = 1.42 seconds away. Working backwards, we get 124.96 feet, or 38.08 metres. Add a bit for the guy to release the brake before the camera flashes and this just doesn't hold water... we're talking about 45 or 50 metres total.

So based on our previous assumptions:
    * The vehicle is travelling at 60MPH
    * The speed limit is 40MPH
    * The driver has an average reaction time per the Highway Code baseline standard

There is no way an average person, in an average car, could slow down sufficiently in 50 feet to get a positive hit on the RADAR, but get a negative on the photo. An F1 or WRC rally driver with a full Advanced Driving license, experience and lightning-fast reactions, driving a shiny new sports car *might* be able to pull it off, but not your average Joe Q. Public in his clapped-out Vauxhall Astra or Ford Focus. Give the guy a Citroen 2CV and it's an even more absurd proposition!

QED, folks. Can someone prove me wrong, or improve the proof? *GRIN*

Ob disclaimer: this, of course, does not take into account the deceleration of the vehicle. Not that it's likely to make a big difference to the end result.

There's an easy solution to this...

"AnyDVD HD".

Sits between the BluRay player software and the drive and completely removes AACS, region protection and so on before the player gets a chance to see it. Well worth the money if you want to watch out-of-region BluRays on a Windows box. Would love to see a Linux version, but I'm not holding my breath...

For DVDs, the VideoLAN player does a pretty good job of playback and "accidentally-on-purpose" ignores the feature lockouts, anti-piracy warning screens and... *drumroll*... region protection. It's easily one of the best OSS applications out there (and certainly the most user-friendly media player -- MPlayer is nice for playing 'weird stuff' but VLC gets points for being dead easy to use). Gotta love that little traffic cone! :)

Nah, the first lesson is not to watch or listen to anything which involves Metallica in any way, shape or form... :)

Depends if the box is completely bricked or "bootloader bricked".

If you can't even get a bootloader prompt then JTAG is the only game in town. You use JTAG to flash a bootloader and erase the rest of the flash ROM so the bootloader drops into a command prompt instead of trying to boot a kernel. Once you have a working bootloader, you typically use XMODEM to transfer the kernel and rootfs binaries across. Alternatively you use Ethernet or some other high-speed interface (USB, anyone?)

If you have a working bootloader, then you interrupt it on boot, drop to the command prompt and upload a new, (hopefully) working kernel and rootfs.

JTAG is only really necessary if your bootloader is totally screwed.

Ugh, seconded. Fox DVDs are really bad for this (though thankfully they've gotten *slightly* better)

Bones Season 1-3: unskippable "You wouldn't steal a car..." advert from FAST (which The IT Crowd quite rightly lampooned the hell out of). Thankfully my DVD player has a "bug". Hit STOP -- "Cannot resume from this point. Playback will resume from start of disc." Now hit PLAY, then TOP MENU. Oh, look. It's the menu screen!

Season 4: Same old annoying crappy advert, but you can hit Skip Track now. Except you still get the 20 second two-slide "It's illegal to copy this DVD, yanno? You should rat out your friends too..." slide combo. STOP/PLAY trick doesn't work any more.

Season 5: Yep, same old shitty FAST advert, followed by the ubiquitous 20th Century Fox trailer. Unskippable. But the MENU button works, so you can skip straight to the episode list...

What REALLY pisses me off is how they run the stupid advert louder than the DVD audio. I have to mute the surround amp while it's running, otherwise the amp goes into volume-limit and starts clipping. Ick. Either that or I set the volume really low to start, then increase it when the DVD starts. Either way it's a pain.

HDFury use the leaked HDCP master key table to generate a new key.

Or they stuff the entire MKT into ROM, and make the thing generate a new key if the authentication fails.

What's that I hear? Could it be a game of Whak-a-Mole merrily chirruping away in the background? I think it is!

I dunno, the dark blue metal-box Netgear LAN switches are pretty decent.

And the DG834GT (with UberGT firmware) is a great little DSL modem/router -- I run mine in modem mode, though, and use Ubuntu+Shorewall to handle routing, firewalling and NAT, and my SixXS IPv6 tunnel.

.... Do a zero-wipe instead.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=16M

Replace '16' with the buffer size of your HDD in megabytes...

Wiping the first 1MB or 1GB (depending on your taste) is usually good enough, unless you're selling the machine. In which case, zero-wipe is mandatory!

They do make nice laser pickups (and I think the Philips players use them almost universally), but the CPU, MPEG decoder and error-corrector circuitry (all designed by Philips) is astonishingly bad. If the disc isn't perfectly clean, scratch free and absolutely perfectly mastered, the ECC engine falls over and the picture starts to break up. The CPUs are generally WAY underpowered for what they're doing. I used to hit Record on my Aiwa VCR and it'd start recording within a second or two. The Sony DVD recorder hooked up to the TV downstairs takes almost a minute to start recording. The MythTV box is almost instant. Guess which one gets used more often... the DVD recorder is used more-or-less like an expensive DVD player (the Myth box falls over on some DVDs).

Oh, my MD players have been through a ton of punishment. The RH1 has been absolutely babied, but my MZ-N710 (bought as a refurbished unit several years ago ago) was dropped, banged, and got dragged to Terra Firma by its USB cable once or twice. Still works fine. The RH1 lives in a Lowepro camera pouch, and only comes out occasionally. I've been meaning to try time-syncing it with my brother's camcorder -- if only as a "can this be done?" experiment.

As I understand it, most of the BBC Regional Radio off-site interview / RNG teams still use Sony MD recorders for field recording. If they're good enough for Auntie Beeb... well...

Here's an interesting factoid for you: design and manufacture of most of the Sony video hardware is outsourced...

Sony VCRs: usually made by Samsung. There's a lovely design cockup in the FX-series -- a capacitor was installed the wrong way round, which screwed with the controller and ended up wiping the EEPROM. Only way out of this is a VHS alignment tape (custom to Sony/Samsung and only available to their service centres) and a full reset. Oh, and a new capacitor.

Sony DVD players: Samsung or Philips. Usually bottom-of-the-barrel crap.

Sony DVD recorders: Almost always Philips. Utterly crap, slowest processors and worst laser pickups imaginable. Hit STOP then PLAY and you'll be waiting a good minute for the thing to get its act together.

I like my Bravia and my MZ-RH1 Minidisc recorder (great for recording lectures) but the rest of my Sony kit (not much)? Crap.

I love how they use proprietary connectors for the camera USB ports, and change them with every new model series. They do the same with the batteries too... absolute evil. Point of comparison -- the Canon NB2LH battery from the 400D? Used in almost all their SD-card camcorders. Costs about £30, runs the thing for 90 minutes or so. Sony equivalent? £69, and there are four variants depending on which camera you have. Upgrade your camera, and you get to replace all your spare batteries. The chargers are (usually) cross-compatible, but that's about it. Lose a Sony charger, expect to pay a good £50-£60 for a replacement. Lose a Canon one and you can probably replace it for £20-£30, or less on Ebay.

As far as I'm concerned, Sony can FOaGDIAF. Canon are getting first-dibs if I need any new imaging gear -- my Pixma iP4600 is the first inkjet I've had which didn't suffer a fatal head clog just by leaving it idle for a few months, and my 7D has taken the worst the British weather can dish out and kept on going. I've seen customers bring Canon 10Ds back into the shop, wanting to try out a new lens. The cameras usually look like hell, but work perfectly. That kind of reliability gets you lots of brownie points.

I've exchanged emails with Bill Mensch... Well actually it was more like:

I bought a couple of W65SC02 chips. Wired them up, and two of them wouldn't do as they were told -- the logic analyser said the data was good, but the 6502's ALU wasn't returning the right results for some reason.

Anyway, Bill gets hold of my original email, then proceeds to send me a rather long list of things to check. Never did get those two chips working, but if that isn't customer service, I don't know what is!

Also: the "missing" ROR instruction isn't a bug. It was intentionally left out of the CPU, until -- in Bill's words -- "with market feedback, we realised we needed to add it and then modified the design."

LOL!

Actually, I'm looking into buying a basic Mac Mini for development work -- someone asked me to port a bit of my code to OSX, which I can't really do without a Mac of some description...

One of the (many) nice things about Linux is the way the printing system is designed. For CUPS, you generally only have to write a format converter (which takes a PNM and spits out printer control codes). CUPS deals with the issues of talking to the printer, and rasterising incoming PostScript vector data into PNM data.

Plus most of the major format converters are OSS/FS -- HPLIP (the PCL converter), Gutenprint (nee Gimp-Print), and a bunch of add-ons (like the P-touch label printer driver). Write a format converter and a quick PostScript PPD and you're in business. Porting to a new platform is often as simple recompiling, assuming the code is bit-width agnostic (32/64/128bit clean).

On the Windows platform, it seems the driver interface changes with every major version iteration, for better or worse... Win2k drivers could occasionally be coaxed into working on XP 32-bit (and vice versa), but that's pretty much the end of it. WinXX drivers run in kernel-space, even if all they're doing is printer data generation, where they don't actually *need* any hardware access which couldn't be provided in a better way by a HAL...