FTFY.

Some of my suppliers have more than doubled their prices -- in some cases quadrupled them.

£200 for a 1.5TB drive, anyone?

One of the parts scalpers emailed me with a "limited time offer" too -- £895 for a 1TB... they can keep it.

If the academic journals have a problem with it, there's nothing to stop the university itself from starting their own academic journal.

A couple of UK universities have gone down that path already.

The PIC32 isn't ARM-based. It's MIPS32-based.

The Philips/NXP LPC series is (for the most part) ARM-based though. ARM CPU core tied to custom peripherals (though as I understand it the UART is a stock-standard 16550)

... Or make variants of the spyware which avoid said heuristics.

Sir, I'd like you to meet my friend, the double-edged sword...

What surprises me is that even though O2 bought Be, they haven't really absorbed them into the corporate 'machine' (so to speak). O2 resell Be's services under their own banner, with some pricing and feature differences, but the Be packages are more or less the same as they always have been...

They did screw up my line move and leave me without internet access for nearly three weeks (thank $DEITY for 3G dongles and Shorewall being so easy to reconfigure!) but that was at least as much BT's fault as it was Be's. Specifically, it took three weeks and a new DSLAM line-card for Be to realise that the cable between the incoming line and their DSLAM was screwed. BT overrode Be's request for a DSL engineer and sent a line technician (who didn't have DSL test gear or training), then signed the exchange line off as "tested good" THREE TIMES before it seems someone actually got a cable tester out, found the break and fixed it. And of course, while all this was going on, the voice line worked perfectly. Hmm.

To put that in perspective though, for the past four or so years, I've had absolutely no trouble with them. The Live Chat reps know their stuff, as do most of the phone reps. Ask any other ISP to change your DSLAM line profile or enable FastPath and you'll get a "what, sir?" or "we can't do that, sir..."

I wouldn't necessarily recommend them for non-technically-minded folks (unless they fancied learning a bit about DSL tech along the way) but for power users, they're more or less the gold standard.

Interesting side point: Be's customer service and tech support call centre is based in Bulgaria (or was last time I checked). I've had more trouble getting Apple's customer services team to understand what I'm saying than I ever have with Be's CS team. (plus side -- most if not all of Be's team at least grasp the concept of the ICAO Phonetic Alphabet, if not knowing it off-hand. Small thing, but it helps immensely when reading alphanumeric software version numbers and MAC addresses out over the phone...)

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.