It's amazing how they can turn a talented, although with obvious problems kid, into an outwright criminal. He is 18, for God's sake!!

With four (count'em, four) good browsers competing for user attention, the evil days of monopoly and stagnation are ending at last. The light of the standards-based Internet is dawning, and "works best with Internet Explorer" is becoming the odd anachronism it deserves to be.

While I don't doubt that moving some of their infrastructure to a Linux environment would yield nothing but gains for them, the fact remains that a ton of those guys are wedded to Excel. Many have spent years fine tuning massive VB macros.

I have the same problem at my work. I want to automate and speed up a lot of the reporting my coworkers do by moving the processing over to one of our Linux servers, but Excel is always a problem. Some of our people actually see Excel as a platform in itself. It's become kind of a joke among some of us there. "Excel would make a great Operating System if only it had a decent spreadsheet."
Some of our macros can take upwards of twenty minutes to run.

I suppose they could use OpenOffice-server, and I've considered playing around with it, but it seems like too much unnecessary overhead. Right now I think I'm gonna give JExcelAPI a whirl as soon as I get a break in between projects.

I spent years hacking satellite television, from the early days, the glory days of the H and HU cards and then left the scene when DTV killed with the P4 card and lawsuits. I've written my own 3Ms and emulators. What Chris has done in this video really is the ultimate holy grail of smart card hacking. The security layer he is referring to, at least on NDS cards, is sort of a sticky layer that when you attempt to pull off the coating to access the bus, it simply rips up many of the thin wires on the chip and you're SOL. This is enough to discourage casual hackers and those without good resources. It also, as he mentions late in the video, eliminates the need for using "glitching", which was accomplished using a specially programmed Atmel chip and some software, to attempt to oscillate the voltage in such a manner that allows you to read/write to the card without having a properly signed packet. Dumping ROMs is exceptionally difficult to do, even with the thoroughly hacked HU cards, and he can just casually do it with his setup. Makes me think he could also dump the ASIC, something even in the heyday of DTV hacking, was never accomplished. This would eliminate the need for an access card at all- once you've dumped the ROMs, got a valid EEPROM, all you need to do is emulate the ASIC and opcodes for the processor (which on the HU card was a Texas Instruments TMS370 chip with a modified instruction set).