I'm going to disagree here, at least if you're in the UK.
I had a Kyocera FS-C5200DN. I have had no end of trouble with it and Kyocera support:
* Defective firmware. If connected to a Linux server, the printer would reject any job and throw a Service Required fault (which turned out to be an assert failure). I was informed by the local Kyocera distributor that there was a firmware update, which I needed to contact Kyocera to get. Their response was initially to deny everything. I asked how to request a service callout under the warranty - I was given a list of Kyocera repair agents. Every single one of them was dedicated to business customers - not a single one of them would do a residential callout. One went as far as claiming their Kyocera repair contract prohibited them from doing so.
* Complete loss of several colours. There's a sensor on the developer unit which tells the printer when the hopper is low on toner. An Archimedian screw type mechanism in the toner cartridge feeds the toner, and a motor in the printer turns that via a gear. When the sensor fails, the printer thinks there's always toner in the dev unit, even when there isn't. Once again I tried to raise a service call - the printer had a month left on the guarantee. Kyocera's response was that the invoice date was irrelevant, they worked from the manufacturer date - which meant in their opinion, my warranty had ended four months prior. Once again I was given a list of service agents, and none would accept a callout. Once again, "the contract prohibits us from doing residential callouts for Kyocera hardware".
* Image registration shifting on every job. The printer needs "calibrating" -- aligning the four toner images against each other. This started shifting on every print job, sometimes every page. I called once more, and was quoted £150 for a service call-out. Nope.
This morning, the network interface card failed completely. The printer has run a total of 57,000 pages in less than five years.
Had Kyocera supported their product, I'd have bought another in a heartbeat. As it stands, I'm not going to touch their products with a barge pole. Their after-sales support sucks -- quite honestly, it seems that once they have your money, they couldn't care less. If you're a business customer they'll suck up beyond belief (they'll suck up even more if you have a support contract), but home-office customers? Forget it.
The only reason I managed to keep this thing running for five years is because I found someone on the FixYourOwnPrinter forum who worked at a Kyocera repair shop; they very kindly emailed me the service manual and firmware update and a few service notes. Every single problem I had is documented in those notes. Sadly the repair procedures involve parts I can't get (Kyocera will only sell parts to authorised repair agents). So the printer's being scrapped and replaced with a Samsung CLP-680ND. At least that's a cheap printer to start with... far easier to eat the cost of the machine if it all goes pear-shaped later on (the Kyocera cost about £650 with carriage and such added on).
You're thinking about Bnetd -- Blizzard sued the dev team under the terms of the DMCA. As I recall, the main issue was that they'd created a Battle.net emulator which didn't implement CD key checking -- Blizzard refused to allow Bnetd to validate CD keys against Battle.net (citing security and piracy fears), and proceeded to send a DMCA takedown to the Bnetd project's ISP.
Blizzard then sued the Bnetd developers and their ISP (in addition to the takedown request), alleging copyright infringement, trademark infringement, breaking the Battle.net and several Blizzard games' EULAs *and* several DMCA violations to boot. The EFF defended the dev team, but Blizzard still won the lawsuit, the Bnetd.org domain, and a judgment against the original developers.
Proof positive that Blizzard were definitely in the "evil" category long before the Activision merger.
(However this didn't stop the GPL'd source code of the Bnetd project ending up on many, *many* servers worldwide... far out of reach of the DMCA restrictions)
(Disclaimer: any opinions presented herein are my own, and not necessarily those of any other entity)
A lot of patents give only the barest details about the invention in question; not enough to actually implement it, but just enough to satisfy a court enough to use said patent to beat one's competitors into submission.
Oh wow, and I thought I was the only person crazy enough to do component-level repair on consumer kit:)
I've got two testbench monitors -- an Acorn AKF17 TV-sync display (a Philips CM8833-II with a different label and a few less connectors) and a Viewsonic VX922.
The power switch on the Acorn broke - I jammed a plastic toothpick in there to hold it in. Still works fine. The Viewsonic suffered the effects of Capacitor Plague. £15 worth of new name-brand (Panasonic, specifically) capacitors and it works fine again.
I've replaced broken USB ports on phones and computer kit, fixed power supplies, test and measurement gear, TVs (CRT and LCD), you name it. If I see something with a "broken" sticker on it, and I think I can make use of it, I'll try and fix it. You can't really beat the combination of "saving the planet" and solving a puzzle...
Probably helps that I'm fairly active in the retrocomputing community. Put simply, you NEED these skills to be able to keep those machines running. You can't just call the manufacturer and have them fix it... Around here, though, people give you crazy looks if you tell them you fixed something... The usual response is something along the lines of "Why did you waste your time doing that? You could have bought a new one from Argos for £x!"...
Better the money goes into your pot (even if it theoretically "damages" another of your business units -- in this case digital vs. film) than one of your competitors.
Kodak have brought this on themselves. I'll be stocking up on their film though. EliteChrome EBX and Ektar are pretty nice...
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)
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...)
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.
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.
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!:)
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.
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.
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!
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.
This surprises me. Sony manufacture pickups and having personally used them I can say they are amongst the nicest that I've seen. Fantastically easy to interface and produce a very nice clean datastream.
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).
I concur with the camera gear. I know someone who's been through two Alpha 200 cameras without doing anything extreme with them. My D200 has worked (briefly) at -55degC and made a fully recovery once warmed up, gets used in dusty and corrosive environments and has fallen out of the car more times than I'd like to admit. Sony really don't make them like they used to. My MD player took similar abuse.
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.
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I'm going to disagree here, at least if you're in the UK.
I had a Kyocera FS-C5200DN. I have had no end of trouble with it and Kyocera support:
* Defective firmware. If connected to a Linux server, the printer would reject any job and throw a Service Required fault (which turned out to be an assert failure). I was informed by the local Kyocera distributor that there was a firmware update, which I needed to contact Kyocera to get. Their response was initially to deny everything. I asked how to request a service callout under the warranty - I was given a list of Kyocera repair agents. Every single one of them was dedicated to business customers - not a single one of them would do a residential callout. One went as far as claiming their Kyocera repair contract prohibited them from doing so.
* Complete loss of several colours. There's a sensor on the developer unit which tells the printer when the hopper is low on toner. An Archimedian screw type mechanism in the toner cartridge feeds the toner, and a motor in the printer turns that via a gear. When the sensor fails, the printer thinks there's always toner in the dev unit, even when there isn't. Once again I tried to raise a service call - the printer had a month left on the guarantee. Kyocera's response was that the invoice date was irrelevant, they worked from the manufacturer date - which meant in their opinion, my warranty had ended four months prior. Once again I was given a list of service agents, and none would accept a callout. Once again, "the contract prohibits us from doing residential callouts for Kyocera hardware".
* Image registration shifting on every job. The printer needs "calibrating" -- aligning the four toner images against each other. This started shifting on every print job, sometimes every page. I called once more, and was quoted £150 for a service call-out. Nope.
This morning, the network interface card failed completely. The printer has run a total of 57,000 pages in less than five years.
Had Kyocera supported their product, I'd have bought another in a heartbeat. As it stands, I'm not going to touch their products with a barge pole. Their after-sales support sucks -- quite honestly, it seems that once they have your money, they couldn't care less. If you're a business customer they'll suck up beyond belief (they'll suck up even more if you have a support contract), but home-office customers? Forget it.
The only reason I managed to keep this thing running for five years is because I found someone on the FixYourOwnPrinter forum who worked at a Kyocera repair shop; they very kindly emailed me the service manual and firmware update and a few service notes. Every single problem I had is documented in those notes. Sadly the repair procedures involve parts I can't get (Kyocera will only sell parts to authorised repair agents). So the printer's being scrapped and replaced with a Samsung CLP-680ND. At least that's a cheap printer to start with... far easier to eat the cost of the machine if it all goes pear-shaped later on (the Kyocera cost about £650 with carriage and such added on).
- Phil Pemberton (philpem)
- www.philpem.me.uk
Yes, unfortunately our polititicians really are that stupid.
You're thinking about Bnetd -- Blizzard sued the dev team under the terms of the DMCA. As I recall, the main issue was that they'd created a Battle.net emulator which didn't implement CD key checking -- Blizzard refused to allow Bnetd to validate CD keys against Battle.net (citing security and piracy fears), and proceeded to send a DMCA takedown to the Bnetd project's ISP.
Blizzard then sued the Bnetd developers and their ISP (in addition to the takedown request), alleging copyright infringement, trademark infringement, breaking the Battle.net and several Blizzard games' EULAs *and* several DMCA violations to boot. The EFF defended the dev team, but Blizzard still won the lawsuit, the Bnetd.org domain, and a judgment against the original developers.
Proof positive that Blizzard were definitely in the "evil" category long before the Activision merger.
(However this didn't stop the GPL'd source code of the Bnetd project ending up on many, *many* servers worldwide... far out of reach of the DMCA restrictions)
(Disclaimer: any opinions presented herein are my own, and not necessarily those of any other entity)
Who needs cats when you have chinchillas?
It depends on the specific patent...
A lot of patents give only the barest details about the invention in question; not enough to actually implement it, but just enough to satisfy a court enough to use said patent to beat one's competitors into submission.
Oh wow, and I thought I was the only person crazy enough to do component-level repair on consumer kit :)
I've got two testbench monitors -- an Acorn AKF17 TV-sync display (a Philips CM8833-II with a different label and a few less connectors) and a Viewsonic VX922.
The power switch on the Acorn broke - I jammed a plastic toothpick in there to hold it in. Still works fine.
The Viewsonic suffered the effects of Capacitor Plague. £15 worth of new name-brand (Panasonic, specifically) capacitors and it works fine again.
I've replaced broken USB ports on phones and computer kit, fixed power supplies, test and measurement gear, TVs (CRT and LCD), you name it. If I see something with a "broken" sticker on it, and I think I can make use of it, I'll try and fix it. You can't really beat the combination of "saving the planet" and solving a puzzle...
Probably helps that I'm fairly active in the retrocomputing community. Put simply, you NEED these skills to be able to keep those machines running. You can't just call the manufacturer and have them fix it... Around here, though, people give you crazy looks if you tell them you fixed something... The usual response is something along the lines of "Why did you waste your time doing that? You could have bought a new one from Argos for £x!"...
Better the money goes into your pot (even if it theoretically "damages" another of your business units -- in this case digital vs. film) than one of your competitors.
Kodak have brought this on themselves. I'll be stocking up on their film though. EliteChrome EBX and Ektar are pretty nice...
Or go over to yahoo, which is all spammers anyway.
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.
.... 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!
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.
This surprises me. Sony manufacture pickups and having personally used them I can say they are amongst the nicest that I've seen. Fantastically easy to interface and produce a very nice clean datastream.
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).
I concur with the camera gear. I know someone who's been through two Alpha 200 cameras without doing anything extreme with them. My D200 has worked (briefly) at -55degC and made a fully recovery once warmed up, gets used in dusty and corrosive environments and has fallen out of the car more times than I'd like to admit. Sony really don't make them like they used to. My MD player took similar abuse.
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.