Posts by Ratz

Airport scanners face double exposure

If you're selected, scanning is mandatory.

From the code of practice:

Communications will be available at the security screening area to inform passengers that .For the benefit of all passengers' security, passengers may be required to be screened using body scanning equipment.

It should be made clear at the earliest possible stage that all passengers selected for screening by a body scanner must be scanned. If a passenger declines to be scanned that passenger must be refused access to the Restricted Zone, with the result that the passenger will not be able to fly.

So you now /have/ to submit to being scanned or not go through. You can't even opt for a pat-down.

Home Office to order fingerprinting of air passengers

Petition the PM on this

There is already a petition in place to request the banning of collecting biometric data from people making use of essential services within the UK. That is: buses, planes, electricity, water etc.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/NoBiometrics/

Please do your bit and sign up.

Intel Atom 230 ultra low-power desktop CPU

A word on wattage

Given how utterly patethic that review was and I can't even work up the entusiasm to flame it, here's a word on what was ignored:

I recently built one of these using a "noah" case with a DC-DC converter in it, a samsung 1TB drive (about 16W idle, 17W active) an old laptop CDRW drive and a 2GB stick of DDR2. Whilst copying a buttload (technical term) of stuff across the network to it, the CPU usage was sitting pretty at ~5% in XP-64 and the power usage (as measured by a maplin plug-into-the-wall meter) was 37 watts. The most I've ever managed to get this machine to consume was 51W on startup when the drive was first spun up. This quickly dropped back to 40 and idle is usually around the 35W mark.

As for the "dark ages" ports, all I can say is thank christ they're there, I work on embedded systems and it's great to have a machine with useful connectivity. When you need something to "just work" and it's playing lame, it's so much easier to debug over serial or parallel interfaces. Most embedded systems have a UART hidden away somewhere, even if it's only an internal header. USB->RS232 converters just don't work reliably enough.

Next time, let's have a review that doesn't compare melons to the krasnoyarsk tractor museum.