Posts by Al Amet

Windows XP SP3 sends PCs into endless reboot

Does it on Intel as well

First machine in the developers group that it was installed on died. It had an Intel Xeon process not an AMD. Went into a continuous boot cycle

Privacy chief says biometric concessions not good enough

Jobs that remove fingerprints

When I was younger and before I started working with computers I did furniture refinishing. That was over twenty years ago and I still have few finger prints because of it. Currently the only way I can get whats left of my fingerprints to show up is to wash my hands throughly with a harsh detergent removing the oils in the skin so that they show up. A little hand lotion makes them all disappear.

From what I remember reading an article about fingerprints years ago there are about a dozen different jobs, all involving hand labor, that can cause fingerprints to disappear. Brick layers are another group that won't have fingerprints. If you continuously work with an abrasive material over years the body quits manufacturing the fingerprints.

Then there are also those people for genetic reasons don't have any at all. I remember a newspaper article I read years ago about a family that didn't have fingerprints and it was likely that since the parents didn't have them and passed the gene onto the kids that their kids would likely not have fingerprints either.

Germany rolls out ePassport II - it's fingerprinting good!

What if you have no fingerprints

What about those people who don't have fingerprints and I'm not talking about the ones who don't have them for genetic reasons. I'm talking about those that don't have them because of the type of work they do. People that work with abrasive materials all day long often don't have detectable fingerprints. I still have spots on my finger tips that are completely smooth and have no detectable prints with ink or scanners. And what about those that have lost part of their digits due to an accident or birth defect. It will be interesting how the system deals with these people if prints are a requirement.

Venezuela to shift clocks half an hour

Countries align for economic reasons

Time zones are not set in stone. When where I lived in Indiana we never did daylight savings. From the windows time settings.

GMT+03:30 Tehran

GMT+04:30 Kabul

GMT+05:30 Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi, Sri Jayawrdenepura

GMT+05:45 Kathmandu

GMT+06:30 Yangon (Rangoon)

GMT+09:30 Adelaide, Darwin

GMT-03:30 Newfoundland

Countries do alignments to make time relative within their country . If a time zone splits a country they can shift their time a half hour and have the entire country in the same time zone. Shifting an entire country like Venezuela is planning on doing can greatly benefit a country.

RFID a 'technical blunder', report says

RFID's are a supplement not solution

A friend of mine got a sample of what EMP can do to electronic equipment, tags, watches, etc. when a 2hp electric compressor motor blew. I had thought that this was a good example until after talking with a co-worker that knew of a business where he grew up that had the transformer out back hit by lightning and had it fry every piece of electronic equipment on the property. Because of the fact that EMP can fry the tags means that RFID tags will still need to be supplemented by bar codes or some other form of backup machine-readable identification. Heck even bar codes have a human readable number string so that if the scanner has trouble reading the tag, the ID number can still be typed in manually. Because the tags are not fullproof, RFID is not going to eliminate bar codes, just supplement them in some situations. I think that he's just wanting to make people realize that this isn't an end-all solution.

Finance sector still the disk backup leader

On-site verses off site

Most tape backup operations require the cycling of the tapes off site in case there is a disaster. The biggest problems for backups is the OS and how fast it can supply and take the data. Snapshot images of the disks get around some of these limitations but often will only restore to the system from which they were taken. True backups will restore to a different system which is all you'll have after a fire or flood. I'm not saying disk backups are bad, they just have different limitations. A good archival system would have both, disk for near-line and tape for off-line (off site) backup.

MoD boffins in Cornwall GPS-jamming trials

Foil foils GPS

You don't need something as sophisticate as a psudolite to affect your road tracking GPS (although the MoD will probably be doing some spoof testing with them). I use a piece of aluminum foil to suppress satellite tracking when I do testing. You also don’t need to do L2 decryption to get centimeter accuracy in your measurements, there are other easier ways that are currently available. I’d imagine they’re looking at ways of corrupting the data received by the enemy. For a military action this would be better than disabling GPS in an area since it would tip off the fact that something is about to happen.