Comment Re:PCI-e on die is transformative (Score 1) 58
No, but maybe I should start writing them.
Comment PCI-e on die is transformative (Score 2) 58
I think a lot of commenters on this are missing the point that 16 lanes of PCI-e 3.0 directly on-die is going to be a massive boost to Native PCI-e NAND Flash implementations (Fusion-io, for example). One of the biggest hurdles to getting more productivity out of faster CPUs and the proliferation of sockets/cores is feeding data to those CPUs. The disparity here is staggering... CPUs have improved by over a million times where storage interfaces and devices have only improved perhaps 100x (being generous) in the same timeframe. This change puts many terabytes of native PCIe NAND flash memory in very close proximity to the CPU complex and will enable vastly more efficient applications.
Submission + - Saving Captain Crunch (savingcaptaincrunch.com)
nunley writes: Blue Box creator, Captain Crunch (aka John Draper) urgently needs surgery and is at risk of losing the use of his hands if he does not have the required surgery. The Crunchster suffered an injury at DefCon this year after being hugged by an overzealous fan, and he is trying to raise the funds to cover the co-pay and rehab. He is one of the legends, and he needs our help.
Comment Re:So many critics... (Score 1) 195
This type of reader has very good specifications regarding false-positives and false-negatives.
The basis of the technology is that it constructs an image of the fingerprint based on variations in the electrical resistance over the surface of the living finger - please note the word "living." The exterior surface of your skin, including the finger, is dead. Strip off the upper few layers of dead skin cells and you find the first layer of living skin cells. These skin cells have specific qualities of electrical resistance. They also composed into specific shapes over the surface of the skin. The combination of specific electrical qualities in the cells and specifically how the cells are arranged results in measurable and unique variations of electrical resistance over the surface of the finger. That is what a capacitive fingerprint sensor does - it reads variations in the electrical resistance of the living surface of the finger and constructs a map of the finger that shows those variations.
I don't think the variations caused by stress or illness would be enough to skew the reader to get a false-negative reading (user fails to login with correct finger). If you think about the fact that the user is dragging the finger across the reader at infinitely variable speeds (even though only a relatively small range of speeds will work), you'll realize that the mapping technology is pretty advanced, so the very slight variations introduced by stress or illness would not interfere.
The basis of the technology is that it constructs an image of the fingerprint based on variations in the electrical resistance over the surface of the living finger - please note the word "living." The exterior surface of your skin, including the finger, is dead. Strip off the upper few layers of dead skin cells and you find the first layer of living skin cells. These skin cells have specific qualities of electrical resistance. They also composed into specific shapes over the surface of the skin. The combination of specific electrical qualities in the cells and specifically how the cells are arranged results in measurable and unique variations of electrical resistance over the surface of the finger. That is what a capacitive fingerprint sensor does - it reads variations in the electrical resistance of the living surface of the finger and constructs a map of the finger that shows those variations.
I don't think the variations caused by stress or illness would be enough to skew the reader to get a false-negative reading (user fails to login with correct finger). If you think about the fact that the user is dragging the finger across the reader at infinitely variable speeds (even though only a relatively small range of speeds will work), you'll realize that the mapping technology is pretty advanced, so the very slight variations introduced by stress or illness would not interfere.
