The article was written by one Mr. Mark Burnett. Neither he nor I ever mentioned a theoretical attack on encrypted corporate secrets. The guy makes his kids use 14-character passwords.
I stand by my assessment of that practice. It's stupid and counterproductive.
10,000 machines would cost $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 at least. Why is somebody going to harness the combined processing power of 10,000 machines to break into this guy's PC? Or mine? Or yours?
This guy says, "I require my kids to use at least 14 character passwords...". Unless his kids are al Qaeda agents or stealing nuclear secrets he's being ridiculous. And counterproductive. No kid is going to use a truly random 14-character password. Translate the names of the kids' pets into l33t speak and mash them up a few different ways and you won't need 10,000 computers to crack those passwords in less than a day.
Even if the password is not case-sensitive eight characters allows for more than 2.8 trillion passwords using the 26 letters and 10 digits. Many systems time out after three or so attempts. Even if you allow a thousand attempts (an absurdly high number) you'll still be very safe.
Of course is someone steals a password-protected system he would have an unlimited number of attempts. So make it a nine character password. If the cracker can run one million tries a second he has only a 50% chance of cracking a truly random password in the first 16 years of trying.
The story links to other sites' top reasons for going into space and Space.com's list inevitably includes mining.
In the same paragraph the article states "water is the most precious substance you can find in space" and "everywhere we look there is water." Well which is it? Is it rare or ubiquitous? It can't be both.
I remain unconvinced that space mining will ever make much sense. It's all but certain that molecular nanotechnology will revolutionize materials science in the first half of this century, obviating any conceivable need for space mining and eventually, perhaps, even some earth mining.
You'd think programmers would be good at math. Follow me here:
Page and Brin are worth $7,000,000,000. That's 46,666 TIMES that chump change $150,000 a year salary!
To put it in perspective, that $150K is to Page and Brin as $1.00 is to someone who has, say, $46,666 equity in his house.
Q. E. goddam D.
And in case you still don't get it and you think it is a tax dodge, let's hear what a great American jurist had to say about taxes:
Over and over again Courts have said there is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich and poor, and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands. Taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. to demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.
-- Honorable Learned Hand, US Appeals Court Justice
You idiot. Foregoing $150,000 in salary will not affect any capital gains taxes they may pay. These guys are worth BILLIONS. $150K is practically a rounding error.
It keeps reloading and reloading and reloading... I didn't have the patience to try to read the source to find out what it is. But it's creepy to hit the down arrow on your back button and see the same page listed halfway down your screen. WTF?
Of course the geeks are ranting about "clueless lusers" but it's not the users who are clueless, it's the geeks. What geeks simply can't imagine is that the average person sess computers as BORING complex machines. That's right BORING. SUPER boring. HYPER boring. SOUL-CRUSHINGLY BORING. In the western democracies most people know how to drive a car. But they know nothing about how cars work. Why? CARS ARE BORING to most people. They just want to get from point A to point B.
Stop faulting people for wanting to live their lives without having to understand yet another boring, super-complex technology and start thinking about ways to make their lives easier.
Automakers didn't rant about pussies who can't even crank a car. They developed the electrical ignition. They didn't rant about retards who don't have the coordination to use a clutch, brake and accelerator to shift a car. They developed the automatic transmission. They didn't rant about morons who can't remember to to turn their headlights off, they developed warning chimes and headlights that turn themselves off.
Sometimes I think the dolts who actually buy from spammers are as odious as the spammers themselves. The ten percent figure is astonishingly high. But then there's just as much room at the left-hand side of the bell-shaped curve as there is on the right hand side.
Thanks. Both the/. article and the linked story were utterly uninformative. Sometimes it seems that a lot techies disdain even the merest explanation as baby talk. Even when you're addressing a largely technical audience a little explanation helps because not everybody knows every technical detail about an entire field.
In writing a headline accuracy is not enough. A headline should be explanatory.
"Dutch A.G. Supports Scientology v. Spaink Verdict"
fails to tell us which party won the judgment. The headline implies there was an appeal, which means that at one time the judgement had gone the other way. There may have been multiple appeals. Even if you're familiar with the case you might not know where the judgement stood before the present one.
There is no excuse for parsimony in headlines when space allows more information. The headline should have read:
"Dutch A.G. Rules Against Scientology in Spaink Verdict"
I can confirm that. When I went to Navy boot camp in 1972 we got all of our many injections with no-needle spray injectors. I remember them as looking a little bit like an artist's airbrush.
This guy gave only a brief mention to Gratis Internet and no mention at all to J&T Cooper (Coopbro) or Offercentric. The programs of these companies are pretty transparent and entirely reasonable. Lumping them in with the likes of Incentive Reward Center is linking Kiwanis with Hell's Angels.
I'll say it again. I have personally taught more than 10,000 people how to use a mouse. That's something Jef Raskin, nor you, I'd venture to say have done.
Most of these people were elderly. (My school was a storefront in a Boca Raton, FL shopping center.)
The two button mouse was simply not the issue one-button fanciers have assumed it is.
"Why do we need to subject them to "left=default!" and lectures about hamburgers at diners to try to twist their brains into understanding this detail?"
Now you're humiliating yourself in public, which I assume is why you chose to remain anonymous. To imagine that explaining the left button is the default is "subjecting" them to something is absurd. When you teach someone how to drive (a car with an automatic transmission) you have to "subject" them to the idea that you slow down by simply taking your foot off the accelerator rather than hitting the brake immediately.
And if you think using the useful and witty analogy about hamburgers is to "twist" their brains I'm afraid your brain is already twisted beyond recognition.
Whoever modded this down as a troll is a moron. This entry was a thoughtful, reasoned argument.
It's time for everyone to admit that Apple's insignificant market share is due mostly to incredibly arrogant, stupid mistakes like sticking with the primitive, one-button mouse long after its inadequacy had become obvious.
Finally, Apple gets off its high horse a bit. Of course the GUI itself wasn't invented at Apple either but Apple was happy to borrow GUI ideas invented BEFORE the Lisa/Mac came out.
You know, Microsoft's success isn't TOTALLY attributable to Gates' aggressive business practices. One of Microsoft's strengths is that they will take any great idea from anywhere and use it. They aren't too proud to use what is literally the state of the art.
Apple should have admitted its mistake and offered two button mice long ago.
The right mouse button is the opposable thumb in the evolution of the user interface.
Slashdot Mirror
This card has EIGHT THOUSAND times as much RAM as my first computer had. (It was a Sanyo MBC-555 with 64KB RAM.)
Truly, we live in an age of wonders.
The article was written by one Mr. Mark Burnett. Neither he nor I ever mentioned a theoretical attack on encrypted corporate secrets. The guy makes his kids use 14-character passwords.
I stand by my assessment of that practice. It's stupid and counterproductive.
10,000 machines would cost $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 at least. Why is somebody going to harness the combined processing power of 10,000 machines to break into this guy's PC? Or mine? Or yours?
This guy says, "I require my kids to use at least 14 character passwords...". Unless his kids are al Qaeda agents or stealing nuclear secrets he's being ridiculous. And counterproductive. No kid is going to use a truly random 14-character password. Translate the names of the kids' pets into l33t speak and mash them up a few different ways and you won't need 10,000 computers to crack those passwords in less than a day.
Even if the password is not case-sensitive eight characters allows for more than 2.8 trillion passwords using the 26 letters and 10 digits. Many systems time out after three or so attempts. Even if you allow a thousand attempts (an absurdly high number) you'll still be very safe.
Of course is someone steals a password-protected system he would have an unlimited number of attempts. So make it a nine character password. If the cracker can run one million tries a second he has only a 50% chance of cracking a truly random password in the first 16 years of trying.
Show your work:
Number of seconds in a year = ca. 3,153,600
36^9 = 101,559,956,668,416 / 1,000,000 = 101,559,956
101,559,956/3,153,600 = 32 years to search entire key space.
32 / 2 = 16 years to search half of key space.
I love it when a government agency spends money on self-promoting hype rather than something substantial.
He is sharp. Notice how he picked right up on that. The man is good.
When all you have is a hammer, evertyhing looks like a nail, so the saying goes.
This designer is ridiculous. The problems surrounding this intelligence failure are far too complex to be ameliorated by redesigning a document.
The story links to other sites' top reasons for going into space and Space.com's list inevitably includes mining.
In the same paragraph the article states "water is the most precious substance you can find in space" and "everywhere we look there is water." Well which is it? Is it rare or ubiquitous? It can't be both.
I remain unconvinced that space mining will ever make much sense. It's all but certain that molecular nanotechnology will revolutionize materials science in the first half of this century, obviating any conceivable need for space mining and eventually, perhaps, even some earth mining.
You'd think programmers would be good at math. Follow me here:
Page and Brin are worth $7,000,000,000. That's 46,666 TIMES that chump change $150,000 a year salary!
To put it in perspective, that $150K is to Page and Brin as $1.00 is to someone who has, say, $46,666 equity in his house.
Q. E. goddam D.
And in case you still don't get it and you think it is a tax dodge, let's hear what a great American jurist had to say about taxes:
Over and over again Courts have said there is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich and poor, and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands. Taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. to demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.
-- Honorable Learned Hand, US Appeals Court Justice
You idiot. Foregoing $150,000 in salary will not affect any capital gains taxes they may pay. These guys are worth BILLIONS. $150K is practically a rounding error.
It keeps reloading and reloading and reloading... I didn't have the patience to try to read the source to find out what it is. But it's creepy to hit the down arrow on your back button and see the same page listed halfway down your screen. WTF?
Of course the geeks are ranting about "clueless lusers" but it's not the users who are clueless, it's the geeks. What geeks simply can't imagine is that the average person sess computers as BORING complex machines. That's right BORING. SUPER boring. HYPER boring. SOUL-CRUSHINGLY BORING. In the western democracies most people know how to drive a car. But they know nothing about how cars work. Why? CARS ARE BORING to most people. They just want to get from point A to point B.
Stop faulting people for wanting to live their lives without having to understand yet another boring, super-complex technology and start thinking about ways to make their lives easier.
Automakers didn't rant about pussies who can't even crank a car. They developed the electrical ignition. They didn't rant about retards who don't have the coordination to use a clutch, brake and accelerator to shift a car. They developed the automatic transmission. They didn't rant about morons who can't remember to to turn their headlights off, they developed warning chimes and headlights that turn themselves off.
Get a clue.
Five minutes ago I had no idea this problem with Flash existed. Now I've flushed all of this crap out of my system (as best I can tell).
This is one of the reasons I come to Slasdot.
Mod that man up!
Everybody has Bruce Schneier's Password Safe right? Far from from a cure-all but at least you have to remember only one really high-entropy password.
Now can anyone tell me the best way to keep my password out of my Windows swap file (other than switching to another OS)?
The name of the program is X Window. Therefore the headline should read:
Preview of X Window Eye Candy
or
Preview of X Window's Eye Candy
Sometimes I think the dolts who actually buy from spammers are as odious as the spammers themselves. The ten percent figure is astonishingly high. But then there's just as much room at the left-hand side of the bell-shaped curve as there is on the right hand side.
Thanks. Both the /. article and the linked story were utterly uninformative. Sometimes it seems that a lot techies disdain even the merest explanation as baby talk. Even when you're addressing a largely technical audience a little explanation helps because not everybody knows every technical detail about an entire field.
...after the story appears on Slashdot, how are they going to handle hosting all of those multimedia files?
In writing a headline accuracy is not enough. A headline should be explanatory.
"Dutch A.G. Supports Scientology v. Spaink Verdict"
fails to tell us which party won the judgment. The headline implies there was an appeal, which means that at one time the judgement had gone the other way. There may have been multiple appeals. Even if you're familiar with the case you might not know where the judgement stood before the present one.
There is no excuse for parsimony in headlines when space allows more information. The headline should have read:
"Dutch A.G. Rules Against Scientology in Spaink Verdict"
or simply
"Dutch A.G. Rules Against Scientology"
I can confirm that. When I went to Navy boot camp in 1972 we got all of our many injections with no-needle spray injectors. I remember them as looking a little bit like an artist's airbrush.
The summary doesn't excuse the poorly formed headline. It's a terrible headline.
This guy gave only a brief mention to Gratis Internet and no mention at all to J&T Cooper (Coopbro) or Offercentric. The programs of these companies are pretty transparent and entirely reasonable. Lumping them in with the likes of Incentive Reward Center is linking Kiwanis with Hell's Angels.
I'll say it again. I have personally taught more than 10,000 people how to use a mouse. That's something Jef Raskin, nor you, I'd venture to say have done.
Most of these people were elderly. (My school was a storefront in a Boca Raton, FL shopping center.)
The two button mouse was simply not the issue one-button fanciers have assumed it is.
"Why do we need to subject them to "left=default!" and lectures about hamburgers at diners to try to twist their brains into understanding this detail?"
Now you're humiliating yourself in public, which I assume is why you chose to remain anonymous. To imagine that explaining the left button is the default is "subjecting" them to something is absurd. When you teach someone how to drive (a car with an automatic transmission) you have to "subject" them to the idea that you slow down by simply taking your foot off the accelerator rather than hitting the brake immediately.
And if you think using the useful and witty analogy about hamburgers is to "twist" their brains I'm afraid your brain is already twisted beyond recognition.
Whoever modded this down as a troll is a moron. This entry was a thoughtful, reasoned argument.
It's time for everyone to admit that Apple's insignificant market share is due mostly to incredibly arrogant, stupid mistakes like sticking with the primitive, one-button mouse long after its inadequacy had become obvious.
Finally, Apple gets off its high horse a bit. Of course the GUI itself wasn't invented at Apple either but Apple was happy to borrow GUI ideas invented BEFORE the Lisa/Mac came out.
You know, Microsoft's success isn't TOTALLY attributable to Gates' aggressive business practices. One of Microsoft's strengths is that they will take any great idea from anywhere and use it. They aren't too proud to use what is literally the state of the art.
Apple should have admitted its mistake and offered two button mice long ago.
The right mouse button is the opposable thumb in the evolution of the user interface.