Ok, it may be that people are caught up in WoW. But that will fade eventually. Then they'll move on to something else.
And then there's people out there who, like me, look at WoW and go "Geez, I don't have the time to devote my life to this." and never play it. I've looked at it in fascination, but I've also woken up on Sunday after a long binge of Civilization X, and wondered where my weekend went. Those experiences taught me that I need to pick my gaming prudently. So I don't play WoW. I've already seen people's lives disappear when they start playing.
Also, like any other "where are the gamers?" question, you need to make sure the games you're making are fun or you have no room to complain.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure I'd love to play WoW, but I have a job, I take night classes, and I'm trying to find that elusive thing called "girl". Dumping time into the hole of WoW would kill off at least one of those. And I think when I'm 50, I'd rather look back on the fun times I had with (eventual) children than fun times I had with avatars in a world that didn't exist.
It's carbonated juice. It's pretty good, and it satisfies the craving for the fizzy soda thing while still being as healthy as juice. It's a pretty good mix.
Sounds like you're getting Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) or Radio Frequency Interference (RFI).
Both are the result of either bad or cheap shielding. Most consumer electronic devices should have at least some shielding.
Look for frayed speaker wires. Look for cracks in your cell phone case (the one it's made out of, not the cool "leather" one you got when you bought it).
Either get new speakers, or replace your cell phone. Or both.
- set a custom riner for each person in my address book.
- set a DIFFERENT ringer for numbers that are *Unavailable*
- set another ringer for numbers that aren't in my Phonebook.
That way I can ignore it based on the ringer.
If someone I know calls, but I didn't know they called, then they can leave a voicemail, and I can add them to my Address Book. Hunt around. Play with phones before you buy them. Some have options like this, some dont.
It's a shame that people in the OpenSource community get so easily worked up when people say they want "unneccessary" features. All it tells me is that no one has taken a really good hard look at Office.
Office alternatives are never going to unseat office until a few things happen:
1) The ease of use and development of a databse similar to Access is created. I've used a lot of databases, and none of match up feature-wise to Access. Yes, I know, there's more powerful databases out there, and ones that can do X. But none out there use the native Operating Systems widget set to build applications.
2) The interoperability of the various Office programs is unmatched. The ability to use a custom Database built in Access to pull information from the corporate server, which then uses Word to display reports, and Excel to put the information into usable formats is currently unmatched, and a bigger "unnecessary feature" than OpenSource developers give it credit for.
3) A long, hard, cold look needs to be taken at Office. As long as people continue to beleive that Word is "just a word processor" and Excel "just a spreadsheet", and Access is some "database throwback to the 90's" then you're never going to make any headways against office. The Win32 API/OLE/ActiveX/Acronym of the Day combo is a much more powerful set of tools than most people give it credit for.
4) Hardly anyone buys Office for home. Most of them pirate it from work. As long as work drives their usage of Ofiice, it's going to stay entrenched. As long as companies continue to use the "unneccessary" features of Office, nothing else is going to manage to make a dent.
It seems to me that the easiest way to do this is to freeze yourself, hopefully in a way that your DNA won't degrade. Once cloning technology is viable, have yourself cloned, and leave your money to your eventual clone.
If mind transfer technology is available, then do that, but that might be a ways further off.
Hi Taco. Thanks for the commentary from behind the curtain.
I think it's more important for the story to make it to the site, regardless of the submitter. I've been reading the site for a long time (note my 4 digit/. ID. Whee!) And I've done the same thing most of my friends have as/. has gotten bigger, and as real life and professional concerns creep into our lives. We hit the/. front page, hit all the relevant links that interest us (tabbed browsing works wonders) and read the stories, but ignore the commentary. Occasionally we'll delve into the commentary to see what's being said.
I think this might be an opportunity to see how many people hit the site vs. how many actually comment. I've noticed as time has gone on, a lot of older/. users don't post much. Partially because we don't want to deal with the unruly mobs in the discussion area, but also because we don't have the time to delve into a deep conversation.
If someone is making it to the front page because they're submitting good stories, then more power to them. I have noticed that sometimes it seems there's favoritism, since I've submitted stories, with links, and they'll be rejected, but a few hours later, or a day, someone else will submit the exact same story with the same links, and it'll get accepted. That's annoying. And that's probably a bigger issue to deal with on the operations end. One the other hand, the story still got out there, and into the minds of the/. hordes, which is the point of the whole endeavor.
So, I say, don't throttle people's submissions. let them submit away. Post the stories if they're good/unique, etc. If you've got someone who's posting a lot, it might be worth waiting a little while and seeing if another user posts the same story, so that you can bring an end to some of the "Tragedy of the Commons" we're experiencing. If the story still hasn't been posted after a reasonable amount of time, put it on the page. It's more improtant to have the info than it is to censor.
I know this is going to be hard to stomach, because you're overworked, but I'll charge on anyway.
The easiest way to deal with this is to make changes without them knowing about it, and just do your job. This sounds like an environment where it's better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. But, what you have to do is spend your time actually fixing problems first.
So, take your Christmas break, and on the first day, get good and drunk. Socialize, whatever. On the second day, when you're recovering from the food and alcohol induced coma. Then, make a mental invoentory of the following things:
Where the company is now.
Where the company is going. (this is very important).
What's currently broken.
Then, using point 2 (where the company is going) figure out what you need to be ready when the company gets there. As you're planning, make sure you can fix what's broken along the way. If your migration plans include switching away from the buggy email program to something a little more advanced, then include it. Then, when you have to fix someone's machine because that buggy email program is acting up again, let them know that the problem will be fixed by whatever month you've plotted out.
The first few months of this will be rough, because you're going to be breaking stuff left and right, and users are going to complain. But if you inform them that stuff's gonna break, they're generally ok with it. Then you have to spend time fixing it.
This is a good time to experiment. If you've wanted to try Linux for something, do it now. If you've wanted to buy one piece of hardware that you think you might need 5 of, try one now. Then, as problems start getting ironed out, you'll find your workload goes down, and then your job won't be so burdensome.
No matter what, sabotaging stuff is not the way to go here. All that does is alienate you from your users, and make your life harder. Your best bet is incremental improvement.
And, from having done this before....
A lot of your end-user issues will go away if you upgrade the memory in your end-user's machines. If you're running XP and Office in a machine with 256 MB RAM, then you need to buy more. I know this comment is going to set a lot of people off, but I've seen problems evaporate when you upgrade a standard office computer to 1 GB of RAM or more. That can free up an ungodly amount of time.
I apologize that this is some sort of disorganized ramble....
Ok, I read the site, and there's some misinformation there.
1) He's comparing the cost of keeping, and driving your 1999 Accord that's presumably already paid off with the cost of entering into a new loan. That automatically skews the numbers in his favor.
2) He assumes that you're going from the Accord to either another different model, or a hybrid. (Comparison Prius vs. Corolla) as opposed to assuming you NEED a new car since that 1999 Accord at 1500 miles a month has 108000 miles on it, and might be running a little weird. ( I know Hondas can go for 200K+, spare me the stories. 100k is a psychological barrier people have). And then comparing between your choice between equivalent models hybrid vs. non-hybrid (ie: Accord V6 vs. Accord Hybrid or Ford Escape vs. Ford Escape Hybrid). He should check to see if the price premium still holds out over time then.
There was a third point, but I've since forgotten it.
I love how large global environmental trends can be attributed to mankind's existence. And that one thing is responsible for it.
Remember how in the '80's we were heading straight for an ice age? What happened to that?
What about how the magnetic poles are supposed to reverse (flip) sometime between now and then next 700 years? What if the ice caps melting are really part of the beginning of this process?
What if it's something that happens all the time, but we have no recorded history of it? I mean, you know (if you believe in evolution) the earth has been here for billions of years, and we have at most 2000 years of recrded history, some of which is weather? How do we know?
What if this is the preliminary step in the beginning of the next ice age? Or it's some sort of cleaning process the earth goes through? Has anyone looked at the alrger trends? Maybe they're too big for us to grasp, if we even can.
Alright, I've seen this argument a number of times, and for some reason people forget that OS X is unix-based. It has the same ability to handle hardware that all other unixen do.
In the above statements, if you could substitute the word "Linux" or "NetBSD" for every occurrence of Macintosh, and not sound like some sort of raving lunatic, I'd be surprised.
I don't understand how Linx and xBSDs can be expected to "run everywhere" on everything, yet, for some reason OS X, a very pretty GUI that is supported by the same technology as the other Unixes, is excluded from that. It just mystifies me.
I mean, come on, really. Who really thought that their brain worked like a computer? I know I can do things my computer can't. And no matter how fast the computer I'm using is, I'm always waiting for it to finish so I can get it to move on to the next task.
Plus, I can "know" things, whereas my computer just stores them. I can also plot future things to do, whereas the computer just does what it's doing now.
I mean.. sheesh.... if I thought in binary, odds are I'd only see in black and white.
If a $300 dollar camera breaks half way into a once in a lifetime performance, how much is that lost footage worth?
Or, what if you drop it when you're getting out of the truck on the way to the performance, on a saturday night? The more expensive camera allows you the peace of mind that you'll be able to dust it off and keep using it, as opposed to wondering where all these little bits and pieces on the asphalt go.
I'd be willing to advocate having a good camera as the primary, and a cheaper one as a backup. Largely because once the first cheaper one breaks, it's liable to stay broken, and not get replaced, and then you're back down to one, single, fragile camera. Right where you started.
Ok, what I'm going to say is going to sound heretical. And I know you're probably budget strapped, but if you need a durable camera, you need to work UP the product line, not down.
The $3-700 consumer camera is designed to be a wall wart that you, the consumer, sit on the shelf, and use to film the occasional family event, and if it breaks, oh well, it's broke. It's cheap enough to get a new one, and likely, much "better".
In order to get a durable camera, you have to get what's considered a "pro-sumer" camera. This is usually either the top of the line of the consumer product line, or the bottom of the line of the professional line. These cameras are designed to take some considerable abuse, and not die. They can take almost as much abuse as professional level cameras, but aren't as expensive to fix.
Case in point: where I work, we have 5 Canon GL1s that we provide for student check out. We've had these cameras for 5 years now, and each one has been out for repair no more than 2 times total over that time. Now, we know students don't really take care of the equipment when they have it in their posession, but the cameras hold up pretty well to the abuse. We've only had one actually get BROKEN in the last year.
So, you should look at the equivalent in whatever your brand of choice is. The Canon GL1/2/3, the sony VX2000/2100 or the new HDV model they just introduced (What we're migrating to soon). JVC makes some ok stuff.
It's worth looking into. It's a little pricey, but they are simply much better than the consumer ghetto stuff.
This is why I've always been a proponent of pass phrases instead of pass words.
1) It's a lot easier to remember the phrase "My dog is jake" than it is to make a password that's "j4k3d0g!"
2) The number of permutations for passwords is MUCH higher, and will take much more work with a brute force generator. I mean, how long will it take to crack a string of 255 characters? Or longer? (I'm sure someone here will do the math). Plus, with passwords of indeterminate length, it'll be even harder. It's the million monkeys theory. Has there even been a few thousand monkeys yet that have managed to write one sentence of a great work of literature?
3) Then, you can have your passwords stored in an anonymous looking book in case it gets forgotten. Like, say, the opening line to your favorite comic. Who's going to look there? Or, a phrase like "I miss my high school sweetheart". That's a lot easier to remember than some random hashed word.
Yes, it could be reduced, but I still imagine that the total set of possible passwords is still larger than the total set of passwords contrained by the ~200 easily typed characters possbile for each of the eight character positions.
And that's assuming that people don't use nonsense phrases, like their first child's first sentence or something.
Though, adding the l33ting of characters to the sentence would help make it harder to crack.
I don't understand why we need to constantly hash the password down to 8 characters. In the old days, when disk space was at a premium, and every byte counted, it was important. Now that I can carry 1GB of disk space on my keychain (jump drives), I think the 8 character limit needs to be lifted. Why? So we can use phrases.
Everyone has movie lines that they remember, and people remember sentences pretty easily. So make phrase-based authentication.
Instead of making me remember:
wRn?m@9m
Let me remember:
It was a dark night.
Or:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
The biggest advantage is that you can get a long password that people can remember. And you can get punctuation.
Make the max length for a password be 256 characters, and give us something we can remember. Brute force attacks, or password dictionaries against something like this would be impractical, because there would be too many combinations to sort through.
A nice side benefit is that people can write it down, and it just looks like a line of text, not something that screams "password here!"
Slashdot Mirror
1) Australia.
1a) Wander aimlessly around mid-Eastern Europs, not really living anywhere.
2) School.
2a) Money.
2b) Citizenship. (which I can get in Oz, just haven't filled out the paperwork.)
I signed up for Slashdot when I was 25. I got my ID on the day they announced user accounts.
I'm not as old as it appears.
Lets just say I've been an early adopter.
I was the right age when the "intarweb" showed up.
Ok, it may be that people are caught up in WoW. But that will fade eventually. Then they'll move on to something else.
And then there's people out there who, like me, look at WoW and go "Geez, I don't have the time to devote my life to this." and never play it. I've looked at it in fascination, but I've also woken up on Sunday after a long binge of Civilization X, and wondered where my weekend went. Those experiences taught me that I need to pick my gaming prudently. So I don't play WoW. I've already seen people's lives disappear when they start playing.
Also, like any other "where are the gamers?" question, you need to make sure the games you're making are fun or you have no room to complain.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure I'd love to play WoW, but I have a job, I take night classes, and I'm trying to find that elusive thing called "girl". Dumping time into the hole of WoW would kill off at least one of those. And I think when I'm 50, I'd rather look back on the fun times I had with (eventual) children than fun times I had with avatars in a world that didn't exist.
Maybe it's just me.
Try The Switch http://www.switchbev.com/
It's carbonated juice. It's pretty good, and it satisfies the craving for the fizzy soda thing while still being as healthy as juice. It's a pretty good mix.
I'm not shilling for the product, I just like it.
Sounds like you're getting Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) or Radio Frequency Interference (RFI).
Both are the result of either bad or cheap shielding. Most consumer electronic devices should have at least some shielding.
Look for frayed speaker wires. Look for cracks in your cell phone case (the one it's made out of, not the cool "leather" one you got when you bought it).
Either get new speakers, or replace your cell phone. Or both.
My cell phone lets me:
- set a custom riner for each person in my address book.
- set a DIFFERENT ringer for numbers that are *Unavailable*
- set another ringer for numbers that aren't in my Phonebook.
That way I can ignore it based on the ringer.
If someone I know calls, but I didn't know they called, then they can leave a voicemail, and I can add them to my Address Book. Hunt around. Play with phones before you buy them. Some have options like this, some dont.
The page still hasn't loaded, and I had time to type this response.
It's got some custom Java/ActiveX thing that won't load in my browser.
Oddly enough, Google just has plain HTML, and it works fine. I can't imagine that there's a connection.
That's sarcasm, for the impaired.
Still waiting for it to load....
It's a shame that people in the OpenSource community get so easily worked up when people say they want "unneccessary" features. All it tells me is that no one has taken a really good hard look at Office.
Office alternatives are never going to unseat office until a few things happen:
1) The ease of use and development of a databse similar to Access is created. I've used a lot of databases, and none of match up feature-wise to Access. Yes, I know, there's more powerful databases out there, and ones that can do X. But none out there use the native Operating Systems widget set to build applications.
2) The interoperability of the various Office programs is unmatched. The ability to use a custom Database built in Access to pull information from the corporate server, which then uses Word to display reports, and Excel to put the information into usable formats is currently unmatched, and a bigger "unnecessary feature" than OpenSource developers give it credit for.
3) A long, hard, cold look needs to be taken at Office. As long as people continue to beleive that Word is "just a word processor" and Excel "just a spreadsheet", and Access is some "database throwback to the 90's" then you're never going to make any headways against office. The Win32 API/OLE/ActiveX/Acronym of the Day combo is a much more powerful set of tools than most people give it credit for.
4) Hardly anyone buys Office for home. Most of them pirate it from work. As long as work drives their usage of Ofiice, it's going to stay entrenched. As long as companies continue to use the "unneccessary" features of Office, nothing else is going to manage to make a dent.
It seems to me that the easiest way to do this is to freeze yourself, hopefully in a way that your DNA won't degrade. Once cloning technology is viable, have yourself cloned, and leave your money to your eventual clone.
If mind transfer technology is available, then do that, but that might be a ways further off.
Hi Taco. Thanks for the commentary from behind the curtain.
/. ID. Whee!) And I've done the same thing most of my friends have as /. has gotten bigger, and as real life and professional concerns creep into our lives. We hit the /. front page, hit all the relevant links that interest us (tabbed browsing works wonders) and read the stories, but ignore the commentary. Occasionally we'll delve into the commentary to see what's being said.
/. users don't post much. Partially because we don't want to deal with the unruly mobs in the discussion area, but also because we don't have the time to delve into a deep conversation.
/. hordes, which is the point of the whole endeavor.
I think it's more important for the story to make it to the site, regardless of the submitter. I've been reading the site for a long time (note my 4 digit
I think this might be an opportunity to see how many people hit the site vs. how many actually comment. I've noticed as time has gone on, a lot of older
If someone is making it to the front page because they're submitting good stories, then more power to them. I have noticed that sometimes it seems there's favoritism, since I've submitted stories, with links, and they'll be rejected, but a few hours later, or a day, someone else will submit the exact same story with the same links, and it'll get accepted. That's annoying. And that's probably a bigger issue to deal with on the operations end. One the other hand, the story still got out there, and into the minds of the
So, I say, don't throttle people's submissions. let them submit away. Post the stories if they're good/unique, etc. If you've got someone who's posting a lot, it might be worth waiting a little while and seeing if another user posts the same story, so that you can bring an end to some of the "Tragedy of the Commons" we're experiencing. If the story still hasn't been posted after a reasonable amount of time, put it on the page. It's more improtant to have the info than it is to censor.
And that's my Karma Bonused 2 cents. Thanks.
I know this is going to be hard to stomach, because you're overworked, but I'll charge on anyway.
The easiest way to deal with this is to make changes without them knowing about it, and just do your job. This sounds like an environment where it's better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. But, what you have to do is spend your time actually fixing problems first.
So, take your Christmas break, and on the first day, get good and drunk. Socialize, whatever. On the second day, when you're recovering from the food and alcohol induced coma. Then, make a mental invoentory of the following things:
Where the company is now.
Where the company is going. (this is very important).
What's currently broken.
Then, using point 2 (where the company is going) figure out what you need to be ready when the company gets there. As you're planning, make sure you can fix what's broken along the way. If your migration plans include switching away from the buggy email program to something a little more advanced, then include it. Then, when you have to fix someone's machine because that buggy email program is acting up again, let them know that the problem will be fixed by whatever month you've plotted out.
The first few months of this will be rough, because you're going to be breaking stuff left and right, and users are going to complain. But if you inform them that stuff's gonna break, they're generally ok with it. Then you have to spend time fixing it.
This is a good time to experiment. If you've wanted to try Linux for something, do it now. If you've wanted to buy one piece of hardware that you think you might need 5 of, try one now. Then, as problems start getting ironed out, you'll find your workload goes down, and then your job won't be so burdensome.
No matter what, sabotaging stuff is not the way to go here. All that does is alienate you from your users, and make your life harder. Your best bet is incremental improvement.
And, from having done this before....
A lot of your end-user issues will go away if you upgrade the memory in your end-user's machines. If you're running XP and Office in a machine with 256 MB RAM, then you need to buy more. I know this comment is going to set a lot of people off, but I've seen problems evaporate when you upgrade a standard office computer to 1 GB of RAM or more. That can free up an ungodly amount of time.
I apologize that this is some sort of disorganized ramble....
Ok, I read the site, and there's some misinformation there.
1) He's comparing the cost of keeping, and driving your 1999 Accord that's presumably already paid off with the cost of entering into a new loan. That automatically skews the numbers in his favor.
2) He assumes that you're going from the Accord to either another different model, or a hybrid. (Comparison Prius vs. Corolla) as opposed to assuming you NEED a new car since that 1999 Accord at 1500 miles a month has 108000 miles on it, and might be running a little weird. ( I know Hondas can go for 200K+, spare me the stories. 100k is a psychological barrier people have). And then comparing between your choice between equivalent models hybrid vs. non-hybrid (ie: Accord V6 vs. Accord Hybrid or Ford Escape vs. Ford Escape Hybrid). He should check to see if the price premium still holds out over time then.
There was a third point, but I've since forgotten it.
I love how large global environmental trends can be attributed to mankind's existence. And that one thing is responsible for it.
Remember how in the '80's we were heading straight for an ice age? What happened to that?
What about how the magnetic poles are supposed to reverse (flip) sometime between now and then next 700 years? What if the ice caps melting are really part of the beginning of this process?
What if it's something that happens all the time, but we have no recorded history of it? I mean, you know (if you believe in evolution) the earth has been here for billions of years, and we have at most 2000 years of recrded history, some of which is weather? How do we know?
What if this is the preliminary step in the beginning of the next ice age? Or it's some sort of cleaning process the earth goes through? Has anyone looked at the alrger trends? Maybe they're too big for us to grasp, if we even can.
I dunno, but there are perfectly good nVidia drivers for OS X, since nVidia is an option for graphics cards Doesn't seem like that would be a problem.
So sorry to exapand your vocabulary.
From Wikipedia:
"The Anglo-Saxon plural form "Unixen" is not common, although occasionally seen."
Alright, I've seen this argument a number of times, and for some reason people forget that OS X is unix-based. It has the same ability to handle hardware that all other unixen do.
In the above statements, if you could substitute the word "Linux" or "NetBSD" for every occurrence of Macintosh, and not sound like some sort of raving lunatic, I'd be surprised.
I don't understand how Linx and xBSDs can be expected to "run everywhere" on everything, yet, for some reason OS X, a very pretty GUI that is supported by the same technology as the other Unixes, is excluded from that. It just mystifies me.
Maybe it's just anti-Mac zealotry.
I mean, come on, really. Who really thought that their brain worked like a computer? I know I can do things my computer can't. And no matter how fast the computer I'm using is, I'm always waiting for it to finish so I can get it to move on to the next task.
Plus, I can "know" things, whereas my computer just stores them. I can also plot future things to do, whereas the computer just does what it's doing now.
I mean.. sheesh.... if I thought in binary, odds are I'd only see in black and white.
If a $300 dollar camera breaks half way into a once in a lifetime performance, how much is that lost footage worth?
Or, what if you drop it when you're getting out of the truck on the way to the performance, on a saturday night? The more expensive camera allows you the peace of mind that you'll be able to dust it off and keep using it, as opposed to wondering where all these little bits and pieces on the asphalt go.
I'd be willing to advocate having a good camera as the primary, and a cheaper one as a backup. Largely because once the first cheaper one breaks, it's liable to stay broken, and not get replaced, and then you're back down to one, single, fragile camera. Right where you started.
Ok, what I'm going to say is going to sound heretical. And I know you're probably budget strapped, but if you need a durable camera, you need to work UP the product line, not down.
The $3-700 consumer camera is designed to be a wall wart that you, the consumer, sit on the shelf, and use to film the occasional family event, and if it breaks, oh well, it's broke. It's cheap enough to get a new one, and likely, much "better".
In order to get a durable camera, you have to get what's considered a "pro-sumer" camera. This is usually either the top of the line of the consumer product line, or the bottom of the line of the professional line. These cameras are designed to take some considerable abuse, and not die. They can take almost as much abuse as professional level cameras, but aren't as expensive to fix.
Case in point: where I work, we have 5 Canon GL1s that we provide for student check out. We've had these cameras for 5 years now, and each one has been out for repair no more than 2 times total over that time. Now, we know students don't really take care of the equipment when they have it in their posession, but the cameras hold up pretty well to the abuse. We've only had one actually get BROKEN in the last year.
So, you should look at the equivalent in whatever your brand of choice is. The Canon GL1/2/3, the sony VX2000/2100 or the new HDV model they just introduced (What we're migrating to soon). JVC makes some ok stuff.
It's worth looking into. It's a little pricey, but they are simply much better than the consumer ghetto stuff.
This is why I've always been a proponent of pass phrases instead of pass words.
1) It's a lot easier to remember the phrase "My dog is jake" than it is to make a password that's "j4k3d0g!"
2) The number of permutations for passwords is MUCH higher, and will take much more work with a brute force generator. I mean, how long will it take to crack a string of 255 characters? Or longer? (I'm sure someone here will do the math). Plus, with passwords of indeterminate length, it'll be even harder. It's the million monkeys theory. Has there even been a few thousand monkeys yet that have managed to write one sentence of a great work of literature?
3) Then, you can have your passwords stored in an anonymous looking book in case it gets forgotten. Like, say, the opening line to your favorite comic. Who's going to look there? Or, a phrase like "I miss my high school sweetheart". That's a lot easier to remember than some random hashed word.
Yes, it could be reduced, but I still imagine that the total set of possible passwords is still larger than the total set of passwords contrained by the ~200 easily typed characters possbile for each of the eight character positions.
And that's assuming that people don't use nonsense phrases, like their first child's first sentence or something.
Though, adding the l33ting of characters to the sentence would help make it harder to crack.
I don't understand why we need to constantly hash the password down to 8 characters. In the old days, when disk space was at a premium, and every byte counted, it was important. Now that I can carry 1GB of disk space on my keychain (jump drives), I think the 8 character limit needs to be lifted. Why? So we can use phrases.
Everyone has movie lines that they remember, and people remember sentences pretty easily. So make phrase-based authentication.
Instead of making me remember:
wRn?m@9m
Let me remember:
It was a dark night.
Or:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
The biggest advantage is that you can get a long password that people can remember. And you can get punctuation.
Make the max length for a password be 256 characters, and give us something we can remember. Brute force attacks, or password dictionaries against something like this would be impractical, because there would be too many combinations to sort through.
A nice side benefit is that people can write it down, and it just looks like a line of text, not something that screams "password here!"
DBS = Digital Broadcast System
Most satellite and digital cable systems are considered this.
DVI = Digital Video Interface
It's that new connector with lots of really small pins that connects monitors and HDTVs together digitally.
DVR = Digital Video Recorder
TiVo, ReplayTV, New cable/satellite boxes with built in hard drives, etc.
HD = High Definition
The new TV standard. 4x the resolution. Roughly 16x the color depth.
HDTV = High Definition Television
See above.
OTA = Over The Air
Sucked in with an antenna.
PC = Personal Computer
Linux/Mac/Windows using computer.
PVR = Personal Video Recorder
MythTV, ReplayTV, TiVo.
RGBA = Red-Green-Blue Analog
Old school video hookups. Also known as S-Video, RF, Component.
STB = Set Top Box
That little box that lives on top of your TV.
US = United States
The last remaining Superpower as of this writing.
The samsung SIR-T165 can capture OTA HD broadcasts. It has firewire out ports.
I've hooked it up to my Mac, with a piece of sofware called VirtualDVHS and captured HD streams off of the device.
HD Streams gobble disk space like you wouldn't believe.
I think they may even have made a model that does satellite feeds also, with firewire ports, but you'd have to check around, and maybe hit ebay.