Hard News: Steve, 1999
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If you choose a five word password from a 40,000 word vocabulary you get ~10^23 total passwords. To get the same security from an ascii password you’d have to have to remember 12 random characters.
That makes no sense to me. If you choose a 5 word password from a 40,000 vocab you have less than 40,000 passwords, not 10^23.
If you use dictionary words or names or anything else common as your password you really need to keep your username secret. Brute force attacks which have only 10K or so possibilities will fall over real quick, unless the system is otherwise secured (limited number of attempts etc).
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
The fact that they can now get great industrial design delivered rapidly to your hands in unthinkable volume at a close-to-competitive price is behind that.
They'd be more competitive if it wasn't for some questionable pricing:
Macbook Pro 17" ( = ex-VAT price in NZ $)
Hong Kong: HK$ 19,288 = NZ2944.00
Singapore: S$ 3,398.00 = NZ$3175.00
Thailand: ฿ 81,900.00 = NZ$3045
Australia: AU2899.00 = NZ$3316
NZ: NZ$ 4,199.00 = NZ$3651I know from experience that the SG and HK prices are very negotiable in store too. I suspect the Thai one is as well given that some malls have 4 or 5 Mac dealers.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Oh and Apple’s design isn’t the story behind their commercial success anymore – it’s their supply chain and ruthless efficiency. Even with Ives’ gorgeousness Apple were never going to be the largest company in the world. The fact that they can now get great industrial design delivered rapidly to your hands in unthinkable volume at a close-to-competitive price is behind that. And that’s why Cook deserves CEO.
This.
I hadn't realised till this week that it was Cook who reinvented Apple's supply chain, after Jobs killed all existing Mac desktop models in favor of the iMac and the pro line. Apple achieved the best inventory performance in the industry quite quickly -- they made what they sold and sold what they made. That's the part of the story that usually gets left out.
I'd love to know how the decision to get into chip design with the A4 was made. And interestingly, while Apple and Samsung are locked in patent war mode, it's Samsung that produces Apple's chip design.
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Stephen Judd, in reply to
Kyle, Lucy: there is this assumption that the attacker knows a significant portion of users have simple consistently capitalised phrases in English as their passphrase. I don't think that's anywhere near true now, and I doubt it will be any time soon. I suppose I've outed MYSELF in this thread, if anyone is trying to brute force one of my accounts; but then I've gone for something a bit more challenging than a string of space-separated lower case words.
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Noting, of course, that the ARM processor core on which the A4 is based is licensed from Advanced Risc Machines -- the company formed after the makers of the BBC Acorn landed a deal with Apple to produce a version of the Risc chip they'd made based on fresh ideas from Berkley.
That was for the Newton, another product Jobs killed. It's interesting that the Newton OS paradigm was dumped, but Apple went back to ARM when it wanted to go mobile again.
That was easy because since it was formed, ARM has been in the business of licensing the intellectual property of its designs to other companies. The company has "shipped" 15 billion ARM processor cores without actually making any of them.
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Lilith __, in reply to
That makes no sense to me. If you choose a 5 word password from a 40,000 vocab you have less than 40,000 passwords, not 10^23.
I don’t pretend to know anything about any of this, but isn’t the point that with a password made of 5 random common words put together, both the words and their order of appearance in the password can vary; so the number of possible combinations isn’t less than the total word pool, but much, much more?
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Stephen Judd, in reply to
It’s interesting that the Newton OS paradigm was dumped
I think we could make a case that iOS is a spiritual descendant from a UI POV. It's a long time since I had quality time with a Newton, mind.
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Stephen Judd, in reply to
Yes, I think Kyle is mathematically wrong, even given his assumptions. If someone wants to work it out, the formula is here.
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Biobbs, in reply to
I still have a soft spot for the beeb and have a port of Chucky's Egg somewhere
I so loved Chucky's Egg! I wasted a lot of my life on that game- I'd've probably finished uni 6 months earlier if it wasn't for Chucky's Egg. And Frac. And that one where you have to run around the castle and avoid the baddies and the big spider.
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Here I get to point out that Apple didn't initially choose the ARM for the Newton, they had their own internal CPU project (a CRISP variant) for the Newton that was canned at the last minute - leaving, as always, a whole lot of pissed off engineers who'd just spent a few years of their lives on it
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Jim Cathcart, in reply to
They’d be more competitive if it wasn’t for some questionable pricing:
Too true. Outside the Apple stores in Japan, it is possible to buy previous generations of brand new Macs under full warranty. It at least gives people a chance to buy within their budget. I haven't seen the same arrangement elsewhere.
Also, having worked on third party licensing arrangements with Apple in the manufacturing space (audio peripherals), they can be very difficult to work in the fast moving consumer electronics industry.
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Smartphones still can't play MMOs
They can, I've spent a few hours testing one out over the last couple of months. I had an empire stretching from Avondale to Laingholm. But I gave it all away for a single kiss...
Password security? Cracks me up how much people obsess about it. Only my bank account is even worth bothering on a strong password, and even then, it does lock up after 3 failed attempts anyway, and sends me a text.
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Sacha, in reply to
it does lock up after 3 failed attempts anyway, and sends me a text
taunting your failed memory
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
Password security? Cracks me up how much people obsess about it. Only my bank account is even worth bothering on a strong password, and even then, it does lock up after 3 failed attempts anyway, and sends me a text.
There are plenty of things for which password security is not hugely important. But I'd venture that there's a few more things than your bank account deserving of some attention to security. If nothing else, having something like your Facebook or Google account hacked might not be extremely costly, but it is really fucking annoying. (And can be used for some very malicious things.)
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Steve Jobs record on workers rights.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/11863/remembering_steve_jobs_record_on_workers_rights/
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One problem is that "lesser" accounts often give access to the information you need to successfully use social engineering on an important one.
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Jim: thanks for that link.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Steve Jobs record on workers rights.
Apple is the highest-profile Foxconn customer, and thus takes most of the heat, much as it was targeted by Greenpeace on the sustainability of its products (which improved markedly as a result of the scrutiny).
But the screen on your Kindle? That Asus netbook? Your Nokia or Sony Ericsson phone? Your Playstation? Your Dell, HP or Cisco device? Made, in whole or in part, at Foxconn.
Some of those companies have supplier responsibility codes -- Cisco for example -- but none of them seem to do the degree of supplier auditing that Apple does. Apple has been producing reports since 2007, and does cancel contracts.
My point isn't that manufacturing practices in China can leave much to be desired -- although that's obvious -- but that it makes little sense to single out "Steve jobs' record on workers rights", when Apple is demonstrably more responsive than most of its peers.
Apple's treatment of its US workforce is generally regarded as very good -- I know someone who used the staff health plan to get sexual reassignment surgery -- with the exception being the retail workers, who have had cause for complaint.
On the suicides issue Auckland University's StatsChat recently pointed that while all suicides are are tragic, the rate of suicide amongst Foxconn employees is markedly lower than that of the general Chinese population.
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My high school had BBC Micro's in the computer lab until 1990.
By far and away the best game of that generation was this.
Chucky can shove his egg where the sun don't shine... :)
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BenWilson, in reply to
If nothing else, having something like your Facebook or Google account hacked might not be extremely costly, but it is really fucking annoying. (And can be used for some very malicious things.)
Strikes me as an extremely unlikely thing to happen. The cost would not be great. The cost of entering long passwords adds up every day. The cost of losing a hard password is not insubstantial either, have actually had that happen to me many times.
To me, having powerful passwords is a lot like putting 3 locks on your front door, all of which you have to open every time you want to come or go. It's overkill, unless you have genuine reasons to fear a sneaky break in.
Getting phished is more likely. That has happened to people I know and it was a bit of a pain.
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Apple is the highest-profile Foxconn customer, and thus takes most of the heat
Well, you would expect that. However, as Andy Grove points out, it’s the hollowing out of jobs in the U.S. computer industry where Apple and others have failed. At this stage benefits are accruing to technophiles and shareholders but it appears that Apple has some way to go to improve its triple-bottom line business practice. Did Jobs share some responsibility in that? You would certainly have hoped so.
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Biobbs, in reply to
By far and away the best game of that generation was this.
Chucky can shove his egg where the sun don't shine... :)
Well... that's what I used to tell him to do regularly, when I was playing the game.
Always thought Wing Commander et al should really have been paying royalties to Elite.
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My first computer, in the early 80s, was a 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It had a whole 7 colours, and unlike it’s predecessor (the 1k, monochrome, ZX-81) was marketed as a games machine! It had no monitor, the keyboard and joystick connected to your TV. I remember spending many hours happily playing Manic Miner , a rudimentary platform-and-ladders game, to the accompaniment of a tinny version of Hall of the Mountain King , played from a minute speaker hidden inside the keyboard. Games came on audio tape, so you hooked up your tape player to the computer and listened to the bleeps and squeals and watched the screen flash until it was done. Loading took a while, and if your tape got kinked or stretched, forget it! I also spent many frustrating hours typing in BASIC programs from computer magazines, which hardly ever worked due to unnoticed typing errors. I learned to type on those funny rubber keys. Happy days.
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David Hood, in reply to
My daughter fires up the Elite clone Oolite a few times a year to go privateering
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I remember spending many hours happily playing Manic Miner , a rudimentary platform-and-ladders game, to the accompaniment of a tinny version of Hall of the Mountain King , played from a minute speaker hidden inside the keyboard.
Manic miner was the first thing I thought of when I heard the first minute or so of this track . Trent Reznor must be a fan...
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