blogx
musings of mark since 2001

Ran across an interesting articles about password strength that rehashes old information but it’s worth repeating. For those in a hurry, check your password strength over at the Microsoft free password checker. The table he uses is reproduced below.

Pay particular attention to the difference between using only lowercase characters and using all possible characters (uppercase, lowercase, and special characters - like @#$%^&*). Adding just one capital letter and one asterisk would change the processing time for an 8 character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries.

Password Length	All Characters	Only Lowercase
3 characters 4 characters 5 characters 6 characters 7 characters 8 characters 9 characters 10 characters 11 characters 12 characters 13 characters 14 characters	0.86 seconds 1.36 minutes 2.15 hours 8.51 days 2.21 years 2.10 centuries 20 millennia 1,899 millennia 180,365 millennia 17,184,705 millennia 1,627,797,068 millennia 154,640,721,434 millennia	0.02 seconds .046 seconds 11.9 seconds 5.15 minutes 2.23 hours 2.42 days 2.07 months 4.48 years 1.16 centuries 3.03 millennia 78.7 millennia 2,046 millennia

Remember, these are just for an average computer, and these assume you aren’t using any word in the dictionary. If Google put their computer to work on it they’d finish about 1,000 times faster.

Once again Time magazine has determined that it’s American readership needs to know more about teaching the bible to kids, rather than the news that is making the covers of their magazine in the rest of the world, “Talibanistan“.

Russia is hedging it’s bets and going with what they think is a winner in China, all the while certain that sooner or later, most likely sooner the USA or its allies are going to attack another “axis of evil”. Things aren’t going well anywhere in the Middle East it seems with Pakistan seemingly heading for a melt down too, and they do have nuclear weapons.

I’ve been asked a couple times about Vista…

Vista is kinda cool, nice png image transparency enabled desktop, and good to see the graphics finally up to par with what some Linux and Mac users have already been enjoying for a couple years.

The Alt Tab combo makes nice live thumbnails for what is running in the taskbar below, and the Windows key and Tab creates a nice “stack” of the windows available. It’s got desktop widgets by default that are easy to configure and personalize, while the start button is now like Linux start button, just a logo in the bottom left corner and there is no word “start” to be found. Also finally gone are the “My” folders, Just “Documents” without the My.

The test laptop is a brand new out of the box Dell Inspiron and we got the suggested upgrades of fat graphics ram and lots of processing power. After the initial boot and load up, it found the internet no problem and was verified by Microsoft quick and seamlessly.

She (a 65 year old power user) got the Home Premium Media Edition, which gives you all the nice transparencies and graphics as mentioned, and she got the Office stuff too and that also was “verified” by Microsoft after we dug the CD out of the shipping box and typed in the key number. Never had to open the CD case, just wanted the number and the software was already on the hard drive by Dell ready to go, nice.

I found it Vista very_easy_to_configure, and think even a 65 year old that isn’t a power user would be fine with a little gentle help at the beginning if it’s their first laptop/PC. It came with all three internet ports ready and found them all seamlessly; dial-up, wireless, and we booted up initially with our ethernet cable plugged into the back of it. Boots quick, no complaints really.

Too many other goodies to mention, but as mentioned it’s only about time that Microsoft gave everyone nice graphics and functionality that the rest of the computer world enjoys. The commercials from Mac are a little over blown as you might have guessed, especially with a new install like this.

Again, like Linux or Mac when you first get your environment in place you’ll get the the equivalent of the root (administrator) asking for password to run an executable that’s going to change registry files. It quiets right down when all the configs are set for new programs installed etc.

If you are already signed in as the administrator it doesn’t even ask for the password, click okay and you are off and installing. We added Firefox, made it the default browser and also added Google’s Picasso and it was easy-peasy. Outlook 2007 is much more secure, reads emails as plain text files instead of HTML by default, good stuff like that.

Getting a fairly recent photo printer to work took a bit of fiddling, but nothing like the trials of those that install Vista on anything but brand new heavy duty hardware made just for Vista. After a couple trips to the printer manufacturer’s web site and no luck, the simple fix was to use the USB for it instead of trying to go through LPT1.

To me, it feels like it’s a good operating system if you have the brand new horsepower for it and are willing in some cases shell out extra, if not money at least time, getting some of your old peripherals to work or buying new ones. A very nice system for someone if you get them all the hardware peripherals like external hard drives, printers, scanners, monitors, webcams and anything else you can think of at the same time.

Two interesting articles, the pig/human chimeras are apparently a prime candidate for xenotransplantation while the second reads like an advertisement for those awaiting organ transplants, until you get near the bottom of the piece.