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Comment: Re:xkcd (Score 5, Insightful) 174

by Sigma 7 (#39090865) Attached to: Google Working On Password Generator For Chrome

Randall uses four words, not one. Even if you use a small word list of 5000 words (and TWL has much more words), that's 6.25 *10^14 combinations. It's still a few times stronger than a 8-character random alphanumeric which has ~2.81*10^14 combinations.

And if you go with the full TWL, you need at least 12 characters in the random alphanumberic to even be as strong as the 4-word passphrase.

It's only less secure in the sense that a similarly sized alphanumeric has more possible combinations - which is not being compared.

Comment: Re:Something for my own site? (Score 2) 241

by Sigma 7 (#38668276) Attached to: Reddit Turning SOPA "Blackout" Into a "Learn-In"

HOWEVER... I'd need a nice, simple, easy to understand block of text to put up explaining SOPA and why it's bad. No technical words, no fancy terminology. Hell, if I can keep it to 2-syllable words only, all the better.

Collateral damage.

Why those two words? Major carriers and websites are held liable for the content of their users even when one decides to go rogue and abuse their services. This includes sites such as Academic Earth, CosmoLearning, Google, Facebook, Reddit, Slashdot, Sourceforce, Steam, Wikipedia, and Youtube; and removing one of these can make a significant impact on progress.

The only good thing about the law is that they add provisions to prevent abuse. However, that should have been in the DMCA instead of SOPA - or at least within generic set of laws.

Comment: Re:Not all schools are equal (Score 1) 333

by Sigma 7 (#37810946) Attached to: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn't Use Computers

And to fire teachers who cannot teach.

Just this is sufficient.

If you think computers are bad for teaching, that's perfectly fine. However, students have a wide variety of learning styles that don't work in a one-size-fits-all method; you can see those that need instruction, while others are best handled by reading from a textbook. Some of the students get their best results if they use a computer, while others prefer pen and paper.

In my case, I prefer computer-based learning, since it gets rid of the bad teachers. As long as the computer system isn't too bad, I'll learn something.

Comment: Re:Native Apps? (Score 1) 354

by Sigma 7 (#37573724) Attached to: How Adobe Flash Lost Its Way

I was under the impression that the MinGW package manager application let the user download MinGW and w32api at once.

Most likely, I used an older Mingw (or perhaps Cygwin) install that didn't, or perhaps sped through the install by somehow skipping compiler selection.

But right now, I'm using TakeoffGW, since I had trouble compiling some packages. But given that Cygwin's version of sched.h was mixed with that distribution, I think the author encountered a similar issue.

But still, one of Cygwin/Mingw/MSYS should be enough.

Comment: Re:Native Apps? (Score 1) 354

by Sigma 7 (#37566146) Attached to: How Adobe Flash Lost Its Way

The market is fragmenting so fast its with all these "App" platforms, that there will be a great incentive for the first to create the "write once" , "run everywhere" tool chain. This will of course take a few years, but so many different platforms cannot be sustained.

To start, they should create a distribution like that for Windows. There's more than enough libraries that should make it possible.

The problem is that we already have splintering caused by attempts to create one. As of now, the crossplatform stuff includes Allegro, OpenGL, QT, SDL, SFML, wxWidgets as well as many other libraries. It's quite bad if you want to use Mingw to develop, which is too minimalistic to include even headers to fully use your system (requiring the user to download a w32api package, by then you'd wonder why it isn't in the stock download).

Comment: Re:And who paid for this study? (Score 1) 235

by Sigma 7 (#37113490) Attached to: IE 9 Beats Other Browsers at Blocking Malicious Content

The latest version of Chrome now allows you to run individual plugins if necessary. This is useful for running just one embed and not things on the side.

However, it took a few versions to get that right - almost as if the developers never heard of the flash banners that took 200% CPU.

Comment: Re:"as of 2007" (Score 1) 232

by Sigma 7 (#36279446) Attached to: Malware Scanner Finds 5% of Windows PCs Infected

p.s. this is why anyone with half a clue disables any and all browser plugins.

Wishful thinking.

The common setting you see in browsers is an all-or-nothing deal, which constrains you to visiting text only sites until you open the menu to open a preferences menu to change the setting (that affects all plugins rather than just untrusted ones.)

It took Google Chrome several attempts to get it right. First, they added plugin blocking in some menu. Then they added a button in the address bar that allows unblocking plugins. Then, the bug where that button unblocked plugins for multiple tabs/windows was fixed. Finally, they added a right-click menu to unblock individual plugins (which helped, since that first button only allowed one click).

Firefox support for blocking plugins is miles behind a non-updated version of Opera. In Opera, there's actually a menu item that disables plugins, and it's not too deep either. While the latest version doesn't allow unblocking individual plugins, it's still easy to unblock if necessary.

Oh, and if an extension implements what should be core browser functionality, then maybe it should be added to the browser instead of forcing extension authors to do the work.

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