As an example, let's take a simple example where a keyboard has all the capital and lowercase letters, and numbers 0 through 9. There are 52 possible letters and 10 possible numbers - 62 potential characters. An 8 character password has 62^8 or 218,340,105,584,896 possible combinations.
Right
If I impose a rule that says you must have at least one capital letter, that more than halves the attack space because one combination drops from 62 possibilities to 26, and our new attack space is only 91,561,979,761,408.
If I say you have to have one capital letter and one number, that reduces a combination from 62 to 10, and our new space is only 14,768,061,251,840 passwords.
No, with those conditions the space isn't 26*10*62^6, which is what you assumed - that's the space if you require that the first letter be uppercase, the second a number and the rest whatever.
With those conditions, you're removing from the original 62^8 space all the passwords that are just lowercase, which are 26^8. So your new password space is 62^8 - 26^8 = 218,131,278,520,320, which is 99,9% of the original space...
Deflation encourages hoarding wealth and inflation encourages investment and wealth creation. Ideally you don't want a huge amount of either, but a small amount of deflation is certainly better for the economy than deflation.
s/deflation/inflation
You nailed it, so i was going to mod you up, but as you are already at +5 i thought it would be more useful to point out the typo.
Having a unified memory is a nice thing, but i expect it will only make a difference in something like the PS4, where you can target a specific architecture, which has GDDR5 as main memory, and doesn't have a discrete GPU. These two points are relevant: if you have "normal" DDR3 you loose a lot more than you gain by having UMA, and this will not change a thing in discrete GPUs because the PCIe bus is going to always be in the way of the GPU accessing main memory.
I think it is more a "nice to have" than a big step forward. The difficulty in programing GPUs lies in the different algorithms one must employ, and while having to copy memory back and forth between the CPU and GPU is a nuisance and something to be avoided, that usually isn't a dealbreaker, though i admit it is useful in some situations.
For £300 I got an Atom-based netbook with an 80GB SSD, 4GB RAM, slightly smaller screen and 9 hour battery life. It can run Chrome, and a lot of other things. What's the ARM bringing to the Chromebook, if it can't give far better battery life?
£300 GBP are $482.
That's what ARM is bringing.
BTW where do you get a netbook with an 80 GB SSD?
They could go Android, sure, but Android phones are almost commodity phones, where the handset manufacturer isn't adding enough value to make them differentiators. That means as a customer, I could pick up an LG or HTC or Motorola or Samsung and get a pretty similar phone. And that means they all compete on price. That puts the Nokia phones up against the manufacturing might of China, which means that margins would start out razor thin and fade quickly to non-existent.
Well, that strategy worked for Samsung, so why shouldn't it work for Nokia, given that, at the time, Nokia had a better position than Samsung?
Your own mileage may vary.
