incandenza

But the "reduction" adds no benefit. You might as well just check the whole hash and eliminate the false positives, which have no purpose. (A false positive has no correlation with being "closer" to the real password.)

All you're doing is shifting the time at which you check the password, from when the form is submitted, to when each key is pressed.

You seem to be wanting to assume that a correlation between some subset of the input bits leads to a correlation between some subset of the hash bits. But that's exactly what a cryptographic hash function is designed to prevent.

EDIT: The brute-forcing issue assumes that you treat form submissions and keypresses differently. In other words, why would you ignore a billion mismatches on keypresses and then raise an alarm on a few failed form submissions? You're just dividing the detection into two different phases, for no real purpose.

But these "classes" have no meaning. The only thing that means anything is whether the entire hash matches or not. Comparing a subset of bits just gives you random results, (aside from the case where the entire original hash matches).

If something like this worked, it would provide a method of breaking the hash in a piecemeal fashion, which would mean the hash algorithm never worked properly in the first place.

EDIT: reply to below: The only thing it can tell you is that two passwords don't match. It tells you nothing about whether they're similar. (And also doesn't tell you they do match, for which you need the whole hash.)

This doesn't make any sense. There is no "reduction" of a cryptographic hash that shows you anything other than "100% match" or "not 100% match". Essentially this is just displaying a random symbol along the side until the password matches completely.

EDIT: I'm surprised more people aren't commenting on this. It should be clear that if there were any way to tell if a match were "close", that would totally defeat the purpose of a cryptographic hash.

Essentially all this does it check the password (well, with extra meaningless false positives) without you having to press return.

That is my preferred explanation as well. A caveman would not notice a WiFi signal even if it was blasting right through the cave; he would probably be looking for smoke signals or something.

Also, a huge intelligence gap makes communication uninteresting. e.g. we know a little bit about how ants communicate via pheromones, but we're not trying to send "messages" to them; what would it possibly be useful to say?

I bought a generic one, pretty much the first hit on Amazon, and it works fine on the Air. It never occurred to me that this was a difficult requirement to meet anymore.

They come with those dual-headed connectors, but I've never encountered any situation where you had to use both.

Also, the Air's USB ports put out the higher current that the iPad needs to charge faster, hence are even more likely to be able to handle this.

I do think Apple will stick to this, but on the other hand an engineer's comment on a bug report is not much to go on--they may not know Apple's real plans, and Apple could go back on its stated plans anyway.

I discovered this yesterday and loved it, but it didn't occur to me until today to look up the first host I ever used to get online, in the late 80s (Usenet and email access only at that time). Not only is it there, it actually has me and my two best friends of the time listed in the 'finger' output! I'm amazed.

Every SSD I see on Newegg mentions that it has a 3 year manufacturer's warranty.

OK, but then you sort of have to be careful what you put in the first line, and then it's really no different.

Anyway, I would think that most of the time suck in email comes from replying to others' messages (which already have subjects), not creating messages from scratch when you're not even in the mail program. (If you do that a lot, maybe you should stop increasing everyone else's email burden...)

Sparrow already does virtually all of this. The only real differences are the Subject thing (not sure how this saves you time, other than pressing TAB once), and displaying images from the address book.

Now he can start counting "days since I stopped telling people about how I quit Facebook".

It's interesting that this also seems to have factored into Richard Stallman's philosophy. Since he considered working on closed software unethical, and noted that he could always survive as a waiter, he felt he couldn't justify working on closed software based on the excuse that it was necessary for financial reasons.

True; I would say that 'pure craftsman' type of person would be totally comfortable with the 'loser' position in this analysis. They would not be looking askance at the 'sociopath' types; whereas another type of person might be saying, "Hmm, these executives are making 100x as much as me, and yet my work is quite critical to this business. Is that really fair?" etc.

Again, I want to emphasize that I realize these terms are shockingly harsh--and of course, if we're staying with this analysis, one or another of them applies to every single person in a (medium to) large organization. I'm trying to use them in a neutral, not inherently insulting way, even if that's almost impossible to do :) I'm just trying to extend the analysis of the article a little, and so I kind of have to use its terms (and of course, it wouldn't have drawn as much attention if it were phrased in a more neutral way, etc.)

It could be that the original article's analysis is just flawed, which I would consider a valid position, etc.--but I'm just going along with its terms because they do seem to fit shockingly well (to the point that the whole thing seems like a bit of a punch in the gut when I re-analyze some past experiences).

This is a pretty amazing analysis.

I think a lot of really talented engineers in Silicon Valley fit into a kind of hybrid category I might call 'loser with sociopathic tendencies' (gotta love these terms--hey, I didn't invent them, I'm just following the article). Although they deliberately choose to remain at the 'loser' level in terms of the org chart, they have a 'sociopathic' level of awareness of how the business operates (maybe from being an early employee or founder of previous startups). They're never truly comfortable at the 'loser' level, but maybe not willing or capable of making a move to the 'sociopath' level, and consciously avoid the 'clueless' level (which I think they eventually enter anyway, even if they avoid becoming managers, by entering some kind of 'emeritus' engineering position).

The article suggests that Toby might be in this category, which I didn't think fit at first, but maybe it does--this type of person seemed to me to generally be laconic, cultivated a high degree of irony about the nature of the organization and their role within it, and usually carried an 'escape plan' as a prominent part of their mental outlook (based on either past actual or future fantasized stock option earnings) --all quite similar to the Toby character.

I also think there's a type of person who views anyone at the 'sociopath' level as being inherently morally corrupt, and therefore preemptively excludes him/herself from ever reaching that level, even if they'd otherwise be capable of it. I don't think this is a correct view; the 'sociopath' type may just be the type of person who is more willing to face the full reality of how the business is run and make tough decisions that involve firing and so on. For example, even in the show I don't think the David Wallace character is portrayed as being particularly corrupt. Ryan, on the other hand, is purely selfish and greedy for power--but this actually causes him to fail at the higher levels (which I think often happens in real life as well).

(By the way, in case it's not obvious, I'm trying to use these terms in the sense they're defined in the article--I don't mean them to be truly pejorative to anyone operating at any of these levels.)