Recently I’ve been having problems with Ubuntu and sleeping my laptop and it turns out it has the strangest cause. I even rolled back to a 9.10 version since that used to work. And it did for a while. Then it stopped. All I got was the sleep light flashing constantly.
It looks like the issue was actually having an SD card in the reader on my laptop. As soon as I took it out I could sleep as usual.
Thanks to this thread for the suggestion – http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1470067
It seems to me that there is a scope for a tool that can create a set of rainbow tables from a known starting point. A tool that would take what the user believes is their password and generates all the possibilities, differing cases, number substitution etc. as the existing algorithms attempt to.
That way it ought to make recovering a password that someone has lost the plot with easier.
Of course the tool has limited utility since it’s not often that you are in a scenario where a reset is not possible and someone a) knows roughly what it should be and b) can’t login now and c) has been using the account for long enough that it’s important to recover it.
The Marketing people at Microsoft have really been busy lately. Lots of American TV show’s I’ve been watching have had plenty of Microsoft plugs. Things like Windows glowing logos on the backs of their monitors (both laptop and desktop). Then there was the episode of NCSI Los Angeles where the character does the shaky thing to minimize all the other windows with his Windows 7.
Now there are major sites suggesting you use IE8 because it works so well with them. There’s the Guardian – http://www.guardian.co.uk/internet-explorer-8/optimised-for-the-guardian and Amazon.co.uk who’ve developed a toolbar – http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html?docId=1000425993.
While it’s neat to see the Apple bias being offset in the movies this is getting a little weird. They seem to be making a lot more impact these days. Ever since their rather cool comeback to the Mac/PC ads with the I’m a PC campaign they’ve been a lot more pervasive in their marketing. Heck there’s even one of those “I’m a PC” “stickers on my laptop.
The Dumping Ground 