(I may be repeating someone else, but I do not have the time to read through all the comments...)
There is really not enough historical draw data to analyze whether there are any statistical anomalies in this particular lottery or not. So while analyzing the draw data might be fun, it is completely useless and has no practical bearing.
As I understand, the lottery in question has two draws per week. That's about 104 draws per year. And the author states that the lottery has been running since 1995, that is for about 12 years. About 12 years * about 104 draws/year = about 1248 draws. And as the author himself states, the odds of winning the jackpot is 1 in 175,711,536 which means that there are 175,711,536 different draw outcomes. And only about 1248 of those have been drawn already. That is, of the total "outcome space" only a miniature fraction of 1248 / 175,711,536 = 7,1026e-6 has already occurred. Judging from this fraction only, we cannot say whether the numbers are biased or not, we need more data. And if the data might seem biased now, I am quite sure that the numbers will even out given enough time... for all the draw outcomes to have a chance of occurring at least once, we will need to wait for roughly 140,000 years.
Doing the swap of the memory module was unnecessary. The Windows 98 installer, SETUP.EXE accepts a command line option that disables the test for sufficient physical memory.
Sure, the support for the development process is much more evolved when developing in Java.
But unfortunately the Java APIs available on the phones (MIDP + CLDC + a bunch of additional specialized APIs from different JSRs) don't accommodate for very advanced applications. The J2ME VM is a sandbox and the MIDlet application is much like an Applet, with restricted access to the underlying hardware and other functionality.
Here a company offers a product that has restricted use, it only is compatible with certain other products and technologies. Consumers that buy these products of restricted use know the limitations, and still want to buy these products. Why should the consumer ombudsman interfere with this?
Yes, it would be better for the consumers in general if the products were not restricted. But it should not be illegal or forbidden to sell these restricted products. If somebody wants to sell such products and there are people who want to buy them, let them do it.
A central file in the nVidia display dirver for Windows is named nv4_disp.dll.
Googling for nv4_disp and noting the large amount of search results does not prove the existence of a single, unfixed widespread nVidia "nv4_disp bug".
Practically all crashes in the nVidia Windows driver happen in nv4_disp.dll, no matter what bug caused the crash.
Yes, the image resolution is low but you need to take into account that another spec mentioned is 1MB of Java heap memory. The captured images are stored in Java Image obejcts uncompressed. So the memory requirement for a QVGA (320x240) four-bytes-per-pixel RGBA image is 307,200 bytes, which will fit well within the 1MB of heap memory.
The phone camera will probably be able to capture images with a higher resolution (up to megapixels), but because of this Java heap memory limitation they probably need to limit themselves to QVGA resolution. And besides, if the image processing / recognition algorithms work sufficiently well with images of QVGA resolution, there is no need to use higher resolutions.
Now that Windows Update and certain Windows downloads require you to validate your copy of Windows before accessing the services (the Windows Genuine program), people have of course started having troubles with invalid product keys, etc.
To help people sort out their Windows license problems, Microsoft have put online the Windows Genuine Advantage Talkback bulletin board, where Microsoft offers advice for people with license troubles.
An interesting utility that I found mentioned there on the bulletin board is Microsoft Genuine Advantage Diagnostic Tool, that shows lots of information about the license / product key of the current Windows installation.
I don't see much use in this... Ususally (at least in GSM GPRS and UMTS 3G networks) the phones are behind one or two NATs. That is, all packet data users of an mobile operator are seen to the internet as coming from the host gprs.mobile.operator.com, or the like. You cannot directly connect from the internet to a specific mobile phhone's IP address, regardless of the existence of a mobile web server there.
NATting is partly done to protect the mobile users from excess traffic. Imagine someone pingflooding your mobile's IP address, and you paid for data packet traffic by the kilobyte!:)
I see this webserver porting more as an technology demo from Nokia's part: "Hey look how cool our phone operating system and programming platform is!", instead of being a real, useful application.
Judging from a traceroute, the servers seem now to be hosted in The Netherlands.
I'm a bit surprised, when the admins of TPB said in Swedish media that they will relocate abroad, I actually thought that they would move outside the EU.
Let's see how the Dutch officials will react to this; how long TPB will stay up before they try to take it down again.
I wouldn't call what they are offering as trusted computing. They are not
the manufacturers of the OS, so whatever they are offering is NOT trusted computing.
"Trustworthy" was here used only as a saying. As in "Please, trust us". Please read the ISC diary entry.
Since it's a typical binary patch you have to trust them that this
patch won't hose your system or make you pwned by these or other folks.
Look, when I want to upgrade
my box, I just do a apt-get update; followed by either apt-get dist-upgrade
or use synaptic. I know my sources (I select them myself), I know that the reality
checks exist (gpg keys, outside sources verifying the software, etc.). I know
I'm not getting hosed when I install software from my usual Debian repositories.
Sure, you use apt-update when your os vendor has relased a fix. But what do you do when no official fix is yet unavailable, as the situation is now for Windows users?
Would I have felt safer if the sourcecode was released? Perhaps.
But the source code is released, too. The installation package should have copied it into the "WindowsMetafileFix" folder under the "Program Files" folder.
The web site that exactly matches my company name...
Since there is no TLD mentioned, I assume that the.com TLD is implied.
I find it really sad that we are in a situation where the.com TLD gets all the attention. If you have a business and don't own the.com domain that matches your company name or a trademark you own, you're practically screwed. The.com TLD namespace has grown into a global business name registry, which effectively hinders companies that are not even on the same continent from having the same name.
Since the article poster seems to be in the US, how about registering a.us domain? Or.net,.biz, etc...?
There was discussion on this on the Full-Disclosure mailing list when posters suspected that the 100% CPU usage on their computers was because of some new unknown virus.
A repesentative of Trend Micro Germany made a post to the thread where he explained the situation, apologized for it and offered pointers to their support database so that people could get the malfunctioning virus signatures uninstalled.
But real geeks don't use the mouse when they browse the web.:) You can perform all normal browsing functions using the keyboard only. Use Ctrl+T for opening a new tab, Ctrl+L for focusing the Location bar to type a new web address, PgUp/PgDown for scrolling up and down, Alt+Left and Alt+Right for navigating back and forward, etc. Reading through and learning the Mozilla keyboard shortcuts was really an eye-opener for me.
Pausing for 3-20seconds in the middle of an action sequence while the game loads the next zone doesn't make any sense and just works to break up the game play.
Have you defragmented your hard drive after downloading the HL2 content from the Steam server(s)?
I'd imagine that the Steam download system is somehow load-balanced and that you have downloaded the content from several sources in parallel. This may have resulted in very fragmented game data files, causing the unconvenient disk load delays.
Slashdot Mirror
(I may be repeating someone else, but I do not have the time to read through all the comments...)
There is really not enough historical draw data to analyze whether there are any statistical anomalies in this particular lottery or not. So while analyzing the draw data might be fun, it is completely useless and has no practical bearing.
As I understand, the lottery in question has two draws per week. That's about 104 draws per year. And the author states that the lottery has been running since 1995, that is for about 12 years. About 12 years * about 104 draws/year = about 1248 draws. And as the author himself states, the odds of winning the jackpot is 1 in 175,711,536 which means that there are 175,711,536 different draw outcomes. And only about 1248 of those have been drawn already. That is, of the total "outcome space" only a miniature fraction of 1248 / 175,711,536 = 7,1026e-6 has already occurred. Judging from this fraction only, we cannot say whether the numbers are biased or not, we need more data. And if the data might seem biased now, I am quite sure that the numbers will even out given enough time... for all the draw outcomes to have a chance of occurring at least once, we will need to wait for roughly 140,000 years.
Doing the swap of the memory module was unnecessary. The Windows 98 installer, SETUP.EXE accepts a command line option that disables the test for sufficient physical memory.
See for example http://www.windowsgalore.com/windows.95/setup.swit ches.html for details.
Sure, the support for the development process is much more evolved when developing in Java. But unfortunately the Java APIs available on the phones (MIDP + CLDC + a bunch of additional specialized APIs from different JSRs) don't accommodate for very advanced applications. The J2ME VM is a sandbox and the MIDlet application is much like an Applet, with restricted access to the underlying hardware and other functionality.
Here a company offers a product that has restricted use, it only is compatible with certain other products and technologies. Consumers that buy these products of restricted use know the limitations, and still want to buy these products. Why should the consumer ombudsman interfere with this?
Yes, it would be better for the consumers in general if the products were not restricted. But it should not be illegal or forbidden to sell these restricted products. If somebody wants to sell such products and there are people who want to buy them, let them do it.
A central file in the nVidia display dirver for Windows is named nv4_disp.dll.
Googling for nv4_disp and noting the large amount of search results does not prove the existence of a single, unfixed widespread nVidia "nv4_disp bug".
Practically all crashes in the nVidia Windows driver happen in nv4_disp.dll, no matter what bug caused the crash.
Yes, the image resolution is low but you need to take into account that another spec mentioned is 1MB of Java heap memory. The captured images are stored in Java Image obejcts uncompressed. So the memory requirement for a QVGA (320x240) four-bytes-per-pixel RGBA image is 307,200 bytes, which will fit well within the 1MB of heap memory.
The phone camera will probably be able to capture images with a higher resolution (up to megapixels), but because of this Java heap memory limitation they probably need to limit themselves to QVGA resolution. And besides, if the image processing / recognition algorithms work sufficiently well with images of QVGA resolution, there is no need to use higher resolutions.
Now that Windows Update and certain Windows downloads require you to validate your copy of Windows before accessing the services (the Windows Genuine program), people have of course started having troubles with invalid product keys, etc.
To help people sort out their Windows license problems, Microsoft have put online the Windows Genuine Advantage Talkback bulletin board, where Microsoft offers advice for people with license troubles.
An interesting utility that I found mentioned there on the bulletin board is Microsoft Genuine Advantage Diagnostic Tool, that shows lots of information about the license / product key of the current Windows installation.
Oh, wow... should have read TFA... :) There was a mention of gateways, enabling connections to be made from the internet to the mobiles.
I don't see much use in this... Ususally (at least in GSM GPRS and UMTS 3G networks) the phones are behind one or two NATs. That is, all packet data users of an mobile operator are seen to the internet as coming from the host gprs.mobile.operator.com, or the like. You cannot directly connect from the internet to a specific mobile phhone's IP address, regardless of the existence of a mobile web server there.
NATting is partly done to protect the mobile users from excess traffic. Imagine someone pingflooding your mobile's IP address, and you paid for data packet traffic by the kilobyte! :)
I see this webserver porting more as an technology demo from Nokia's part: "Hey look how cool our phone operating system and programming platform is!", instead of being a real, useful application.
Judging from a traceroute, the servers seem now to be hosted in The Netherlands.
I'm a bit surprised, when the admins of TPB said in Swedish media that they will relocate abroad, I actually thought that they would move outside the EU.
Let's see how the Dutch officials will react to this; how long TPB will stay up before they try to take it down again.
...except that the public transport SMS tickets in Helsinki are normal textual messages, not specialized image barcodes, like in the article.
The source code is now online, too.
Argh, double negative.
...no official fix is yet available...
I wouldn't call what they are offering as trusted computing. They are not the manufacturers of the OS, so whatever they are offering is NOT trusted computing.
"Trustworthy" was here used only as a saying. As in "Please, trust us". Please read the ISC diary entry.
Since it's a typical binary patch you have to trust them that this patch won't hose your system or make you pwned by these or other folks.
The patch is distributed by Ilfak Guilfanov, who develops the IDA Pro Disassembler and Debugger. The WMF fix installation package includes source code for the DLL it installs.
Look, when I want to upgrade my box, I just do a apt-get update; followed by either apt-get dist-upgrade or use synaptic. I know my sources (I select them myself), I know that the reality checks exist (gpg keys, outside sources verifying the software, etc.). I know I'm not getting hosed when I install software from my usual Debian repositories.
Sure, you use apt-update when your os vendor has relased a fix. But what do you do when no official fix is yet unavailable, as the situation is now for Windows users?
Would I have felt safer if the sourcecode was released? Perhaps.
But the source code is released, too . The installation package should have copied it into the "WindowsMetafileFix" folder under the "Program Files" folder.
The web site that exactly matches my company name...
Since there is no TLD mentioned, I assume that the .com TLD is implied.
I find it really sad that we are in a situation where the .com TLD gets all the attention. If you have a business and don't own the .com domain that matches your company name or a trademark you own, you're practically screwed. The .com TLD namespace has grown into a global business name registry, which effectively hinders companies that are not even on the same continent from having the same name.
Since the article poster seems to be in the US, how about registering a .us domain? Or .net, .biz, etc...?
Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Premium nForce4 SLI Audio, GB-LAN, IEEE, USB, PCI-E, SATAII w/RAID, DDR-400, ATX
Wow, there's an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers integrated on the motherboard? No wonder it's such an expensive setup...
:D
http://bash.org/?23396
Nokia's press site has some high-resolution images.
Nokia announced a whole new line of phones, the Nokia Nseries (press release).
In this series, three models were introduced:
Parent's high-modded comment takes its insightful thoughts from Paul Graham's essay The Submarine, which was recently discussed here on Slashdot.
There was discussion on this on the Full-Disclosure mailing list when posters suspected that the 100% CPU usage on their computers was because of some new unknown virus.
A repesentative of Trend Micro Germany made a post to the thread where he explained the situation, apologized for it and offered pointers to their support database so that people could get the malfunctioning virus signatures uninstalled.
Older Slashdot stories
But real geeks don't use the mouse when they browse the web. :) You can perform all normal browsing functions using the keyboard only. Use Ctrl+T for opening a new tab, Ctrl+L for focusing the Location bar to type a new web address, PgUp/PgDown for scrolling up and down, Alt+Left and Alt+Right for navigating back and forward, etc. Reading through and learning the Mozilla keyboard shortcuts was really an eye-opener for me.
Have you defragmented your hard drive after downloading the HL2 content from the Steam server(s)?
I'd imagine that the Steam download system is somehow load-balanced and that you have downloaded the content from several sources in parallel. This may have resulted in very fragmented game data files, causing the unconvenient disk load delays.