As I previously mentioned here, the whole Genuine Advantage Program is a piece of crap. If you produce a valid VLK key based on my previous post, there is no way for microsoft to realize you are using a legal or a illgal key. I just validated my key and downloaded Photo Story 3! It's really worthless. Just follow my Algorithm.
It seems MLATs have been used before to shut down Indymedia sites in the US; this cryptome mirror of Montreal IMC pages documents one such case. Here's a summary from a quoted email there:
Heres a quite interesting story on the power of mlats and what we will have to look forward to with the COE treaty :
A cop car was broken into in Quebec and a security doc relating to measures for the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit protests was stolen and posted in the net in Seattle. At the behest of the RCMP, a magistrate judge issued an order to grab the records from a Seattle web site called the 'independent media center' using the US/CAN mlat. They were then visited by the FBI/Secret Service. They then had a gag order on this for several days before it was released today.
Great precedent. I wonder if when my car gets broken into again, I can use the cybercrime treaty to find my stereo again...
Actually, antimatter does not make good bombs. Even more ordinary nuclear bombs can "fizzle" unless carefully designed: the reaction gets going but too slowly, so the bomb blows itself apart before the reaction can proceed very far.
With antimatter this problem is far worse, because while fission and fusion occur throughout the reaction volume, the matter-antimatter reaction occurs only on a contact surface.
It's exceedingly difficult to get a major explosion with antimatter.(Tiny ones are not hard, since the square-cube law gives you more surface area per volume as the scale shrinks.)
Also, with production technology we can reasonably foresee, antimatter is impossibly expensive for weapons applications.
Even the US military has finite budgets.
The cost of burning a city down with conventional weapons is large but not infinite. We won't get the price down below US$ 60.e6/mg using foreseeable Earth-based technologies and, at 43 kT/gm of antimatter, we're talking roughly US$ 1.4e9 per kiloton !!!!!!!!!
Even the Pentagon's budget isn't THAT large...
Not only does USPTO not receive any tax money, since 1992 much of the money collected in fees by USPTO has not been available to it. From fiscal 1992 through fiscal 2001, more than $675 million has been diverted. Because of the economic damage cause by invalid patents, this is no way to save money. USPTO's ability to conduct meaningful examinations is already compromised. Last year, USPTO Director Q. Todd Dickinson warned of an imminent "reduction in patent quality" resulting from yet another inadequate budget.
Inadequate USPTO budgets benefit only one group of people -- those who get invalid patents. Everyone else suffers. Fund USPTO so that it can afford to attract and retain highly skilled examiners, as well as maintain a world-class library of international patents, journals, catalogs, and other information. A patent office without full funding is the economic equivalent of a fully loaded B-52 bomber with no maps, no compass, and an untrained navigator.
2. Stop and reverse patentability creep
Would the economy be better off if Bruce Springsteen were allowed to patent rhyming "back" and "Cadillac" -- and sue any other songwriter who did so, even if the new song was nothing like "Pink Cadillac?"
Would the economy be better off if the Green Bay Packers were allowed to patent the best defense against a particular play, and sue any team that used that defense against them?
Would the economy be better off if a high-priced defense lawyer were able to patent the use of a legal argument, and sue any other defense lawyer who used it on behalf of his client?
Clearly, the answer to all three questions is no. We're all better off when we can hear new songs, watch good football games, and get a fair trial without getting several patent licenses a day. Unfortunately, several court decisions in the 1980s and 1990s have resulted in the patentabilty of mathematical algorithms and of business methods, which is for programmers just as ludicrous as the above three examples.
Software and business methods patents are examples of "patentabilty creep" in action. Federal judges, legislating from the bench, are expanding the scope of patentable content to not only overwhelm USPTO, but also to do grievous economic harm.
3. Fix USPTO's incentive system to reward quality, not quantity
The Department of Commerce should populate USPTO's advisory committee with members from outside the patent bar, with a view to helping USPTO work toward the economic health of the nation as a whole and not for any special interest group. Employee incentive programs within USPTO should be tied to patent quality, not quantity.
The Web site for the DVD Entertainment Group (their BOD is stocked with bigwigs from the large entertainment and electronics companies) states that "DVD [is] the fastest adopted consumer electronics product ever". There have been literally thousands of news articles written about the explosive growth of DVD sales; here are some quotes from an article on the CBS News Web site(from 10/2003):
Home video sales now account for nearly 60 percent of Hollywood's revenue. DVD sales are not only the fastest growing part of the movie business, they're changing the way Hollywood does business. He says DVD sales can save a film like "Dark Blue," which pulled in a modest $9 million in theaters. "It actually did more revenues in DVD than it did at the box office," says McGurk, because the DVD market is a man's world. Blockbuster films now often sell more than 10 million DVDs in the U.S. alone. And that's at $20 a pop. And with DVD players still in only half of American homes, Hollywood believes those soaring sales will just get hotter still.
Finding Nemo grossed $320 million from DVD sales in 2003. "Consumers spend more money on the DVD version of almost every movie than they do on that same movie in theaters, including blockbusters such as The Lord of the Rings, Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean" (USA Today). CNN/Money reports that the movie studios "pocket roughly 80 cents of every dollar on each DVD sold, a take well above the 50 cents for each dollar at the box office" and The Hollywood Reporter says that "studios are earning about 60% more upon initial release from video sales of theatrical feature films than they did during the VHS-only era". So, not only are video sales up overall, DVDs are more profitable for the media companies than VHS or the box office.
We project filmed entertainment spending in the United States, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Asia/Pacific, Latin America, and Canada will rise at a 7.5 percent compound annual rate, reaching $108 billion in 2008 from $75.3 billion in 2003. EMEA will be the fastest-growing region, rising by 10.3 percent compounded annually to $36.9 billion in 2008 compared with $22.6 billion in 2003. The U.S. market will expand at a 6.3 percent rate, from $34.3 billion in 2003 to $46.6 billion in 2008. Spending in Asia/Pacific will increase from $13.3 billion to $17.3 billion in the five-year period, growing at a 5.4 percent compound annual rate. Filmed entertainment in Latin America will total $1.6 billion in 2008, up from $1.3 billion in 2003, representing a 4.6 percent gain compounded annually. Spending in Canada will rise from $3.9 billion in 2003 to $5.6 billion in 2008, 7.7 percent compounded annually.
This is anything BUT piracy eating into sales. Mr. Lucas, would you like to change your answer?
FYI, I successfully extracted the algorithm MS uses (same VLK Public Key Infrastructure), and broke the private key uses to generate product keys.
Decode
The following computations are based on this product key:
JCF8T-2MG8G-Q6BBK-MQKGT-X3GBB
The character "-" does not contain any information, so, the MS product key is composed of 25-digit-character. Microsoft only uses "BCDFGHJKMPQRTVWXY2346789" to encode product key, in order to avoid ambiguous characters (e.g. "I" and "1", "0" and "O"). The quantity of information that a product key contain is at most . To convert a 25-digit key to binary data, we need to
convert "JCF8T2MG8GQ6BBKMQKGTX3GBB" to "6 1 3 22......", where 'B'=0, 'C'=1, 'D'=2... we call the array "6 1 3 22..." base24[]
compute decoded = , the result is: 00 C5 31 77 E8 4D BE 73 2C 55 47 35 BD 8D 01 00 (little-endian)
The decoded result can be divided into 12bit + 31bit + 62bit + 9bit, and we call theses 4 parts 12bit: OS Family, 31bit: Hash, 62bit: Signature, and 9bit: Prefix.
Verify
If you want to understand what I am talking about in this section, please refer to some Elliptic Curve Cryptography materials.
Before verifying a product key, we need to compute the 4 parts mentioned above: OS Family, Hash, Signature, and Prefix.
Microsoft Product-key Identification program uses a public key stored in PIDGEN.DLL's BINK resource, which is an Elliptic Curve Cryptography public key, which is composed of:
p, a, b construct an elliptic curve
G(x,y) represents a point on the curve, and this point is so called "generator"
K(x,y) represents a point on the curve, and this point is the product of integer k and the generator G.
Without knowing the private key k, we cannot produce a valid key, but we can validate a key using public key:{p, a, b, G, K}
compute H=SHA-1(5D OS Family,Hash, prefix, 00 00) the total length is 11 byte. H is 160-bit long, and we only need the first 2 words. Right lift H's second word by 2 bits. E.g. if SHA-1() returns FE DC BA 98 76 54 32 10, H= FE DC BA 98 1D 95 0C 04.
compute R(rx,ry)= Signature * (Signature*G + H*K) (mod p)
compute SHA-1(79 OS Family, rx, ry) the total input length = 1+2+64*2=131 bytes. And compare Hash and result, and if identical, the key is valid.
Producing A Valid Key!
We assume the private key k is known (sure, Microsoft won't public this value, so we have to break it by ourselves).
The equation in the product key validation system is as below:
Hash=SHA(Signature*(Signature*G+SHA(Hash)*K) (mod p))
What we need is to calculate a Signature which satisfies the above equation.
Randomly choose an integer r, and compute R(rx,ry)=r * G
Compute Hash= SHA-1(79 OS Family, rx, ry) the total input length = 1+2+64*2=131 bytes, and we get the first 62bit result.
compute H=SHA-1(5D OS Family,Hash, prefix, 00 00) the total length is 11 byte, and we need first 2 words, and right lift H's second word by 2 bits.
And now, we get an equation as below:
Signature*(Signature*G+H*K) = r * G (mod p)
By replacing K with k * G, we get the next equation:
Signature*(Signature*G+H*k*G) = r * G (mod p)
, where n is the order of point G on the curve
Note: not every number has a square root, so maybe we need to go back to step 1 for several times.
Get Private-key From Public Key
I've mentioned that the private key k is not included in the BINK resource, so we need to break it out by ourselves.
In the public key:
K(x,y) = k * G, we only know the generator G, and the product K, but it is hard to get k.
The effective method of getting k from K(x,y) = k * G is Pollard's Rho (or its variation) method, whose complexity is merely , where n is the order of G. (n is not included in public key resource, so, we need to get n by Schoof's algorithm)
Because a user cannot suffer a too long product key, the Signature must be short enough to be convenient. And Microsoft chooses 62 bit as the length of signature, hence, n is merely 62-bit long. Therefore, the complexity
Consider the simplest case, a lock with only one dial having, say, 6
numbers. How many combinations are there for such a lock? Clearly, 6. Now
consider a lock with two dials, each dial having 6 numbers. For each choice
of number on the first dial, we can have any of 6 different choices for the
second number. Thus, this lock would have 6 * 6 = 36 lock combinations.
Now consider a lock with 3 dials, each dial having 6 numbers. We just
figured out that there are 36 ways to set the first two numbers; for each of
these. So if you have understood this and see the pattern, you can
immediately write down how many combinations there are for any such lock.
Now the "odds" question. If there are N possible combinations, and you try
one of them, the probability that it is the right one is 1/N, and the
probability that it is a wrong one is (N - 1)/N.
Now suppose the 1st try is
a failure but the 2nd is a success; the odds of this are
[(N - 1)/N] * [1/(N - 1)] = 1/N again.
[The 1/(N - 1) factor comes from the fact that on the 2nd try there are
N - 1 combinations to try, since you have tried one that does not work and,
presumably, will not try it again.] The odds that you will succeed in one
or two tries is the sum of the individual probabilities, because they are
mutually exclusive events (that is, the first success cannot occur on BOTH
the first and second tries). Generalizing to the case of a first success on
the Kth try is straightforward.
This basically means that visitors of w3schools.com, who are generally techies, are seeing the benefits of the open source browser, while general users are slower on the uptake. But that's OK, I'm sure once the techies are fully convinced, it will spill over into the minds of the general public, who tend to look to us as their techincal gurus.
Fortunately, more distros are coming with nice fonts out of the box these days. RedHat 8+, Debian, and Mandrake all use fontconfig, xft, and the latest font doodads to anti-alias fonts and provide truetype support in KDE 3+ and Gnome 2+. Grab the xft enabled Moz builds and things should lok a LOT better.
Installing Fonts via KDE (at least in SuSE) is easy. In the KDE Control Center, System Administration, Font Installer.
Found this in 10 seconds. Just opened up the SuSE Linux User Guide book that comes in the boxed version, and looked in the Index for Fonts, section installing, and it exaplains where it is.
I just added the fonts I want (in Administrator mode), and activated them. They were then working in all my programs. I now have 1000+ different fonts installed on my system (not that I need that many)
Debian has also a ton of decent fonts (like the MS Core Fonts and the Vera fonts) available as packages.
The progress of V2 itself wasn't so important to United States, not until Einstein envisioned
a scientific military weapon that carried the potential to end the war.
In the early 1940's, he wrote a letter to president Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to start a project to build an atomic bomb because the German government had already started a little atomic bomb project of their own. Einstein believed that a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of the United States would not only end the war, but ensure safety to the rest of the world after the war as well. Roosevelt, being a believer in Einstein, became thrilled at this letter and took the plea into deep consideration. Soon, the project was underway.
This reminds me of a Private Email Netowrk I had in my mind when I was in university. Imagine a Private Email Network that comprises a number of courier servers and Agent clients interconnected by the Internet. In addition to the courier operated by univeristy itself, other couriers are operated by ISPs, telecommunications carriers, and private enterprises. All couriers interwork to form a coherent network serving all users. Each user is registered with and served by a single courier.
"We vigorously deny these claims and find them to be completely baseless and without merit," said Marc Morgenstern, who heads Loudeye's Overpeer division, in a statement.
It sounds too much like Iraqi Information Minister (Al-Sahaf) "We will win this war and we are winning!"
WinFS, Avalon and Indigo are not gone from Longhorn, they are just down-leveled so WinXP users can also download and install them. This means WinFS & Co. will be released off-cycle as a development platform.
This is a very good news. Now we don't need to worry about installing Longhorn in order to play with WinFS and Indigo. When the time comes, just download it from MS site and install it on your WinXP SP2. This is a very good news we are getting from Bill Gates. The same move they did before releasing WinXP SP2, by offering RC1 and letting developers and vendors test their applications. This means They care.
Now Bill Gates it saying OK If you can't understand what I'm talking about, I release it as a down-leveled package (just like.NET Framework stuff) and you can play with it on your WinXP.
It's exactly like a Monarch who wanted to 'reform' his country but the speed of his 'reformation' was so high that eventually his people would not understand it and they took up a revolt against their king. The King was expelled from the land and died in exile. 30 years later, the people will feel the same 'reforms' as their King did 30 years bfore.... It's too late ofcourse and The King is dead....
Slashdot Mirror
And where is the add-ons folder? And there lies your problem
No! from GAIN network.
Floodgap Gopherspace
and
gopher.quux.org
1- You can't receive calls from land lines, traditional VOIP services or cell phones
2- No location awareness and No 911
3- You can't use your land lines or cordless phones
4- WiFi just isn't pervasive enough...Yet
5- You can't take your address book with you
In the meantime, I keep my cell phone.
As I previously mentioned here, the whole Genuine Advantage Program is a piece of crap. If you produce a valid VLK key based on my previous post, there is no way for microsoft to realize you are using a legal or a illgal key. I just validated my key and downloaded Photo Story 3! It's really worthless. Just follow my Algorithm.
Heres a quite interesting story on the power of mlats and what we will have to look forward to with the COE treaty :
A cop car was broken into in Quebec and a security doc relating to measures for the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit protests was stolen and posted in the net in Seattle. At the behest of the RCMP, a magistrate judge issued an order to grab the records from a Seattle web site called the 'independent media center' using the US/CAN mlat. They were then visited by the FBI/Secret Service. They then had a gag order on this for several days before it was released today.
Great precedent. I wonder if when my car gets broken into again, I can use the cybercrime treaty to find my stereo again...
second!
With antimatter this problem is far worse, because while fission and fusion occur throughout the reaction volume, the matter-antimatter reaction occurs only on a contact surface.
It's exceedingly difficult to get a major explosion with antimatter.(Tiny ones are not hard, since the square-cube law gives you more surface area per volume as the scale shrinks.)
Also, with production technology we can reasonably foresee, antimatter is impossibly expensive for weapons applications.
Even the US military has finite budgets. The cost of burning a city down with conventional weapons is large but not infinite. We won't get the price down below US$ 60.e6/mg using foreseeable Earth-based technologies and, at 43 kT/gm of antimatter, we're talking roughly US$ 1.4e9 per kiloton !!!!!!!!! Even the Pentagon's budget isn't THAT large...
Not only does USPTO not receive any tax money, since 1992 much of the money collected in fees by USPTO has not been available to it. From fiscal 1992 through fiscal 2001, more than $675 million has been diverted. Because of the economic damage cause by invalid patents, this is no way to save money. USPTO's ability to conduct meaningful examinations is already compromised. Last year, USPTO Director Q. Todd Dickinson warned of an imminent "reduction in patent quality" resulting from yet another inadequate budget.
Inadequate USPTO budgets benefit only one group of people -- those who get invalid patents. Everyone else suffers. Fund USPTO so that it can afford to attract and retain highly skilled examiners, as well as maintain a world-class library of international patents, journals, catalogs, and other information. A patent office without full funding is the economic equivalent of a fully loaded B-52 bomber with no maps, no compass, and an untrained navigator.
2. Stop and reverse patentability creep
Would the economy be better off if Bruce Springsteen were allowed to patent rhyming "back" and "Cadillac" -- and sue any other songwriter who did so, even if the new song was nothing like "Pink Cadillac?" Would the economy be better off if the Green Bay Packers were allowed to patent the best defense against a particular play, and sue any team that used that defense against them?
Would the economy be better off if a high-priced defense lawyer were able to patent the use of a legal argument, and sue any other defense lawyer who used it on behalf of his client?
Clearly, the answer to all three questions is no. We're all better off when we can hear new songs, watch good football games, and get a fair trial without getting several patent licenses a day. Unfortunately, several court decisions in the 1980s and 1990s have resulted in the patentabilty of mathematical algorithms and of business methods, which is for programmers just as ludicrous as the above three examples.
Software and business methods patents are examples of "patentabilty creep" in action. Federal judges, legislating from the bench, are expanding the scope of patentable content to not only overwhelm USPTO, but also to do grievous economic harm.
3. Fix USPTO's incentive system to reward quality, not quantity
The Department of Commerce should populate USPTO's advisory committee with members from outside the patent bar, with a view to helping USPTO work toward the economic health of the nation as a whole and not for any special interest group. Employee incentive programs within USPTO should be tied to patent quality, not quantity.
Home video sales now account for nearly 60 percent of Hollywood's revenue. DVD sales are not only the fastest growing part of the movie business, they're changing the way Hollywood does business.
He says DVD sales can save a film like "Dark Blue," which pulled in a modest $9 million in theaters. "It actually did more revenues in DVD than it did at the box office," says McGurk, because the DVD market is a man's world.
Blockbuster films now often sell more than 10 million DVDs in the U.S. alone. And that's at $20 a pop. And with DVD players still in only half of American homes, Hollywood believes those soaring sales will just get hotter still.
Finding Nemo grossed $320 million from DVD sales in 2003. "Consumers spend more money on the DVD version of almost every movie than they do on that same movie in theaters, including blockbusters such as The Lord of the Rings, Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean" (USA Today). CNN/Money reports that the movie studios "pocket roughly 80 cents of every dollar on each DVD sold, a take well above the 50 cents for each dollar at the box office" and The Hollywood Reporter says that "studios are earning about 60% more upon initial release from video sales of theatrical feature films than they did during the VHS-only era". So, not only are video sales up overall, DVDs are more profitable for the media companies than VHS or the box office.
And the future looks rosy as well. PriceWaterhouseCoopers has a sample chapter of their Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2004-2008 report online which says:
We project filmed entertainment spending in the United States, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Asia/Pacific, Latin America, and Canada will rise at a 7.5 percent compound annual rate, reaching $108 billion in 2008 from $75.3 billion in 2003. EMEA will be the fastest-growing region, rising by 10.3 percent compounded annually to $36.9 billion in 2008 compared with $22.6 billion in 2003. The U.S. market will expand at a 6.3 percent rate, from $34.3 billion in 2003 to $46.6 billion in 2008. Spending in Asia/Pacific will increase from $13.3 billion to $17.3 billion in the five-year period, growing at a 5.4 percent compound annual rate. Filmed entertainment in Latin America will total $1.6 billion in 2008, up from $1.3 billion in 2003, representing a 4.6 percent gain compounded annually. Spending in Canada will rise from $3.9 billion in 2003 to $5.6 billion in 2008, 7.7 percent compounded annually.
This is anything BUT piracy eating into sales. Mr. Lucas, would you like to change your answer?
Decode ......", where 'B'=0, 'C'=1, 'D'=2 ... we call the array "6 1 3 22..." base24[]
compute decoded = , the result is: 00 C5 31 77 E8 4D BE 73 2C 55 47 35 BD 8D 01 00 (little-endian)
The decoded result can be divided into 12bit + 31bit + 62bit + 9bit, and we call theses 4 parts 12bit: OS Family, 31bit: Hash, 62bit: Signature, and 9bit: Prefix.
The following computations are based on this product key: JCF8T-2MG8G-Q6BBK-MQKGT-X3GBB The character "-" does not contain any information, so, the MS product key is composed of 25-digit-character. Microsoft only uses "BCDFGHJKMPQRTVWXY2346789" to encode product key, in order to avoid ambiguous characters (e.g. "I" and "1", "0" and "O"). The quantity of information that a product key contain is at most . To convert a 25-digit key to binary data, we need to convert "JCF8T2MG8GQ6BBKMQKGTX3GBB" to "6 1 3 22
Verify
If you want to understand what I am talking about in this section, please refer to some Elliptic Curve Cryptography materials. Before verifying a product key, we need to compute the 4 parts mentioned above: OS Family, Hash, Signature, and Prefix.
Microsoft Product-key Identification program uses a public key stored in PIDGEN.DLL's BINK resource, which is an Elliptic Curve Cryptography public key, which is composed of: p, a, b construct an elliptic curve G(x,y) represents a point on the curve, and this point is so called "generator" K(x,y) represents a point on the curve, and this point is the product of integer k and the generator G.
Without knowing the private key k, we cannot produce a valid key, but we can validate a key using public key:{p, a, b, G, K}
compute H=SHA-1(5D OS Family,Hash, prefix, 00 00) the total length is 11 byte. H is 160-bit long, and we only need the first 2 words. Right lift H's second word by 2 bits. E.g. if SHA-1() returns FE DC BA 98 76 54 32 10, H= FE DC BA 98 1D 95 0C 04. compute R(rx,ry)= Signature * (Signature*G + H*K) (mod p) compute SHA-1(79 OS Family, rx, ry) the total input length = 1+2+64*2=131 bytes. And compare Hash and result, and if identical, the key is valid.
Producing A Valid Key!
We assume the private key k is known (sure, Microsoft won't public this value, so we have to break it by ourselves). The equation in the product key validation system is as below:
Hash=SHA(Signature*(Signature*G+SHA(Hash)*K) (mod p))
What we need is to calculate a Signature which satisfies the above equation. Randomly choose an integer r, and compute R(rx,ry)=r * G Compute Hash= SHA-1(79 OS Family, rx, ry) the total input length = 1+2+64*2=131 bytes, and we get the first 62bit result. compute H=SHA-1(5D OS Family,Hash, prefix, 00 00) the total length is 11 byte, and we need first 2 words, and right lift H's second word by 2 bits. And now, we get an equation as below:
Signature*(Signature*G+H*K) = r * G (mod p)
By replacing K with k * G, we get the next equation:
Signature*(Signature*G+H*k*G) = r * G (mod p) , where n is the order of point G on the curve
Note: not every number has a square root, so maybe we need to go back to step 1 for several times.
Get Private-key From Public Key
I've mentioned that the private key k is not included in the BINK resource, so we need to break it out by ourselves. In the public key:
K(x,y) = k * G, we only know the generator G, and the product K, but it is hard to get k. The effective method of getting k from K(x,y) = k * G is Pollard's Rho (or its variation) method, whose complexity is merely , where n is the order of G. (n is not included in public key resource, so, we need to get n by Schoof's algorithm) Because a user cannot suffer a too long product key, the Signature must be short enough to be convenient. And Microsoft chooses 62 bit as the length of signature, hence, n is merely 62-bit long. Therefore, the complexity
...you can even /. imdb site
This is an article about the quantum encrypted bank transaction in Vienna, Austria, which was mentioned in the post.
Now the "odds" question. If there are N possible combinations, and you try one of them, the probability that it is the right one is 1/N, and the probability that it is a wrong one is (N - 1)/N.
Now suppose the 1st try is a failure but the 2nd is a success; the odds of this are [(N - 1)/N] * [1/(N - 1)] = 1/N again. [The 1/(N - 1) factor comes from the fact that on the 2nd try there are N - 1 combinations to try, since you have tried one that does not work and, presumably, will not try it again.] The odds that you will succeed in one or two tries is the sum of the individual probabilities, because they are mutually exclusive events (that is, the first success cannot occur on BOTH the first and second tries). Generalizing to the case of a first success on the Kth try is straightforward.
This basically means that visitors of w3schools.com, who are generally techies, are seeing the benefits of the open source browser, while general users are slower on the uptake. But that's OK, I'm sure once the techies are fully convinced, it will spill over into the minds of the general public, who tend to look to us as their techincal gurus.
This happens to you when you don't pay the appropriate licensing fees!
Google's architecture might play well with this design with lots of processors in a dense package with relatively good power efficiency per processor.
Installing Fonts via KDE (at least in SuSE) is easy. In the KDE Control Center, System Administration, Font Installer.
Found this in 10 seconds. Just opened up the SuSE Linux User Guide book that comes in the boxed version, and looked in the Index for Fonts, section installing, and it exaplains where it is.
I just added the fonts I want (in Administrator mode), and activated them. They were then working in all my programs. I now have 1000+ different fonts installed on my system (not that I need that many)
Debian has also a ton of decent fonts (like the MS Core Fonts and the Vera fonts) available as packages.
Some Other Xbox 2 Concepts here
In the early 1940's, he wrote a letter to president Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to start a project to build an atomic bomb because the German government had already started a little atomic bomb project of their own. Einstein believed that a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of the United States would not only end the war, but ensure safety to the rest of the world after the war as well. Roosevelt, being a believer in Einstein, became thrilled at this letter and took the plea into deep consideration. Soon, the project was underway.
I thought they legalized soft drugs!!!
This reminds me of a Private Email Netowrk I had in my mind when I was in university. Imagine a Private Email Network that comprises a number of courier servers and Agent clients interconnected by the Internet. In addition to the courier operated by univeristy itself, other couriers are operated by ISPs, telecommunications carriers, and private enterprises. All couriers interwork to form a coherent network serving all users. Each user is registered with and served by a single courier.
It sounds too much like Iraqi Information Minister (Al-Sahaf) "We will win this war and we are winning!"
Talking about how great Python can be, I imagined this kind of sites run on a more stable servers.
This is a very good news. Now we don't need to worry about installing Longhorn in order to play with WinFS and Indigo. When the time comes, just download it from MS site and install it on your WinXP SP2. This is a very good news we are getting from Bill Gates. The same move they did before releasing WinXP SP2, by offering RC1 and letting developers and vendors test their applications. This means They care.
Now Bill Gates it saying OK If you can't understand what I'm talking about, I release it as a down-leveled package (just like .NET Framework stuff) and you can play with it on your WinXP.
It's exactly like a Monarch who wanted to 'reform' his country but the speed of his 'reformation' was so high that eventually his people would not understand it and they took up a revolt against their king. The King was expelled from the land and died in exile. 30 years later, the people will feel the same 'reforms' as their King did 30 years bfore .... It's too late ofcourse and The King is dead....