Making Online Shopping Safer
To make online shopping safer, the RBI has made it mandatory, from 1st August onwards, for all online transactions to have an extra level of authentication. The ‘extra’ level, is a password that you will have to enter after entering your credit/debit card details while making online payments. You will require this ‘extra password’ for transacting on any website in India. This new technology is called VBV – Verified by Visa or MSC – MasterCard SecureCode.
How do I get this ‘extra password’?
All you have to do is log on to your bank’s website, register your card for Verified by Visa (or MasterCard SecureCode) and get your password.
What about American Express cards?
For Amex cards the ‘extra level of authentication’ will work slightly differently. On the payment step, you will be asked to enter you billing address, which will be passed on to the bank. This will be checked against your billing address the bank has on its records. If the addresses don’t match your payment will be rejected. This technology is called AVS – Address Verification System. Please check your credit card statement if you don’t remember your exact billing address.
What if my bank does not support Verified by Visa / MasterCard SecureCode?
The RBI notification concerns cards issued within India only. If your card is issued outside India, your online transactions will go through even without this extra authentication step (unless your Card Issuer requires SecureCode/VbV authenrtication). If your card is issued in India, we suggest you look for a new bank!
Each bank has its own process for card registration. So, hop on to your bank’s website and register now:
| HDFC Bank | ICICI Bank (Special Instructions) | Citibank | HSBC Bank |
| Standard Chartered | State Bank of India | Axis Bank | ABN Amro |
| Deutsche Bank | Karur Vysya Bank |
Review – Kambakkht Ishq
Was feeling bored back home to thought of going to a movie, and it happenned to be Kambakkht Ishq. I went over to the ticketing counter and asked for the last row corner seat – and WoW !!! I was sooooooooo lucky to get one. Amazed that I was, that I have come 5 minutes before the start of the movie, and I have got a good seat. As I entered, the PVR guy checking my ticket said, sit anywhere you like. Little did I know that I was being taken to a torcher room and to be given a third-degree treatment for getting into a hall with 3 more people on a Friday night. Even the PVR people must be unhappy to run an air-conditioning for three people all sitting at their will in the theatre. I had to literally look out for them as I could not see even a single person sitting in the first place.
Still I had no idea why was the hall sooo empty. I brought a ‘Jumbo-Combo’ which is a combination of a large Pop-corn and a Pepsi to munch some stuff as I did not want to get up in the middle of the movie.
And then, ‘the movie’ started.
Didn’t start of too badly with the stunts stuff going on, nice loud music, decent location and nice stunts none-the-less.
But barely 10 minutes into the movie, and I saw Kareena kapoor entering into a church (Akshay KUmar was there already), unnecessarily, unccalled, with no manners, started shouting first on Amrita Arora and then to her husband whom she had barely known. And then, she abused Akshay, whom she was not even concerned too… and called him a Dog. Reciprocating with least chivalry, Akshay kumar abused back with ‘bitch’, which is the worst abuse for a woman. But no, Kareena, as it turned out to be, was actually a bitch and Akshay Kumar a Dog in this third-class B-Grade Adult flick.
20 minutes into the movie, and I was already done with my ‘Jumbo-Combo’ and getting to my nails, speechless as to how a movie can start so disasterously.
The idea behind the film was nothing more than projecting cheap comedy with close-ups of skin-shots in minimal clothing, with no story line (unless you call this crap a story).
Supposed story-line:
In one of the most stupid plots ever witnessed in an Akshay Kumar film, we have the leading lady (Kareena), a doctor, performing her first surgery on her male lead (Akshay), who is injured while performing a stunt. While operating she happens to leave her watch inside his stomach. The watch keeps playing “Om Mangalam” every hour, so loudly that it could put the best of audio speakers to shame. The doctor, worried of being sued, tries every trick in the book to get the watch out and even sleeps with him (or atleast she thinks so). Now, Akshay falls in love, so what does he do? He slips her into a bikini, takes her underwater and proposes.. What does Kareena do? Injects him out of his consciousness and performs a surgery to take the watch out. What the HELL !!!
I did not understand:
Why and how was Akshay Kumar accidently operated the second time. When did he agree and who lets the doctors operate without the consent and the necessity of te cure.
- The dialogues – “‘Tumne aisa kyu kiya mere saath’. sick bastard like you…” Damn it woman. Its your room, you called Akshay, and you call him a Bastard… hahahaha… Akshay should be calling her a bitch there.Dog-bitch. what dialogues!!!
- What was Aftab doing in the movie. A 12 man in the queue of stuntmans… hahahahaha. He just wore a dress and not do a stunt. One shot in which Akshay Kumar got hurt, Aftab was just standing… Damn it.
- Did you see… The world’s worst business class any airline carries. Arrrreee, thy had kept 12 sofa-sets… hahahahaha… and those too were not cleaned properly. The seat on which Akshay Kumar was sitting (the seat that he changed), had a couple of threads coming out. hahahahahaha
- And did you happen to see the plane when it took off. Oh man, the bottom of the plan was as dirty as the toiled seat that comes in the Domex advertisement.Such a high budget movie, capturing the world’s dirtiest plane capable of flying….. all rusted from below.
- The Bitch, sorry the Doctor, Yeah… you guessed right, I am talking again of Kareena Kapoor. She does modelling assignments for her fees but travels in Business class (even though it was the world’s-dirtiest-plane-that-can-fly), enjoys the nights in a hotel suites worth more than 5000 USD a day ! What the F**k?
- What was Kareena doing giving 10 sleeping pills to Akshay? Sleep with him? Hahahaha… She anyways would not have been able to carry him to the hospital to operate!!! I am sure had Akshay slept, this bitchy doctor would not have the strength of operating without instruments in the hotel suite itself…
- And finally, Aftab strikes before the movie ends. He-Man, the 12th Man, ‘the aftab’ drives. But what!!! A Volkswagon’s Beetle!!! And then comes the villian. Double the size and the hero (Aftab) asks the heroines (Kareena and Amrita) to RUN… Hahahaha… Thats something new. Why did he drive so fast. To a street where there is nowhere to go… And hey, look who comes handy… Its the Rocky the Balboy the Rambo… Thers the Stallone. Just came to hit some people.
Phew !!! What a movie…
- Bur hey, what a surprise, its not yet over… Aftab was okay but he was lying on the floor (I think he was scared of all the 6′5″ giants… and rightfully so). And then he spoke… CHALE !!!!…. Hahahahahaha…. Comedy of an action flick
- And then, the final shot, the marriage of Akshay Kumar with the leading Hollywood actress Denise Richards. Bloody direction… The director used the same set that was there in Aftab’s marriage (The first shot) but from a different angle. And more so, a hollywood moviestar’s marriage with no papparazzi and no stars invited. How amazing!!!
- And did you know, that watch had a 4000W PMPO speakers. Akshay thought the neighbours were playing loud music… hahahaha.
Finally the movie finished. I had ended up eating 2 Jumbo-Combos, one large Nachos and a burger. Hey Bhagwan…
This is on record, the worst movie I have ever seen in a hall. The dialogues are cheap, music is pathetic, lyrics are horrible, and the performances are worst. Akshay Kumar into another stupid role tring hard to rise above the script but failing, Kareena Kapoor in her ‘bitchiest’ role ever displaying ample amount of skin but ending up into a horrid performance, Aftab Shivdasani as wasted as Kiron Kher, Javed Jafferey doing a 100m sprint role of just 3 scenes with 10 minutes of time, Amrita Arora is a 12th Man that has nothing to do except wearing the smallest of clothing……. I mean, what was it. hahahahaha.
Suddenly I felt appreciating Chandni Chowk to China and the Tashan of Akshay Kumar. Suddenly Govinda became a star. Suddenly Indra the Tiger (hindi-dubbed-Tamil movies) and the likes on Sony channel felt watchable.
I beg you guys, please, please, please… rather jump from a high-rise building, get under a train, but don’t try suicide by watching movie. one it costs your money and two, its pretty painful.
Most Shocking Celebrity Deaths
Michael JACKSON
When stars pass away unexpectedly, fans all over the world are left shocked and stunned. And more often than not, conspiracy theories often spring up around the deaths of some of this celebrities — be it Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley or John Lennon.
In the case of Jackson, who died of cardiac arrest five days back, it took hours for the first conspiracy theories to start circulating. The most popular is that he faked his death to escape the media glare and impending bankruptcy — despite medical reports blaming an overdose of prescription drugs.
Heath LEDGER
Heath ledger’s death in last January shocked fans, family and friends alike. The Australian actor, who apparently died of a drug overdose, was discovered by his housekeeper and his masseuse in his apartment.
Two weeks after his death, a report from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York concluded that the death was accidental ‘resulting from the abuse of prescription medications.’
A case against Ledger’s close friend Mary Kate Olsen, who was alleged to have supplied Ledger with the drugs, was also closed.
Anna Nicole Smith
Anna Nicole Smith’s death was shocking too.
The model and former Playboy Playmate died of drug overdose on February 8, 2007, in Florida, at the age of 39.
A month later, her boyfriend Howard K Stern and doctors Sandeep Kapoor and Khristine Eroshevich were charged with giving her drugs from June 5, 2004 to January 26, 2006.
Marilyn Monroe
In 1962, Marilyn Monroe’s shocking death at her home in Los Angeles led to a number of conspiracy theories.
An autopsy found a cocktail of drugs in her system and the county coroner recorded the cause of death as acute barbiturate poisoning by accidental overdose.
However, speculation over Monroe’s death continues to this day and centres on her relationships with US President John F Kennedy and his brother, Robert Kennedy. Most of the theories allege she was murdered either by the CIA or the Mafia as she knew too much about the Kennedy links to organised crime.
Elvis
Conspiracy theories have surrounded the demise of the Elvis Presley, who was found dead on his bathroom floor in Graceland in 1977.
Two autopsies into the death of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, whose prescription drug abuse was widely documented, concluded that he was killed by a sudden heart attack. And, yet there are many theories surrounding his death — by far the most persistent being that he somehow faked his own death in a bid to boost flagging record sales.
Hundreds of thousands of supposed sightings of the legend have been claimed in the three decades since.
Bruce Lee
The exact details of Bruce Lee’s untimely death are a subject of controversy. The actor was in Hong Kong to discuss a film with former James Bond star George Lazenby. He met with producer Raymond Chow and later drove together to his colleague Betty Ting’s house.
A little later after Chow left, Lee complained of a headache, and Ting gave him a painkiller, Equagesic, which contained both aspirin and a muscle relaxant. Lee then went to lie down for a nap. But he never woke up. He was just 32-years-old.
Although there were no signs of injury, Lee’s brain had swollen considerably. Though Lee’s death was ruled as ‘death by misadventure’, his untimely demise fed many theories about his death, including murder involving the Triad society and a supposed curse on him and his family.
What was bizarre was that Lee’s son Brandon Lee, also an actor, died 20 years after his father, in a freak accident while filming The Crow. He was 28.
Kurt Cobain
The troubled frontman of the band Nirvana has been struggling with drug addiction as well as the professional and personal pressures surrounding himself and his wife, musician Courtney Love.
On April 5, 1994, the estimated date of his death, Cobain’s body was discovered at his home. He had apparently shot himself. He left a suicide note which read, ‘I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music, along with really writing . . . for too many years now.’
Happy Birthday ‘WALKMAN’
Sony introduced its Walkman portable cassette player thirty years ago this week, kicking off a revolution in the consumer electronics industry by changing the way people enjoy music.
Until its introduction, the only way people could enjoy their own choice of music while on the go was to lug around a larger, heavier cassette player, but the Walkman brought music to the belt-clip, purse or pocket.
The first Walkman, the TPS-L2, cost ¥33,000 in Japan and US$200 in the U.S., but despite the relatively high price tag the reception was enthusiastic. In 1980 The Wall Street Journal called the Walkman “one of the hottest new status symbols around” and noted that prospective U.S. owners faced a month-long wait because of a backlog in orders.
The player had several features that were innovative for the time including dual headphone sockets, independent volume control for the left and right audio channels and the distinctive orange “hotline” button on the top that faded the tape output and engaged a microphone so the listener could talk to someone nearby without stopping the music or taking off their headphones.
The design and much of the mechanics of the TPS-L2 was based on a model that came out in 1978 but was never branded as Walkman. The TCM-100 was a portable cassette recorder aimed at people who needed the ability to record audio clips on the go, such as business people and journalists. The TPS-L2 brought the technology to the mass-market.
With the success of the Walkman a product line was born that would go on to become one of the world’s best-known brand names — but that global branding almost didn’t happen. Fearing that “Walkman” wasn’t proper English, Sony initially chose the brand name “Soundabout” for the U.S. market, derived from the word walkabout, and “Stowaway” for the U.K. It wasn’t until a year later, in 1980, that Walkman became the global brand name.
Within a few years the products were developing fast.
The WM-2, introduced in 1981, was notable for its styling, which was much more modern that of the TPS-L2 and also offered in several colors to suit personal tastes. By 1983, just four years after the launch of the Walkman, Sony introduced the WM-20, which was the same size as a cassette case. Then in 1984 the Walkman line expanded with the introduction of the D-50, the first CD Walkman.
For much of the eighties and nineties Sony reigned supreme in the personal audio space. It sold hundreds of millions of Walkman players and was the standard by which most competing products were judged. However, things started to change with the arrival of digital music.
Sony’s first Walkman to accept digital files, the NW-MS7, was introduced in Japan in December 2000 and went on sale elsewhere the following year. The product tied Sony’s MemoryStick flash media format with its ATRAC file format and MagicGate copy protection. Sony didn’t know it at the time but the formula would prove disastrous to Walkman’s leading position in the portable audio market.
The introduction of digital music didn’t just mean more convenience for users. It lowered the entry barrier to the player market and suddenly companies that had never made a digital audio player before could throw together a few chips, add some buttons and a display — or more likely find a Taiwanese contract manufacturer to do this for them — and launch their own player.
Users were rallying around downloaded music or ripping CDs into the MP3 format and there was no shortage of companies lining up to sell them players. In contrast Sony was requiring users convert MP3 files to ATRAC before they could be loaded on the Walkman.
Apple’s entry to the market in 2001 with the iPod was the first step in a what would be a short journey to replace Sony as the most fashionable brand name in portable audio.
In recent years under CEO Howard Stringer Sony has been attempting to reinvigorate its Walkman line and sales have been rising. Sony sold 7 million Walkman digital music players in the financial year that ended in March, up from 4.5 million in 2006. For the current financial year it expects to sell 6.3 million units, a lower number due in part to the poor economy. Sony’s latest flagship model, the NW-X1000, packs noise cancelling, a bright touchscreen display, mobile TV, and the ability to surf the Internet and watch YouTube videos. It’s already on sale in major markets and supports Sony’s ATRAC format but also MP3, Windows Media and Linear PCM in addition to AVC, MPEG4 and WMV9 video files
Some Amazing Facts !!!
Did you know the facts that follow? I didn’t… Let see if these amaze you. I will update these regularly – keep visiting:
- This happened during the third Test between Pakistan and South Africa in Faisalabad in 1997-98. Pakistan’s legspinner Mushtaq Ahmed was bowling to Pat Symcox, South Africa’s No. 9, and a googly shot between the middle and off stumps … but the bails stayed put. Wisden reported: “Umpire Dunne gave his spectacles a disbelieving wipe, but the bail was found to be badly cut.” Symcox, who had 56 at the time, went on to make 81 – very important runs, as it turned out, as South Africa ended up winning a close match by 53 runs.
Nokia – Not always the best
This blog of mine comes on for those people who are religiously following Nokia and do never see beyond Nokia.
I have heard from people that there is no phone which is better that what Nokia offers and that they are ready to take me on for no good reason in life. I am making sure here that instead of the verbal duel I tend to get in, there should be a written evidence of what I feel, lacks with Nokia. Having said this, I am no point of time arguing that Nokia is one of the best phone-makers available, but it also has some loopholes… which actually are one-to-many.
Lets go through some here:
- The Cheap Plastic: Seriously! They are obvious and cheesy – N85 is a big fail because of it.
- Use Capacitive Touch (for the touch phones like the Nokia 5800 music phone or the recent addition N97) – I don’t care what the hell your engineers might be saying. Spend one hour with the iPhone and you will see how effortless capacitive is versus resistive.
- No Standardised Look-and-Feel – Promote a standardized look and feel for apps through your SDK. Maintain customer expectation/experience and quality across all apps – created by Nokia or by a third-party developer. Does it even occur to you that’s one primary reason the iphone is so popular?
- E71 – The camera is a joke compared to N73, which is three years older. This is not the precedent Nokia would want to set. News to you !!! – technology should move forward – not backwards. The iPhone 3G with a 2MP camera without flash takes phenomenally better pictures in daylight – that even after 3 E71 firmware updates. Get it? (Business phones are not meant to take pictures in the evenings or nights anyways
. Fire the E71 camera division. It’s even worse when Nokia does not even accept they screwed up. - Firmware updates across the board!? E61 – just 3 years old – is a business phone. The browser sucks. It crashes all the time or runs out of memory. It’s an older version. You can’t leave it in the dirt after two years of half-hearted support. There are no updates or support available. Why are your firmware updates 6 months apart? It’s unacceptable. The market and internet is evolving too fast for you to sit; either reduce the number of devices per service line if you can’t handle them or hire more/smarter people.
- Widgets – Do you remember; 2 years ago Nokia mentioned that there will be widgets, which will let users input their flight details and in turn the widget will alert them about flight arrival or departure delays, airport conditions, etc? The services to offer this information are already here – e.g. FlightStats.com. But I don’t see the widgets anywhere?! What happened? Good idea/selling point but sounds like someone fell asleep. This should have been one primary focus of multitasking capability in a phone.
- E-series. Aah… the award-winning phone that no credible reviewer had the balls to take a pock shot at. Instead, stupid reviewers sounded like they were done a favor with a review handset when they justified the poor camera performance, ‘oh, it’s a business phone; its primary function is not to take pictures.’ If that’s the case, then why the hell has it packed a horrible e-mail client for 4 years; even on its newest iteration? Oh, and why does the phone not recognize calendar invites!? Even gmail has worked that shit out. Inexcusable! Do you guys even test your own devices in a non-Nokia-centric environment at all? I didn’t think so. By the way, Nokia email is a paid for app eventually, it is not a replacement for the inbuilt messaging client. A client and service are two different entities and should be maintained so if you want people to use your devices anywhere. For e.g. your browser doesn’t just work with your servers now, does it? I would rather pay to the Apple’s MobileME than over the sucking Nokia’s email that is no better than a Gmail or any other email service.
- RAM. Why do your phones even today have minuscule amounts of RAM – usually just enough to get by – even though the prices have dropped exponentially?
- Call log – Nokia just managed to screw this up even more? Call log used to work fine on the E61, or even E62 that I used for some time. But with the E71, every incoming call is shown as a ‘cell phone icon’ even if the number is associated with a land line. Also, why are you not using different icons for work, home, cell phones? Is that rocket science? Amazingly, Nokia had it working right a few years back. This is technology not moving forward – but backwards – with time.
- Call log 2 – You know how right after you’ve called a contact or received a call, you want to try to call that contact again but but maybe at another number from the contact profile? Well guess what – you have to go through the address book to look at the other numbers. Yes, you can’t open the contact profile or alternate calling numbers from the call log itself. What the hell? Talk about basic UI workflow/routing design fail.
- Contacts – Have you ever noticed how ‘easy’ it is to ‘delete’ a contact but hard to ‘undo’ edits/deletes? I would think by the 5th iteration of S60 you would have got that down to a pat. I can hit the ‘back’ key and get a prompt to hit delete a contact. Nice. But if it’s a mistake, then what? I’m outta luck until the next time I sync. Plus, if my phone is set to sync automatically, then I will lose the information from my PC as well, if it comes in range with my computer (I use Bluetooth) or if I forget about restoring the information before I re-sync. Did it EVER occur to you that if you want to make deletion easy you have to make recovery just as easy? Didn’t think so. I am now beginning to think, Nokia folks secretly don’t use their own phones. hahahahaha…
- Standard bookmarks in the browser that can’t be deleted. You asked for the hacking of your firmware. Because those bookmarks are useless and have never offered anything REMOTELY useful. They should have been removed from the browser by the second iteration 4 years ago. Or you should have built a team to develop content that’s not discontenting. Besides, what’s wrong with allowing people rearrange those bookmarks? Plus stupidly, people had to go right ahead and build a SEPARATE bookmark item for each link instead of putting them all in one folder called ‘Nokia’s junk’? How silly? Instead of glorifying what Nokia has accomplished, how about spending some time over the failures?
Times have changed; it’s not just about the hardware anymore – but more about the software. Also, if Nokia can’t make its software to interact with non-nokia phones over the internet then its just a wastage of time (Nokia Friendview, etc). There are many platforms to compute – the internet has always been social and Nokia’s time as a leader has already been squandered.
I am SICK of the whole Nokia band-of-reviewers sticking to NOKIA and ignoring the most basic failures for the nth iteration it has come out with. For eg, everyone is ‘praising’ the Nokia Messaging/Email app but no one is chastising Nokia for the abysmal in-built e-mail client as unacceptable for INR 17000+ phones – which will be the only ‘free’ alternative in a few months.
I have the right to call out a poorly managed product line especially when NOkia makes such haughty claims but little to show for. It looks Nokia stopped innovating a long long time ago.
I just hope you guys will be more considerate in understanding that Nokia is not a Great phone. I has its own loopholes, which from a close look actually stink. Just think of it – the processor of N97 is just 60MHz faster than the processor in its previous phone, the Nokia 5800 express music. On the same lines, Samsung is giving a processor that is approximately twice as fast. So… think before you leap…
Celebrating 25 years of ‘Tetris Effect’ – One of the world’s most popular game
About Tetris
Tetris is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov on June 6, 1984. He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix “tetra- (all of the game’s pieces, known as Tetrominoes, contain four segments) and tennis, Pajitnov’s favorite sport.
The game (or one of its many variants) is available for nearly every video game console and computer operating system, as well as on devices such as graphing calculators, mobile phones, portable media players, PDAs and even as an Easter egg on non-media products like oscilloscopes. It has even been played on the sides of various buildings, with the record holder for the world’s largest fully functional game of Tetris being an effort by Dutch students in 1995 that lit up all 15 floors of the Electrical Engineering department at Delft University of Technology.
While versions of Tetris were sold for a range of 1980s home computer platforms, it was the hugely successful handheld version for the Game Boy launched in 1989 that established the reputation of the game as one of the most popular ever. Electronic Gaming Monthly’s 100th issue had Tetris in first place as “Greatest Game of All Time”. In 2007, Tetris came in second place in IGN’s “100 Greatest Video Games of All Time” selling more than 70 million copies.
Gameplay
A random sequence of tetrominoes (sometimes called “tetrads” in older versions)—shapes composed of four square blocks each—fall down the playing field (a rectangular vertical shaft, called the “well” or “matrix”). The object of the game is to manipulate these tetrominoes, by moving each one sideways and rotating it by 90 degree units, with the aim of creating a horizontal line of blocks without gaps. When such a line is created, it disappears, and any block above the deleted line will fall. As the game progresses, the tetrominoes fall faster, and the game ends when the stack of tetrominoes reaches the top of the playing field and no new tetrominoes are able to enter.
There are many other formats/versions of the game available today. Some of which are Tetris Acorn Drop, Tetris Sprint, Tetris Battle, Tetris Marathon, Tetirs Ultra, Tetris 1989, Tetris Survival, Tetris N-Blox, etc.
The first Tetris game
Color of tetriminoes
Pajitnov’s original version for the Elektronika 60 computer used green brackets to represent blocks.Versions of Tetris on the original Game Boy and on most dedicated handheld games use monochrome or grayscale graphics, but most popular versions use a separate color for each distinct shape. Prior to The Tetris Company’s standardization in the early 200s, those colors varied widely from implementation to implementation.
Tetrominoes
Scoring formula
The scoring formula for the majority of Tetris products is built on the idea that more difficult line clears should be awarded more points. For example, a single line clear in Tetris Zone is worth 100 points, while a back-to-back Tetris is worth 1,200.
Nearly all Tetris games allow the player to press a button to increase the speed of the current piece’s descent, rather than waiting for it to fall. If the player can stop the increased speed before the piece reaches the floor by letting go of the button, this is a “soft drop”; otherwise, it is a “hard drop” (some games allow only soft drop or only hard drop; others have separate buttons). Many games award a number of points based on the height that the piece fell before locking.
End of play
Players can lose a typical game of Tetris when they can no longer keep up with the increasing speed, and the tetrominoes stack up to the top of the playing field.
Ever thought if it were possible to play to play the game forever?
This question was first encountered in a thesis by John Brzustowski in 1988 and has been more recently investigated in published articles by Walter Kosters. The conclusion reached was that a player is inevitably doomed to lose. The reason has to do with the S and Z tetrominoes. If a player receives a large sequence of S tetrominoes, the naïve gravity used by the standard game eventually forces the player to leave a hole in a corner.
Suppose that player then receives a large sequence of Z tetrominoes. Eventually, that player will be forced to leave a hole in the opposite corner without clearing the previous hole. Back and forth, the holes will necessarily stack to the top. If the pieces are distributed randomly, this sequence will eventually occur. Thus, if a game with an ideal, uniform, uncorrelated random number generator is played long enough, any player will top out.
Practically, this does not occur in most of Tetris variants. Some variants allow the player to choose to play with only S and Z tetrominoes, and a good player may survive well over 150 consecutive tetrominoes this way. On an implementation with an ideal uniform randomizer, the probability at any given time of the next 150 tetrominoes being only S and Z is one in (2/7)^150 (approximately 2×10^-82). Most implementations use a pseudorandom number generator to generate the sequence of tetrominoes, and such an S–Z sequence is almost certainly not contained in the sequence produced by the 32-bit linear congruential generator in many implementations (which has roughly 4200000000 states). In fact, newer Tetris brand games from 2001 and later tend to follow a new guideline such that the randomizer generates all seven tetrominoes in a permutation at one time, guaranteeing an even distribution over the short term, and this randomizer allows the player to continue a game indefinitely in theory, often clearing all blocks from the playfield. On the other hand, the “evil” algorithm in Bastet often starts a game with a series of more than seven Z pieces.
Recent versions of Tetris such as Tetris Worlds allow the player to continuously rotate a block once it hits the bottom of the playfield, without it locking into place (see Easy spin dispute, above). This permits a player to play for an infinite amount of time, though not necessarily to land an infinite number of blocks.
3rd Generation iPhone Rumor Round-up
3rd Generation iPhone - Most rumors covered
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- 3rd Generation iPhone – Most rumors covered
There is a lot being said about the 3rd Generation iPhone which people believe will be disclosed on the WWDC 2009 to be held on June 8, 2009.
There is a lot being said about the 3rd Generation iPhone which people believe will be disclosed on the WWDC 2009 to be held on June 8, 2009.
As people are expecting more and more from the new generation iPhone, as the competition is also gearing up (eg. Palm Pre, LG, etc.), there are a lot of speculations with a result of this.
I have been following the developments around the web and am putting down some for your reference. Here we go:
A graphical representation that has been put together of the dozens of rumors that have been circulating over the past few months regarding the third generation iPhone that’s likely to be announced next week at WWDC 2009. A few notes:
- Some source numbers have been put beside each arrow, these are the references for each rumor and are published at the bottom of this post.
- The rumors (such as release date and price) that don’t really match a particular part of the iPhone’s hardware/software have been placed at a random point on the back of the iPhone.
- The prediction key is based entirely on the writers’ opinion, and is by no means accurate.
