Sweepstakes: Give the Old Lady a New LookWritten by Dinko Bacun
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says it will be necessary to develop new mathematical properties to fully understand their distribution. First of all, what is a prime number? A prime number is an integer greater than one which can be divided only by one and itself. One, two and three are primes. Four isn't, because it is divisible by two. Five and seven are primes, while six (divisible by two and three), eight (divisible by four and two) and nine (divisible by three) are not. Prime numbers play an extremely important role in mathematics and are used in numerous calculations (most known are factoring, greatest common divisor, linear equation solving, etc.). But perhaps most important quality of prime numbers is simplest one: any number grater than one may be written as a product of prime numbers. But their real importance for computer world became evident around 1977, when R.L. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. Adleman discovered a way to encode messages in such a way that code would be almost impossible to break even if method of encoding was public, i.e. known to everybody. In very simple terms, if you have a secret code (number), and it is written as a product of two prime numbers, then you can make public method of encoding, and number (public key), while the factor is kept secret. Sound familiar? Remember PGP? So, how secure would be such an arrangement? It would be easy to generate a prime number of about 120 digits, as it would take only about 90 comparisons using modern algorithms. Generate another prime number of 130 digits, and you would end up with a key of 250 digits which would be security code. Prof. Donald E. Knuth in "The Art of Computer Programming" Vol.II page 388 analyzes how long would it take to break such a security code. If we knew of a method to find factors of a 250 digit number in one tenths of a microsecond (which is what FLOPS term is all about), we would need about 10 to power of 25 microseconds (that's a big number of microseconds: one followed by twenty five zeroes) to find all comparisons. As there is only 1,556,952,000,000 microseconds in a year we would need more than 3 x 10 to power of 11 [300,000,000,000] years of CPU time to find answer. If there were a government agency which would try to decode message, and it purchased ten billion computers and set them all to work on such a problem, it would still take them 31 years to crack security code into factors. So if you published security code (public key) and also method of encoding, but kept secret one of factors you would still be pretty secured. Understand why all fuss about PGP (which stands for Pretty good privacy)? Understand importance of prime numbers? So, old lady is getting a new fresh look. It seems far more interesting than lottery style sweepstakes. The participant seems to control his chances, and cost for over 1000 buyers is even less than regular opening discount everybody gives away. We just added content, i.e. we let participants learn something new, which is what web is all about. I guess point of this article really is: you shouldn't throw away old marketing tools that worked well for so many years. You just have to make them content rich, give them a new twist.
Dinko Bacun CEO of Tendriks d.o.o. dinko@tendrix.com
| | Basics of Internet MarketingWritten by Dale Clark
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That's sad truth about Internet marketing. Folks have been misled and feel cheated when they don't start making money quickly. You were told you'd get rich over- night, but it's not happening, as a matter of fact some of you have been taken to cleaners. Don't feel like lone ranger though, many good people have lost money to scammers. It doesn't mean your stupid. It means that you need to take time and research an opportunity before spending any money. I know lotto mentality has spoiled a lot of peoples dreams. It causes you to give up before you ever have chance for success. You need to decide whether you have time. It doesn't matter whether you're able to work it part time or full time. It's quality of effort and energy you put into it. You have to set your priorities and go from there. Don't give up! Take your Time and you'll be surprised at how Valuable you are and that You Can Succeed!
Dale Clark is the 'WebSter' and independent marketer for CJ Clarks Email Basics http://jackofclarks.com/
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