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Always a good thing to have in any lab: http://jamesthornton.com/fun/blinkenlights.html For the clueless: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights

'reduced to trolling the Internet by making up terms like "Open Sores Movement"'

It sure is, a bad taste pun that does nothing for his reputation. I wonder how his other prediction is coming along. It is 2007 after all. Maybe Bob is suffering from the halo effect, wherein both he and others assume he is authoritative on all things.

was Re:Kinda spoilt (Score:4, Insightful)

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Windows, the OS that made email and browsing dangerous ..

I just got done writing a paper on this. Pretty interesting stuff. About the best source I found online for CFs was

Out of those papers I found the ideas in Collaborative Filtering with Privacy (2002), by John Canny (Computer Science Division, UC Berkeley) the most interesting. It talks about using homomorphic encryption to store a public profile. Pretty sweet.

Lord Grey (first post) already gave a fairly good description, but I'll repeat it here. Basically, the patent is for software that can detect all manners of numbers (e.g. 1, II, "three", etc.) and highlight them in a given document.

I'm glad to know that, for example, taking the regular expressions from here and using them here counts as stunningly creative and non-obvious.

The ability to find an highlight given patterns of expressions in a document is very old indeed. The difference seems to be that instead of using a powerful generalised pattern matching system (like, say, regular expressions) we are restricting ourselves to a particular set of patterns - specifically patterns representing numbers. Of course patterns representing numbers (in word and other forms) already formatted for ready use as regular expressions have been around for quite some time too.

There might be some merit in the particular pattern matching that Microsoft uses to identify numbers (in potentially many languages), and maybe they can copyright the regular expression (or whatever matching system they're using) to do the indentification. That makes perfect sense and is entirely reasonable. I don't see how a patent on a concept that is simply a specialisation of existing concepts really makes a lot of sense though.

Jedidiah.

Well, google found this, which seems like a good start;
http://jamesthornton.com/emacs/chapter/emacs_31.ht ml

Then this one has some useful tips;
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/emacs/DiredPower

Vast ist dis? Neiner blinkenlights?

That's why sequences (as implemented by PostgreSQL and Oracle) are handy. Simply create a sequence, and call NEXTVAL(sequence_name) to get the identity of the next record. It isn't an autoincrementer (but can be used as one with default values), and you get the advantage of knowing what ID you will use before your insert - very handy for inserting a lot of related data at once. You can also do tricks like having sequences with different increment numbers, different base values, or even concatenate them with a string to get multi-master friendly safe replication.

For a sequence/nextval to be useful, the increment must be absolutely atomic - that is, it must return the next value and increment without any chance of the same number being given to another caller. Oracle and PostgreSQL do this for you.

You can simulate these in SQL Server with the following stored procedure (original source here: Sequence table: CREATE TABLE sequences ( -- sequence is a reserved word seq varchar(100) primary key, sequence_id int ); MS SQL Server stored procedure: CREATE PROCEDURE nextval @sequence varchar(100), @sequence_id INT OUTPUT AS -- return an error if sequence does not exist -- so we will know if someone truncates the table set @sequence_id = -1 UPDATE sequences SET @sequence_id = sequence_id = sequence_id + 1 WHERE seq = @sequence RETURN @sequence_id I've used this to great effect in SQL server. I've had to emulate it in Access once (yuck! it worked, though!). I've never tried it in MySQL, but it can probably be done.

This page (see LAST_INSERT_ID(expr) talks about how to do it in MySQL. I don't use MySQL when I can avoid it; it's a great, fast database for high-read environments without triggers and similar, but I've never seemed to end up working in one of those!

One thing to note is that some of these organizations have multiple lists with different aggressiveness levels. I'm only using the safest of them and block roughly 85% of spam at no cost to my employer. How are you blocking 99%? Are you using the more aggressive lists?

-mlk

It should be the running theme with Linux:

Linux Network Administrators Guide 2nd ed

O'Reilly Linux Command Reference

now if they'd only rerelease micro cornucopia... man, that was a great magazine.

it had Bruce Eckel before he was cool... and i quote:

"the best computer magazine ever published - they even had plans for building a robot in a flower pot!"

everything a growing boy needed! my dad took me out to Bend, OR once to see the "publishing centre". they were burning chips and looked at us weird, like: "you could have gone to rushmore or something, and instead you're watching us blow eproms in big old bean cans?". what a childhood!

is it just me, or has it been "nostalgia monday" here?

Congratulations, you just described Brook's Law!

How does PostgreSQL compare to Oracle? Is PostgreSQL more or less secure than Oracle? I don't know. I've never heard of a problem with it nor have I had one. Is PostgreSQL faster or slower than Oracle? I don't know, and apparently Oracle desperately doesn't want anyone to find out. From benchmarks that have had Oracle results deleted to benchmarks that someone (I wonder who?) has gotten the ISP to remove for "violation of our Terms of Service" (this used to be a benchmark), Oracle is very aggressive in preventing anyone from finding out how their database really performs. I wonder why? (However what might be another version of the second benchmark seems to have survived by carefully avoiding the mention of names of proprietary products.) All I know is that after trying to deal with the bloat of Oracle on a less-than-mainframe-class PC, PostgreSQL was a lean, mean breath of fresh air. Converting PL/SQL to PL/pgSQL was easy, too.

Until Oracle allows publication of benchmark results just as does Postgresql one can claim that Oracle is leading in sales, but not much else.

http://jamesthornton.com/acs/benchmarks-ora817-pg7 03.html

So much for "openness", although if you look hard enough you and draw your own conclusion about the name of a "leading proprietary database application" is you can see PostgreSQL can perform impressively:

http://www.angelfire.com/nv/aldev/pgsql/GreatBridg e.html

And they are known for dirty marketing tricks, where once they lock you in they jack up the price:

http://pub13.ezboard.com/fiwetheydatabases.showMes sage?topicID=76.topic&index=1

As the news release says, some stuff is already online -- MIT Web Curriculum Free Online.