That's exactly what I was thinking, unless AOL is doing something ' amazing ', it's very much likely that the requirements of their DB infrastructure are similar to that of everyone else. The way everyone else solves these problems is through a marraige of well-designed infrastructure and reactive software systems, asfaik. That said, it still sounds uber cool and the ultimate DB toy/tool.

It is perverse, no doubt about that, but there is a logic to it, everything is about knowledge, complex interlinked systems like the global economy are constantly changing and as a result so is the information we have about it. Any trader with the ability to take this raw data and convert it into knowledge about the future value of a stock can make money. It's not simply taking money from someone, it's exploiting the fact that they haven't recognised the true value of the stock. That's the theory anyway.

The real insanity starts when you try to nail down the true value of a stock based on responses to millisecond changes in the markets. No human could ever function like this, so algorithms are encoded with our flawed theories of how to recognise the "true value" of a stock. Assuming the markets behave (or, in more recent terms, consistently increase in value), it's all good, but as soon as the markets start to behave irrationally, these algorithms go apeshit, exacerbated by the fact that there's thousands of these systems all following their own crazy formula, in real time, with real money, now that is perverse.

It's good to see these trolls taking a hit for once, it always seems like they've got the upper hand, especially with the dysfunctional patent system.

wow, buddy, you just made a ton of sense with that comment. If it was possible to rate the comment, "god-like in its apprehension of the problem", that's what you'd be getting.

insect sex is notoriously violent, insects do not use sex as a bonding mechanism so there's no pleasure, in the sense we know, associated with it. Many different species have developed various strategies to work around this, such as scrapers on the end of the males penis to remove rivals sperm. I kid you not, god help me, I'm after a bottle of wine and can't be bothered finding the link.

add the ip address and/or hostname of all the hosts you use to access your servers into /etc/hosts.allow. If denyhosts picks up 3 failed logins from a single ip address, that address is added to /etc/hosts.deny, if this happens to be your machine (and you're having a bad day entering your password), you could get locked out of your system.

this is a perfect application for an evolutionary algorithm,

The levels of Methane on Mars are much higher than expected http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars#Methane . If bacertia could easily survive under the soil in the red planet, than that could explain the source of methane.

slashdot seems the perfect place to ask this question, I'd a like a solution requiring the use of measuring tapes, callipers, several badgers and a laser interferometer

perhaps today is the day Satan goes to work in a snow plow?, seriously though, is anyone else a little surprised at this?

an amazing achievement, hopefully a preview of better things to come and a brighter future for us all

"random crashes on a Vista machine are not a feature and is probably a hardware issue" How comes this is an issue with vista?, xp and linux work perfectly and in case you haven't noticed, I'm not alone with these kind of issues, I've never had to resort to lies when describing the complete and utter failure of Microsoft to produce something of value, ask yourself this fanboy, how a bunch of volunteers prodcued an operating system that is superior in performance in every way to vista?

sorry buddy, but random crashes on a vista machine are a feature not a bug. I've been using linux for the last 6 years and not once have I had an unexplained crash. I started a new job in a developer environment which is exclusively windows and within the first week my vista machine had to be wiped and reinstalled to solve the problem of repeated and unexplained crashes. Colleagues have had their machines simply reboot for no reason, and the performance of the machine is painful. I can unzip the same file faster in a virtual box linux guest than I can in the vista host, pardon my language, but it's a f**king joke that vista is being pushed as a "replacement"