Louis de Branges, a French-born mathematician now at Purdue University in the US, is claiming a proof of the Riemann hypothesis. The Riemann hypothesis, if proved, would explain the apparently random pattern of prime numbers and consequently provide a way to predict primeness in numbers.
If true, the solution could undermine Internet security Systems by making predictable and solvable random data encryption. Encryption has been the backbone of secure Web transactions from the earliest days of e-commerce and also is used to secure e-mail and even stored data that contains corporate secrets or private information.
However, the proof is far from accepted by mathematicians and this acceptance could take some time as it is a complicated proof. Then it will take more time to come up with exploits so for now, I think it is safer to enter your credit card in an e-commerce transaction than to give it to the waiter at the restaurant or to a mail-order company via phone.
In a follow-up to my post on SQL Server migration options I decided to download and try out MS SQL Server Express Beta 2.
The program downloaded no problem but the SQL Server 2005 Express error code 3417 came up on installation: (Click to enlarge)
I checked various newsgroups and ensured that all the requisite components were uninstalled before starting. I installed the .Net Framework 2.0 as recommended on the SQL Server 2005 Express download page - all to no avail.
It is either due to my installing it on a Windows XP SP2 OS or the fact that my copy of Windows XP SP2 is installed on my Apple Powerbook using Virtual PC!
I guess the chances are that it doesn’t like the hardware but I already have Visual Studio .Net, SQL Server Enterprise Manager and Visual Web Developer 2005 Express edition all installed and running fine on it. Maybe when Beta 3 is released - or maybe I’ll just look into another db!
I saw a notification on Verisign that they are going to speed up their VeriSign Naming and Directory Services. Verisign currently generates new versions of the .com /.net zones files twice per day - after this change the elapsed time from registrars’ add or change operations to the visibility of those adds or changes in all 13 .com/.net authoritative name servers is expected to average less than five minutes. Wohoo!
Microsoft’s SQL Server is brutally expensive with the Standard Edition being $4999 per processor and then there is the requirement for Windows licence and CALs for the server it is sitting on. And those are US prices - it is more expensive again in Europe, of course!
Unsurprising then that people are looking for cheaper alternatives. One easy alternative is to use Microsoft’s MSDE - however, MDSE is limited to 5 concurrent connections, databases smaller than 2gb and still requires Windows licencing.
Microsoft are now touting SQL Server 2005 Express as the successor to MSDE. 2005 Express can handle databases of up to 4gb in size but again only runs on Windows.
MySQL is a fully featured open source rdbms which can run on Linux and consequently this is quite a popular alternative to MS SQL Server. Differences in the SQL implementation and lack of Stored Procedures in MySQL limit the ease of database migration projects. So while it is easy enough if you start with MySQL, moving an established database to MySQL is not a trivial task.
In the last few days Sybase announced that they were releasing a free version of their Adaptive Server¬Æ Enterprise (ASE) Express Edition for Linux. Microsoft’s SQL Server is based on an earlier version of Sybase so there are similarities between the two and their T-SQL is very close. The limitations placed on this offering are that the database be no more than 5gb, 1cpu and 2gb of ram.
With the release of this product free there is now a much cheaper alternative to MS SQL Server for people who want to painlessly migrate their existing databases.
Curious about IPv6? Wondering about the differences between IPv6 and IPv4? Interested to know what impact the advent of IPv6 will have on your networks?
There’s an interesting explanation of IPv6 which has just been published and makes IPv6 understandable even to simpletons like me!
Apple have launched an affiliates program for iTunes.
Sign up for this program is free and anyone signing up before September 15th is eligible for a draw for a free iPod. Apple have a faq page which doesn’t answer questions on whether non-US residents can become affiliates!
As an affiliate you can link directly from your website to any song, album or artist on iTunes. The iTunes store currently has over 1 million tracks from all five major labels and over 600 leading independents and over 8,000 audiobooks and popular public radio programs.
The signup page, which asks for details like social security number and other personal pages, is not a secured page (although the form submission is over https)! It would be re-assuring to see a padlock on the bottom of this page.
More a disappointment though is that the page doesn’t work in Firefox 0.9.3. and the affiliate program is only for the US Apple store. Hopefully these issues will be ironed out soon.
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