A recent CACM has an article on CAPTCHAs (those visual problems used to defeat registration 'bots). The article made the point that solving a CAPTCHA requires advancing the state-of-the-art of artificial intelligence and image recognition. Similarly, the spammers have begun using Markov chains to fool spam tools that work at …

ReSharper is very early, the only refactoring this first version supports is "rename..." The license also expires in two days! So you needn't rush to the download site quite yet...

Here are links that I (Larry O'Brien) have been meaning to post (the "I"s and "me" in the following are the original authors):

http://www.netcrucible.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=6c883fbb-16d3-467f-a028-110e9078132a 

If you follow the rumor mill, you may have heard of X# or "Xen", the crazy next-generation …

Rise of Service-Orientation

I like Jeff's suggestions for a Service Oriented Lanugage  via [DevHawk]

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p dir="ltr"> My latest SD Times article  discusses the passing of Object-Orientation and the rise of Service-Orientation.

Doug Seven has a list of 26 ideas that shouldn't be done with SQL. You can vote for the top 10. via [Christian Nagel's OneNotes]

Naturally, the comments section immediately debates whether stored procedures are inherently evil...

Reshaper, a C# refactoring plug-in for Visual Studio .NET 2003, is now available for early access. This is from JetBrains, nee IntelliJ, makers of the IDEA Java IDE.

http://www.jetbrains.net/resharper

User name: eapuser

Password: eapuser

Microsoft launched .NET two years ago last Friday. My short take: CLR and C# are unqualified successes; Managed C++ was a failure, but they'll turn that around with C++/CLI; and that the jury's still out on VB.NET. The most disappointing thing to me is the relative dearth of …

K5 thread analyzes the comments in the leaked W2K code. It doesn't quote the code at all other than a general comment that the code is quite clean, with most functions fitting on a single screen.

Paul Allen's company Vulcan is bankrolling three competing teams that are attempting to create software that does well on the SATs. Early results show that it's possible to get the computer to deal with quantitative questions like "If you mix these two chemicals, what will the resultant pH be?" but …