DBMS and Mail-Merge Supp . o. .r . t.

1.1 Overview
n this section, you will find a brief description of the DBMS features, along with
installation instructions and a few samples.
While the DBMS and mail-merge functions were designed to work together, they can
also be used independently from each other. That is, you may find the DBMS support
useful even if you have no need for mail-merge functionality, and likewise you can use
the mail-merge functions without a DBMS back-end. Both functions require LISTSERV
Classic or LISTSERV HPO, and are unavailable in LISTSERV Lite.
Note: Embedded mail merge is the default for LISTSERV 14.5 and following.
1.1.1 DBMS support
LISTSERV's DBMS support allows you to:
• Direct LISTSERV to store subscriber information in a DBMS, on a list by list basis.
That is, you may have a mix of traditional LISTSERV lists and DBMS lists.
Furthermore, you can adjust the layout of your DBMS lists to match existing or
current applications. You can map each list to a private table if this is what makes
sense for you, or you can put all the lists in the same table, place related lists in one
table, etc. You can add as many columns as you want to store additional information
about subscribers.
• Use the DBMS as a back-end for mail-merge jobs. LISTSERV can execute arbitrary
SQL SELECT statements to extract recipients from your DBMS, and make related
information (name, country, account number, etc.) available for mail-merge
operations.
DBMS support is available through Microsoft's ODBC interface on Windows 2000 and
greater, and Oracle's OCI interface on OpenVMS Alpha, Digital Unix, AIX and Solaris
(SPARC only). Additionally, DB2 is supported natively (i.e. via CLI) under the unixes
which are supported by both DB2 and LISTSERV.
L-Soft formally supports SQL Server 2000, 2005, and 2008 as a datastore for mailing
lists.
L-Soft formally supports Oracle 8i, 9i, 10g, and 11g as a datastore for mailing lists.
L-Soft does not support Microsoft Access (any version) as a datastore for mailing lists.
1.1.2 Why require Oracle 8 or higher?
While this is probably no longer an issue for most Oracle customers, we are leaving this
section in for historical purposes.
Oracle introduced major changes to the OCI API in version 8. While many of the concepts
remain similar, all the function calls have been renamed and most have a different calling
sequence. Supporting both OCI 7 and OCI 8 would require more than a handful of #ifdef
statements – we would need to develop and support a separate interface for OCI 7. In
I
Section 1 DBMS and Mail-Merge Support
LISTSERV®, version 16.0 Advanced Topics Manual
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addition, we would need to license Oracle 7 on all supported systems, which would
significantly increase our development costs. While we recognize that there is a large
Oracle 7 installed base, a year or so from now most of them will have upgraded to Oracle
8, thus the cost for developing an OCI 7 interface and purchasing six Oracle 7 licenses
would have to be amortized over a period of about a year, leading to much higher
licensing costs for the OCI 7 version. Furthermore, it is possible to use LISTSERV's OCI
interface with an Oracle 7 server: the only component which must be at version 8 is the
client, i.e. SQL*Net. As Oracle-based LISTSERV installations typically run on a separate,
dedicated system, this simply means that you need to purchase a version 8 or higher
client license for the system in question. It is not necessary to upgrade the server to
Oracle 8 or higher. Oracle 7 is also supported through the ODBC interface.
As noted above, L-Soft formally supports Oracle 8i, 9i, 10g, and 11g
1.1.3 Mail-Merge
Documented Restriction: In order to use the mail-merge features, you must set the site
configuration variable EMBEDDED_MAIL_MERGE to a value of 1 (that is, enabled).
This is the default.
LISTSERV's mail-merge support allows you to send individually customized messages
to large numbers of recipients with very high throughput. The mail-merge functions
support:
• Simple substitutions, such as "Dear &firstname;".
• Conditional blocks, such as a birthday greeting sent when the message happens to
coincide with the recipient's birthday, or a warning when the balance of the account
is negative.
• Special facilities to send promotional banners to a randomly generated subset of the
recipients. For instance, you can indicate that a first banner should be sent to a
random subset of 200 recipients, while another banner is sent to a randomly
selected (but distinct) series of 500 recipients, and others receive a third banner, or
no banner at all.
• Easy support for "few of many" topic subscription, such as a service offering news
about movie actors (many registered actors, while most people will only want news
about a handful of them).
• Full integration with the DBMS interface, allowing recipients to be selected through
arbitrary SELECT statements, while every column that can be converted to a
character string is made available as a mail-merge field.
• A simple bounce processing and collection system – LISTSERV processes and
decodes all bounces, and writes the failing addresses to a plain-text file. You can
group related mailings in the same bounce file or use a separate file for each
mailing, whichever makes the most sense in your context. As each message is sent
in "probe" format, even non-standard bounces will be processed accurately, as long
as the remote MTA sends bounces to the correct (RFC821 MAIL FROM:) address.
1.2 Pre-Installation Tasks
Before installing DBMS and mail-merge support, please review the following steps and
make sure that your selected target system is ready to receive this update.
• DBMS support requires version 1.8d or later of LISTSERV Classic or Classic HPO
(DB2 support requires version 1.8e or later).
• Mail-merge support requires LISTSERV Classic or Classic HPO with
EMBEDDED_MAIL_MERGE set to 1 (enabled) in the site configuration file.
• If you are planning to use the DBMS interface, you must install vendor-supplied
DBMS support files on the target machine before installing the LISTSERV update.
For ODBC (Windows), the appropriate drivers are already installed as part of the
operating system under supported versions of Windows. For OCI, you need to install
and configure the Oracle8 client files (SQL*Net et al.) The OCI material is typically
licensed and not freely redistributable, and thus does not come with the LISTSERV
kit. (Note that OCI is not supported natively by LISTSERV under Windows, but can
be accessed via ODBC.)
• If you are using Windows, you must be running at least Windows 2000 with Service
Pack 4 applied. Windows NT 4.0 is no longer supported. The current Windows
installation kits query the operating system for the current version and service pack,
and will abort the installation if you are not running the minimum required version. LSoft
no longer supports Windows NT. Windows 2000 (Server and Workstation),
Windows 2003 Server, and Windows XP (Professional and Home) are currently
supported.
• If using the DBMS interface, you may want to create a DBMS username for
LISTSERV in advance, and grant it the CREATE SESSION (mandatory) and
CREATE TABLE (optional) privileges. If you are planning to create all tables
yourself, you should not grant CREATE TABLE to LISTSERV's DBMS username.
• A compiler is required to use the OCI interface on unix systems. L-Soft may not
legally ship pre-linked executables containing the SQL*Net library.
• A compiler is also required to use the CLI interface on AIX, for similar reasons.


to be continue...................................

What are the current trends in computer science(both in networking and embedded systems)?

 Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

Computing, Internet and Artificial Intelligence - As processing power improves, the functionality and value of computers tends to increase significantly. The best computers of just a decade ago could not even handle tasks that the average desktop computer now handles with ease. The networking of these computers has expanded the possibilities even further. Computing and the internet has already changed many of our lives. We plan trips, research products, and explore our history in entirely new and more efficient ways. It seems clear, however, that the impact of the internet has just begun its influence on our lives. As processing power continues to improve, and as the collaboration afforded by the internet evolves, the impact is likely to skyrocket. With this increasing computing power of a unimaginably extensive network, comes the possibility of improving artificial intelligence. If all of this work culminates in a technological singularity, then perhaps all of the other projects listed in this article will seem insignificant. Aside from a singularity, however, improvements in computing is certain to speed technological advancement in all fields.

Additional goals in theoretical computer science are to unify seemingly separate fields of computing, determine whether or not certain problems are in principle unsolvable, what techniques may be used to factor huge numbers or discover the largest prime numbers, an so on.

Source(s):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-perfor…
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-reversib…
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-autonomi…

Three Tech Advances That May Lead to a More Equitable World

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This article was first published on the The Asia Foundation’s blog, In Asia.

By Melody Zavala

“Just because they are poor and isolated doesn’t mean they don’t have the potential to be the next Bill Gates,” said Shahed Kayes, the founder of Subornogram Foundation in Bangladesh, while introducing me to lively students at a school he started on the remote island of Mayadip. Located in the Meghna River, the island’s 1,100 residents don’t have access to public services such as safe drinking water, public schools, or health care. The residents rely on the river’s catch of fish for their livelihood, and 97 percent live below the poverty line. Although the school doesn’t own a single computer and the island has no electricity, Shahed couldn’t resist taking out his personal laptop and showing the children how to use it, giving them at least a small glimpse of the world beyond their shores.

Shahed Kayes, pictured here with students, founded the Subornogram Foundation. The school doesn't own a computer and the island has no electricity.

While the school on Mayadip only recently acquired rough wooden tables to use as desks, Shahed’s philosophy captures the promise that technology holds to leap over barriers created by geography, social class, and language.
The desire to use technological innovations to improve education in both the developed and developing worlds is undeniably trendy these days. I attended a UNESCO and Consortium of School Networking conference on this topic in Washington, D.C., recently, and there are dozens of similarly themed workshops being held every month. Experiments using technology in education in the developing world are often driven by international funders, domestic companies, and non-profits who hope these innovations can surmount the many obstacles facing severely challenged education systems where rote teaching methods and undertrained, underpaid, and outnumbered teachers are the norm.

In recent years, Asian governments have made large investments in technology innovations to expand their population's technology capacity. Photo by Bart Verweij.

National governments have also made large investments in this sector with the hope that expanding their population’s technology capacity will fuel economic growth. In Thailand, the government has set aside the equivalent of $60 million to purchase 900,000 tablets through the One Tablet per Child initiative for the country’s 860,000 first graders. The governments of India and the Philippines have been behind efforts to create the world’s cheapest tablets. The National Library of Vietnam reports that while 2,000 people daily walk through the doors of the main Hanoi library, another 5,000 access their online database, compelling the government to invest in digitizing its collections.
And as mobile phone ownership becomes commonplace in the developing world and internet access increases, democratization of information does seems more possible than ever before. In 2010, although the population of Malaysia was 28 million, there were over 30 million mobile phone subscriptions. In the same year, the average Filipino cell phone user sent an average of 600 text messages per month, 43 percent more than their counterparts in the United States. In Vietnam, the internet penetration rate is 31 percent and, in the capitol, Hanoi, penetration is 64 percent. Vietnamese internet use averages about 30 million searches per day. Indeed, when I visited Vietnam last year, I was amazed to find a small rural post office in Duyen Hai overrun by more than 30 eager boys playing educational games and one young girl doing research for a school project, on computers funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through a project with The Asia Foundation and the National Library.
I admit that I can be skeptical about projects I come across that seem to employ technology just for technology’s sake or as a panacea rather than a tool. But these early efforts have yielded some important lessons, including the realization that device-specific projects can quickly become obsolete while long-term investments in training, support, and adaptation are necessary for projects involving technology to be effective and sustainable. With these guiding principles in mind, I am energized by the potential that technological innovations hold to create a more level playing field in education, training, and learning across the globe.
With wider application, the following three advances will, I predict, move us toward greater equality in education and radically transform our world:
1. Literacy will increase dramatically and informally through mobile phones. Ambitious adults and children who lack access to formal education will nonetheless be able to increase their literacy through self-paced “learn to read” text lessons via simple cell phones they already own. Imagine what this means for the Asia-Pacific region, home to the largest number of illiterate adults worldwide at 518 million in 2008, according to UNESCAP. An interesting pilot is the SMS literacy project initiated in three districts in Pakistan by UNESCO and Mobilink. Adolescent girls were able to retain newly acquired literacy skills by using mobile phones to receive and send SMS messages in Urdu and copy them into their workbooks over a four-month period.
2. Language will cease to be the barrier it is today because of breakthroughs in localizing content. Exceptional ideas, techniques, and literature will more easily be shared, appreciated, and put into practice across cultures. Computer programmers are rapidly developing sophisticated tools that enable translation between languages at lightening speed and, increasingly, even account for cultural nuances in meaning. Although a human touch is still ideal for translation, this technology-driven localization solution will vastly change our lives and break down communication challenges among users of different languages. In the near future it means that students and reformers will more easily access the information they need even if it is not published in a language they speak.
3. Education will become widely accessible, more affordable, and less exclusive. Today, circumstances of birth, income, and geography greatly affect an individual’s ability to access quality education. This is changing rapidly in the higher education sphere thanks to the Open Education Resource (OER) movement and initiatives such as iTunes University and Open CourseWare (OCW). Launched by MIT in 2001 and supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the OCW Consortium’s 250 universities and associated organizations from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas offer more than 13,000 college level courses in 20 languages entirely free. The site boasts 133 million visits by 95 million visitors from virtually every country. The OCW Mirror Site Program provides the same content on hard drives to educational organizations with limited or costly internet access.
Distance learning is part of this phenomenon. Increasingly, governments, technology companies, and educators are partnering to upgrade capacity and extend education to remote areas. For example, in Sri Lanka, the cellular company Mobitel and the University of Colombo are beginning to offer post-graduate courses using broadband mobile links to students anywhere in Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
While physical books will remain an appropriate technology for delivering education to our partners in many parts of Asia for years to come, technology’s potential to help Books for Asia meet its mission to improve access to information and opportunity is undeniable as we look ahead. That’s why we are launching a new “Technology Start-up Fund: Access for Asia.” The brand-new fund will support promising projects incubated by our in-country staff in collaboration with creative education organizations, publishers, technology companies, and donors.
Melody Zavala is the director of The Asia Foundation’s Books for Asia Program. She can be reached at mzavala@asiafound.org. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual author and not those of The Asia Foundation