Oracle: determine maximum number of connections suppported
How to check the maximum number of allowed connections to an Oracle database?
Why does Benford's Law (or Zipf's Law) hold? Both  (if you take a list of values, the distribution of the most significant digit is rougly proportional to the logarithm of the digit) and  (given a corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is roughly inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table) are not theorems in a mathematical sense, but they work quite good in the real life.   Does anyone have an idea why this happens?  (see also ) Selling a car with a lien I own a car personally, but it is mortgaged to a bank. I want to sell it to an individual. I haven't the funds to repay the loan until I'm paid for the car. The buyer doesn't want to pay me without a lien release (or guarantee that one is coming). The bank won't release the lien until it gets the funds. What do people do in a case like this? It must be a common case. What should I do? Should I buy a Canon 55-250mm lens or 70-300mm for my Rebel T3i? I have the basic 18-55mm lens that came with my camera but I need a next step up that's not too expensive.   What are the most common types of photos shot with either lenses? Or what is each lens best for? Is there a way to exclude other particle systems from the effects of a Wind effect? I have a scene with a number of particle systems. I'd like to have a separate wind effect for my main scene and another for an extra: an emitter + wind-effect to blow leaves into my scene. I can't find any way to exclude, so here I am. At the very worst, I can just render the main scene and then render the wind effect and composite it, but I figured I'd check first. Value of recommendation letters from professors in a different field How can energy be useful when it is 'abstract'? The topic which haunted me for two years until I gave up on it. But now I am doing engineering and this topic suddenly popped out of my textbook from nowhere. I seriously need to understand this topic because I wasn't able to do so in the past. I have read many book on 'energy' and it came to nothing. Maybe just because the many books I have read all said 'energy' is something which doesn't 'exist'! It is 'abstract'! It is just a number which represents the state or orientation of a system. But then I see so many examples that 'uses' energy to do 'work'. But the question here is that if anything doesn't exist in this universe, then how can the same thing be used to do something that exist?  My problem is that I didn't understood the topic 'energy' and all the other topics related to it (work, power etc.) The other day I was looking at Stack Overflow on my Android phone. All is made very nice and all, but I could not find the Review button/link. Is it being implemented, did I miss it, or it is not available? How to call shell commands from Ruby How do I call shell commands from inside of a Ruby program? How do I then get output from these commands back into Ruby? Power series of a function I am wondering if there are any functions $f(x)$ such that it cannot be expressed as a power series of $x$? This might turn out to be a silly question, but I can't think of one at the moment.   Thanks! Many people want to try/use Android without buying a new Android phone.  How can I install Android on my current phone or device running Nokia Symbian, Maemo, or MeeGo; Microsoft Windows Mobile or Windows Phone 7/8/10; Apple iOS (iPhone); RIM's BlackBerry OS; Palm's WebOS; Samsung's Bada; HP's WebOS; Mozilla's Firefox OS; or other phone / operating system? Why does a Tesla car use an AC motor instead of a DC one? I was just watching a mega factory video and wondered why they use an AC motor which requires a power inverter instead of DC which may be powered directly from their DC battery? Introducing an inverter means more cost (weight, controller, etc).  Are there any reasons for that? What are the differences between an AC and DC motor that may have lead to this decision? Also does anyone know what kind of motor is used in other electric cars? After a brief discussion with @MonicaCellio (In the comment) - It has come to my attention that perhaps I chose the wrong words to describe my original idea (In the edit history). When I wrote "social features" I was actually suggesting an alternative way to for users to share their knowledge using a new type of post and articles and not just by questions and answers.   The basics of my idea was to allow users to write articles on topics relevant to the community on the SE websites just as any answer posted is expected  to be too. Allowing users to write their own content (I.E posts/articles/etc..) will be granted as a privilege for advanced users so that not anyone could write stupid things, users that will write content must be established and well-familiar with the rules of SE.   I know anyone can start a blog, but it's require frequent maintenance and content updates, while writing on SE ensure that it addressed to a large, well-established community, with a similar fields of interest.  Posts writing will follow the same guidelines as asking and answering questions does, but it will provide an alternative for users that are mostly answering specific questions, as a new method to contribute to the community.   By writing, one may also reveal more about their personality, wit, way of thinking, ETC. That's when the "social" takes place - You'll also have "authors" and not just "users" you can remember by their catchy name, but people that you can remember by the field of interest they are writing content about.   They key points will be:    Users will be able write rich content with advanced WYSIWYG HTML editor, content that doesn't require a question to answer, but that is still relevant to the SE website it is writing on. Users will be able to Upvote/Downvote other users posts. Posts will be listed on their author profile, so it will not just show the activity, but additional layer of user generated content. Popular posts with high reputation could be associated to tags making the information of tags richer with user generated content Users will be able to include links in answers not only to other questions, but also to posts. User will be able to comment on post to allow the author to correct and improve it. It will improve the interaction and offline discussions (Which are prohibited when it come to long discussions on questions and answers). I believe that users will be happy to share their own tutorials, tips and tricks - Because they are already doing so when answering questions, but before the can start, they'll have to earn enough reputation to ensure that only high profile users will be able to write high profile content, and not just any rubbish. It will provide another type of method for voting and getting earning reputation Users will be able to include content in their CVs on SO Jobs.  Opportunity to earn some new badges.   So it's a Mega feature request and it require some detailed design work, but I do think that it will invite a new type of activity for users on SO (and the rests of the sites of-course). Points at integer distance How many points can one can place in $\mathbb{R}^n$, with the requirement that no $n+1$ points lie in the same $\mathbb{R}^{n-1}$-plane, and the euclidean distance between every two points is an integer? Does anyone know where I can find cheat codes for Goldeneye 007 Wii? I know that the game hasn't even been out for a week, but does anyone know if any cheat codes have been released by Activision yet?  I know that they must exist since there is a cheat codes menu within the game. Operator norm. Alternative definition Is there an app that will notify me (in notifications center) if a process is using up a high percentage of CPU for a specified amount of time? The other day, I was sitting in a coffee shop working, when I looked down to find that 25% of my battery was left.   I looked at my Activity Monitor and saw that the time machine process was going at 90% for a while (as long as I was watching it).   Are there any apps that can notify me if a process is at a certain level for a certain amount of time? I normally use the following idiom to check if a String can be converted to an integer.  public boolean isInteger( String input ) {     try {         Integer.parseInt( input );         return true;     }     catch( Exception e ) {         return false;     } }   Is it just me, or does this seem a bit hackish?  What's a better way?    See my answer (with benchmarks, based on the  by ) to see why I've reversed my position and accepted  to this problem.  I think this original code will be used by most people because it's quicker to implement, and more maintainable, but it's orders of magnitude slower when non-integer data is provided. zsh scripting - How do I NOT match a pattern in filename generation? I'm currently trying to loop through a set of directories, but only the ones I care about.   $ ls -d */ cfdpost_statefiles/     p050L0260/  p050L0510/  p060L0390/  p070L0260/  p070L0510/  p092L0390/  p097L0260/  p110L0390/  p131L0325/  p150L0510/  profiles/ ERCOFTAC_TestSettings/  p050L0390/  p060L0260/  p060L0510/  p070L0390/  p084L0510/  p094L0325/  p100L0510/  p125L0510/  p136L0260/  p162L0260/  settings/   I want to match all the p###* directories except for the ones beginning with p125 and p150.  If I just do patterns with a pipe, I get:  $ for dir in ./p(125|150)*(/); echo $dir ./p125L0510 ./p150L0510   However, if I try and use the ^ like it shows :  $ for dir in ./p^(125|150)*(/); echo $dir zsh: no matches found: ./p^(125|150)*(/)   Any ideas how to proceed? Windows 8 skype is terrible.  They've removed many buttons, most of the preferences, and have in general made it impossibly oversimplified and difficult to use.  Old Skype was fine when I had windows 7.  Is there any way to get it back on Windows 8? Is there a standard for public key encrypting and signing short messages? Some systems, that operate over flaky bearers, need to send signed, encrypted messages that are entirely self contained - i.e. send a single 300 byte UDP rather than have a 10Kb, two-way, certificate conversation over TCP.  Assume the destination has a private key and already knows the source's public key, and the source has a private key and already knows the destination's public key.  Given this assumption, is there a standard for encrypting/signing a small, but arbitrary length, message?  (I'm well aware of the dangers of rolling my own encryption scheme.)  Would there be a minimum ciphertext size that is related to the public key size?  (I'm thinking plain PKI encryption for plaintexts shorter than the key, and a PKI encrypted AES key for longer plaintexts.)