If the company needs you trained up on Oracle, point out to them that Oracle has an excellent training program that will get you up to speed (and certified!) in just a few weeks. Their training has many paths and areas of focus---DBA, developer, etc. They even do specialty training on stuff like Oracle Spatial (their GIS specialty module)
As you have pointed out, Oracle is a big 'un. If your company wants to entrust its data to it, they should entrust its care to an employee they've trained to use it.
If they try to be ominous to you, all "Well, maybe instead of training you we should just hire somebody who's already trained," point out to them that in the long run it would cost them a lot more to train an Oracle guy to replace you than it will to train an existing employee to do Oracle. This of course assumes you're good at your job, that the skills you exercise for them are reasonably non-generic, and that you have been with them for some time.
Once you're trained, you'll have some idea of what to look for in a book. That is when you start buying books.
Oh, and install a copy of Oracle on your RHEL box at home, and client stuff on your XP box. You do have a RHEL box and an XP box at home, don't you? All that's available for download from Oracle.
Apple also puts stickers on all iPods asking you not to pirate music.
All the sex shops here have racks and racks of exotic toys, all labeled "for novelty purposes only," because in Atlanta it's illegal to sell a dildo.
And all the head shops all sell "water pipes."
In either place, if you start asking questions about getting high or getting off, you get kicked out.
Interestingly enough, you can walk right into a gun shop and say "I need a gun to kill my husband with" and they'll still sell it to you (maybe). Okay, you have to go outside the city limits for that. I love that you have to go outside the city limits to buy a dildo or a gun, and I've seen more than one bumper sticker that says "when dildos are outlawed, only outlaws will have dildos."
Maybe if they called a gun a "hole punch" the way they call a bong a "water pipe" we could skirt this whole issue. I mean, we call it "the Internet" instead of "all the music and porno in the world for free," right?
I have not "tried to argue" that copying 100 microfilms costs the same as copying 100 sets of bits. That's inane. What I have argued is that if this data is important enough to preserve for a century, it should be archived to a non-digital medium. And after the initial transfer, the cost of duplicating a master film is...
Ah, fuck it. I'm tired of doing your research for you. You log in as an AC, then expect a legitimate user to Google "lifetime of microfilm" and "cost of microfilm transfer" because you're too sorry to educate yourself. I no longer see any benefit in changing the relationship between my knowledge and your ignorance.
The only reason use Slashdot as an Anonymous Coward is if you would be fired, arrested, or sued for your post.
How are you planning to store microfilm for a century
In a drawer or filing cabinet.
and what are guarantees that it'll actually stay preserved for that long?
Wet-film microfilm has an estimated survivability of 500 years in ideal conditions and a minimum of 100 years in any reasonable conditions. To my knowledge this exceeds the lifetime of any digital medium.
It's fairly trivial to store redundant copies of your digital files, even in multiple locations worldwide. The costs are minimal too.
It's fairly trivial to store redundant copies of your microfilm, even in multiple locations worldwide. The costs are minimal too.
If you want to guarantee that the work can be read in fifty years, get the pages converted to microfilm or microfiche. Then they can be read a century from now by anybody with a light source and a magnifer. Consult your local university library on how have this done. It's quite possible you'll end up scanning it all to TIFF files and sending a DVD to a service bureau, thereby giving yourself a digital copy as well.
Unless you need the capability to grep the documents, there's little point in digitizing old notes. Digitization carries a number of risks, anyway, not the least of which is that in a few decades (and by "a few" I mean one or two) you may find the information unreadable by any still-functioning hardware. Then again, you could just upload it to "the Internet" and let various system administrators guarantee its perpetuity.
A frank question you have to ask, though, is how important it is to preserve this information. A strong test is how often anyone has needed to refer to these old notes in the intervening years. It's difficult to say this about the output of one's labor, but it may well be that it truly serves no further purpose and what you really need to do is bypass the scanner, go directly to the recycling center and bid it all farewell.
Except that a computer is not strictly required to geocache. A GPS is. Or a really excellent set of maps. A geocache is a physical object located at map coordinates. Computers are used to facilitate geocaching, but geocache is not a computer term.
Computers already have a few homonyms anyway, like "key". I press a key to create a letter, and I use a key to encrypt a letter to Grandma.
I'll stop referring to the discussed activity as "Geocaching" as soon as you stop referring to UCE as "Spam" and hidden features of software or DVDs as "Easter Eggs." For that matter, stop calling the person who operates an aircraft as a "pilot." Depending on which version of English you speak, also please stop referring to the luggage compartment at the rear of your automobile as either a "boot" or a "trunk."
Every gas station I passed on the way home had a line of cars coming out the driveway. Prices have jumped by at least $1/gallon for all grades. One station wanted $4.399 for regular unleaded and they still had buyers waiting (despite a station half a mile away asking a "mere" $3.599).
Sunday I topped off my motorcycle for $2.59/gallon for midrange. Good thing I get 40mi/gal.
I'm starting to remember that the worst thing about the 1970s wasn't the music.
Several key oil refineries are down right now, this could mean higher gas and heating bills down the road this year.
The refineries aren't that badly damaged. The problem is that they have no power. As for higher prices, there's a more immediate concern: The gas and oil pipelines in the region have no power. They may not get power for another two weeks. Atlanta has not received new gasoline in two days. Retailers typically have a ten day reserve.
So my immediate concern is not how much gas will cost but whether there will be gas to buy at all. I guess we won't be driving to Grandma's for Labor Day after all.
Don't be too proud of this one, you're 100% wrong.
*Sigh*. At no point did I say a user could rename his account. I said that changing a user's name under Unix was trivial, and it is---generally a matter of editing one or two textfiles. If an administrator needs to change the user's name (to correct the spelling, add disambiguation, meet new departmental standards) and if (as the parent post seems to imply) the password algorithm is using the contents of the name field as salt to md5, the user's old password is broken.
So I am 100% wrong only if your assumption that I think users can change their own account names is right. Unfortunately, it is 100% wrong. Neener neener neener.
A second weakness of the proposed system is that if the username is known to the cracker, then the salt is also known, again making dictionary attacks viable.
The most obvious reason I can think of is that under Unix it is trivial to change a username as everything in the system is done by the uid. If the username is used for password salt, a change to the username would require a change to the password.
As was mentioned before, a string of random characters, stored in the clear, makes better salt.
On a completely unrelated note, this is my 1000th post to Slashdot. It's a dubious accomplishment: I'm rather proud of some of the things I've written here, but the effort to create 1000 Slashdot posts is probably greater than the effort to write a textbook or a novel.
First, since no animal has to die to create this meat, moral arguments for vegetarianism do not apply (health matters (particularly regarding cholesterol and saturated fat) still apply).
Second, it will only be a matter of time before human meat is grown by this method. And you thought bacon was tasty!
A small sideways thought: I wonder what rabbis will have to say about this. Since the pork chops wouldn't come off of an actual pig, would it be kosher or not? Also, that bit at communion where Christians say "this is my body," wouldn't it be cool if they could use actual human flesh?
Would somebody please register "JeremyMalcolmIsAnObnoxiousFuckheadnux?" so I can start marketing my JeremyMalcolmIsAFuckheadnux-compatible video card drivers?
Otherwise I'm just going to have to start calling it Lin*x.
Java's "music" class library appears to support every musical instrument in the symphony but on closer inspection requires you to understand metallurgy before you can instantiate a trombone, and spit valves are in the open position by default. C++'s music library on the other hand assumes that all brass insturments are, at their most fundamental level, a kazoo. You can drive it with anything from bare lips to a jet-powered compressor, but despite Stroustrup devoting eight pages to protected
abstract virtual base pure virtual private kazoo destructors, never once in the 20-year standardization process did anyone notice there is no member function called play().
I use a Week-at-a-Glance academic day planner. It also has month pages where I can write notes like "OS paper" or "AI topic due." On the page for that week I write more detail like "AI topic due 5PM e-mail OK use template www.cs.blabla/~prof/ai/template.doc".
Very visual, fits easily in backpack, can be sat on, does not crash or fail or consume batteries, is large enough to see all of October and excatly why the third week in October is going to suck. They also have a page for writing in your default weekly schedule. The very best part is that data entry is very fast and an utter breeze---no fake keyboard, no stylus, no strange Graffiti font to struggle with writing accurately enough for the PDA to tell a 'Y' from a 'T' from a 'U'. You just write.
These planners cost about $15/year.
Overteching is often the sign of a freshman. Every year I see eager, well-scrubbed kids and trying to take class notes on their laptop. This usually lasts a week or two. If you see a junior or senior using a laptop in class, he's either finishing up a paper or playing games.
It sounds as though you have already made an ethical about how fast you drive and have decided to abide by it. What boggles me, though, is that despite having made this decision, you seem to insist on having a camera pointed at you to help you enforce it.
It's like a six year old saying, "Mommy, if you see me playing in the creek you should spank me."
I've had the opportunity to visit Australia as a tourist and aside from a few delightful cities the rest of the continent is the middle of fucking nowhere. It's beautiful nowhere, occasionally even interesting, but it's also the sort of nowhere where you can put a brick on the accelerator and take a nap because there's nothing between the nowhere you are and the nowhere you're going but more nowhere.
So why does all this nowhere have a 100km/h speed limit that is supposed to apply to every type of vehicle and driver, in every weather condition and visibility, regardless of the time of day?
In cities, pedestrian crossing, and other target-rich environments, I can understand the urgency behind enforcing the speed limit. In those areas, the limits are often set by engineers who may know something the typical driver does not. But out in the middle of all that beautiful nowhere, the only limitations a pragmatic engineer will find are the horsepower and drag coefficient of the vehicle.
I did RTA, which is why I related the experience of taking a class whose textbook was only available through the purchase of a one year license. I also think that a 33% discount is absurdly small. That 33% is probably the cost of printing a book; why won't 67% of the paper-edition's cost buy you a permanent e-book?
most students don't care at all about a class after their final. If you're just going to sell back the book anyway...
So why does Random House get to keep all the money from its resale? Publishers are so excited about e-books because there is no such thing as a "used" e-book. Paper books have the tragic flaw of being redistributable---they can be resold many times, can be borrowed, can even be given away, but the publisher only gets paid once. That's un-American, that is.
My fear is that the DRM'd e-books in these schools are a market test---if they're profitable (and they will be), the paper editions will disappear completely and knowledge will only be available on per-user basis. The extreme case is that when Fahrenheit 451 happens, it won't be about censorship; it will be about protecting citizens against unlicensed knowledge. Book-hoarders will be called eco-terrorists and tree killers. The victory will be complete when Enron can protect its felony-admitting memos simply by turning them off.
My digital image processing class is going to be pretty math intensive --- probability, statistics, integrals, vectors, Fourier transforms. I will be referring constantly to a math textbook I used two terms ago. If it had expired at the end of the semester, I'd be fucked this term.
I am a student at Georgia State University, so this crap at Princeton does not apply to me. I want to relate a personal experience, though:
My first encounter with an e-textbook was a tech writing class last fall. The "book" was a license to use a website for a year. I did not purchase the textbook and I got an A in the class anyway.
My current coarse load has me reading
TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 1 by Stevens
Unix Network Programming by Stevens
Computer Networking by Kurose & Ross
Database Systems by Elmasri & Navathe
Digital Image Processing by Gonzalez & Woods
Each of these---and particularly the Stevens books---belongs on any programmer's reference shelf if he does work in those subject areas. Can you imagine being forced to turn in your copy of Unix Network Programming at the end of the semester, only to have to buy another at the start of your career? Evidently Princeton sees no problem with this.
The object of education is to make permanent improvements to students' minds. Upon graduation the students can and must have the right to take not just that knowledge but its source materials as well.
I call upon all students to send a message to their schools: knowledge has no expiration date, and neither should textbooks. Start a petition! Organize mass class-drops for courses that require expiring texts. Pressure instructors to sign a pledge. Pressure departments to adopt a policy. Demand that your school accept new editions at most once every five years (with exceptions only for current technologies, fashion trends, etc.). Calculus hasn't changed in a century; why am I using an 7th edition calculus book?
Students do not exist for the benefit of textbook companies. Never forget that. Textbooks exist so their knowledge can become a permanent part of students' knowledge. The only reason to offer temporary information is if it's not going to matter a year from now. And if it's not going to matter a year from now, why is any college teaching it?
Most F/OSS I know of has capital-letter support build right in instead of being a value-added option you obviously were too cheap to spring for. You had to cut'n'paste to get "M$" into your post, didn't you?
With destroying websites hosted in a country without said country's permission: you're destroying property in another country, without the blessing of applicable law.
I'm not convinced that any government's sovereignty was violated, or for that matter that there is any applicable law in the circumstance.
Here are some possibilities:
British Intelligence successfully hacked and destroyed the web sites, whose admins decided faith is just as good as backups.
Whatever country they are hosted in agreed to order the sites shut down.
Instead of being destroyed or taken down, they have been blacklisted at the switch.
Al Qaeda forgot to renew its domain registration.
The servers were crashed by an irate third party.
The servers crashed all by theyselves because the admins were too busy hatin' to RTFM.
They forgot to pay their Microsoft licensing fees and Microsoft DRM'd them.
They got TOS'd for advocating violence.
As for using cruise missiles to knock out terrorist training facilities in Afghanistan: That was in reaction to an act of war. Two acts, actually: Those camps were used by the terrorist organization that bombed two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998. The host country's government was utterly complicit (and repeatedly said they would never hand over the terrorist leader), so on August 20, 1998, we blew up the camps, and we were well-justified in doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
'Did you see his eyes? Like gimlets!'
'You mean like that Dwarf who runs the delicatessen on Cable Street?'
As you have pointed out, Oracle is a big 'un. If your company wants to entrust its data to it, they should entrust its care to an employee they've trained to use it.
If they try to be ominous to you, all "Well, maybe instead of training you we should just hire somebody who's already trained," point out to them that in the long run it would cost them a lot more to train an Oracle guy to replace you than it will to train an existing employee to do Oracle. This of course assumes you're good at your job, that the skills you exercise for them are reasonably non-generic, and that you have been with them for some time.
Once you're trained, you'll have some idea of what to look for in a book. That is when you start buying books.
Oh, and install a copy of Oracle on your RHEL box at home, and client stuff on your XP box. You do have a RHEL box and an XP box at home, don't you? All that's available for download from Oracle.
285 and Memorial, thereabouts. When I lived in Grant Park I would go to the range down I-75 by the Farmers' Market. Not sure where I'll shoot now.
All the sex shops here have racks and racks of exotic toys, all labeled "for novelty purposes only," because in Atlanta it's illegal to sell a dildo.
And all the head shops all sell "water pipes."
In either place, if you start asking questions about getting high or getting off, you get kicked out.
Interestingly enough, you can walk right into a gun shop and say "I need a gun to kill my husband with" and they'll still sell it to you (maybe). Okay, you have to go outside the city limits for that. I love that you have to go outside the city limits to buy a dildo or a gun, and I've seen more than one bumper sticker that says "when dildos are outlawed, only outlaws will have dildos."
Maybe if they called a gun a "hole punch" the way they call a bong a "water pipe" we could skirt this whole issue. I mean, we call it "the Internet" instead of "all the music and porno in the world for free," right?
Ah, fuck it. I'm tired of doing your research for you. You log in as an AC, then expect a legitimate user to Google "lifetime of microfilm" and "cost of microfilm transfer" because you're too sorry to educate yourself. I no longer see any benefit in changing the relationship between my knowledge and your ignorance.
The only reason use Slashdot as an Anonymous Coward is if you would be fired, arrested, or sued for your post.
In a drawer or filing cabinet.
and what are guarantees that it'll actually stay preserved for that long?
Wet-film microfilm has an estimated survivability of 500 years in ideal conditions and a minimum of 100 years in any reasonable conditions. To my knowledge this exceeds the lifetime of any digital medium.
It's fairly trivial to store redundant copies of your digital files, even in multiple locations worldwide. The costs are minimal too.
It's fairly trivial to store redundant copies of your microfilm, even in multiple locations worldwide. The costs are minimal too.
Unless you need the capability to grep the documents, there's little point in digitizing old notes. Digitization carries a number of risks, anyway, not the least of which is that in a few decades (and by "a few" I mean one or two) you may find the information unreadable by any still-functioning hardware. Then again, you could just upload it to "the Internet" and let various system administrators guarantee its perpetuity.
A frank question you have to ask, though, is how important it is to preserve this information. A strong test is how often anyone has needed to refer to these old notes in the intervening years. It's difficult to say this about the output of one's labor, but it may well be that it truly serves no further purpose and what you really need to do is bypass the scanner, go directly to the recycling center and bid it all farewell.
Computers already have a few homonyms anyway, like "key". I press a key to create a letter, and I use a key to encrypt a letter to Grandma.
I'll stop referring to the discussed activity as "Geocaching" as soon as you stop referring to UCE as "Spam" and hidden features of software or DVDs as "Easter Eggs." For that matter, stop calling the person who operates an aircraft as a "pilot." Depending on which version of English you speak, also please stop referring to the luggage compartment at the rear of your automobile as either a "boot" or a "trunk."
I've had that song running through my head since Tuesday.
Sunday I topped off my motorcycle for $2.59/gallon for midrange. Good thing I get 40mi/gal.
I'm starting to remember that the worst thing about the 1970s wasn't the music.
Oh, and did I mention that if Atlanta runs out of fuel, then the busiest airport in America runs out of fuel, too?
The refineries aren't that badly damaged. The problem is that they have no power. As for higher prices, there's a more immediate concern: The gas and oil pipelines in the region have no power. They may not get power for another two weeks. Atlanta has not received new gasoline in two days. Retailers typically have a ten day reserve.
So my immediate concern is not how much gas will cost but whether there will be gas to buy at all. I guess we won't be driving to Grandma's for Labor Day after all.
*Sigh*. At no point did I say a user could rename his account. I said that changing a user's name under Unix was trivial, and it is---generally a matter of editing one or two textfiles. If an administrator needs to change the user's name (to correct the spelling, add disambiguation, meet new departmental standards) and if (as the parent post seems to imply) the password algorithm is using the contents of the name field as salt to md5, the user's old password is broken.
So I am 100% wrong only if your assumption that I think users can change their own account names is right. Unfortunately, it is 100% wrong. Neener neener neener.
A second weakness of the proposed system is that if the username is known to the cracker, then the salt is also known, again making dictionary attacks viable.
As was mentioned before, a string of random characters, stored in the clear, makes better salt.
On a completely unrelated note, this is my 1000th post to Slashdot. It's a dubious accomplishment: I'm rather proud of some of the things I've written here, but the effort to create 1000 Slashdot posts is probably greater than the effort to write a textbook or a novel.
Second, it will only be a matter of time before human meat is grown by this method. And you thought bacon was tasty!
A small sideways thought: I wonder what rabbis will have to say about this. Since the pork chops wouldn't come off of an actual pig, would it be kosher or not? Also, that bit at communion where Christians say "this is my body," wouldn't it be cool if they could use actual human flesh?
Would somebody please register "JeremyMalcolmIsAnObnoxiousFuckheadnux?" so I can start marketing my JeremyMalcolmIsAFuckheadnux-compatible video card drivers?
Otherwise I'm just going to have to start calling it Lin*x.
Java is C++ without the giant rotating knives.
Java's "music" class library appears to support every musical instrument in the symphony but on closer inspection requires you to understand metallurgy before you can instantiate a trombone, and spit valves are in the open position by default. C++'s music library on the other hand assumes that all brass insturments are, at their most fundamental level, a kazoo. You can drive it with anything from bare lips to a jet-powered compressor, but despite Stroustrup devoting eight pages to protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private kazoo destructors, never once in the 20-year standardization process did anyone notice there is no member function called play().
Very visual, fits easily in backpack, can be sat on, does not crash or fail or consume batteries, is large enough to see all of October and excatly why the third week in October is going to suck. They also have a page for writing in your default weekly schedule. The very best part is that data entry is very fast and an utter breeze---no fake keyboard, no stylus, no strange Graffiti font to struggle with writing accurately enough for the PDA to tell a 'Y' from a 'T' from a 'U'. You just write.
These planners cost about $15/year.
Overteching is often the sign of a freshman. Every year I see eager, well-scrubbed kids and trying to take class notes on their laptop. This usually lasts a week or two. If you see a junior or senior using a laptop in class, he's either finishing up a paper or playing games.
It's like a six year old saying, "Mommy, if you see me playing in the creek you should spank me."
I've had the opportunity to visit Australia as a tourist and aside from a few delightful cities the rest of the continent is the middle of fucking nowhere. It's beautiful nowhere, occasionally even interesting, but it's also the sort of nowhere where you can put a brick on the accelerator and take a nap because there's nothing between the nowhere you are and the nowhere you're going but more nowhere.
So why does all this nowhere have a 100km/h speed limit that is supposed to apply to every type of vehicle and driver, in every weather condition and visibility, regardless of the time of day?
In cities, pedestrian crossing, and other target-rich environments, I can understand the urgency behind enforcing the speed limit. In those areas, the limits are often set by engineers who may know something the typical driver does not. But out in the middle of all that beautiful nowhere, the only limitations a pragmatic engineer will find are the horsepower and drag coefficient of the vehicle.
most students don't care at all about a class after their final. If you're just going to sell back the book anyway...
So why does Random House get to keep all the money from its resale? Publishers are so excited about e-books because there is no such thing as a "used" e-book. Paper books have the tragic flaw of being redistributable---they can be resold many times, can be borrowed, can even be given away, but the publisher only gets paid once. That's un-American, that is.
My fear is that the DRM'd e-books in these schools are a market test---if they're profitable (and they will be), the paper editions will disappear completely and knowledge will only be available on per-user basis. The extreme case is that when Fahrenheit 451 happens, it won't be about censorship; it will be about protecting citizens against unlicensed knowledge. Book-hoarders will be called eco-terrorists and tree killers. The victory will be complete when Enron can protect its felony-admitting memos simply by turning them off.
My digital image processing class is going to be pretty math intensive --- probability, statistics, integrals, vectors, Fourier transforms. I will be referring constantly to a math textbook I used two terms ago. If it had expired at the end of the semester, I'd be fucked this term.
My first encounter with an e-textbook was a tech writing class last fall. The "book" was a license to use a website for a year. I did not purchase the textbook and I got an A in the class anyway.
My current coarse load has me reading
- TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 1 by Stevens
- Unix Network Programming by Stevens
- Computer Networking by Kurose & Ross
- Database Systems by Elmasri & Navathe
- Digital Image Processing by Gonzalez & Woods
Each of these---and particularly the Stevens books---belongs on any programmer's reference shelf if he does work in those subject areas. Can you imagine being forced to turn in your copy of Unix Network Programming at the end of the semester, only to have to buy another at the start of your career? Evidently Princeton sees no problem with this.The object of education is to make permanent improvements to students' minds. Upon graduation the students can and must have the right to take not just that knowledge but its source materials as well.
I call upon all students to send a message to their schools: knowledge has no expiration date, and neither should textbooks. Start a petition! Organize mass class-drops for courses that require expiring texts. Pressure instructors to sign a pledge. Pressure departments to adopt a policy. Demand that your school accept new editions at most once every five years (with exceptions only for current technologies, fashion trends, etc.). Calculus hasn't changed in a century; why am I using an 7th edition calculus book?
Students do not exist for the benefit of textbook companies. Never forget that. Textbooks exist so their knowledge can become a permanent part of students' knowledge. The only reason to offer temporary information is if it's not going to matter a year from now. And if it's not going to matter a year from now, why is any college teaching it?
Most F/OSS I know of has capital-letter support build right in instead of being a value-added option you obviously were too cheap to spring for. You had to cut'n'paste to get "M$" into your post, didn't you?
I'm not convinced that any government's sovereignty was violated, or for that matter that there is any applicable law in the circumstance.
Here are some possibilities:
As for using cruise missiles to knock out terrorist training facilities in Afghanistan: That was in reaction to an act of war. Two acts, actually: Those camps were used by the terrorist organization that bombed two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998. The host country's government was utterly complicit (and repeatedly said they would never hand over the terrorist leader), so on August 20, 1998, we blew up the camps, and we were well-justified in doing so.