Historically, I'd agree with you. I've installed Oracle on many *nix systems, starting with Solaris more than 10 years ago. The only upside to making such an attempt is that you really feel you've accomplished something when you do manage to get it to work.
But Oracle 10g Express is a breeze to install, at least on RHEL4, which is where I've done so. It is a single rpm. I had no problems with dependencies. You run a configure script and it walks you through the handful of steps, in simple English and you're good to go.
It is a text based script, so none of their Java madness. It starts up the database and the listener. It asks you if you want to have the DB start at bootup. It is just sweet. It even has a simple, well designed web app for management.
Oh, and it is free to use in development and production.
> Interestingly, where normal humans had needs of 100 meg, 1 gig, 100 gig storage spaces, this represents the first leap beyond what the ordinary person could ever hope to use. People always say this. I have around 100 movies on DVD. 100 X 4.7GB =.5 TB. Add music and presto. Once again the "will never needs" are wrong again.
There are many methods of improving security. Requiring users to change passwords is not one.
Choosing a good password is difficult. You need it to be easy for a user to remember, but hard for anyone else to guess. If it is difficult for the user to remember, it will end up on a PostIt on his monitor. If it is easy to guess, then many methods will work to compromise the account.
Requiring a user to change his password on a regular basis means that the user must come up with more passwords. The average quality of that password will almost always be less than that of a single good password. They are less likely to even try and come up with a good password if they have to change it frequently. So the quality will almost always be less.
The amount of time to crack a password using straight brute force methods is almost always much greater than the expiration period. So attempts to foil such an attempt with password expiration. If a password space would take 10 years to check, having a user's password expire every 10 years is not really useful.
If a user's password is going to be broken, it will almost always happen through means other than brute force. Either through the PostIt method, social engineering, dictionary attacks, using personal information. These attacks take much less time than you could reasonable expire a password. Let's say you require changes every month. The above attacks would take anywhere from a couple minutes to a few hours. The compromise would happen on average with 15 days left before the password would expire. Once compromised, there is little (but not no) value in closing the barn door. Detecting and rectifying these situations are better handled through other means, especially since changing the password never let's anyone know that a compromise ever occured, even though it stops it (though most likely, the person will still have access through other means once they got in).
Expiring passwords not only doesn't improve overall security, it lessens it. The few minor advantages are far outweighed by the downsides of such a policy.
I've seen probably seven or eight films in digital. Toy Story 2, Dinosaur, Perfect Storm, Monster's Inc. being a few. I've seen a couple in both digital and on 35mm. Here is what I found.
I prefer the digital, especially for animated films. The color saturation is much better, the picture is rock solid as compared to film (you don't really notice the shaking on a normal film until you see the digital equivalent, though when you see bleeding during credits, this is one example) and a pristine copy from the first day to the last are the biggest things I preferred.
Animation is really best able to take advantage of the format (especially cgi). It allows these films to avoid filmstock throughout their entire lifecycle. Plus, it tends to have very little noise in it which makes it a better candidate for compression and less artifact prone (though I don't remember any egregious problems with any of the live action films I've seen).
There are still problems. There are noticeable digital artifacts. Movement can look bad. But it is still early on in the life of these techniques.
I believe that the projecters use are 3 chip DLP's with a resolution of 1280x1024. It really is amazing how good a picture they can produce.
Stereohpile's Guide to Home Theater has had an excellent set of home theater PC articles over the last six months or so. It's definitely worth checking out for details on what is out there and what works well.
The more recent articles are not on their website, but are available in the print edition, though they mostly cover new software players. Definitely check out the first item listed and follow the links to the manufacturers of turnkey HTPC systems.
I was at the CES. There were lots of DVD recorders, including some for HD. Only JVC supports the D-VHS format. Writeable DVD is already available (though in 4 different formats DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW & DVD-RAM). Everyone was showing these.
HD DVD was a bit rarer. Pioneer had a prototype machine running DVR-Blue which used a blue laser to fit 22.x GB of storage on a disc, enough to hold ~2 hours of 1080 video. I don't which writeable technology will win out in the long run, but whatever it is, it is going to put the VCR to bed in the long run.
The more likely competition will be with DVR (Tivo/ReplayTV).
The fact that you can read about and discuss potential threats to your privacy is a pretty good indicator that you could do a lot worse. Given that businesses want to make a profit, they are always going to move in the direction that helps them maximize that profit. It is the place of government and the voice of the people to pull in the other direction in order to keep a reasonable balance. This equilibrium shifts all the time, but in general hasn't continued in any one direction, be it good or bad (and whatever you consider good and bad, someone else calls bad and good), for any sizeable portion of our history.
So businesses trying to make more money via any means necessary and people doing what they can to make this known and reverse the trend is just how this little country of ours works.
The first thing to do is determine whether you are going to need full administrative services or whether you are just looking for bandwidth. Both are available, but make a number of differences in what to look for.
Once you've decided what you want, find out who else uses a given service. This applies both if you are looking for bandwith only or are looking for full service. You want access to be fast. You want it to be reliable. Do traceroutes from different locations to determine response times to the other clients of the service you are looking at. You can figure out a lot about their peering arangements and see if there are problems with a given site.
Ask them directly about their peering arangements. Find out about failover strategies. Ask them about service guarantees and make sure that partial refunds on service are available if those marks aren't met. This is key. If they don't meet their obligations, they don't get paid.
If you are also looking for 24/7 admin, find out how familiar they are with the apps you'll be using. Find out how they monitor the apps in question. Do they have people on site 24/7 or is most of the work done remotely? Ask them about their backup strategy and how they go about recovery of a fully lost system. Ask them to recommend a configuration for your site. You don't have to use it, but it should give you a good idea of how well they understand the networking issues.
Especially if you are doing the admin yourself, you need to know where the physical facility is and what kind of access you can have to it. If you have a server at an ok prompt, you'll need to get to it physically (unless you've set up a portmaster with remote access).
That should help you get down to a few possibilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it was in 2003?
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/13060/page4/
--Tim
Historically, I'd agree with you. I've installed Oracle on many *nix systems, starting with Solaris more than 10 years ago. The only upside to making such an attempt is that you really feel you've accomplished something when you do manage to get it to work.
e /xe/index.html.
But Oracle 10g Express is a breeze to install, at least on RHEL4, which is where I've done so. It is a single rpm. I had no problems with dependencies. You run a configure script and it walks you through the handful of steps, in simple English and you're good to go.
It is a text based script, so none of their Java madness. It starts up the database and the listener. It asks you if you want to have the DB start at bootup. It is just sweet. It even has a simple, well designed web app for management.
Oh, and it is free to use in development and production.
Check it out at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/databas
--Tim
I'd recommend IT Conversations. Interviews and shows with a host of people in the IT industry.
http://itconversations.com/.
--Tim
> Interestingly, where normal humans had needs of 100 meg, 1 gig, 100 gig storage spaces, this represents the first leap beyond what the ordinary person could ever hope to use. .5 TB. Add music and presto. Once again the "will never needs" are wrong again.
People always say this. I have around 100 movies on DVD. 100 X 4.7GB =
Because everyone that currently works for Lucasfilms lives in the area?
A description of a larger scale system can be found here.
There are many methods of improving security. Requiring users to change passwords is not one.
Choosing a good password is difficult. You need it to be easy for a user to remember, but hard for anyone else to guess. If it is difficult for the user to remember, it will end up on a PostIt on his monitor. If it is easy to guess, then many methods will work to compromise the account.
Requiring a user to change his password on a regular basis means that the user must come up with more passwords. The average quality of that password will almost always be less than that of a single good password. They are less likely to even try and come up with a good password if they have to change it frequently. So the quality will almost always be less.
The amount of time to crack a password using straight brute force methods is almost always much greater than the expiration period. So attempts to foil such an attempt with password expiration. If a password space would take 10 years to check, having a user's password expire every 10 years is not really useful.
If a user's password is going to be broken, it will almost always happen through means other than brute force. Either through the PostIt method, social engineering, dictionary attacks, using personal information. These attacks take much less time than you could reasonable expire a password. Let's say you require changes every month. The above attacks would take anywhere from a couple minutes to a few hours. The compromise would happen on average with 15 days left before the password would expire. Once compromised, there is little (but not no) value in closing the barn door. Detecting and rectifying these situations are better handled through other means, especially since changing the password never let's anyone know that a compromise ever occured, even though it stops it (though most likely, the person will still have access through other means once they got in).
Expiring passwords not only doesn't improve overall security, it lessens it. The few minor advantages are far outweighed by the downsides of such a policy.
It should be illegal for anyone to simulate murder. That would take out a lot of our film makers.
I've seen probably seven or eight films in digital. Toy Story 2, Dinosaur, Perfect Storm, Monster's Inc. being a few. I've seen a couple in both digital and on 35mm. Here is what I found.
I prefer the digital, especially for animated films. The color saturation is much better, the picture is rock solid as compared to film (you don't really notice the shaking on a normal film until you see the digital equivalent, though when you see bleeding during credits, this is one example) and a pristine copy from the first day to the last are the biggest things I preferred.
Animation is really best able to take advantage of the format (especially cgi). It allows these films to avoid filmstock throughout their entire lifecycle. Plus, it tends to have very little noise in it which makes it a better candidate for compression and less artifact prone (though I don't remember any egregious problems with any of the live action films I've seen).
There are still problems. There are noticeable digital artifacts. Movement can look bad. But it is still early on in the life of these techniques.
I believe that the projecters use are 3 chip DLP's with a resolution of 1280x1024. It really is amazing how good a picture they can produce.
bachelors cooking method.
When a recipe calls for 10 minutes at 400 degrees, he just throws it in the kiln at 4000 degress for a minute.
Check out:
http://www.guidetohometheater.com/pcinema.shtml0 7 3
http://www.guidetohometheater.com/shownews.cgi?76
http://www.guidetohometheater.com/shownews.cgi?81
http://www.guidetohometheater.com/shownews.cgi?84
The more recent articles are not on their website, but are available in the print edition, though they mostly cover new software players. Definitely check out the first item listed and follow the links to the manufacturers of turnkey HTPC systems.
I was at the CES. There were lots of DVD recorders, including some for HD. Only JVC supports the D-VHS format. Writeable DVD is already available (though in 4 different formats DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW & DVD-RAM). Everyone was showing these.
HD DVD was a bit rarer. Pioneer had a prototype machine running DVR-Blue which used a blue laser to fit 22.x GB of storage on a disc, enough to hold ~2 hours of 1080 video. I don't which writeable technology will win out in the long run, but whatever it is, it is going to put the VCR to bed in the long run.
The more likely competition will be with DVR (Tivo/ReplayTV).
The fact that you can read about and discuss potential threats to your privacy is a pretty good indicator that you could do a lot worse. Given that businesses want to make a profit, they are always going to move in the direction that helps them maximize that profit. It is the place of government and the voice of the people to pull in the other direction in order to keep a reasonable balance. This equilibrium shifts all the time, but in general hasn't continued in any one direction, be it good or bad (and whatever you consider good and bad, someone else calls bad and good), for any sizeable portion of our history.
So businesses trying to make more money via any means necessary and people doing what they can to make this known and reverse the trend is just how this little country of ours works.
Once you've decided what you want, find out who else uses a given service. This applies both if you are looking for bandwith only or are looking for full service. You want access to be fast. You want it to be reliable. Do traceroutes from different locations to determine response times to the other clients of the service you are looking at. You can figure out a lot about their peering arangements and see if there are problems with a given site.
Ask them directly about their peering arangements. Find out about failover strategies. Ask them about service guarantees and make sure that partial refunds on service are available if those marks aren't met. This is key. If they don't meet their obligations, they don't get paid.
If you are also looking for 24/7 admin, find out how familiar they are with the apps you'll be using. Find out how they monitor the apps in question. Do they have people on site 24/7 or is most of the work done remotely? Ask them about their backup strategy and how they go about recovery of a fully lost system. Ask them to recommend a configuration for your site. You don't have to use it, but it should give you a good idea of how well they understand the networking issues.
Especially if you are doing the admin yourself, you need to know where the physical facility is and what kind of access you can have to it. If you have a server at an ok prompt, you'll need to get to it physically (unless you've set up a portmaster with remote access).
That should help you get down to a few possibilities.