Thursday, March 31, 2005

automatically generate a password. Hello Tom, here I have created a table as shown below,can you please give me a procedure for the auto system generation of password and want to know the probabality of that password being occured. CREATE TABLE USER_INFO (Title varchar2(... [Ask Tom MOST RECENT ARTICLES] Another geek post.  Good stuff today. 12:37:22 PM    comment []

sqlloader versus external table.. hi Tom, Is there any advantage of sql* Loader over the new 9i feature external table. Which of them is faster. sql* loader direct path load or direct path load from the external table. thanx in advance Nikhil India [Ask Tom MOST RECENT ARTICLES] Sorry - geek post. Tom seems to be in favor of external tables over sqlldr, a tool that has been around for a long time and works well.  Time to get out the manuals and see what else they can do. 12:35:02 PM    comment []

Workers Spending More Time on the Road (AP). AP - To the list of extreme sports, add extreme commuting: those who travel 90 minutes or more on the trek to work. Nationally, only 2 percent of workers log those kind of one-way commuting times, but their numbers are growing, according to a 2003 Census Bureau survey released Wednesday. [Yahoo! News: U.S. National] That 2 percent must be here in Washington.  Average commute times are at least 90 minutes.  Most are closer to two hours door to door. 10:53:20 AM    comment []

Panel: Agencies 'Dead Wrong' on Iraq WMDs (AP). AP - In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows "disturbingly little" about the threats posed by many of the nation's most dangerous adversaries. [Yahoo! News: U.S. National] How much did the governement spend on this report?  Yes, I suppose that all of us who wondered why the WMDs found in Iraq were not on the front page of the newspaper with all of those reporters over there and drew the conclusion that there were not any are now confirmed and can say we told you so, but did we really need to spend money on a report that does that? More importantly, I think we have seen that this President has no clue about the world he is living in and is trying to dress up the United States rather than take care of the core, underlying problems.  A pig in a suit is still a pig, even if it is dressed well. 10:44:22 AM    comment []

Passport Chip Criticism Grows. More critics speak out against a government plan to put remotely readable chips in U.S. passports. Opponents of the plan include business travel groups, security experts and privacy advocates. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News] The government just does not get it.  So, perhaps I cannot scan the chip but all I need is a radio and I can pick up the signal, using exactly as described as a homing signal.  If I were the bad guy, that is all I need to follow an American and scoop him or her off the street and hold them for ransom. The reality is that the special readers will be manufactured, probably in China, to specifications that will be transmitted over the Internet.  It will not take much to get one of these readers as well as the devices for encoding chips in the first place.  There are at least three entry points in the system that can be penetrated and as we have seen of late, the government does not have a very good track record for creating software projects that actually do as they are supposed to. Will it cost the bad guys some extra money?  Sure, but it is peanuts.  Will other countries adopt this model.  Unlikely.  Only the richest of industrialized nations could even afford it and as we have seen of late, most are more worried about debt, oil prices and health care than the United States.  Of course, the United States should be more worried about debt, oil prices and health care than they are about bogus passports. 10:35:19 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 David Lane.