Google allows up to 100 character passwords and maybe more now. Cheers, Russ

LOLs The troff (pronounced T-Roff) I was referring to is the old typesetter symbolic language processor for formatting documents.

Yeah, I disagree as well. I eschewed IDEs for most of my career favoring just plain vi--even on Windows--but since discovering Visual Studio Code, that all changed. With its VIM plugin, I can have the best of both worlds--a vi-like UI with all the VSC bells and whistles. For a complete newbie, an IDE can be a help and a hindrance. The sheer volume of options, settings, and plugins cam be a challenge and can quickly overwhelm a first timer. I'm like OP. My career is nearing a close. My first coding experience was also in 1986. The language was Exec2, and the hardware was an IBM System 370 mainframe. That was a different time. There were few tools available (Anyone here remember troff?), few language options, and no Internet to use for research. Now, starting out can be both easier and harder. Easier because there are so many more options to choose from and harder also because there are so many options to choose from. At least there are many great sources of information these days, but this is even problematic because _mis_information is just as common as the good stuff. Of course Kimmie needs to tell us a little bit more about what kind of programming they want to do. If unknown, my tip is to start with defining that. Cheers, Russ

Same here. I only "worked" from home about two weeks during the pandemic and went back to the office months before it was officially allowed. Even after almost three years, I am still the only one in our local team (of a large corporation) that goes to the office every day. I cannot work at home because my "office" is forced to be a corner of my bedroom, and MY BED IS RIGHT THERE! I realized quickly that it was not going to work. But, I guess I am the only one on my team that has this struggle because everyone else seems to be OK with it. Cheers, Russ

Calin Negru wrote:

If you ask me it`s not a DB job to abstract the idea of files.

Abstraction is literally what it is all about whether we are talking about databases, file systems, or even, say, cooking. A cake recipe, for example, is an abstraction of the process of converting a particular set of ingredients into a particular cake. The recipe is not the cake itself, the ingredients from which the cake is made, or the physical process of making the cake. It is metadata for an abstraction of all three. Databases and file systems are abstractions of magnetic charges on a disk platter filtered through many layers of other abstractions rising to their 'visible' representations. Databases and file systems are different tools for different purposes, so it is not surprising that their representations of those magnetic charges differ. A database is not a file system. While it might store its contents in files, it needn't. Until version 19, for example, Oracle allowed for 'raw' storage so that no file system was even involved. While a database can store its data in files that can be 'seen' in the file system, that is only a handy method of organization so that they can be managed, as files, by file system tools such as Windows Explorer or Linux commands such as ls, cp, and del. Internally, those database files are not file systems, and they cannot be abstracted into a file system-like representation. Because most databases are relational and not hierarchical, there is not even a plausible way in which to represent them as if they were file systems. Software that represents logical database structure hierarchically such as SQL Server Management Studio (for Microsoft) and SQL Developer (for Oracle) are not representing the physical structures within the data files hierarchically but rather the logical organization of tables according to the 'recipe' provided by the data dictionary. Internally, database file contents are not files and folders tucked away inside the files that appear in the file system. SSMS and SQL Developer are only representing the logical organization of data tables, indexes, tablespaces and what not in a hierarchical way. But though this may give the impression of a file system inside the database files, there is no such thing within them. Going back to the original question:

Quote:

Does the difference reside in the fact that in a data base file the da

It is a principle in cryptography that only encrypting 'what is important' just tells adversaries what to focus on. It gives them valuable information that they would not otherwise have, and the last thing you want to give adversaries is any information. Cheers, Russ

Quite often, the person who benefits the most from good code documentation is your own future self. Cheers, Russ

I once took over a codebase that was in the form of hundreds of UNIX shell scripts in which there was not a single line of comments in any of them. This was exactly at the moment that things were rapidly going to hell in production, and the problem was somewhere in this group of scripts. I reached out to the 'programmer' of the scripts who said that the code itself was the documentation and that (he knew that I was a very good shell programmer) I should be able to figure it out. While it is true that I could unwind the code eventually, we were in a crisis situation where I needed to quickly identify the specific line of code that was causing problems. There was no time for crawling through code, and that is the whole point. If there is a high urgency, there is no time to 'learn the code'. In that case, a simple, one line sentence at the top of each script--'this script does x'--would have helped enormously. SOME documentation is ALWAYS needed. Cheers, Russ

I wrote numerous programs and XEdit macros in Rexx back in the mid-80s. Originally, my scripts were in Exec-2 in VM/CMS on an IBM System 370, but when we got access to REXX, I rewrote them all. I recall EXECIO as being particularly fiddly. Cheers, Russ

I work on a large government project that has as its goal to release no software that has any bugs. It is, of course, an impossible goal because it is not possible to release any non-trivial application that does NOT have bugs. Naturally, the demanding release schedule the government requires makes this goal even more impossible. Software has bugs. It is the nature of the beast. Frequently, those bugs are due to the impossibility of knowing in advance all of the kooky ways in which our software is used. Users should know, after all, that they are not supposed to do that. So...are they stupid users or are we stupid developers? Cheers, Russ

There is nothing particularly evil about money or the earning of it. How many here volunteer their time and talents to their companies merely for a sense of benevolent altruism. No! We all want monetary compensation for our labor. Companies are made up of lots of people who want the same thing as we do. But, when companies avail themselves of earnings from ideas or inventions, they are also creating earnings for a great many people besides. Many people think of businesses as profit making enterprises, but this is not a complete view. They are profit and loss enterprises. In the story about the laying of the first transatlantic cable, an enormous sum of money was lost in the first attempt, and that was a dead loss for the man whose dream it was. He eventually repaid all of his investors. The final success of his idea was not just a pecuniary one but a very important engineering triumph that opened a new era in telecommunications that benefitted all of humanity far beyond the immediate financial benefactors of that success. Cheers, Russ

When I read this book a few years ago, I also read three other this-is-how-it-came-to-be books around the same time. They were... - Longitude, by Dava Sobel - The story of the invention of accurate timepieces to solve the problem of finding longitude at sea. - A Thread Across the Ocean, by John Steele Gordon - The story of the laying of the first transatlantic undersea telegraph cables. - The Difference Engine, by Doron Suade - The story of the invention of the first real modern computing device. When reading these three along with The Measure of All Things, one gets a good demonstration of what is done well by government and what is done only poorly. Where there was immediate market application, as with the undersea cable, great quantities of money were readily available and massive ships and manpower could be obtained. Where this was lacking, as with Babbage's machine, relatively tiny sums for the next iteration of progress and innovation could not be had. The government is best at such things as setting standards for commerce as with the metric system and accurate navigation as with the longitude problem. The government should leave actual commerce to the merchants themselves. Computers might have gotten an early start had Babbage tried to find a compelling commercial use for his invention instead of putting copyists out of work producing mathematical tables. Cheers, Russ

The reason this is false is that amateur radio is NOT just about talking to people over long distances. It is about about the technical craft of radio telecommunications which requires an understanding of radio theory, electronics, antenna design, and emergency communications. One of the main social benefits of the Amateur Radio Service is emergency telecommunications when all other systems and services are unavailable. Amateur radio played a HUGE role in assisting in the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Tell me how the internet is going to make it possible for vicitims in a disaster area to communicate their needs and well-being to the outside world when there are no functional access points. This is one of the main reasons for the existence of amateur radio. Kind regards, Russ N3RUS

Whenever a new version of Windows comes out, my elderly father gets it, and the first thing he does is switch to classic view.

Try Googling "sql commands". There is lots of good stuff there. Regards, Russ

neoghy wrote:

How can i prevent the data from getting vanished without writing commit or set autocommit commands on everytime.

This is like asking how I can eat my cake without opening my mouth. Cheers, Russ

I suppose it is unkind to laugh at people who are fumbling around with problems in technologies they do not understand, but this is a funny little exchange. First: SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES has nothing to do with the person's problem. Second: The person's error is quite self-explanatory. Third: One wonders why he (or his helpers here) did not just Google the error message. The solution would have been quickly found. The problem is that the person is either 1) trying to create a table in his own schema without having the CREATE TABLE privilege, or 2) trying to create a table in another schema without the CREATE ANY TABLE privilege. In addition, the user's account must have a quota on its default tablespace or have the UNLIMITED TABLESPACE privilege without one of which the ORA-01536 error will occur. Kind regards, Russ

You can install Oracle on 32-bit Vista. If you do not have a support contract, you cannot get patchsets such as 10.2.0.4 or any other type of product update. You can only install the products that are available as downloads on OTN. Everything else is in MetaLink, which requires payment for support. Kind regards, Russ

This is old, but I couldn't resist. Instead of getting his technical input from forums or even from Tom Kyte, he should be doing what Tom himself would say--RTFM! Kind regards, Russ

Vikram A Punathambekar wrote:

I feel it helps a great deal if a developer were to talk directly to the end user.

Interactions between developers and users are perilous. Quite often, said interaction can be very beneficial toward clarifying ambiguities in requirements. Conversely, this can be a principal cause of requirements creep. Such meetings could include statements by either party like, "Wouldn't it be great if the product could do [insert feature here]?" This could spell disaster for a project that is already on a tight timeline with respect to the requirements already in the queue. Strict discipline must be imposed upon these interactions to control user expectations and constrain developer promises. New requirements should usually not be permitted as a topic of discussion—even those that are a natural extension of those already defined. This does not mean, however, that developers could not or should not assist with the requirements definition in the first place. Here, their participation could be invaluable. Kind regards, Russ