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Is dbase considered obsolete? There was a time when it was more prominent that SQL, but now it seems largely dying...
dBase as a DB system seems to have just about died out now. The owning company is still in business, so technically, it's not dead.
That being said, the dbase formatted files (dbf) are still used. However, I think it's hard to justify using dBase for any new development, especially now that there are so many superior single file database solutions, such as SQLite.
These provide far superior options, especially when doing operations across multiple tables.
dBase is NOT OBSOLETE !!
Only if you do not want to work in DOS you can feel that it is obsolete.
We can even today write single and multiple table applications in our good old dBase
which can handle DMBS work for small and medium sized enterprises successfully.
The reports that are generated are pure text files which can be deployed on WEB.
Both FRONTEND and BACKEND along with DML and DDL at one place it is still a great
environment to work with.
The Dbase format lives on in ESRI Shapefiles used for storing geospatial data. So DBF as a file format is still not dead...
Yes, dBase is obsolete.
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This question is partly theoretical and partly practical. A perfect answer would answer theoretically why, and practically how.
Question
Given an encrypted file, and a non-encrypted version of the same file, can the encryption key be recovered? More specifically how might one achieve this?
Background
I have some backup files from a colleagues old machine. They have been stored in an encrypted 7zip file. The file table has not been encrypted, so it should be possible to isolate individual files. What I don't have is the actual encryption key (due to a storage medium failure). I do however have some unencrypted files which are also in the container. How can I use these to recover the whole archive?
As others have said, this is a "Known Plaintext Attack". All good cyphers are proof against such an attack. Any cypher which cannot withstand such an attack never gets off the starting blocks.
The best suggestion is to find out the specific encryption method used and look for specific weaknesses in that particular method. Alternatively, ask people who knew the key if they can remember even part of the original password. "It began with a D" will reduce the work you need to do to brute force it by a factor of 26 or 52.
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Currently I am doing a restructuring project mainly on the Oracle PL/SQL packages in our company. It involves working on many of the core packages of our company. We never had documentation for the back end work done so far and the intention of this project is to create a new set of APIs based on the current logic in a structured way along with avoiding all unwanted logic that currently exists in the system.
We are also making a new module currently for the main business of the organization that would work based on these newly created back-end APIs.
As I started of this project, I found out that most of the wrapper APIs had around more than 8000 lines of code. I managed to covert this code into many single APIs and invoked them from the wrapper API.
This activity in itself has been a time-consuming process but I was able to cut down the number of lines of code to just 900 in the wrapper API by calling independent APIs for each business functionality.
I would like to know from you experts if this mode of modularizing the code is good and worth the time invested in it as I am not sure if it would have many performance benefits.
But from a code readability perspective, this is definitely helping and now I am able to understand the 8000 lines of code much better after restructuring and I am sure the other developers in my organization too will understand.
Requesting you to let me know if I am doing the right thing and if its having its advantages apart from readability please do mention them. Sorry for the long explanation.
And is it okay having more than 1000 lines of code in a wrapper API.
Easy to debug
Easy to update
Easy to Modify/maintain
Less change proneness due to low coupling.
Increases reuse if the modules are made generic
Can identify unused code easily
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I have a project idea for which I want to mine publicly available data on another website that it received by crowd-sourcing. This is so I have initial data for my own project. To reiterate, I want to write a robot to grab data that is displayed on another website and use it for my own website. Does anyone know the legality of this sort of thing? Does the original website own the data that was given to it by a crowd? Even if so, can I use it?
Web scraping is a legally complicated issue.
The hassles of legal action and enforceability often keep scrapers from getting in trouble.
Outright duplication is considered actionable, although courts have ruled that "duplication of facts" is permitted (US).
I advise you read up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping#Legal_issues
Best,
legally, you should be fine. as long as the data is made available and the people have consented; you aren't hacking and the other site has permission to share. check for a license on the other site, if there isn't one inquire or be prepared for access to be denied at some point. and even though it is publicly available doesn't mean the other site wants it to be.
also, double check and make sure that you don't inadvertently publish private data as well.
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I have some software which we added an open common file format (.iwb) to. The government organisation that initiated that work has been cut in the cutbacks.
Now a not for profit organisation has taken up the mantle, however its going to cost and once you pay you are not allowed to reveal the "materials" you gain.
http://www.imsglobal.org/iwbcff/jointheIWBCFFIalliance.cfm
I understand people need to be paid but the whole not sharing thing makes it feel like its going against what a standard is meant for.
What's a good strategy:
Pay up and shut up (there might be plenty of closed standards
that work in this way)
Fork the standard to an organisation that will not require people to pay to read it
Drop the file format
Stay behind the curve and reverse engineer the files
Any standard that is not freely accessible is no standard at all but is instead a proprietary format. I'd say either:
petition them to open the standard up
Drop your support for it (and tell your customers why you have to)
Fork an earlier open version and create a free version of the standard
Paying for access to a standard sounds like a horrible idea because:
It encourages this behavior
It's likely to just be wasted money because others won't want to pay either, and a standard used by no one is not a standard.
Publish the last version you had access to.
Site that you support that version of the standard.
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I am writing a program that needs a list of English words as a source file for it to work. I realise that these source files are available for students writing games such as Hangman or Crossword solvers but I am having trouble locating such a source file and wonder if anyone knows how I can attain one without slowly scraping websites and building up a dictionary manually.
What about /usr/share/dict/words on any Unix system? How many words are we talking about? Like OED-Unabridged?
For an English dictionary .txt file, you can use Custom Dictionary.
You can also generate a list aspell or wordlist with own settings.
Also you can take a look at http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/
Only english words: http://www.math.sjsu.edu/~foster/dictionary.txt
Also take a look at:
http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/
http://www.math.sjsu.edu/~foster/dictionary.txt
350,000 words
Very late, but might be useful for others.
There's also WordNet. Its data files format are well-documented.
I used it for building an embeddable dictionary library for iOS developers (www.lexicontext.com) and also in one of my apps.
#Future-searchers: you can use aspell to do the dictionary checks, it has bindings in ruby and python. It would make your job much simpler.