What is wisdom? Where does it come from? Where can we find it? And what does it mean in our lives? In Secrets of the Oracle, David Shaw explores these questions by turning to the works of wisdom writers, whose words retain their meaning and transformative power even centuries after they were written. Wisdom literature exists in two shaping forms - the aphorism, geared towards the past, and the oracle, a revolutionary impulse looking to the future. Secrets of the Oracle discusses both types of wisdom, finding them in the works of poets and philosophers from Tennyson and Zeno to Yeats and George Berkeley, from Browning and Schleiermacher to T.S. Eliot and F.H. Bradley. The book also discusses the contribution to wisdom of Jesus and the author of Ecclesiastes, of Abraham Lincoln and Norman Maclean. Part celebration of wisdom found and part lament for wisdom lost, Secrets of the Oracle is convincing in its assertion that wisdom articulates what is and offers creative visions of the future.

Secret ORACLE is the definitive guide to undocumented and partially documented features of the ORACLE database server. This book will improve your efficiency as an ORACLE database administrator and enable you to master more difficult administrative, tuning, and troubleshooting tasks than you ever thought possible. Topics covered include: The MERITS performance optimization method, which extends the state-of-the-art wait event tuning paradigm. Controlling processes of an ORACLE instance with the fragmentarily documented ORADEBUG command to trace SQL statements as well as wait events and dump process state, call stack, and hang analysis information. Tracing the cost based optimizer to understand its cost calculations and decisions. Understanding hidden parameters that govern Automatic PGA Memory Management. Leveraging undocumented features of the Oracle10g/11g scheduler and other partially or fully undocumented PL/SQL packages, such as DBMS_SYSTEM, DBMS_SUPPORT, and DBMS_UTILITY.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology, Inscrypt 2008, held in Beijing, China, in December 2008. The 28 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 183 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on digital signature and signcryption schemes, privacy and anonymity, message authentication code and hash function, secure protocols, symmetric cryptography, certificateless cryptography, hardware implementation and side channel attack, wireless network security, public key and identity based cryptography, access control and network security, as well as trusted computing and applications.

A nobleman's murder. A secret buried in her past. The hunt for the truth begins... Airene the Finch, a peddler of whispers, is no stranger to scandal. But when a nobleman is killed, Airene is pushed to her limits in pursuit of the murderer - and the secret that will change her world forever... A tale of secrets, magic, and mystery, Secret Seller is the prequel novella to the epic fantasy trilogy The Famine Cycle. If you like the roguish characters of The Lies of Locke Lamora, the prose of The Farseer Trilogy, and the magic of Mistborn, you'll love this new fantastical world! PRAISE FOR CITY OF WHISPERS, BOOK 1 OF THE FAMINE CYCLE ★★★★★ "...Deftly blends political intrigue and tension between ruling powers, the mystic ability of the wardens, and the threat of war including the looming terror of a daemon god. " - Readers' Favorite ★★★★★ "I was enthralled from the first chapter." - Amazon review ★★★★★ "Loved this world of the finches." - Amazon review ★★★★★ "A hard book to put down." - Amazon review ★★★★★ "This book was so complex and layered. I loved the characters, the storyline and the paranormal aspects." - Amazon review

This volume constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Information Hiding held in Alexandria, Virginia, in July 2006. Twenty-five carefully reviewed full papers are organized into topical sections covering watermarking, information hiding and networking, data hiding in unusual content, fundamentals, software protection, steganalysis, steganography, and subliminal channels.

Mariuccia Umbellino is a young woman living in the remote mountain village of Montemonaco, Italy, in the early years of the 19th century. Nearby, the secret recesses of the Grotto of the Fates—home to an ancient oracle of Apollo—are about to be invaded and destroyed, on orders from the Pope. But the men sent to do the dirty work don’t know who (or what) they’re dealing with. This oracle and this girl won’t be messed with. In the dark of night, Mariuccia and her mother set out to rescue their revered oracle. In the adventure that ensues, things are blown up, love spells are miscast then recast, a downtrodden housekeeper gets her revenge, and the mysterious fate of a jettatore—a person born with the Evil Eye—is finally revealed.