Police say the felon heated his books to 200C to disable the rights management chip. [Ad] Police say he provided the illegal heating service to as many as 10 other criminals and this is his third strike. [Ad] His previous two convictions were for reading texts that were no longer in print and removing jingle players from books to block part of the advertizing. [Ad] His crimes are estimated to have cost 15 Billion dollars in lost revenues according to The Corporation(TM). [Ad] The death penalty has been granted, but the judge has reserved the right to choose the method. His trial is scheduled for Sept of 2008. [Ad] This station is a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL-Time-Warner-Microsoft-Disney(TM), which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the US-UK Government(TM), which is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Corporation(TM). [Ad] All rights reserved. [Ad]
Re:You cannot deny GCC is the heart of free softwa
on
The Stallman Factor
·
· Score: 1
From what I've read Linux wasn't written with gcc initially, it was ported over from Borland C.
Not that gcc isn't great and all, but I resent the whole GNU/Linux when I have a Linux machine running at home without a single program from FSF.
What I like best about GPL is the right to ignore the original author and do your own thing when he turns wierd on you.
First there is security, do you know any competent securty experts to set that up?
Then there is the fact that there is this infinitely better technology called paper out there. It's very high res, accepts many forms of input, can display just about anything and is cheap.
Given a telephone wire and optimum conditions, what's the theoretical maxiumum speed that data can be transfered at?
The theoretical maximum would be more than enough to transfer all the digital files in existance in the blink of an eye. But in reality it depends, I'm pretty impressed by 1000-Base-T.
The question I would ask is how much data can you send through a telephone wire that traverses the telephone network... Where it's in close proximity to other wires, bent at wacky angles, terminated improperly, etc, etc. Then my question would be when will our governments build a last mile fiber network?
When can we begin worrying about sending 5 terabits/sec down that multimode fiber installed eveywhere, like we can with the newest single mode fiber? (or vice versa on the modes).
1) Why are classes like Integer so weird? It is such a pain to, for example, increment them... Change of this would conflict with absence of operator overloading, true (I don't like that too much either, but at least can imagine why it's (not) there). However, why not make them magical like String's "+"?
I'm pretty sure you can't change the value of an Integer, just like String. This is for efficiency. I'm sorta of two minds about not including operator overloading in the language, I love it in C++, but it can be good to have code that novices can read.
2) Several times I got caught on the fact that there is no way to pass an int by reference. And I don't like Integer (see aboive)...
Create your own container class. But passing int's by reference doesn't sound very object oriented, perhaps a change in style would be more appropriate. I have never run into the problem myself. I sometimes do it in C++, but I consider it a bad habit...
3) One (public) class per file. This especially bugs me with small interfaces. Such a waste of screen space and disk space (each file takes up 4k on the file system)... Why not allow to put a hierarchy of interfaces (and, preferably, classes) in one file? I couldn't disagree with you more. Having a file per public class makes browsing other people's code much easier. It's a habit I have adopted in C++. grep is a wonderful thing, but it can break the flow when you're reading code in an editor. Wasting 4k on the file system isn't much of a problem, even on embedded systems. If it really really bothers you use a compressed file system or make you're inodes smaller, remember class files are minute compared to compiled code so you end up using much less space overall.
Why Bill Joy still doesn't like templates puzzles me the most. I'm sure it could be done elegantly in Java.
I like KDE, I'd probably prefer coding in it since it's C++ instead of C. But Gnome is just much more pleasing to the eye; Even more so with Ximian.
Probably the coolest thing for KDE is the Liquid theme, but even with that it just feels like the whole thing lacks polish.
I still install KDE whenever a major version comes out. At some point I'm sure it will pass some milestone like Mozilla 0.9.8 or Mandrake 7.2 where I'll start recommending it to new users.
I've never used this thing, my only experience with the exchange client is that's the thing that sends e-mails that implement ancient header extensions that are only supported for backwards compatability and the occational need to set up a webserver for the exchange users that can't get attachments. What does it do that IMAP doesn't? Does it compress internal spam e-mails? anything else?
I just lost a lot of respect for Mr. Cerf. He doesn't seem to get it. "Parental" controls an IP "protections" close of the internet from everyone.
A member of the Internet Society told me there was a power grab there recently where they took away the voting rights of the members and gave most of the power to corporate sponsors and the IETF.
Should Cerf now be reclassified as enemy of freedom?
Calling a decree to take away the internet under that friendly headline is the same tactic used when the US congress calls internet censorship bills "child protection" bills. He may just be ignorant, but I think we have to consider he may just be evil now. It happens.
Were the public advocate & attorney general called? It seems a lot of those folks want to be senators or governors so they like big idealogical fights that are TV friendly. There is an insane amount of power in bringing in the media, it costs them in their advertizing budget and makes their clients antsy, especially adobe and apple which don't already have the bad name of microsoft.
So you learn that there is 500 times more of some suspected cacrinogen in (a loaf of?) bread than you allow in water. Humans have been eating bread for 10,000 years. In those years average life expectancy has tripled. And they conclude bread is dangerous?
Wouldn't this tell a thinking person that you can increase that safe limit on the chemical in water by 500x?
And the very fact that they didn't try to publish it tells me there is something wrong with their measurements. There must be at least one graduate student watching that dream of a PhD disappearing into the ether as she curses her advisor....
My problem with what you said, is that you made it seem that Japans budget is close to the US's budget.
Japan's budget is big enough that the US wouldn't attack them. Israel spends much less on it's military than France, but they can fly twice as many sorties than the US in the middle east. If they didn't have that military we would probably have sent in UN troops a long time ago to make the palestinian concentration camps more livable. (I mean concentrarion camp in the traditional way, not as the WWII euphamism for the death camps.)
I'm one for a stronger Japanese army, it's already strong in a conventional sense, but nuclear weapons would be a plus if only to keep an future war conventional. They have a vibrant democracy, and I don't see that changing even if they are experiencing their "great recession."
A company like Paypal, on the other hand, runs a sort of 'virtual currency' service, which is a true aggregator and a factor on the sellers side as well.
So they are just trying to get a cut of PayPal?
I'm prolly one of the few/. who like the service. It's convenient to be able to send money across the country without a wire service, and it's even convienient enough to send money to a friend that's buying me a theatre ticket. But usually those are small enough to just transfer it out of my bank account, for larger e-bay purchases I use a credit card and so this seems to be aimed mostly at micro-retailers. In NYC those are the ones that won't accept credit cards for purchases under $20 cuz they are charged $1 or $2 per transaction from CCBill type services, I'm sure things are similar elsewhere.
Computer science programs are LOADED with cheating. Not just a bit. A *lot*. The faculty at my institution didn't think we had a problem... until we looked. And what a problem it was.
I attended two undergraduate schools. One was an engineering school with an honor code, the other was a liberal arts school without one. Cheating was rampant at the engineering school. There were whacko punishments worse than the Georga Tech case but no one reported what really went on. There were friggin study groups during unproctored exams. But rthe punishments were too harsh for any of us to finger our friends, even if we disapproved of it. There were levels of cheating, but if you reported someone for cheating on an exam they could send the same punishment to you cuz a friend of yours asked you how to solve a homework problem. Completely untenable. At the liberal arts university exams counted more and were heavily proctored. I proctored one of those exams and caught a couple cheaters at the begining (palm pilots & HP's...) Then I stood behind the suspicious ones and while they may have hated my guts, they didn't cheat. Homeworks counted for a lot less at the liberal arts school, and professors complained that people didn't do them, but I think the students were better off.
I also graded homeworks at the liberal arts school, and there were about 20% who probably cheated on the first homework, then 10%, then there were none. I just gave them 0's on those homeworks (after telling the prof). They got a talk, but since the prof had the ability to give them F's for the class for cheating, they risked the C they might get not cheating. None of those caught on the first homework got less than a B, and no one caught on the second assignment got less than a C, there were D's & F's in the intro class so this wasn't too bad for the inauspicious beginings (the copied material was always just B quality or less anyway). Anyone caught cheating often got *extra* proctoring for a few terms but that wasn't so bad that they didn't own up to it when confronted, they just spent the time they should have on their classes. I can't say I'd wish grading one of these classes on anyone though, I had to read all horrible the code these kids wrote. The engineering school just ran test files that didn't really exercise programs, didn't catch memory leaks, off by one's, and wasn't very friendly to partial credit which really helps these students because you actually tell them what mistakes their making.
I later graded a more advanced Algorithms class and saw no cheating. No-one had the same set of 10 answers, they were tough assignments so they knew no-one had all the right answer, and cheaters know they are usually caught on shared mistakes.
...for shame. I'm seriosly considering cancelling my membership.
Damn, I would too but I cancelled when they came out with their "ethics" statement. If I agree to donate my labor for some cash it doesn't mean I'm a serf who can't check my e-mail on my lunch break because I'd be using my employer's computer. IEEE might as well fault me for using employer air, at least that is used up in the process.
The 'feature' of.Net which annoys me the most is that Exceptions are no longer required to be caught
I forgot that one, I thought maybe there was some way to turn that feature back on that I just hadn't discovered yet.
Another annoyance is the documentation. I had to link with a non-COM dll that I didn't have source code to. I ended up writing a COM wrapper, and then a C# wrapper that called it. I got the impression from some of the documentation that I could call functions directly but none of the several syntax versions in the documentation compiled. The examples didn't compile, etc. Not to mention the difficult and slow documentation browser (ie6-w/?XML?) Don't blame it on my dual Xeon only being a 1 Gig 1.4Ghz machine, the javah html works fine on my ancient pentium pro.
But still the lack of real arrays reminds me too much of Pascal pre-Borland... I really liked their TP6 which I've read was designed by the same man. *shrug*
What I'd really like in C# or Java is dynamic templates. It could be done, in Java you'd just call the compiler on some template code the first time a Vector was instantiated.
start using C#, because it can do everything that C++ and Java could do
Have you ever programmed in C#? It can't do half what C++ or Java can do. Variably sized arrays, fall through in switch statements, easy reflection, familiar libraries (STL/JDK), etc. You lose the security of Java, and don't get the speed of C++.
You see win win, I see lose lose.
C# may succeed, especially as a VB replacement. REXX and TCL still have their uses, but something else will unseat Java. Come to think of it, 10 years wouldn't be so bad for a language, C had maybe 7 years, and C++ 10 years in the limelight. I still use those every day.
I wonder if using Titanium instead of steel in the World Trade Center would have saved some lives?
Nah, the columns would have simply been thinner and used less fire protection. You might as well ask if housing all offices in helicopters would be safer. I doubt the industry could even supply the amount of titanium needed to build one 110 story building if it did nothing else. It no longer costs 3x more than gold, but it's still not that cheap nor very plentiful (in its refined form).
Of course if it ever is maybe we'll build 200+ story towers;) With air defenses.
the First Amendment argument seems pretty weak...just like (almost) everyone else here, IANAL, but saying that anonymity is required for true freedom of speech seems a tenuous link at best.
The First Amendment isn't just about speech. It's basically protecting your right to disagree with the majority so long as you don't physically maim anybody else. The things it names, freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion are just the outward manifestations of thought, the kind of thing the government could monitor at the time. Unfortunately freedom of the body wasn't mentioned so violations of this right in the form of drug laws still happen. Still there is a history of interpreting the law as allowing your privacy to be protected when it comes to books. The libraries I've worked at don't keep your name attached to the book once it's been returned safely to avoid these types of lawsuits.
Holes in Kerberos? Are you referring to Krb4 or Krb5?
I was thinking of v4. But Isn't the whole system still based on trusting the host machines? This certainly can't be the case with machines that users have physical access to. Which is probably the case at most organizations.
Plus there is the deployment problem, if a hole is found in v5 protocol you'll be stuck with them until you can upgrade every machine in the organization. MIT is still running v4....
Plus with tickets expiring people have to re-login every once in a while. And it isn't very friendly to different administrative domains, so you might be stuck with single point of failure, or even worse all accounts and machines would have to go through some bureaucratic hassle to do anything.
Still it might work for his situation which is why I sorta recommended it.
Ken Kutaragi talked about their us research group's mulitprocessor PS2 machine as their model for the PS3. It had 16 PS2's in it but he said they were aiming for something like a 1000x performace boost going from PS1->PS2 and got a 400x boost. For PS3 they want a 10000x performance boost over the PS1.
It's going to be a bitch to program... But it might make for a bitching real time raytracer.
Not a good idea, there are lots of repeats in the average strand of DNA and within a species the strands are practically identical. Even if you just used the bits that differed from the average people could just look at you and your family medical history and get a lot of the key.
I've written a one off application for the Palm and while I agree the API is justifiably limited you can't say it's easy. For a large application you can come up with your own memory allocation strategies and you want to write your own hash tables and search trees.
For a one off which you might spend a total off 8 hours developing you want something like Java or at least STL or just the basic C libraries (strings,math,stdio). I spent half my time on this app implementing data structures that I take for granted or writing wrappers around their API to make it more standard C like. Now this may have been just a few hours but I just wanted to make a simple lists application with a small database. (It was to keep track of who showed up at a weekly party.)
Slashdot Mirror
Police say the felon heated his books to
200C to disable the rights management chip.
[Ad]
Police say he provided the illegal heating
service to as many as 10 other criminals
and this is his third strike.
[Ad]
His previous two convictions were for reading texts that were no longer in print and removing
jingle players from books to block part
of the advertizing.
[Ad]
His crimes are estimated to have cost 15 Billion dollars in lost revenues according to The Corporation(TM).
[Ad]
The death penalty has been granted, but the judge has reserved the right to choose the method. His trial is scheduled for Sept of 2008.
[Ad]
This station is a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL-Time-Warner-Microsoft-Disney(TM), which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the US-UK Government(TM), which is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Corporation(TM).
[Ad]
All rights reserved.
[Ad]
From what I've read Linux wasn't written with gcc initially, it was ported over from Borland C.
Not that gcc isn't great and all, but I resent the whole GNU/Linux when I have a Linux machine running at home without a single program from FSF.
What I like best about GPL is the right to ignore the original author and do your own thing when he turns wierd on you.
First there is security, do you know any competent securty experts to set that up?
Then there is the fact that there is this infinitely better technology called paper out there. It's very high res, accepts many forms of input, can display just about anything and is cheap.
Given a telephone wire and optimum conditions, what's the theoretical maxiumum speed that data can be transfered at?
The theoretical maximum would be more than enough to transfer all the digital files in existance in the blink of an eye. But in reality it depends, I'm pretty impressed by 1000-Base-T.
The question I would ask is how much data can you send through a telephone wire that traverses the
telephone network... Where it's in close proximity to other wires, bent at wacky angles, terminated improperly, etc, etc. Then my question would be when will our governments build a last mile fiber network?
When can we begin worrying about sending 5 terabits/sec down that multimode fiber installed eveywhere, like we can with the newest single mode fiber? (or vice versa on the modes).
1) Why are classes like Integer so weird? It is such a pain to, for example, increment them... Change of this would conflict with absence of operator overloading, true (I don't like that too much either, but at least can imagine why it's (not) there). However, why not make them magical like String's "+"?
I'm pretty sure you can't change the value of an Integer, just like String. This is for efficiency. I'm sorta of two minds about not including operator overloading in the language, I love it in C++, but it can be good to have code that novices can read.
2) Several times I got caught on the fact that there is no way to pass an int by reference. And I don't like Integer (see aboive)...
Create your own container class. But passing int's by reference doesn't sound very object oriented, perhaps a change in style would be more appropriate. I have never run into the problem myself. I sometimes do it in C++, but I consider it a bad habit...
3) One (public) class per file. This especially bugs me with small interfaces. Such a waste of screen space and disk space (each file takes up 4k on the file system)... Why not allow to put a hierarchy of interfaces (and, preferably, classes) in one file?
I couldn't disagree with you more. Having a file per public class makes browsing other people's code much easier. It's a habit I have adopted in C++. grep is a wonderful thing, but it can break the flow when you're reading code in an editor. Wasting 4k on the file system isn't much of a problem, even on embedded systems. If it really really bothers you use a compressed file system or make you're inodes smaller, remember class files are minute compared to compiled code so you end up using much less space overall.
Why Bill Joy still doesn't like templates puzzles me the most. I'm sure it could be done elegantly in Java.
I like KDE, I'd probably prefer coding in it since it's C++ instead of C. But Gnome is just much more pleasing to the eye; Even more so with Ximian.
Probably the coolest thing for KDE is the Liquid theme, but even with that it just feels like the whole thing lacks polish.
I still install KDE whenever a major version comes out. At some point I'm sure it will pass some milestone like Mozilla 0.9.8 or Mandrake 7.2 where I'll start recommending it to new users.
I shoulda just said, "me too" huh?
I've never used this thing, my only experience with the exchange client is that's the thing that sends e-mails that implement ancient header extensions that are only supported for backwards compatability and the occational need to set up a webserver for the exchange users that can't get attachments. What does it do that IMAP doesn't? Does it compress internal spam e-mails? anything else?
I just lost a lot of respect for Mr. Cerf. He doesn't seem to get it. "Parental" controls an IP "protections" close of the internet from everyone.
A member of the Internet Society told me there was a power grab there recently where they took away the voting rights of the members and gave most of the power to corporate sponsors and the IETF.
Should Cerf now be reclassified as enemy of freedom?
Calling a decree to take away the internet under that friendly headline is the same tactic used when the US congress calls internet censorship bills "child protection" bills. He may just be ignorant, but I think we have to consider he may just be evil now. It happens.
Were the public advocate & attorney general called? It seems a lot of those folks want to be senators or governors so they like big idealogical fights that are TV friendly. There is an insane amount of power in bringing in the media, it costs them in their advertizing budget and makes their clients antsy, especially adobe and apple which don't already have the bad name of microsoft.
So you learn that there is 500 times more of some suspected cacrinogen in (a loaf of?) bread than you allow in water. Humans have been eating bread for 10,000 years. In those years average life expectancy has tripled. And they conclude bread is dangerous?
Wouldn't this tell a thinking person that you can increase that safe limit on the chemical in water by 500x?
And the very fact that they didn't try to publish it tells me there is something wrong with their measurements. There must be at least one graduate student watching that dream of a PhD disappearing into the ether as she curses her advisor....
My problem with what you said, is that you made it seem that Japans budget is close to the US's budget.
Japan's budget is big enough that the US wouldn't attack them. Israel spends much less on it's military than France, but they can fly twice as many sorties than the US in the middle east. If they didn't have that military we would probably have sent in UN troops a long time ago to make the palestinian concentration camps more livable. (I mean concentrarion camp in the traditional way, not as the WWII euphamism for the death camps.)
I'm one for a stronger Japanese army, it's already strong in a conventional sense, but nuclear weapons would be a plus if only to keep an future war conventional. They have a vibrant democracy, and I don't see that changing even if they are experiencing their "great recession."
A company like Paypal, on the other hand, runs a sort of 'virtual currency' service, which is a true aggregator and a factor on the sellers side as well.
/. who like the service. It's convenient to be able to send money across the country without a wire service, and it's even convienient enough to send money to a friend that's buying me a theatre ticket. But usually those are small enough to just transfer it out of my bank account, for larger e-bay purchases I use a credit card and so this seems to be aimed mostly at micro-retailers. In NYC those are the ones that won't accept credit cards for purchases under $20 cuz they are charged $1 or $2 per transaction from CCBill type services, I'm sure things are similar elsewhere.
So they are just trying to get a cut of PayPal?
I'm prolly one of the few
She does look kinda cute, too short for my tastes though
I can just imagine the Canadian high school trying to flip enough burgers for that shiny new 5 petabyte mp3 player in 2010.
$100 down, $200,000 to go... just another 200 years and I'll have it!
Computer science programs are LOADED with cheating. Not just a bit. A *lot*. The faculty at my institution didn't think we had a problem... until we looked. And what a problem it was.
I attended two undergraduate schools. One was an engineering school with an honor code, the other was a liberal arts school without one. Cheating was rampant at the engineering school. There were whacko punishments worse than the Georga Tech case but no one reported what really went on. There were friggin study groups during unproctored exams. But rthe punishments were too harsh for any of us to finger our friends, even if we disapproved of it. There were levels of cheating, but if you reported someone for cheating on an exam they could send the same punishment to you cuz a friend of yours asked you how to solve a homework problem. Completely untenable. At the liberal arts university exams counted more and were heavily proctored. I proctored one of those exams and caught a couple cheaters at the begining (palm pilots & HP's...) Then I stood behind the suspicious ones and while they may have hated my guts, they didn't cheat. Homeworks counted for a lot less at the liberal arts school, and professors complained that people didn't do them, but I think the students were better off.
I also graded homeworks at the liberal arts school, and there were about 20% who probably cheated on the first homework, then 10%, then there were none. I just gave them 0's on those homeworks (after telling the prof). They got a talk, but since the prof had the ability to give them F's for the class for cheating, they risked the C they might get not cheating. None of those caught on the first homework got less than a B, and no one caught on the second assignment got less than a C, there were D's & F's in the intro class so this wasn't too bad for the inauspicious beginings (the copied material was always just B quality or less anyway). Anyone caught cheating often got *extra* proctoring for a few terms but that wasn't so bad that they didn't own up to it when confronted, they just spent the time they should have on their classes. I can't say I'd wish grading one of these classes on anyone though, I had to read all horrible the code these kids wrote. The engineering school just ran test files that didn't really exercise programs, didn't catch memory leaks, off by one's, and wasn't very friendly to partial credit which really helps these students because you actually tell them what mistakes their making.
I later graded a more advanced Algorithms class and saw no cheating. No-one had the same set of 10 answers, they were tough assignments so they knew no-one had all the right answer, and cheaters know they are usually caught on shared mistakes.
...for shame. I'm seriosly considering cancelling my membership.
Damn, I would too but I cancelled when they came out with their "ethics" statement. If I agree to donate my labor for some cash it doesn't mean I'm a serf who can't check my e-mail on my lunch break because I'd be using my employer's computer. IEEE might as well fault me for using employer air, at least that is used up in the process.
The 'feature' of .Net which annoys me the most is that Exceptions are no longer required to be caught
I forgot that one, I thought maybe there was some way to turn that feature back on that I just hadn't discovered yet.
Another annoyance is the documentation. I had to link with a non-COM dll that I didn't have source code to. I ended up writing a COM wrapper, and then a C# wrapper that called it. I got the impression from some of the documentation that I could call functions directly but none of the several syntax versions in the documentation compiled. The examples didn't compile, etc. Not to mention the difficult and slow documentation browser (ie6-w/?XML?) Don't blame it on my dual Xeon only being a 1 Gig 1.4Ghz machine, the javah html works fine on my ancient pentium pro.
But still the lack of real arrays reminds me too much of Pascal pre-Borland... I really liked their TP6 which I've read was designed by the same man. *shrug*
What I'd really like in C# or Java is dynamic templates. It could be done, in Java you'd just call the compiler on some template code the first time a Vector was instantiated.
start using C#, because it can do everything that C++ and Java could do
Have you ever programmed in C#? It can't do half what C++ or Java can do. Variably sized arrays, fall through in switch statements, easy reflection, familiar libraries (STL/JDK), etc. You lose the security of Java, and don't get the speed of C++.
You see win win, I see lose lose.
C# may succeed, especially as a VB replacement. REXX and TCL still have their uses, but something else will unseat Java. Come to think of it, 10 years wouldn't be so bad for a language, C had maybe 7 years, and C++ 10 years in the limelight. I still use those every day.
I wonder if using Titanium instead of steel in the World Trade Center would have saved some lives?
;) With air defenses.
Nah, the columns would have simply been thinner and used less fire protection. You might as well ask if housing all offices in helicopters would be safer. I doubt the industry could even supply the amount of titanium needed to build one 110 story building if it did nothing else. It no longer costs 3x more than gold, but it's still not that cheap nor very plentiful (in its refined form).
Of course if it ever is maybe we'll build 200+ story towers
the First Amendment argument seems pretty weak...just like (almost) everyone else here, IANAL, but saying that anonymity is required for true freedom of speech seems a tenuous link at best.
The First Amendment isn't just about speech. It's basically protecting your right to disagree with the majority so long as you don't physically maim anybody else. The things it names, freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion are just the outward manifestations of thought, the kind of thing the government could monitor at the time. Unfortunately freedom of the body wasn't mentioned so violations of this right in the form of drug laws still happen. Still there is a history of interpreting the law as allowing your privacy to be protected when it comes to books. The libraries I've worked at don't keep your name attached to the book once it's been returned safely to avoid these types of lawsuits.
Holes in Kerberos? Are you referring to Krb4 or Krb5?
I was thinking of v4. But Isn't the whole system still based on trusting the host machines? This certainly can't be the case with machines that users have physical access to. Which is probably the case at most organizations.
Plus there is the deployment problem, if a hole is found in v5 protocol you'll be stuck with them until you can upgrade every machine in the organization. MIT is still running v4....
Plus with tickets expiring people have to re-login every once in a while. And it isn't very friendly to different administrative domains, so you might be stuck with single point of failure, or even worse all accounts and machines would have to go through some bureaucratic hassle to do anything.
Still it might work for his situation which is why I sorta recommended it.
My shop uses NIS and you can print out the passwords /etc/passwd style. This makes it easy for anyone to copy them and do an offline dictionary attack.
Maybe they just set things up improperly but this doesn't qualify as secure in my book.
Kerberos has some holes too, but it's prolly a little better.
Ken Kutaragi talked about their us research group's mulitprocessor PS2 machine as their model for the PS3. It had 16 PS2's in it but he said they were aiming for something like a 1000x performace boost going from PS1->PS2 and got a 400x boost. For PS3 they want a 10000x performance boost over the PS1.
It's going to be a bitch to program... But it might make for a bitching real time raytracer.
Not a good idea, there are lots of repeats in the average strand of DNA and within a species the strands are practically identical. Even if you just used the bits that differed from the average people could just look at you and your family medical history and get a lot of the key.
I've written a one off application for the Palm and while I agree the API is justifiably limited you can't say it's easy. For a large application you can come up with your own memory allocation strategies and you want to write your own hash tables and search trees.
For a one off which you might spend a total off 8 hours developing you want something like Java or at least STL or just the basic C libraries (strings,math,stdio). I spent half my time on this app implementing data structures that I take for granted or writing wrappers around their API to make it more standard C like. Now this may have been just a few hours but I just wanted to make a simple lists application with a small database. (It was to keep track of who showed up at a weekly party.)