Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1373

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 15:50:03 GMT, Randy Howard

Berkeley is not one of our customers (yet), but I'm currently working for a company which supplies network-connected (wired and wireless) systems which provide one-card access to dorm rooms, library books, meals, bookstore, third-party vendor sales, athletic events, etc. The system consists of a large number of embedded systems (security readers, activity readers, POS terminals, copy machine readers, etc.), talking to an intermediate processor (proprietary system on industrial x86 hardware, a large embedded system.) The intermediate processor reports to a Unix system for configuration and reporting as well as long-term transaction storage. Configuration information includes personal and financial information about every student, staff member, and registered visitor to the campus, as well as information about what purchases they have made, when they entered the dorm, etc. Definitely sensitive information, and the system is accessible to the Internet for most installations. In fact, we provide web-based services so that parents can pay the tuition or recharge their

Guess what? These systems are a mix of word sizes, addressability, and endianess. None of the components are PCs, and none of them run Windows.

-- Al Balmer Balmer Consulting