preventing people from having full access to their property is a criminal offense in my book.
You bought the product as it is shipped. Nothing more, nothing less. When you're buying the console you know upfront it was not designed to run arbitrary code.
I fail to see how this can be a huge disappointment to you later.
it has never been about "piracy" but control.
No and yes. It's in Microsoft's best interest to prevent piracy and to ensure the platform can't be used to run non-signed software. There is no profit in creating and selling consoles. Microsoft earns back the huge amount money they invested -- to make a kick-ass game console for us -- from the game sales.
If everyone would be as narrowminded as you, there would be no market for game consoles at all anymore.
It's okay if you want to run Linux on the thing. I personally don't really see the benefit, but it's a nice challenge to get it running anyway. However, assuming you are going to buy an xbox because you like playing the games, also you should be dead against piracy.
DDoSsing SCO is not a good thing [tm] It will only give them more ammunition to throw at the open source community and will strongen their case that the whole open source community is a bunch of evil anarchists.
This virus is so good for them, you'd almost think they wrote it themselves.
True, but then again Microsoft is not truely one company, as it is many small islands actually doing what you suggest; each with their own targets and business, sharing a common infrastructure and marketing engine. The potential power of this is much greater than that of any small company alone, as long as they don't fall for the bureaucracy trap and retain their speed.
I think Microsoft can pull this off really, even though Google is far superior, they have the power to change the world and reduce Google to a service used by a smaller in-crowd of people that know what is good for them, probably those people now using unix or mozilla.
And if they cann't win fairly, they can always 'fix' the browser.
I'm subscribed to l-k, so if I actually bothered to read the 200-odd messages coming in each day, I could probably give a better summary... anybody know how to stretch a day to 30 hours?
A good night's sleep seems to pass in a minute. So for just one minute of good sleep, you currently invest six or more hours. Therefore the problem can be solved by sleeping just this one minute. The hours you win by doing this can be added to your day, effectively yielding a 30-hour day.
And now HTML to LaTeX because going to replace it you want to do the same. Basically you can map most of the presentation commands, and LaTeX can do much more, but many things that make the web unique simply cannot be done:
- (not easy, unless you include postscript)
- \table (okay!)
- ??
...> - ??
<FORM> - ??
<LAYER>
<MULTICOLUMN> -- (Easy in LaTeX!)
BACKGROUNDS/COLORS/IMAGES - Absent (ever tried coloring a cell, a full page or half a page in a LaTeX doc?)
<A...> - Absent
<MAP> - See <A...>
<OBJECT> - Absent...
So, there are some similarities, but I would say man of the above tags are absolutely needed to make a proper web page...
Ah, just like the mandatory prison sentence for drugs, theft, robbery, murder, prostitution and illegal gambling put a stop to those.
Many crackers do it for the kick. Part of the trick is not being caught. People capable of still causing real harm to online traders are amazingly good at that particular trick. Unlike (I imagine) real-life crimes, with online crimes you have an amazing amount of time to prepare properly and set-up your systems.
About registration, I bet they do...
Problem with IPs is: A criminal who does not want to get linked to multiple attacks simply doesn't use the same car twice but just steals new number-plates or or simply steals a car. Same holds for IP addresses. You just get a new one (one?) for every attack or use someone else's, and preferably never use your own.
First of all, it is never too much work to apply 153 patches to your one, two or ten e-commerce internet servers. For all other machines, you may consider puting the patches on your local disks on the day they are issued, and link to them from sub-directories named after the affected system(s). Allows for really quick updates.
Also, the number of patches you need to apply is quite limited if you just apply the latest SP first (12 for Win2k with SP1), and patches are often named after the SP they will appear in. I would say: Piece of cake to keep those systems up-to-date. Only problem remaining is that MS insists on re-booting after every single applied patch. Then again, isn't that why god gave us perl for win32?;-)
Microsoft has a security buletin that they send out to inform everyone of the security leaks in Micorsoft products. We received 93 nw buletins and numerous updates this year (3 today...). I don't want to defend Microsoft, but I very much doubt they brag about their security in any other way than relative to prior versions.
Second: Linux is hardly ever specifically mentioned. Most security problems are application problems, not kernel problems and affect all *nixes. Linux kernel problems are as rare as Windows NT kernel problems.
Typically Win32 problems are with IIS, LanManager, IE and Office. Recent *nix problems have to do with apache/mysql, samba, bind, bash, ssh, identd etc. The only problems that haunt mostly the Windows OS are the Integration (and Visual Basic) related problems. Apparently that is just too complex to get secure. It's the fact that there is virtually no integration between most *nix applications that saves the *nix community from this *for now*.
No, in fact vulnerabilities were invented by the unix community in the seventies. Microsoft (as usual) just claimed it was new, and took credit for having the first OS with vulnerabilities.
Heh, and then just imagine that ethernet started out as a wireless radio packet switching protocol on Hawai. Coax was considered an improvement...
See: What is the internet
The Ethernet concept arose because a researcher from Xerox PARC spent a sabbatical period at the University of Hawaii and noticed that the random access radio system could be operated on a coaxial cable at data rates thousands of times faster than could be accomplished through the air.
How about using glass fiber to the home instead? Maybe even use wired routers switches to get our packets on the fastest network?!? Then all get what we want and we can reserve the limited bandwidth for radio packets for applications that really need to be mobile, instead of as a nifty techie replacement for DSL.
The answer to your question is: It is the project manager's task to get the project finished, to get the job done. That is her job description. Whether it is impossible to do or not, if she accepts the assignment she must do it or else she is to blame.
If she knows -- which she should -- she cannot do it she should refuse, even if that means she gets fired. Getting fired before the projects is always preferable over getting fired after suffering 1000 hours of frustration in 12 weeks.
The only way to write good software is to get your project management right, get support from your client, and get enough disciplined, good, and motivated staff with the right mix between experience and young enthousiasm. After that, whether you do it the Death March way, or not doesn't matter.
Problem is that getting these necessary components together is in many organizations only possible if you are, act like, or claim to be on a Death March.
Who really should read this book...
on
Death March
·
· Score: 1
I read the book and I think it is okay. Problem with the book is that Yourdon tends to repeat himself over and over again in each chapter.
Also, I think people who plan to be just programmers should not read the book. People who definitely need to read this book are the Project Managers of such (any actually) projects and their bosses/stakeholders.
Especially the topics regarding the motivation of the team members to do it now, but also to do it again should be important to them. IMHO that is where the real problems with Death March projects lie: Programmers who after the project finished think: What did we do it for?!? Why did we work 90 hour weeks??? What was in it for me???
If you do not get that right, then -- appart from filling the ranks of your competitors with your cynical ex-programmers -- you end up staffing your Death March projects with young, new programmers, and that means you miss out on a lot of experience. Since experience is just what such a project needs you shoot yourself in the foot if you give your staff the chance to decide that they will never do it again, or at least not for you(r company).
I like what Yourdon has to say about that, but would advice anyone who doesn't plan to become a project manager on such project not to read this book, because it is a bit on the boring side, even if you are interested in the topic.
I don't care how cool the GUI of this Mac thing is, if it has no middle-mouse-button paste it's worthless, and frankly I cannot see how you would do middle-mouse button paste with just one button.
I once read that screens last much longer than computers. Many people tend to buy new systems but keep the old CRT, especially if the old one is 17" or larger. I know many people who do not want more than 17" on their desk because they claim it is less comfortable to work with.
I wonder if there are some statistics about that. Also it would be nice to see if the same holds for the corporate world, or if the IS departments blindly upgrade screen and system (which I think is happening, and may not be the wisest thing).
I think that Telenet was a reseller of BSD/OS, not a "client" in the strict sense of the word.
Yes, and the PC manufacturers like DELL and Gateway are re-sellers of M$ Windows...:P
Let's see the DOJ's response if Microsoft buys DELL...
What it DOES do is allow a corporation to buy pre-tested and "approved" hardware without worrying about compatibility issues
It is not strictly necessary for the software supplier to OWN the company that sells the hardware. Companies like DELL, Gateway, Compaq etc. also sell pre-tested and 'approved' hardware, and I bet they need not be owned by Microsoft to do that correctly. It is even better if they are not since they may either refuse to use or replace (parts of) the software on their system when these cause problems.
Brand hardware for re-sale
I think you forgot Microsoft Powerpoint there;) Seriously, I think most examples there are not very discutable. Point is, TelnetSystems is not going to make a switch to Linux now, are they? Previously they could, now they can't. End of choice, and if you would take it to the extreme, no real 'market'.
Eventually, people are going to want to do this to the entire atmosphere of Mars to make it breathable. What will happen then? Should an undertaking like that be considered? Should we totally alter a foreign planet and bring it away from its natural state? What would the result be?
I really would love to see this happen. IMHO there is nothing wrong with taking a big lump of red sand and creating a biosphrere-like experiment there. I think there is no essential defference between Nevada and Mars.
IDEs are good. However, my experiences are that with larger projects you typically just want a bit more than the IDE can offer you. I tend to revert to the barebone compilation tools for that. Still using parts of the IDE (especially theeditor) if I can.
Good things IDEs brought us:
Syntax Highlighting!
Statement completion, expanding arguments to calls as you type (dereffing against all include files, giving a list of structure/class members (basically ctrl+space in m$ words)
Integrated debugger: Without that many starting programmers might still think printf() is the only way of debugging anything.
Context sensitive online help
Source control for the masses
Bad things IDEs brought us: Wizards. These hurt skills. (Imagine a visual studio adapt trying to set-up a motif application using only vi and gcc...)
Having seen many definitions of Operating Systems over time, I would like to add my own definition here, including some resoning. Top-down, I would say that a reasonable definition is:
"An Operating System is a software layer that offers services that facilitate the running of applications on some kind of (hardware) platform."
Using this definition it is obvious that there is neither an upper nor a lower limit to operating system functionality. And exactly that is the main problem with the question "What is an operating system". Maybe there is no proper top-down definition.
Let's take a look at my (recent) history to find a bottom-up definition:
1984: The first operating system I ever actively worked with was the builtin OS on a Commodore 64. It offered IO functionality for all provided hardware interfaces (External storage, CRT, Keyboard, Aux), it offered timing and timers and native 2dgfx support.
1986: Later I worked with MSDOS for a while. This OS offered basic IO (CRT, Keyboard,Aux) Advanced Disk IO (hierarchical directory structures) Timing, (very) basic graphical video routines and interrupt handlers. Also it allowed for drivers to extend the basic functionality with, for example, CD-ROM support, Mouse support and later even VMEM and High Memory.
1992: Somewhere in the nineties I discovered the joys of Unix. I worked with some commercial Unix-es (Linux came later for me, sorry). These OSes offerd advanced IO, including terminal connections, timing, very advanced file system support including permissions etc, multi-user support, multi-tasking (later threading), cd-rom, mouse support, virtual memory support, etc. etc.
Fun thing is that most these unix-es were shipped with a windowing system as well, usually X with a window manager. However, with respect to unix these can be considered to be 'just applications'.
Also, MS-DOS 3 had a windowing extension, called Windows [2, 3, 2.11]. I can not remember that Microsoft called it an operating system by then. This could be seen like just another application, Like X, but then again Windows adds virtual memory and (a very rudimentary form of) multi-tasking to the system.
As of 1995 I worked with windows 95 which basically is just MS-DOS with a fancy version of Windows 3.11 on top of it. However, something funny occured and that is that a WIN32 API was extended with some typical operating system functionality like multi-threading, virtual memory, permissions and so on.
Also as of 1996 I work with Windows NT, (even looked deeply into the internals). Here there is no clear separation between DOS and Windows anymore. It is just another Unix-like (don't shoot) operating system providing much functionality Unix also provides like muti-tasking and threading, virtual memory, etc.
Well, by now we should see a pattern. If we look at the basic functionality of all operating systems in this list then we see they all supply:
* Basic IO to CRT, Input devices, Dis[ck] and AUX * Task / Application management [At least one] * Interrupt Services * Timing and Timers
(Even my PalmPilot and HP48 have all this)
And more advanced features such as * One or more File System(s) * Task and Thread-Scheduling [+locks, semaphores etc.] * Virtual Memory * Multi-User support, including security * NIC Support [is really just IO?] * TCP/IP Protocol Stack, Sockets * Basic GFX support * Mouse/Pen support * Extensibility with Drivers (Modules/WDM) * Dynamic Linking Support
I think this is where I would really draw the line for an operating system. So, for me the following items are not part of the operating system:
* GUI Calls (just an add-on library, for me, could be many. The fact that M$ integrates this in the kernel does not influence this) * FTP, Telnet, SMTP,... daemons (just applications) * File System Browser / Explorer (Is just an application, offers no real services to other applications and is in that way not very different from an appplication like Ghostscript) * Internet Browser (same level as Solitaire and Mine Sweeper. Way down the list, does not offer services to many applications at all, which is I think a pre-condition for being part of the OS)
The fun thing is that I tried to put the limit on the bare minimum. If we put the bare minimum routines on a system then it should be reasonably possible to run an application nowadays. SO, maybe that is the bottom up definition then:
"An operating system is a software layer that provides the bare minimum functionality needed to write and run applications with reasonable effort."
Obviously the limit of what is reasonable will differ per person (no VMEM could already be called unreasonable...), per application (Playstation vs PC) and it will change over time. In the 1980s we were already very happy is we had basic screen and keybaord IO. I bet in ten years noone will take a machine seriously when it does not have a graphical interface, so by then I would say that GUI calls are part of the OS.
preventing people from having full access to their property is a criminal offense in my book.
You bought the product as it is shipped. Nothing more, nothing less. When you're buying the console you know upfront it was not designed to run arbitrary code.
I fail to see how this can be a huge disappointment to you later.
it has never been about "piracy" but control.
No and yes. It's in Microsoft's best interest to prevent piracy and to ensure the platform can't be used to run non-signed software. There is no profit in creating and selling consoles. Microsoft earns back the huge amount money they invested -- to make a kick-ass game console for us -- from the game sales.
If everyone would be as narrowminded as you, there would be no market for game consoles at all anymore.
It's okay if you want to run Linux on the thing. I personally don't really see the benefit, but it's a nice challenge to get it running anyway. However, assuming you are going to buy an xbox because you like playing the games, also you should be dead against piracy.
And the other half is smart enough not to write about their cat 'Paws'. Three cheers to them!
They won't run out of cash. Microsoft will just buy another unix license if they do.
DDoSsing SCO is not a good thing [tm] It will only give them more ammunition to throw at the open source community and will strongen their case that the whole open source community is a bunch of evil anarchists.
This virus is so good for them, you'd almost think they wrote it themselves.
True, but then again Microsoft is not truely one company, as it is many small islands actually doing what you suggest; each with their own targets and business, sharing a common infrastructure and marketing engine. The potential power of this is much greater than that of any small company alone, as long as they don't fall for the bureaucracy trap and retain their speed.
I think Microsoft can pull this off really, even though Google is far superior, they have the power to change the world and reduce Google to a service used by a smaller in-crowd of people that know what is good for them, probably those people now using unix or mozilla.
And if they cann't win fairly, they can always 'fix' the browser.
A good night's sleep seems to pass in a minute. So for just one minute of good sleep, you currently invest six or more hours. Therefore the problem can be solved by sleeping just this one minute. The hours you win by doing this can be added to your day, effectively yielding a 30-hour day.
And now HTML to LaTeX because going to replace it you want to do the same. Basically you can map most of the presentation commands, and LaTeX can do much more, but many things that make the web unique simply cannot be done: - (not easy, unless you include postscript) - \table (okay!) - ??...> - ??
<FORM> - ??
<LAYER>
<MULTICOLUMN> -- (Easy in LaTeX!)
BACKGROUNDS/COLORS/IMAGES - Absent (ever tried coloring a cell, a full page or half a page in a LaTeX doc?)
<A ...> - Absent
<MAP> - See <A ...>
<OBJECT> - Absent...
So, there are some similarities, but I would say man of the above tags are absolutely needed to make a proper web page...
Many crackers do it for the kick. Part of the trick is not being caught. People capable of still causing real harm to online traders are amazingly good at that particular trick. Unlike (I imagine) real-life crimes, with online crimes you have an amazing amount of time to prepare properly and set-up your systems.
About registration, I bet they do... Problem with IPs is: A criminal who does not want to get linked to multiple attacks simply doesn't use the same car twice but just steals new number-plates or or simply steals a car. Same holds for IP addresses. You just get a new one (one?) for every attack or use someone else's, and preferably never use your own.
--
Also, the number of patches you need to apply is quite limited if you just apply the latest SP first (12 for Win2k with SP1), and patches are often named after the SP they will appear in. I would say: Piece of cake to keep those systems up-to-date. Only problem remaining is that MS insists on re-booting after every single applied patch. Then again, isn't that why god gave us perl for win32? ;-)
--
Second: Linux is hardly ever specifically mentioned. Most security problems are application problems, not kernel problems and affect all *nixes. Linux kernel problems are as rare as Windows NT kernel problems.
Typically Win32 problems are with IIS, LanManager, IE and Office. Recent *nix problems have to do with apache/mysql, samba, bind, bash, ssh, identd etc. The only problems that haunt mostly the Windows OS are the Integration (and Visual Basic) related problems. Apparently that is just too complex to get secure. It's the fact that there is virtually no integration between most *nix applications that saves the *nix community from this *for now*.
Links: [Microsoft Security] [SecurityFocus] [CERT]
--
--
--
If she knows -- which she should -- she cannot do it she should refuse, even if that means she gets fired. Getting fired before the projects is always preferable over getting fired after suffering 1000 hours of frustration in 12 weeks.
--
Problem is that getting these necessary components together is in many organizations only possible if you are, act like, or claim to be on a Death March.
You really should read: How to run succesful projects by Fergus O'Connell.
--
Also, I think people who plan to be just programmers should not read the book. People who definitely need to read this book are the Project Managers of such (any actually) projects and their bosses/stakeholders.
Especially the topics regarding the motivation of the team members to do it now, but also to do it again should be important to them. IMHO that is where the real problems with Death March projects lie: Programmers who after the project finished think: What did we do it for?!? Why did we work 90 hour weeks??? What was in it for me???
If you do not get that right, then -- appart from filling the ranks of your competitors with your cynical ex-programmers -- you end up staffing your Death March projects with young, new programmers, and that means you miss out on a lot of experience. Since experience is just what such a project needs you shoot yourself in the foot if you give your staff the chance to decide that they will never do it again, or at least not for you(r company).
I like what Yourdon has to say about that, but would advice anyone who doesn't plan to become a project manager on such project not to read this book, because it is a bit on the boring side, even if you are interested in the topic.
--
--
Anyone got any thoughts on LCD with respect to LCD? Are we saving the future world by using LCD screens on our desktop now, or are we making it worse?
I wonder if there are some statistics about that. Also it would be nice to see if the same holds for the corporate world, or if the IS departments blindly upgrade screen and system (which I think is happening, and may not be the wisest thing).
- CD (Orange, Green, Red book) are all still secret. You can not find them on internet
- DVD + Next.Gen. DVD (Confidential standards. Kept a (trade) secret by the DVD Forum!)
- Dolby AC3 Digital Audio [And with it all Dolby sandards]
- ISO9660 (for some time, it's ECMA119 now and downloadable for free, but ISO charge[sd] about $1000 for it)
- MacroVision (though I don't think it would have caught on in the Open Source world
:) ) - FAT32 and NTFS (eeeh... well...)
By the way, compact casette was also a confidential standard until Philips decided to give it away for free to gain more market...And these are just the standards I could think of in a second. I think more 'standards' are secret and have to be paid for than one would think.
Yes, and the PC manufacturers like DELL and Gateway are re-sellers of M$ Windows... :P
Let's see the DOJ's response if Microsoft buys DELL...
What it DOES do is allow a corporation to buy pre-tested and "approved" hardware without worrying about compatibility issues
It is not strictly necessary for the software supplier to OWN the company that sells the hardware. Companies like DELL, Gateway, Compaq etc. also sell pre-tested and 'approved' hardware, and I bet they need not be owned by Microsoft to do that correctly. It is even better if they are not since they may either refuse to use or replace (parts of) the software on their system when these cause problems.
Brand hardware for re-sale
I think you forgot Microsoft Powerpoint there ;) Seriously, I think most examples there are not very discutable. Point is, TelnetSystems is not going to make a switch to Linux now, are they? Previously they could, now they can't. End of choice, and if you would take it to the extreme, no real 'market'.
Or, you could be joking, and if you were
Heh...
--
--
Isn't the basis of a free market that clients keep their options open? I bet if Microsoft would do this the world would be screaming murder.
--
Good things IDEs brought us:
- Syntax Highlighting!
- Statement completion, expanding arguments to calls as you type (dereffing against all include files, giving a list of structure/class members (basically ctrl+space in m$ words)
- Integrated debugger: Without that many starting programmers might still think printf() is the only way of debugging anything.
- Context sensitive online help
- Source control for the masses
Bad things IDEs brought us: Wizards. These hurt skills. (Imagine a visual studio adapt trying to set-up a motif application using only vi and gcc...)Having seen many definitions of Operating Systems over time, I would like to add my own definition here, including some resoning. Top-down, I would say that a reasonable definition is:
... daemons (just applications)
"An Operating System is a software layer that offers services that facilitate the running of applications on some kind of (hardware) platform."
Using this definition it is obvious that there is neither an upper nor a lower limit to operating system functionality. And exactly that is the main problem with the question "What is an operating system". Maybe there is no proper top-down definition.
Let's take a look at my (recent) history to find a bottom-up definition:
1984: The first operating system I ever actively worked with was the builtin OS on a Commodore 64. It offered IO functionality for all provided hardware interfaces (External storage, CRT, Keyboard, Aux), it offered timing and timers and native 2dgfx support.
1986: Later I worked with MSDOS for a while. This OS offered basic IO (CRT, Keyboard,Aux) Advanced Disk IO (hierarchical directory structures) Timing, (very) basic graphical video routines and interrupt handlers. Also it allowed for drivers to extend the basic functionality with, for example, CD-ROM support, Mouse support and later even VMEM and High Memory.
1992: Somewhere in the nineties I discovered the joys of Unix. I worked with some commercial Unix-es (Linux came later for me, sorry). These OSes offerd advanced IO, including terminal connections, timing, very advanced file system support including permissions etc, multi-user support, multi-tasking (later threading), cd-rom, mouse support, virtual memory support, etc. etc.
Fun thing is that most these unix-es were shipped with a windowing system as well, usually X with a window manager. However, with respect to unix these can be considered to be 'just applications'.
Also, MS-DOS 3 had a windowing extension, called Windows [2, 3, 2.11]. I can not remember that Microsoft called it an operating system by then. This could be seen like just another application, Like X, but then again Windows adds virtual memory and (a very rudimentary form of) multi-tasking to the system.
As of 1995 I worked with windows 95 which basically is just MS-DOS with a fancy version of Windows 3.11 on top of it. However, something funny occured and that is that a WIN32 API was extended with some typical operating system functionality like multi-threading, virtual memory, permissions and so on.
Also as of 1996 I work with Windows NT, (even looked deeply into the internals). Here there is no clear separation between DOS and Windows anymore. It is just another Unix-like (don't shoot) operating system providing much functionality Unix also provides like muti-tasking and threading, virtual memory, etc.
Well, by now we should see a pattern. If we look at the basic functionality of all operating systems in this list then we see they all supply:
* Basic IO to CRT, Input devices, Dis[ck] and AUX
* Task / Application management [At least one]
* Interrupt Services
* Timing and Timers
(Even my PalmPilot and HP48 have all this)
And more advanced features such as
* One or more File System(s)
* Task and Thread-Scheduling [+locks, semaphores etc.]
* Virtual Memory
* Multi-User support, including security
* NIC Support [is really just IO?]
* TCP/IP Protocol Stack, Sockets
* Basic GFX support
* Mouse/Pen support
* Extensibility with Drivers (Modules/WDM)
* Dynamic Linking Support
I think this is where I would really draw the line for an operating system. So, for me the following items are not part of the operating system:
* GUI Calls (just an add-on library, for me, could be many. The fact that M$ integrates this in the kernel does not influence this)
* FTP, Telnet, SMTP,
* File System Browser / Explorer (Is just an application, offers no real services to other applications and is in that way not very different from an appplication like Ghostscript)
* Internet Browser (same level as Solitaire and Mine Sweeper. Way down the list, does not offer services to many applications at all, which is I think a pre-condition for being part of the OS)
The fun thing is that I tried to put the limit on the bare minimum. If we put the bare minimum routines on a system then it should be reasonably possible to run an application nowadays. SO, maybe that is the bottom up definition then:
"An operating system is a software layer that provides the bare minimum functionality needed to write and run applications with reasonable effort."
Obviously the limit of what is reasonable will differ per person (no VMEM could already be called unreasonable...), per application (Playstation vs PC) and it will change over time. In the 1980s we were already very happy is we had basic screen and keybaord IO. I bet in ten years noone will take a machine seriously when it does not have a graphical interface, so by then I would say that GUI calls are part of the OS.
Just my $0.05,
Pieter-Bas
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