Last week, I found myself sitting and waiting (and waiting) in an airport. Not that there's anything unusual about that except, according to the airlines, there was some nationwide glitch that disrupted my plans. Ever curious and not getting the full story from CNN, I dropped a note to someone who knows about this kind of stuff. Bill Curtis is chief scientist at Cast Software and I was able to catch up with him while waiting for take off.

Q: Bill, I'm at the airport right now, and a glitch has delayed my flight. What's the problem?

A: Media reports indicate an outage in a telecommunication system that links computers involved in filing flight plans.

Q: Is this the result of a common pattern?

A: Until we know more about the specific cause of the outage, it is hard to say. It could be a software defect or it could be a hardware failure. The common pattern is that a failure in one part of a system can propagate throughout other parts of the system, crashing or degrading overall system performance. Even if future outages have different causes, a common theme is that many parts of the system are very old and need to be upgraded to handle the volume and complexities of modern air traffic.

Q: Are there other such patterns you've seen?

A: Most big system outages are not the result of a single failure. They are the result of a problem in one part of the system beginning a chain reaction of problems in other parts. With the size and complexity of modern computer systems, many of the most critical defects occur in the interactions among different parts of the system. It is very hard for humans to imagine and test for all the possible interactions that can result in damaging consequences.

Q: What is the solution to these types of problems?

A: The FAA needs to upgrade the system. However, they have had problems with large upgrades in the past because they were unable to manage them effectively. The Federal government needs to upgrade its ability to acquire the large, complex systems needed to run the nation’s infrastructure. At the same time, those developing computer systems, and especially software, need to stop thinking of themselves as ‘artists’ and start thinking of themselves as "engineers". We need to provide them better automated tools to augment our limited ability to comprehend all the interactions in large, complex systems. Software engineering is a very young engineering discipline, and not enough software developers are skilled in developing robust software architectures that can handle outages in other parts of the system and sustain their processing. Airplanes are designed with backup systems and other defensive mechanisms so they can keep flying when some part of the system fails. We need to pursue the same type of robustness in upgrading the air traffic control system.

Q: Bill, they just called my flight -- finally. Thanks for your time.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

On the off chance you haven't been following what's known as the "Bilski case" -- well, you should be following it. Of course, at this stage, it's more "catch up" than "follow" since the case is now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court and nothing will likely happen until the middle of next year when the Court lays down the law, so to speak.

Here's the background: Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw applied for a U.S. patent for "a method of hedging risk in the field of commodities trading." The application was rejected by both the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the patent appeals court, which found that the application was not subject matter that qualifies for patent protection. Bilski then appealed the rejection to the Federal Circuit, and again was rejected. Finally, at the start of this year, Bilski and Warsaw petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Federal Circuit's decision, and oral arguments were presented to the Justices last week. And so we now wait to hear their decision.

So why should software developers care about a twice-denied patent application for something that has to do with commodities trading? The fundamental issue, says Robert Tosti, an attorney specializing in patents, trademarks, and other such intellectual property, is whether patents should be allowed on methods that don't involve a machine. Stuff like, well, source code. In other words, the question of whether software can be protected by patents -- an issue that's been bubbling for 20 years or more -- may finally be laid to rest.

Both the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat submitted amicus curiae briefs asking that the Supreme Court to affirm that software is not patentable, with Red Hat pointing out that "our patent system is supposed to foster innovation, but for open source and software in general, it does the opposite. Software patents form a minefield that slows and discourages software innovation." Hear, hear!!

In the meantime, we sit and wait a little while longer. The one thing we can count on when the Justices render their opinion is that some of us will like what they say, and some of us won't.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

No matter how good search engines are these days, people keep trying to do one better. Double that when you're talking about photos or videos. Granted there are "real" image search engines out there (sorry, Google Images doesn't count; it searches the text that's affixed to an image), but they're compute intensive and require extensive "training" to distinguish individual objects store in a huge database.

"If you're looking for images of bicycles, for instance, current algorithms have to be shown pictures of hundreds, if not thousands, of bicycles in order to be able to recognize a bicycle," explains Peyman Milanfar, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California-Santa Cruz. To address this problem, Milanfar and grad student Hae Jong Seo developed a Detection of Human Actions from a Single Example algorithm that enables automated recognition of both objects in images and actions in videos. The software analyzes an image or video and characterizes the most important constituents of the object or action represented. It then searches for those constituents in image and video databases.

The end result is that, to Milanfar, a single photo of a bicycle at night can be used as a template to locate pictures of bicycles in full sunlight, in the foreground or the background. A bicycle is a simply a bicycle, or more precisely, a bunch of pixels. Milanfar's software examines these pixels and their relation to one another. To find actions within videos, like a man riding a bicycle, Milanfar's software completes the same procedures but incorporates the manner in which those pixel relationships move over time. The software analyzes the map of pixel relationships and determines the salient geometric features of the object or action. These components remain perceptually constant within an object regardless of image quality.

Search engines can use this algorithm to identify patterns of pixel relationships by calculating the statistical likelihood that a candidate image contains the queried object. If the template is a bicycle, the outcome consists of a series of photographs containing bicycles of all shapes and sizes, ranked in order of similarity.

"The geometry of the bicycle is recognizable by the shape of the wheels and the way they are connected to the body, for example," Milanfar said. "We compute features from an image that are very stable. They are there even if we make the object bigger or smaller, change the background, or add noise."

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Biometric security has come a long way from when Sir William James Herschel, Chief Magistrate of the Hooghly district in Jungipoor, India, used fingerprints as a means of identification when authenticating contracts in 1858. These days it's "facial recognition" that's being used as identification for everything from issuing drivers licenses to granting access to secure buildings.

Of course, skeptics will guffaw "sure, but how accurate are they?" and the answer is "pretty darn accurate." In fact, Mohamed Abdel-Mottaleb, a professor in the University of Miami's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has developed a system with 95% to 100% accuracy.

The system Abdel-Mottaleb designed uses (1) 3D facial images, and (2) 2D images of the face combined with 3D models of the ear to identify people's unique facial features. For the 3D ear recognition, a series of frames of the ear is extracted from a video clip and then each frame is independently reconstructed in 3D. With the 3D facial images, Abdel-Mottaleb is getting 95% recognition by using a technique that reduces the number of distinguishable landmarks (primarily around the nose, eyebrows, mouth, and chin) considered when matching 3D facial data, by automatically selecting the most discriminative facial regions. The resulting 3D models are then registered using the iterative closest point algorithm.

For the 2D part (referred to as Multi-modal Biometric Modeling and Recognition of the Human Face and Ear), a set of facial landmarks is extracted from frontal facial images using the Active Shape Model technique. The response of facial images to a series of Gabor filters at the locations of facial landmarks are then calculated. The Gabor attributes are also stored in the database.

The similarity between the Gabor features of a facial image and the reference models in the database determine the best match. The match scores of the ear recognition and face recognition are combined to boost the system's overall recognition. Abdel-Mottaleb's experiments have been conducted using 402 video clips matched against 60 video images. As a result, he achieved an identification rate of 100% using the weighted sum technique for fusion.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Mono Tools for Visual Studio is a commercial add-on that lets C# and .NET developers trained in Microsoft Visual Studio stay in their familiar IDE, and use their existing skills, code, libraries, and tools to develop or port applications to Linux, UNIX, or Mac OS X. Before Mono Tools, claims Novell, .NET application porting required developers to learn new programming tools and rewriting/re-architecting applications. With Mono Tools, developers versed in Visual Studio can utilize their existing skills and expertise to build multi-platform applications and identify related issues, isolating and fixing them directly within Visual Studio.

"Our customers want options for Linux, as well as UNIX, Mac OS X, and Windows, so multi-platform support is a critical feature for us to offer in our products," says Pablo Santos, president at Codice Software. "For example, Plastic SCM, our software configuration management product, is implemented in C# because we find it to be the most productive language. By using Mono Tools for Visual Studio, we can now develop for multiple platforms quickly and easily using our preferred programming language and development environment.”

Key features of Mono Tools for Visual Studio include:

• Development and porting of .NET applications to Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS X with analysis, testing, debugging, and deployment all from within Visual Studio. Using Mono Tools for Visual Studio, Novell says that developers can cut the costs of multi-platform application development and save time in porting existing .NET applications to non-Windows platforms.
• Creation of turnkey virtual appliances and software "appliances" for .NET applications using integrated appliance building functionality. Mono Tools for Visual Studio delivers out-of-the-box integration with SUSE Studio Online, a hosted tool that lets build and test appliances based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or openSUSE.
• Integrated porting analysis tools that provide .NET developers a road-map to Linux, Mac OS X, and UNIX. Many .NET developers lack an approach or even an idea of where to begin an application port to non-Windows platforms, a challenge quickly solved with Mono Tools.
• Ability to run and debug applications in Mono within Visual Studio to isolate incompatibilities between Mono and .NET and between Linux and Windows, issues which may affect cross-platform application development.
• Automated packaging for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and openSUSE to prepare applications for immediate deployment on Linux.

"With Mono Tools for Visual Studio, we are bridging the gap between Visual Studio, one of the world's leading development platforms, and Linux, one of the world's leading deployment platforms," said Miguel de Icaza, Mono project founder and vice president of Developer Platforms at Novell. "Customers have been asking us for an easier, more simple, and streamlined process to port their .NET applications to Linux, UNIX and Mac. By integrating our tools right into Visual Studio, we are enabling developers familiar with Windows and .NET to quickly bring their applications to the Linux market, and ISVs to offer their software as ready-to-run appliances."

Mono Tools for Visual Studio is available in three editions:

• Professional Edition (individual).
• Enterprise Edition (one developer in an organization).
• Ultimate Edition, which provides a limited commercial license to redistribute Mono on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X and includes five enterprise developer licenses. All product versions include a one-year subscription for product updates.

A free 30-day trial version is available here. ]]> 2009-11-09T15:53:23Z 2009-11-06T18:57:53Z tag:,2009:/39.52586 2009-11-06T18:57:53Z

Who was it who said "hindsight is 20/20"? Whoever it was, they must have had me in mind when I picked the New York Yankees to win the 2009 World Series of baseball this past weekend. It's only a minor annoyance that the series wrapped up last week, a couple of days before I got around to making my picks.

Clearly, Bruce Bukiet likes a challenge more than I, which is why he went to all of the trouble of picking the winner before the series began. But then Bukiet is a mathematician who is better equipped intellectually than I am to take on such challenges. Bukiet, who is a professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), used mathematical modeling techniques to compute the probability of the Yankees and Phillies winning the World Series.

Who did he pick? The Yankees, of course. His model gave the team a 70 percent chance of winning. How did he pick them? Bukiet's method uses the 2009 regular season statistics for each player on each team's roster. He then applies a Markov Process approach to modeling production of runs in baseball games. Bukiet first presented this mathematical model in 1997 in Operations Research, and it has since been used for a number of purposes, including predicting how many games a team should win in a season, the expected influence of trades, the value of wagering on a game, and who is most deserving of Major League Baseball's most prestigious awards.

But Bukiet doesn't stop there. No, he has to put a little extra mustard on his ballpark hotdog by picking the Cy Young winners, too. In doing so, he considers that the player's contribution is most heavily influenced by how well he has kept players off the basepaths over a large number of innings. According to Bukiet, Zack Greinke of the Kansas City Royals deserves the American League Cy Young Award, while in the National League, the Cy Young Award winner ought to be Tim Lincecum of the San Francisco Giants.

So you're probably wondering who I picked for the Cy Young Award. Hang on to that thought ... I'll let you know in a couple of weeks.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

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There's a lot of rhetoric flying about -- but not much hard data -- about what IT departments and IT professional actually do in practice to make fact-based decisions as to how to organize the work they do.

To address the issue and answer some questions, I'd like to invite you to participate in the November 2009 of Dr. Dobb's State of the IT Union Survey, compiled and coordinated by Senior Contributing Editor Scott Ambler. The goal of this ongoing survey series is to find out what IT professionals are actually doing in practice. The survey should take you less than 5 minutes to complete, and your privacy will be completely protected.

At the end of the survey, you will be given the chance to be entered into a draw for one of 10 copies of Leading Lean Software Development, by Mary and Tom Poppendieck (Addison Wesley, November 2009). Additionally, Dr. Dobb's again is giving you the opportunity to be entered in a draw for one of five official Dr. Dobb's hats.

The results of this survey will be summarized in a forthcoming article by Scott. This is an open survey, so the source data (without identifying information to protect your privacy), a summary slide deck, and the original source questions will be posted at www.ambysoft.com/surveys/ so that others may analyze the data for their own purposes. Data from previous surveys have been used by university students and professors for their research papers, and hopefully the same will be true of the data from this survey. The results from several other surveys are already posted there, so please feel free to take advantage of this resource.

This is on the heels of the September 2009 State of the IT Union Survey, which had similar goals. Scott presents the feedback and results of that survey here. It's interesting stuff.

But the big news is that five randomly selected participants should have received their official Dr. Dobb's hats by now. Congratulations to Lawrence Becker, David Radford, Rich Joyner, Thomas Mossberg, and Phil Sargeant. Thanks for participating guys, and I hope the hats keep your heads warm and eyes shaded.

Don't miss your chance to get a Dr. Dobb's hat while they last. It just takes 5 minutes of your time to complete the survey and throw your hat in the Dr. Dobb's ring.

Go right now to Dr. Dobb's State of the IT Union Survey.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

According to Microsoft, infection rates and threats vary geographically, and SIRv7 contains proven best practices from countries with the lowest infections. For example, infection rates in Japan, Austria, and Germany remained relatively low during this period. The following best practices provide insight into how security experts in these regions keep resources safe from cyber threats:

• Japan has seen its infection rates remain relatively low. One of the reasons is due in large part to collaborations such as the Cyber Clean Center, a cooperative project between ISPs, security vendors, and Japanese government agencies to educate users.
• Austria has implemented strict IT enforcement guidelines to lower piracy rates, and this -- along with strong ISP relationships and fast Internet lines, which aid in security-update deployment -- has helped ensure its generally low infection rate.
• Germany has also leveraged collaboration efforts with its computer emergency response team (CERT) and ISP communities to help identify and raise awareness of botnet infections and, in some cases, quarantine infected computers.

Central to each of these regions is the growing trend of community-based defense, in which the broader industry combines its collective strengths and intelligence to help defend computer users.

Microsoft also recommends that organizations use the data and guidance outlined in the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report to assess and improve their security practices. Among some of the proactive steps organizations can take are:

• Ensure that all third-party applications are being updated regularly by the vendor. Check the vendor's website to determine whether any updates have been released and whether they need to be applied to computers.
• Ensure that a customer's development team is using the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), or similar software security assurance process.
• Ensure that policies are in place to help secure all file shares and regulate the use of removable media. Install AutoPlay update to help regulate automatic initiation of potentially dangerous removable media.

The nice thing about being agile is that, depending on how circumstances roll out, you have the flexibility to change your mind. That's the case with the Symbian Foundation, anyway.

For instance, when the Foundation was formed in mid-2008, one of the cornerstones was to be a Symbian developer app store, along the lines of Apple's App Store, Nokia's Ovi Store, and the like. What a difference a year can make.

As Symbian Executive Director Lee Williams said in a welcoming keynote at the Symbian Exchange and Exposition, "The world doesn't need another app store for developer products."

Instead, the Foundation will be focusing on Symbian Horizon, an application-publishing program designed to reduce barriers to delivering applications on the Symbian platform. Horizon will provide a service that lets developers write an application once, and publish in dozens of stores worldwide. Secondarily, Horizon is a directory of Symbian signed applications that will let developers display and advertise their applications. It will allow users to discover apps and find out which store they are available from by browsing the directory for all apps for their phone, or for specific app categories cross phones.

"Think of Horizon as the 'yellow pages' for S60 applications," explains Symbian's Daniel Lee. "Unlike app stores, Horizon will point users to applications across many app stores." A total of seven stores support Symbian Horizon. In addition to the initial stores announced, Ovi Store by Nokia, Samsung Applications Store, and AT&T's MEdia Mall, four new stores are now participating; China Mobile, Handango, Orange, and Sony Ericsson's Playnow.

From Symbian Horizon, users can find apps specific to their phone, developed by their favorite developer, or browse through them all.

Horizon also provides services to help developers to get the most out of the program, including assistance with application certification, technical development issues, language translation, application publishing to third-party stores, and comarketing opportunities.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

"Our objective is to look at strategic needs and opportunities that cut across product groups and find technology solutions to those problems," says Dan Reed, VP of XCG.

XCG will tackle challenges such as cryptography and parallel-programming models with rapid, large-scale prototyping and testing. That testing will help it transfer new technologies to Microsoft partners and product teams. "It's not just 'let's look at this problem and figure out new alternatives,'" Reed says. "It's 'look at the problem, figure out some new alternatives, build some prototypes of those alternatives, validate them, and then push them into production.'"

Reed predicts that there will be a huge set of technology changes on the hardware level -- and even more to systems software and next-generation applications. Multicore issues will affect Windows and other business products, and XCG is helping to prepare those product teams to cope with the new reality. The group operates on a five- to seven-year time horizon, and, along the way, it will spin off technologies that have shorter-term significance, Reed says. For example, earlier this year, the team demonstrated a hardware/software prototype based on Intel's low-power Atom processors. An intelligent energy-management system could turn processors on/off automatically while still delivering performance, and XCG is working with the Windows Azure team to transfer the energy-management software it has developed.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Kirk Ballou, CEO of start-up company Flash Widgets, can't say enough good things about the Open Screen Project Fund. That's because his company was the recipient of an Open Screen Project Fund grant that made it possible for Flash Widgets to develop the software they wanted to create, not the software they had to develop.

The software Ballou, who spoke at Nokia's Media Day (part of the Symbian Exchange and Exposition), wanted to develop was Twittle, a robust Flash Lite Twitter client. Twittle lets you access your Twitter account on the go via mobile phones and view Replies, Profile, Messages, Favorites, and your Main timeline. But, according to Ballou, "Twittle had to sit on the back burner while the company developed software to keep the lights on." That is, until they caught up with the Open Screen Project Fund.

The $10-million Open Screen Project Fund was developed jointly by Adobe and Nokia (each pitching in $5 million) to do exactly what it did in Ballou's case -- help developers create applications and services for mobile, desktop, and consumer electronic devices using the Adobe Flash Platform. The Open Screen Project is designed to enable a consistent runtime environment across screens. The initiative is dedicated to enable web content, standalone applications, and full web browsing across televisions, set-top boxes, mobile devices, and other consumer electronics that take advantage of Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Platform capabilities.

According to Forum Nokia's Bill Perry, more than 800 developers have submitted applications for grants since the fund was launched in February 2009. Of that, 35 applicants, including Ballou's Flash Widgets, have received funding to the tune of approximately $50,000 each.

"We are excited about the Open Screen Project Fund and the possibilities it offers to designers and developers worldwide," said Adobe's David Wadhwani. "With close to 40 percent of all new mobile devices shipped with Flash Lite in 2008, the fund will enable more developers to bring their rich content and services to a large number of mobile users."

Yes, Wadhwani may be excited about the fund and it's possibilities for developers -- but not nearly as excited as developers like Ballou.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

The VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has created an experimental system that lets people in multiple locations examine and interact with virtual objects that exist ... well, that don't exist at all. Visualize, if you will, two or three people in different locations, all wearing special video eye-glasses that let them see and actually manipulate the same virtual 3D objects that appear to be sitting on the empty table in front of them.

The Augmented Collaboration in Mixed Environments, or "ACME," was built using an open-source viewer from Linden Lab's Second Life virtual world, as well as from open-source ARToolkit and OpenCV libraries.

Sensors, cameras, and microphones located on both ends of the conversation allow voices, head and hand gestures, and movements to change in concert with the behavior of participants, enabling participants to sense the vital visual cues of body language. In this proof-of-concept, participants in physical rooms wear see-through video glasses that depict three-dimensional images of their online counterparts as they stand, walk, talk, or demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects shared between the spaces.

The research necessary for building ACME was supported in part by IBM Research and Nokia Research Center. Prototypes of ACME will be installed at IBM Research Austin and Nokia Research Center Tampere/Finland for internal use and further testing and development. To view a clip pf ACME in action, go to this YouTube video.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Ironically, much of Professor Dozier's work has focused on snow hydrology, not necessarily a topic that springs to mind when thinking about Southern California. But then, much of that region does get its water from the Sierra Nevada range. Of particular interest to Microsoft Research, however, is the work Dozier has done in the use of remote sensing technology to track water in mountainous drainage basins.

As you might imagine, this involves data -- and lots of it -- which led him to crossing-paths with Jim Gray.

"I was interested in dealing with lots of data, and of course he was interested and incredibly knowledgeable about computing technology and databases and what he saw as their future," Dozier says. "So we had a very fruitful collaboration."

Over the years, Dozier has found time to write more than 20 books and monographs, and more than 100 technical articles, many of which focus on remote sensing and information systems. He also co-authored (with Microsoft's William Gail) the article The Emerging Science of Environmental Applications, which appears in The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, published by Microsoft Research and available here.

Again, congratulations to Professor Dozier for a justly deserved award.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Intruders are relentless, attacking websites for security holes over and over. Programmers can perform security checks, but what's the point if you plug 100 holes but still miss one or two. Which is where "Resin," an automatic security checker developed by researchers at MIT, comes into play.

Resin is a runtime that helps prevent security vulnerabilities by letting programmers specify application-level data flow assertions. Developed by Nickolai Zeldovich, an assistant professor in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, grad students Alexander Yip and Xi Wang, and Professor Frans Kaashoek, Resin checks data-flow assertions by propagating policy objects along with data, then invoking filter objects when data crosses a data-flow boundary, such as when writing data to the network or a file. In other words, it's checking the data instead of the code. Attempts to access the data invoke the checker.

To test Resin, the team modified 12 existing applications written in Python and PHP so that they used the Resin system. The modified applications fended off attacks that exploited known security holes, too.

The PHP prototype involved 5,944 lines of code, with the largest module handling SQL parsing and translation mechanisms at about 2,600 lines. The core data structures and related functions are about 1,100 lines. Most of the remaining 2,200 lines involve propagating and merging policy objects. The Python prototype is only 681 lines of code because it doesn't implement all Resin features, and does not have character-level tracking, persistent policy storage in SQL databases, and Apache static file support. Plus Python uses fewer C libraries, thereby requiring less propagation code. All in all, the prototypes incur a 33% CPU overhead.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

I could understand that happening once and maybe even twice over the long haul. But three times in two weeks? That's a bit much even for those of us who appreciate a good punch line and a little irony from time to time.

Then there was the mobile phone executive who put the prototype of a new phone in his pocket just before getting on a crowded subway in Barcelona. When he got off the train, his pocket was empty, not to mention his future with the company.

What all this is leading up to is the news about the possibility of 128-bit support for Windows 8 and Windows 9 -- news inadvertantly posted in a LinkedIn profile by a Microsoft engineer. What makes this interesting isn't the fact that future versions of Windows will have 128-bit support (rumor has it that Windows 9 will also have support for kitchen sinks), but how that news became public. For the life of me, I can't understand why would someone post something of a confidential nature on a public site. But then it happens all the time. I could just as easily ask how someone could put their laptop on top of a car and driving away.

In all likelihood, this is interesting, but not Earth shattering since Windows 7 is just now rolling out, and Windows 8 won't be real until 2011 at the earliest. Your guess is as good as anyone's for Windows 9. Windows 7 will probably be the last 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, as Windows 8 will likely come in 64-bit and 128-bit versions. If not Windows 8, then surely Windows 9. In the meantime, I'd just ike to see Windows 7 get out the door.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com