What I wrote was: | The question
|| Were once SVC's ok, and now they are not preferred? | could be colored naif, but it is an entirely legitimate one, and the answer is yes. It reflected my view that, while Lindy's question had been condescended to, it was in fact an "entirely legitimate" one. This view, expressed umambiguously, was somehow transmogrified into a vehicle of insult followed by condescension. It was neither, and a neutral native English speaker would not have judged it to be either. Let me therefore make my advice more specific. SVC routines are lumbered with a long history of machinery---types, transient areas, segmentation into 4096-byte pieces, etc., etc,---that is now irrelevant. If you have SVC routines that do something that is at once useful and secure, maintain them; if instead you are setting out to do something ab initio, use PC routines instead. Finally, try to consider, dispassionately, the uncomfortable question whether you know enough to do what you are proposing to do safely and securely. I entirely agree with the substance of what Peter Relson has been saying (if not always with the wording of his strictures). Services should be implemented only by people who know what they are doing, i.e., by the over-competent. Most of the user SVC routines I have examined are 1) dispensable, 2) ill-conceived, and 3) insecurely implemented. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
