3 ms·

This is a pretty uninformative article. It doesn't actually say why Windows would crash, as the title promises. It does some trivial math, points out there's an

This is a pretty uninformative article. It doesn't actually say why Windows would crash, as the title promises. It does some trivial math, points out there's an overflow, and then says "Clearly some code in Windows didn’t handle this too well, and Windows hung."

usr1106 7y ago
I don't agree. Nobody of the readers would care about the programming error made 25 years ago in some closed source code. However, timers wrapping around is a very current problem every programmer should be aware of. Not too long ago we had a problem with corrupted video files. After weeks of investigation it turned out that some code used an 32 bit unsigned to count microseconds. Well, that wraps around after approx. 1 h 10 min... Obviously most test cases were videos shorter than that.
- yummybear 7y ago
  I'm a reader and care, so at least one.
  - usr1106 7y ago
    Fair enough. If you stick to open source, then you can always know how programmers got it wrong in the past and present.
    - derefr 7y ago
      No, that allows you to know how programmers of FOSS got it wrong. Not all programming is the same; there are many lessons to learn about software engineering (mostly in the "what not to do" sense) which, for practical reasons, have only ever showed up in (time- and budget-constrained) closed-source codebases.
      - usr1106 7y ago
        Do you you have any fact-based evidence that certain bugs/anti-patterns would happen less in open source code bases or free software code bases? Well, security by obscurity might happen a bit less. And hopefully many bugs in contributions are spotted instead of being merged because the author thinks it should work. But all major open source projects have had amazingly "stupid" programming bugs that went undiscovered for many years. Or the same feature has been patched again and again, but still causes more trouble. Knowing that many company-internal software projects work with little review and very low testing coverage, it should be natural that their code quality is even worse. But that certain kinds of problems would only occur in closed source does not sound evident to me.
        derefr 7y ago
        > Do you you have any fact-based evidence that certain bugs/anti-patterns would happen less in open source code bases or free software code bases? How could I have that, or the opposite of that, without access to closed-source code-bases? That was my whole point: that you can't know what sort of selection bias you're implicitly accepting by only looking at a certain easily-accessible slice of the data. In order to know that it's safe to assume that FOSS is representative of all software, you first have to get access to enough non-FOSS codebases to be representative.
- me_me_me 7y ago
  Then tile is misleading. This is a running theme on HN: Why X does Y? Well we don't know but let me talk abut Z in relation to X.
  - usr1106 7y ago
    Because they didn't handle an integer timer wrapping around correctly. That answers most of the question. What remains is did they forget altogether or program it incorrectly. I'd say I have seen worse click bait, this post didn't annoy me even if the analysis was much simpler than a Google project zero blog post. Did you seriously expect to see Windows source code published? AFAIK it is still under strict NDA regardless of how old it is or did I miss some headlines?
    - ggambetta 7y ago
      I've read several blog posts that actually go and analyze why a bug happens, by disassembling DLLs or whatever they need to do. So yes, with a title like that, I do expect more than "oh, it's probably related to integer overflow somehow."
Stierlitz 7y ago
Not just windows 95 and 98 and it would have to be something buried in the OS for a 32 bit counter going to zero to freeze the system. "Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up" https://www.techworld.com/news/tech-innovation/microsoft-server-crash-nearly-causes-800-plane-pile-up-3577711/ https://www.techworld.com/news/tech-innovation/microsoft-ser...

usr1106 7y ago

I don't agree. Nobody of the readers would care about the programming error made 25 years ago in some closed source code. However, timers wrapping around is a very current problem every programmer should be aware of. Not too long ago we had a problem with corrupted video files. After weeks of investigation it turned out that some code used an 32 bit unsigned to count microseconds. Well, that wraps around after approx. 1 h 10 min... Obviously most test cases were videos shorter than that.

yummybear 7y ago
I'm a reader and care, so at least one.
- usr1106 7y ago
  Fair enough. If you stick to open source, then you can always know how programmers got it wrong in the past and present.
  - derefr 7y ago
    No, that allows you to know how programmers of FOSS got it wrong. Not all programming is the same; there are many lessons to learn about software engineering (mostly in the "what not to do" sense) which, for practical reasons, have only ever showed up in (time- and budget-constrained) closed-source codebases.
    - usr1106 7y ago
      Do you you have any fact-based evidence that certain bugs/anti-patterns would happen less in open source code bases or free software code bases? Well, security by obscurity might happen a bit less. And hopefully many bugs in contributions are spotted instead of being merged because the author thinks it should work. But all major open source projects have had amazingly "stupid" programming bugs that went undiscovered for many years. Or the same feature has been patched again and again, but still causes more trouble. Knowing that many company-internal software projects work with little review and very low testing coverage, it should be natural that their code quality is even worse. But that certain kinds of problems would only occur in closed source does not sound evident to me.
      - derefr 7y ago
        > Do you you have any fact-based evidence that certain bugs/anti-patterns would happen less in open source code bases or free software code bases? How could I have that, or the opposite of that, without access to closed-source code-bases? That was my whole point: that you can't know what sort of selection bias you're implicitly accepting by only looking at a certain easily-accessible slice of the data. In order to know that it's safe to assume that FOSS is representative of all software, you first have to get access to enough non-FOSS codebases to be representative.
me_me_me 7y ago
Then tile is misleading. This is a running theme on HN: Why X does Y? Well we don't know but let me talk abut Z in relation to X.
- usr1106 7y ago
  Because they didn't handle an integer timer wrapping around correctly. That answers most of the question. What remains is did they forget altogether or program it incorrectly. I'd say I have seen worse click bait, this post didn't annoy me even if the analysis was much simpler than a Google project zero blog post. Did you seriously expect to see Windows source code published? AFAIK it is still under strict NDA regardless of how old it is or did I miss some headlines?
  - ggambetta 7y ago
    I've read several blog posts that actually go and analyze why a bug happens, by disassembling DLLs or whatever they need to do. So yes, with a title like that, I do expect more than "oh, it's probably related to integer overflow somehow."

Stierlitz 7y ago

Not just windows 95 and 98 and it would have to be something buried in the OS for a 32 bit counter going to zero to freeze the system. "Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up" https://www.techworld.com/news/tech-innovation/microsoft-server-crash-nearly-causes-800-plane-pile-up-3577711/ https://www.techworld.com/news/tech-innovation/microsoft-ser...