4 ms·
The time one of my colleagues debugged a line-of-business application
- n0rm 12y agohttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/194791.The_Old_New_Thing https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/194791.The_Old_New_Thing
- DCoder 12y agoSee also: free bonus chapters at http://www.informit.com/store/old-new-thing-practical-development-throughout-the-9780321440303 http://www.informit.com/store/old-new-thing-practical-develo... , under Sample Chapters.
- keithwarren 12y agoThe bogus delivery story at the end made the whole thing worth it. This day and age it might even merit a visit from Homeland Security!
- ww520 12y agoThat's the problem of an OS without proper process isolation and without privilege protection. The bad old days.
- shozan 12y agoSo, the OS is to blame here? Not the application programmers?
- carbocation 12y agoIt's the programmers' fault that their application crashed. It's the OS's fault that the OS itself crashed due to the application's crash.
- yuhong 12y agoAh, the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco, which was one of my favorite topics. I have a bad opinion against MS for it, and another favorite thing to mention about Win9x back when I was discussing this fiasco was how the dependence on DOS allowed Caldera to continue to sue MS. I once dug out PX00307 and mentioned it here: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?33838-What-s-the-WORST-setup-you-ve-ever-done-used-seen&p=247803#post247803 http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?33838...
- orbifold 12y agoArguably it would be much better to enforce process isolation and priviledge protection statically in the programming language. Currently system calls have a massive performance overhead, which could be eliminated if the compiler could reason about memory access violations and so on. Legacy code and other applications could run in sandboxed virtual machines. Microsoft has done some research in this direction with their Singularity OS and a programming language called M.
- eru 12y agoThere's also Google NaticeClient (NaCl) which tries a similar static approach, but on the assembly level.
- scintill76 12y ago"The Birth & Death of JavaScript"[0] talked about this. From my memory, in "the future" described in the talk, everything is ported to JS so that the VM does the isolation automatically and all the overhead can be thrown away. [0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- gedrap 12y agoI really enjoy reading well written software development stories from 90s, like this one. It just has a different vibe, emotion compared to the 'modern' stories. Makes me wish I was born a decade earlier, in a western country :)
- Roboprog 12y agoResisting the urge to put "operating system" in quotes :-) This kind of nonsense would not have been possible on *nix, OS/2 or VMS back in the early 90s. (written as somebody who had to write a fair amount of C code back then for such things in addition to the scourge of Win16) Still, hats off for debugging such a goofy work-around with a poorly chosen place for setjmp() to receive a longjmp().
- hyperliner 12y agoAaaaand this is where folks that have an MBA joke about engineers ineptitude.
- fit2rule 12y agoHow many MBA's does it take to change a light-bulb? It depends, how many engineers are on their payroll ..