chadaustin

God, that's the worst. Minecraft is also what led us to accidentally bind my child's account to the administrator account on my TV PC, and because he's a minor we can't actually unbind that account. I've tried for hours and have not succeeded.

"Just make a new account." It's possible but then we'd have to make sure we get every single saved game for all the various games moved over and ugh.

I write Rust for embedded systems and both effects and linear types would be meaningful improvements. Effects especially: if you have multiple cores in a coherent memory domain AND you run with interrupts enabled, you have to deal with three types of mutex:

- data accessed by multiple cores and interrupt handlers must be modified under a spin lock and with interrupts disabled

- data accessed by multiple cores but not interrupt handlers only needs the spin lock

- data accessed by one core but maybe interrupt handlers only needs to pay for disabling interrupts

Depending on your core and how performance sensitive the code is, the costs of the above can vary significantly. It would be nice to encode these rules in the type system.

(Ordered types might be useful for “critical sections” — that is, areas where interrupts are disabled and the interrupt disablement guard absolutely must be dropped in order.)

Every time this conversation comes up, I'm reminded of my team at Dropbox, where it was a rite of passage for new engineers to introduce a segfault in our Go server by not synchronizing writes to a data structure.

Swift has (had?) the same issue and I had to write a program to illustrate that Swift is (was?) perfectly happy to segfault under shared access to data structures.

Go has never been memory-safe (in the Rust and Java sense) and it's wild to me that it got branded as such.

Windows 95 allowed programs to disable system interrupts. No protection on cli instruction. Careful with those rose-colored glasses.

WER existed on XP but the APIs needed to customize dumps didn’t. And IMVU’s crash reporting code dated back to 2005.

> So I think that the claim that Direct3D captures exceptions is suspect.

I would think that too - but I based my claims on a stack trace captured at the time in the overridden SetUnhandledExceptionFilter. Now, computers were the Wild West then, and who knows where those DLLs actually originated, and any further details are lost to time.

> Maybe you were expecting C++ exceptions to be caught, but these APIs are only for SEH.

The distinction was clear then. And very well-documented by Microsoft. We caught all C++ exceptions before SEH.

> Yes, I know it's a 16year old post. But I must stop myths.

Your goal is laudable but I don’t love comments that discount a concrete history that I lived (and documented!). I call this out mostly because it’s happened before in discussions of old Windows APIs. I wish it were easier to get a snapshot of MSDN circa Windows XP, etc.

Hello, author here (16 years ago). I don't think that component existed then. In hindsight, we would have either used WER or initiated crash dumps from outside of the process via a watchdog. It is quite problematic to attempt to capture your process state from within a failed process.

That said, we did have a bunch of hand-rolled state capturing (including Python thread stacks) so maybe WER wouldn't have been as useful anyway.

It did, especially as the drives got older and shrieky. Plus the floppy and optical drives spinning up. But... funny story, when I moved to Silicon Valley, SSDs didn’t exist yet, but compile times were IO-bound. So my company bought everyone Dell workstations with two 15k RPM SAS drives in RAID 0. When I’d kick off a build, the desk would start vibrating under my fingers.

It made everything feel real!

Later, the company switched new employees to 3x 10,000 RPM SATA drives. Not quite as grindy, but still loud.

Looks like ‘97. Unfortunately I can’t find the receipts! If I had to guess, I think I’d say somewhere around $2000 in all. That computer lasted me a LONG time. When it was done being a desktop, it became a Linux server until I sold it around 2009. Sometimes I wish I’d kept it: the Pentium 2 was such an important CPU and I smile every time I see the one on display in the Computer History Museum.

I did a bunch of media and software development back then so RAM helped a lot. Why 640? Not sure. My particular board could have gone up to 768. I did some googling and found some boards that maxed out at 1 GB.

That was a weird time in computing. Things were getting fast and big quickly (not that many years later, I built a dual-socket Xeon at 2.8 GHz, and before that my brother had a dual socket P3 at 700 MHz.) but all the expansion boards were so special-purpose. I remember going out of my way to pick a board with something like seven expansion slots.

But I think your question about why the author said 640 is fair! Maybe they had a machine like mine around then. Or maybe it’s something NVIDIA was designing around?

You are straight up wrong. The first computer I ever built was a Pentium 2, RivaTNT, and it had 640 MB RAM.

I can’t find the purchase receipts or specific board brand but it had four SDRAM slots, and I had it populated with 2x64 and 2x256.

Edit: Found it in some old files of mine:

I was wrong! Not four DIMM slots... three! One must have been 128 and the other two 256.

  Pentium II 400, 512k cache
  Abit BF6 motherboard
  640 MB PC100 SDRAM
  21" Sony CPD-G500 (19.8" viewable, .24 dot pitch)
  17" ViewSonic monitor (16" viewable, .27 dot pitch)
  RivaTNT PCI video card with 16 MB VRAM
  Creative SB Live!
  Creative 5x DVD, 32x CD drive
  Sony CD-RW (2, 4, 24)
  80 GB Western Digital ATA/100
  40 GB Western Digital ATA/100
  17.2 GB Maxtor UltraDMA/33 HDD
  10.0 GB Maxtor UltraDMA/33 HDD
  Cambridge SoundWorks FourPointSurround FPS2000 Digital
  3Com OfficeConnect 10/100 EtherNet card
  3 Microsoft SideWinder Gamepads
  Labtec AM-252 Microphone
  Promise IDE Controller card
  Hauppage WinTV-Theatre Tuner Card

Last Christmas, we got a tree from a local farm in the mountains. We had the tree trimmed and decorated before we discovered a sleeping (hibernating?) bat on the inside.

We got it moved outside, but it took about 24 hours before I realized that I should call County Health. By that point, the bat was gone, and county health suggested I receive rabies treatment, but call my doctor. The bat could have bit or scratched without us realizing it.

The doctor concurred. Rabies treatment must be done at the ER. They strongly recommended everyone in the house receive treatment if we could not 100% rule out physical contact. (We couldn't.)

Me, my wife, my kids, EACH receiving the immunoglobulin and four rounds of vaccines at the ER. We ran the first ER out of the treatment so the kids had to go somewhere else. Also, those are big needles.

The treatment ended up billing insurance over $100,000. (Almost all of that is the immunoglobulin.) We also had to return to both ERs, three times each, with the last time being on Christmas morning.

There is research that says immunoglobulin is _likely_ not necessary if you have no visible bites, but it's current health policy in the USA, and no doctor wants to be the first to undertreat.

Most expensive Christmas tree ever.

You can still put atomics outside the mutex in Rust.

Exactly correct. Loading solarized in 256-color emacs shows just how poorly the (carefully-selected) Solarized colors map onto the xterm-256color palette.