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.)
> Apple M1 has an undocumented extension that, when enabled, ensures instructions like ADDS, SUBS and CMP compute PF and AF and store them as bits 26 and 27 of NZCV respectively, providing accurate emulation with no performance penalty.
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.
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?
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.
One typical approach is double-buffering the allocation but it doesn't work here because you need to pull out the waker list to call `wake()` outside of the mutex. You could try to put the allocation back, but you have to acquire the lock again.
I had an implementation that kept a lock-free waker pool around https://docs.rs/wakerpool/latest/wakerpool/ but now you're paying for atomics too, and it felt like this was all a workaround for a deficiency in the language.
Intrusive lists are the "correct" data structure, so I kept pushing.
Exactly correct. Loading solarized in 256-color emacs shows just how poorly the (carefully-selected) Solarized colors map onto the xterm-256color palette.
Where does this “can’t see more than 60 fps” rumor come from?
It’s trivially refutable by placing a 60 Hz strobe (e.g. old fluorescent light or even some aftermarket headlights) at the corner of your vision.
Also, for interactive systems, 16 ms is a large chunk of our reaction time. You need close to 1 ms response times (1000 fps) to approximate pen and paper.
My approach has been to send a header with the number of fds and bytes the next packet will contain, and the number of payload bytes is naturally never 0 in my case.
I wanted to make a permanent wake-from-sleep capacitive touch button for a PC that doesn't always have a keyboard attached. I tried to use the Tomu for that. Unfortunately, I never was able to wrangle its built-in USB functionality to stay awake when the PC slept.
They're not that hard to pull out. I did find it hard to find good examples for how to program the micro's capabilities, however.
"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.