pitterpatter

Reminds me of a hang in the Settings UI that was because it would get stuck on an RPC call to some service.

Why was the service holding things up? Because it was waiting on acquiring a lock held by one of its other threads.

What was that other thread doing? It was deadlocked because it tried to recursively acquire an exclusive srwlock (exactly what the docs say will happen if you try).

Why was it even trying to reacquire said lock? Ultimately because of a buffer overrun that ended up overwriting some important structures.

Sure, maybe we could have that conversation if noncompetes actually required that...but they don't

Else trade secrets can easily be hired away from competition

Misappropriating trade secrets is already a crime in several states and federally.

you are paid highly for the specific reason that you are long term investment for that company.

Sounds like the company then should make staying long term an attractive proposition. I mean I understand, but "investment" usually implies some amount of risk.

Yes, Rust supports annotating your types with a `#[repr(...)]` attribute to control how it gets laid out in memory. There's a "C" repr that gives you representations interoperable with C.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/type-layout.html#the-c-r...

A solution exists, and is nearly universally implemented: scroll wheels on a mouse, and scroll gestures on a trackpad.

So you didn't read the article huh. The very first paragraph says:

“Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen.

Or literally the next paragraph about difficulties small/hidden scrollbars cause with other input methods, e.g. eye trackers.

This sorta meshes with how I tend to think of cash. I essentially consider withdrawn cash as already "spent" the moment it leaves my account. So when I do get around to spending that cash (especially on something frivolous) there's less of a hangup over it.

The second most recent was when Windows Store local repository become broken. Any attempt at resolving the issue failed using Windows provided tools. Yet again had to reinstall the OS and all applications.

oh man, I had my Windows install get into a weird state where trying to open 'Updates & Security' would just crash the Settings app altogether. Eventually I submitted a feedback hub report for it with a dump and tttrace (though that was a journey in and of itself) and in the meanwhile I actually managed to get updates installed via the PSWindowsUpdate powershell module. Alas, that still didn't fix the crashing Settings app. I had a friend at MS promote my feedback hub item to a bug who relayed the reason being that my copy of MusUpdatehandlers.dll was corrupt somehow. Ok, I guess I can try using sfc and dism to hopefully repair that. A couple rounds of that and all I learnt was I actually had a few more update related DLLs that were also corrupted. The real kicker being the copy in the store was also corrupted??

  2022-05-25 16:40:41, Info                  CSI    00000226 [SR] Could not reproject corrupted file \??\C:\WINDOWS\System32\\updatepolicy.dll; source file in store is also corrupted

At Apple's scale, an edge case is a question of when (and how often) not if.

Could they have purchased the hardware instead? Probably

Uh, from the article:

We use many off-the-shelf development boards and even provide support for a number of these boards in Hubris. These are great for many use-cases, but less great when we are trying to model specific circuits or subsystems of our product designs. Second, we have numerous examples of custom boards that were built simply because we could find no useful OTS (off-the-shelf) alternative.

By creating a standard, and allowing multiple implementations, someone creating a new OS or a new CPU architecture can create their own implementation of the language without having to wait for anyone else to deign to create the port.

Why does that require multiple implementations? There's nothing stopping said party from adding support for their OS/arch to rustc directly today. There are multiple examples of this already: fuchsia, Sony PSP, Nintendo Switch, etc [1]. Now if you want support in rustc itself out-of-the-box this does require LLVM support your target as well. But even then, again nothing stopping you from adding LLVM support too. The avr-rust project for instance maintained an LLVM/rustc fork for a while before those patches were upstreamed.

[1] See the wide variety of targets with varying support today: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.htm...

This is not entirely unique to Google either. I have an old MSN email account I can't get into even though I know the password. It wants me to verify via an old phone number I no longer have access to.

My guess is they wanted you to pay the higher CS tuition to take the CS classes.

Math departments also tend to be a lot more lax in my experience. Case in point: I got sign-off to take a 300-level pure math class without its 300-level prereq. As well as just replace one required course for another to graduate.

Edge is probably the one that annoyed me the most

The hypervisor framework doesn't provide a lot of extra things which are implemented by whatever VMM you're using. Qemu can also use Hypervisor.framework but you certainly wouldn't say it's exactly 1-1 w/ VMware Fusion.

I mean, Windows on ARM (first 32bit and later 64) has been a thing for years now. I don't the issue is the architecture per se. What made the M1 Macbooks so good wasn't just because they were ARM based but specifically Apple's custom M1 chip.

scapy was incredibly useful while I was writing some packet processing for just crafting test payloads and iterating quickly.

I have a .reg file that I run on every new install to remap Caps-Lock to Ctrl

That's generally true but the thing about Microsoft is that it's so huge I wouldn't be surprised at them being customers of a lot of SaaS offerings. Could be via an acquired company that is partially integrated? Or some kind of federated login for partners.

It's hard to notice sometimes because the a struct FOO is often a typedef to whatever the latest version is in the SDK you're using (FOO1, FOO2, etc).

You can definitely do most if not all of that with WinDBG (which is distinct from the Visual Studio builtin debugger). The problem is there doesn't seem to be as much resources around learning how to use it. There are a ton of old hats at MS who know how to perform all sorts of wizardry with WinDBG.

Support for using Hypervisor.framework on M1 Macs was added in 6.2:

https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/6.2#Arm

On macOS hosts with Apple Silicon CPUs we now support the 'hvf' accelerator for running AArch64 guests

So what happens if you have Google Voice with a legacy Google Apps account? https://workspace.google.com/intl/en_us/pricing.html shows that Google Voice is a separate add-on from Google Workspace

There's an open PR for ethernet support (albeit with a different board) that uses the smoltcp crate to provide a tcp/ip stack: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris/pull/158

Generally when MSRC files security issues, they tend to get fixed quickly and across not just the current release but previous ones too.

the cultural animosity for cars has prevented effective expansions of the transit infrastructure

I'm not sure I understand this point? For one, if anything there's a clear preference for cars as the default mode of transportation.

One reason why some have preferred not to ship with Windows is so that they aren't tied to the Windows release cycle. Not to mention, getting fixes into the monthly updates in a whole thing in and of itself.

Seconded! If for nothing else but to support systems they don't currently provide binaries for :(

Speaking of Google web products not working with Firefox: Google Meet backgrounds. What's most frustrating there is that it used to work until they disabled it to just throw up an ad for Chrome (i.e. use a "supported" browser).

That won't always save you, there have definitely been bugs where it tries to hibernate but gets stuck

DirectStorage for instance (allowing P2P DMA between your GPU and SSD) is only going to be available in Windows 11 apparently.

Pretty sure they backtracked on that. "As such, games built against the DirectStorage SDK will be compatible with Windows 10, version 1909 and up"

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-develop...