

The time one of my colleagues debugged a line-of-business application - joshyeager
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2014/07/18/10543324.aspx

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keithwarren
The 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!

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gedrap
I 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 :)

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n0rm
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/194791.The_Old_New_Thing](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/194791.The_Old_New_Thing)

~~~
DCoder
See also: free bonus chapters at [http://www.informit.com/store/old-new-thing-
practical-develo...](http://www.informit.com/store/old-new-thing-practical-
development-throughout-the-9780321440303) , under Sample Chapters.

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ww520
That's the problem of an OS without proper process isolation and without
privilege protection. The bad old days.

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orbifold
Arguably 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.

~~~
scintill76
"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...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-
javascript)

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Roboprog
Resisting 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().

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hyperliner
Aaaaand this is where folks that have an MBA joke about engineers ineptitude.

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fit2rule
How many MBA's does it take to change a light-bulb? It depends, how many
engineers are on their payroll ..

