Loving Open Source
This article on debugging and fixing a bug in Windows without the source is engrossing, in the way that an accident is engrossing. Sometimes you forget that 99% of the source code for the programs you use daily is available for free, and things like this can be changed easily. God I love Open Source...
Speaking of which, do you love Open Source? Opened Hand are on the look out for interesting developers; skills in embedded Linux, GTK+, and DBus are an advantage. If you think you are up to it, email us.
NP: August and Everything After, Counting Crows
Posted by Ben Finney at Tue Nov 8 23:02:12 2005:
While the primary horror item is "how the hell can you stand troubleshooting this without free source code", there's another thing that gets me about "hinting this problem in Windows" articles.
To explain what's happening with mostly textual data, they have no choice but to use a gazillion screenshots of GUI applications.
Being able to operate in text mode opens up such easy communication about problems and solutions. I sometimes forget how stifling it can be without that.
Posted by Josh Triplett at Wed Nov 9 01:20:58 2005:
To explain what's happening with mostly textual data, they have no choice but to use a gazillion screenshots of GUI applications.
Being able to operate in text mode opens up such easy communication about problems and solutions. I sometimes forget how stifling it can be without that.
The other items that stick out are "why hasn't Windows fixed the fact that you can't delete an in-use file yet", and "why why why should modifying the copy of an executable or DLL in memory modify the executable or DLL on disk, thus corrupting it for all eternity if you screw up". In both cases, the solutions are obvious and have been known by OS people for a long time: decouple file names from files on disk and refcount the latter, and use copy-on-write for mappings of executables or DLLs.
