There was a spike in Explorer crashes that resulted in the instruction pointer out in the middle of nowhere.
The start of a Raymond Chen investigation.
There was a spike in Explorer crashes that resulted in the instruction pointer out in the middle of nowhere.
The start of a Raymond Chen investigation.
This is not advanced, it’s just typical shit code written by incompetent idiots. Even in the blog post it was discovered that the idea is copy-paste from a tutorials website (coding for newbies).
The “official” way to do it is just to keep repeatedly trying and failing until it finally succeeds? What a waste of CPU cycles and I/O hardware. How pathetic.
It is called polling and in no way is it waste of system resources. You can try it for example once per second and it would basically be free.
Usually, good practices includes a timeout to avoid looping until end of time.
sj87,
Polling, while not computationally significant on modern CPUs, is always a bad practice if it can be helped. We’ve all seen it of course, but the more software that does this means that the CPU is constantly waking up just to check and see if there’s any work to do. One might ask “what’s the harm if I do it”, but as with the “tragedy of the commons”, everyone starts to justify it and that’s why we can notice backgrounded applications in task manager using CPU even though they’re not doing any work at all. This can interrupts foreground tasks, keeps idle processes pegged into cache & ram, prevents deep sleeping, wastes energy, etc. And polling is less responsive and adds delays. Sometimes we resort to polling because there’s no API to do what we need, or we don’t want to learn them, but whenever possible the best practice is to avoid polling and use an event API.
Much of Windows’ perceived unreliability (post-Windows 2000) comes from third-party uninstallers, antiviruses, and Internet Security Kits messing with Windows. I have none of these installed and I am much happier.
This is the problem with Microsoft not owning the user experience end-to-end (like Apple does): Windows OEMs still crap up Windows installs with third-party AVs.
Third-party uninstallers, antiviruses, and Internet Security Kits are Microsoft’s fault due to terrible security, planning and coding practices going back to the first version of windows. Growth and user adoption were more important, so security took a back seat and awful designs like the registry flourished. Obvious in hindsight, but maybe we’d all be on OS/2 if they had spent more time on those things.
Isn’t that just a Windows bug?