Microsoft on a bug hunt

[rpm]

http://www.mybroadband.co.za/nephp/?m=show&id=1634

 

[Moederloos]

I will give them a clue - start at line 1 and work your way up. Should find at least 10 bugs by line 5.

 

[Moederloos]

Quality M$ "features"

1) Windows Explorer hangs, and your desktop goes with it
2) Broken Network paths hang PC
3) Internet Exploiter
4) IIS
5) No way to elegantly expand system partitions (drive C)
6) Multitasking still a pipe dream
7) Internet Exploiter (worth being here twice all by itself)

Will allow other forumites the opportunity to continue...

Edit: Have to add this one: 8) No decent command line system. WTF? So your stupid wizard gets all confuddled and I must accept a broken PC - lucky me.

 

[mancombseepgood]

Proactive customer support

Now there's a concept

 

[The_Unbeliever]

9) Registry allowing all sorts of malware and spyware to hide their start-up programs in there
10) Task Manager not showing all tasks --> should you want to kill errant malware or spyware
11) Every new Windows version is *not* faster than the preceding version, it is slower.

But who knows - by removing all the bugs, M$ might kill off application support... I mean, some proggies may rely on some obscure bug to function properly...

 

[Darth Garth]

Start from line 1 ... funny

But you chaps really have no idea all the crap that Microsoft had to do in Windows to support it's HUGE market share and have program compatibility all the way from 3.1 to XP today.

Here is a posting from a Windows developer below

One of the stranger application compatibility puzzles was solved by a colleague of mine who was trying to figure out why a particular program couldn't open the Printers Control Panel. Upon closer investigation, the reason became clear. The program launched the Control Panel, used FindWindow to locate the window, then accessed that window's "File" menu and extracted the strings from that menu looking for an item that contained the word "Printer". It then posted a WM_COMMAND message to the Control Panel window with the menu identifier it found, thereby simulating the user clicking on the "Printers" menu option.

With Windows 95's Control Panel, this method fell apart pretty badly. There is no "Printers" option on the Control Panel's File menu. It never occurred to the authors of the program that this was a possibility. (Mind you, it was a possibility even in Windows 3.1: If you were running a non-English version of Windows, the name of the Printers option will be something like "Skrivare" or "Drucker". Not that it mattered, because the "File" menu will be called something like "Arkiv" or "Datei"! The developers of this program simply assumed that everyone in the world speaks English.)

The code never checked for errors; it plowed ahead on the assumption that everything was going according to plan. The code eventually completed its rounds and sent a garbage WM_COMMAND message to the Control Panel window, which was of course ignored since it didn't match any of the valid commands on that window's menu.

The solution: Create a "decoy" Control Panel window with the same class name as Windows 3.1, so that this program would find it. The purpose of these "decoys" is to draw the attention of the offending program, taking the brunt of the mistreatment and doing what they can to mimic the original behavior enough to keep that program happy. In this case, it waited patiently for the garbage WM_COMMAND message to arrive and dutifully launched the Printers Control Panel.

There is a price to be paid for the openness of the Wintel PC ... you can always switch to Apple but hey just pay more and have far less software and hardware choices available.

 

[mancombseepgood]

But you chaps really have no idea all the crap that Microsoft had to do in Windows to support it's HUGE market share and have program compatibility all the way from 3.1 to XP today.

Pity their focus has been marketing and dominance above ethics and stability. Let's not start that whole netscape/ie argument again.

As for it getting slower and slower... it seems they are adding code to code... It may be too late, but they need some really good assembly programmers to rip out the excess imho.

 

[Moederloos]

Pity their focus has been marketing and dominance above ethics and stability. Let's not start that whole netscape/ie argument again.

As for it getting slower and slower... it seems they are adding code to code... It may be too late, but they need some really good assembly programmers to rip out the excess imho.

Its the old "quicker to patch on than rewrite" problem. Want a new feature? Add some code on like a tumour to an existing part of the software. Before too long, the tumour alone is bigger than the original OS.

It has to break some time.

 

[mancombseepgood]

No offense Tibby Dude

And I will from the outset say that this is my opinion and in my experience.

MS have almost always played catch up or copy. I clearly remember the early internet days where MS were reluctant to get involved. Look where that idea went (example of IE).

Think of the TCP/IP issue - TCP/IP was pretty mature before MS decided to abandon their twangy netbios. Then they decided to `invent' some fancy `improvements' to TCP/IP such as Active Directory. Anyone who is familiar with (for example) NDS will know what I mean when I say that AD was a bos-up (although it has improved). Older network engineers will know what I mean when I say that when a Netware network omitted a computer from the browse list, that it was indeed down. Anyone noticed how accurate and stable MS network browsing is (not)? Ever tried setting up an AD with one domain controller... issues man.. issues...

Anyway - maybe I'm showing my age, but I remember the days of Netware 3.12 , OS2, AS/400 fondly... somewhere down the line this marketing behemoth called MS took over the server domain... the only consolation for me is the improvement and market growth in Linux based open systems.

MS like to market new ideas without comitting to stablising their existing products before the plug is pulled on them. Marketing is their game.

 

[MrGray]

One of the stranger application compatibility puzzles was solved by a colleague of mine who was trying to figure out why a particular program couldn't open the Printers Control Panel...

As a programmer, I can honestly say that I would personally shoot anyone who wrote software for ANY OS in the way you described. Windoze sucks, I agree, but everyone uses it so it's a necessary evil. BUT, part of the reason Windows sucks is 3rd party application developers who write software the way you described.

 

[Darth Garth]

Look where that idea went (example of IE).

Well many people ditched Netscape and caused their eventual demise when I.E 4.0 was released as it was the better and faster browser back then.

Think of the TCP/IP issue - TCP/IP was pretty mature before MS decided to abandon their twangy netbios.

What about IPX/SPX from Novell ... you try loading a TCP/IP stack in 640K of DOS or Win 3.1 at the time .

TCP/IP use really only came about when the client workstations moved to better OS's like OS/2 or Windows 95 whose TCP/IP stack was rather solid and fast (from FreeBSD) compared to the various kludges (Trumpet Winsock with Win32s) used to get online to the internet at the time.

Ever tried setting up an AD with one domain controller... issues man.. issues...

Yep the Lan Manager heritage and that entire concept of primary and backup domain controllers was really pieces of turds.

Netware 3.12

I still remember supporting Netware 286 and waiting for COMPSURF .

 

[Darth Garth]

As a programmer, I can honestly say that I would personally shoot anyone who wrote software for ANY OS in the way you described. Windoze sucks, I agree, but everyone uses it so it's a necessary evil. BUT, part of the reason Windows sucks is 3rd party application developers who write software the way you described.

Another story I remember from this dude

One of the "must work" 3.1 apps (a very important app like say Photoshop) from a competitor was found to be broken when they were busy with Windows 95 as it reused memory that it had previously freed.

Offcourse they could play hardball about this buggy app and crash it but then imagine the uproar if you as a user could not use this app when you installed Windows 95.

So in the Windows memory manager today there is special code to check for this app and that particular revision and allow it to abuse it's memory in this way.

It was not the only case apparently.

 

[3GisDaMan]

It's Sim City.

 

[mancombseepgood]

Well many people ditched Netscape and caused their eventual demise when I.E 4.0 was released as it was the better and faster browser back then.

This one needs no comment - how can something that is not open and does not promote interconnectivity be better. How many sites out there only work on the MS product? Clever marketing and unethical business practice were the cause of this - not a better product. Someone else was making money and MS said... lets make it free and take their business away.

What about IPX/SPX from Novell ... you try loading a TCP/IP stack in 640K of DOS or Win 3.1 at the time .

IPX/SPX was stable and worked. MS did develop a dos / win3.1 tcp/ip stack but, well, as you said it, MS DOS was the limiting factor.

TCP/IP use really only came about when the client workstations moved to better OS's like OS/2 or Windows 95 whose TCP/IP stack was rather solid and fast (from FreeBSD) compared to the various kludges (Trumpet Winsock with Win32s) used to get online to the internet at the time.

I disagree... it may have become more prevalent in the PC domain with Win 95, but it still had clunky netbios on top of it. Right up to Windows 2000 that is. It was only with Win2k that netbois was dropped... and then not immediately to be backward compatible with 98 machines. MS never really comitted to it at the early stages. In fact as far as I can see, they only went that route to be present on the web. Winsock apps worked OK (mostly non critical) but netbios over TCP/IP - what a bos.

Many Unix flavours were using stable and standards based implementations of TCP/IP before then.

 

[mancombseepgood]

Not sure I follow dude.. but...

Another story I remember from this dude

One of the "must work" 3.1 apps (a very important app like say Photoshop) from a competitor was found to be broken when they were busy with Windows 95 as it reused memory that it had previously freed.

I take it you are referring to a memory leak

Offcourse they could play hardball about this buggy app and crash it but then imagine the uproar if you as a user could not use this app when you installed Windows 95.

So in the Windows memory manager today there is special code to check for this app and that particular revision and allow it to abuse it's memory in this way.

It was not the only case apparently.

I take it you are referring to the compatibility sections of the registry? In other words.. MS made changes to Windows to allow a previously developed app which was buggy in Win95 run OK. So we all have this extra code just in case you want to use this app. And the motivation was the poor user? Or MS' reputation when the app crashed Windows?
I guess we can all have our opinions.

 

[Turtle]

I take it you are referring to a memory leak

"reused memory that it had previously freed" sounds more like a dangling pointer to me, but it's not very clear from the description.

Tibby's examples seem to exemplify Microsoft's shoddy approach to programming: poor rush-something-to-market design followed by symptomatic treatment to 'patch' problems that arise afterwards.

Windows XP is over four years old now and it's still in the news seemingly every other week for one or other usually very serious "anyone on the Internet can do whatever they want on your computer" type security flaw. This is in spite of a massive PR campaign from Microsoft (I think about two years ago now already?) claiming that they had made a major focus shift towards security. Now we have what, yet another round of 'damage control' PR? ("In response to the new threat, the software company is pledging to take a look at its programs, to avoid similar problems." ... with the amount of profit they're making, they c/should have hired programmers to "take a look at their programs" years ago - remarkably, most vulnerabilities still seem to be discovered by 3rd parties, who don't even have access to the source, which makes me wonder if they have anyone looking at all). It seems people have extremely short memories, because we believe the PR every time that a secure version of Windows is "just around the corner".

 

[Moederloos]

Since MS is by far the most used OS, it is to be expected that it has the most virii. HOWEVER, having said that, and taking into account the HUGE number of said virii, one would expect at least one devastating Linux virus to be doing the rounds. Since we do not see it, fingers must be pointed firmly at MS for faulty software.

And even though there may be devastating malicious code circulating that can destroy a Linux box if run, there is none that I know of that can run without being deliberatly executed by a lame-a$$.