Cutler: ...Microsoft had DOS which was pathetic...
Dave: .. I wrote some of that!
That was hilarious. I still remember how good NT even though it struggled in my 486 with 4Mb of RAM, Dave Cutler is a legend.
Dave Cutler on Windows [video]
111–120 of 222 posts
Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]
#112I worked in the windows kernel team and my favorite story about DC is when he basically made x64 happen because he hated Itanium architecture so much. He worked with AMD and basically made it happen while cranking in his corner office.
What's intriguing to me is that Itanic was the "fetch" that Intel tried to make happen not once, not twice, but three times: once as iAPX 432, once as i860, and once as Itanium. The whole idea of "pack multiple (often variable bit-length) instructions into a word and rely on compiler writers to determine optimal instruction packings" to make implementation simpler and therefore hopefully faster, but woe betide thee if thy compiler dost not find such optimal instruction packings; for then thy CPU will actually run code more slowly than a conventional design like x86! Someone very high up at Intel must've been very in love with this idea, as it was tried and flopped thrice throughout Intel's entire history as a major microprocessor vendor.
I didn't think AMD64 was a good idea at the time because it was more of the same. But good on Dave for helping eliminate the cruft that pretty much killed the RISC revolution.
Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]
#113The bit I found interesting was how Xbox's hypervisor is based on that of Azure, rather than anything they did on the desktop, and that Xbox games are/were packaged up with an OS rather than relying on a single OS on the device, so a bit more like containers. Dave also said he's working on making ML workloads run on idle Xbox Cloud Gaming devices. Any architectural tie between Azure and Xbox had never occurred to me…
The hypervisor in Azure, Xbox and Windows are all the same: HyperV.
Hey Torrent, can you provide a reliable source for that info? Recently, I’ve noticed a surge in Domain Specific VMs even in userland for Linux (like Google Falcon). This has led me to wonder if a boot loader combined with a bytecode VM could optimize performance in not only games but also various applications. I tried checking an Xbox game binary for traces of a VM. Given the potential for encryption obfuscation, I assumed the binaries might be encrypted and didn’t dig deeper. I’m not familiar with the gaming or pirating scenes, so this is all novel to me. But I’m keen on exploring this idea further. What can HyperV bring to the table in this context?
Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]
#114Near the tail end of WinNT 3.1 development, I read an article (possibly from Usenet) about someone creating a screensaver that showed a bluescreen.
I had never created a screensaver before.
I could reliably cause my WinNT dev box to bluescreen due to a bug in an internal Microsoft network driver.
So I read the docs for writing a Windows screensaver. After writing down the values shown for my bluescreen, I cobbled together my first and only Windows screensaver.
I sent an email to the Windows NT group announcing my creation for laughs and giggles.
A few weeks later, the NT build group decided to play a prank on Dave Cutler.
They installed my bluescreen screensaver on one of their build servers.
They also unplugged the mouse and keyboard from the build server.
Then they waited...
Dave Cutler comes in to check on the status of the latest NT build.
He turns on the monitor and sees a bluescreen.
He tries moving the mouse.
Nothing.
He tries typing on the keyboard.
Nothing.
Then the unanticipated happens.
He reaches over and pushes the power button on the build server to reboot the build server.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
I never heard about the aftermath/any fallout from their prank.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]
#115I knew someone who worked on the Windows kernel in the "aughts". Apparently, Dave Cutler was still looking at kernel code reviews back then, and could be quite unsparing in his feedback.
Sounds like another kernel maintainer we all know.
Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like no one on the planet understands how YouTube recommendations work. the same for Large Language Models. YouTube keeps a watch history of every user. users can clean up their view of their watch history, but YouTube keeps it all. if you watch any particular video, YouTube will start suggesting videos watched by other people who watched the video you just watched. YouTube does not know or care what the subje…
> YouTube keeps a watch history of every user. But why does youtube keep recommending me videos I already watched and worse, if I have autoplay enabled, plays videos I already watched?
Because some videos are commonly rewatched, like music videos.
Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]
#117Near the tail end of WinNT 3.1 development, I read an article (possibly from Usenet) about someone creating a screensaver that showed a bluescreen. I had never created a screensaver before. I could reliably cause my WinNT dev box to bluescreen due to a bug in an internal Microsoft network driver. So I read the docs for writing a Windows screensaver. After writing down the values shown for my bluescreen, I cobbled tog…
How in the world was that unanticipated?
Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]
#118Near the tail end of WinNT 3.1 development, I read an article (possibly from Usenet) about someone creating a screensaver that showed a bluescreen. I had never created a screensaver before. I could reliably cause my WinNT dev box to bluescreen due to a bug in an internal Microsoft network driver. So I read the docs for writing a Windows screensaver. After writing down the values shown for my bluescreen, I cobbled tog…
How in the world was that unanticipated?
Because a blue screen is a nice spot to debug. It’s like an assert statement. You want to find out what’s the error code, where it happens, and why. Even a vague location can narrow down the problematic area.
Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]
#119Looking back on all both Daves said, there is an extraordinary amount of attention paid to getting things done and out the door, and almost no mention of planning ahead, and actual security strategy. Its all commercial pressure to get the sausage out of the meat grinder, and keep the failures down to an acceptable level. No wonder things never get better, and never take a turn in the right direction, industry wide. I…
Most execs at most companies really are driven by very short-term planning and thinking, as it benefits their career to do so. They just need enough good quarters/years to justify their promotion from VP to SVP or SVP to CEO. Nobody gets blamed and punished three years after they move on to a new role for the shortsighted choices they made in their previous role. Having said that, Cutler is not one of those execs, bu…
Steve Jobs pushed individual contributors to perfect products before shipping them. Bill Gates had no taste to justify any sort of perfectionism, or compunction against shipping buggy products (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84). It was all dollars and cents, as far as I can tell.
Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]
#120The bit I found interesting was how Xbox's hypervisor is based on that of Azure, rather than anything they did on the desktop, and that Xbox games are/were packaged up with an OS rather than relying on a single OS on the device, so a bit more like containers. Dave also said he's working on making ML workloads run on idle Xbox Cloud Gaming devices. Any architectural tie between Azure and Xbox had never occurred to me…
There is an amazing video about Xbox security. It's extreme.
For example the games executables are actually encrypted on the game discs, and it's almost impossible to even dump the actual binary that is running. RAM is also encrypted.
Or the reason modern TPMs live inside the CPU is to prevent sniffing the TPM bus which people did on the Xbox.