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Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

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Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#121

Post by tedunangst »

bitwize wrote: post #112
eismcc wrote: post #78

I 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 i…

Funny in contrast to all the "I want the cpu to do what I tell it and nothing else" comments in every thread about speculative execution.

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#122

Post by spondyl »

I haven't watched this video yet but I'm looking forward to it, having read Showstopper[1] quite a few years back.

One thing that stuck out to me when I was still in my early 20s thinking I needed to work all the time was the mention that Dave would always take holidays on time, every time without any debate.

While I may not love Microsoft, it was probably my first real exposure of a highly competent and qualified person who wasn't grinding 24/7.

It still feels nuts to write it but it's a holdover from rural (and retail) life where the mindset is basically "The more you suffer, the more virtuous you are".

As much as I still struggle to properly take time off (that is, it's easy to postpone because of X or Y being more important), thinking about Dave's view is always a good reminder that it's not a choice between taking a break and being good at X.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#123

Post by cpeterso »

eismcc wrote: post #78

I 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.

I was an SDET on the Windows team in the 2000/XP era and heard that the internal code name for the x64 port was “Sundown” because Microsoft was hoping it would take down Sun in the server market. Unfortunately for Microsoft, that prize went to Linux on x86-64.

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#124

Post by gosub100 »

mikewarot wrote: post #32

Looking 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…

Their EULA absolves them from all consequences! why would they care what happens to your computer after they get their chunk? That could arguably be the biggest economic contribution software has "given" us, these binding agreements that "we'll take your money, but we don't promise you anything, Sucker!"

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#126

Post by subharmonicon »

esafak wrote: post #119
subharmonicon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As an Apple user since the launch of the original Mac, I guarantee there have never been any perfect Apple products.

Every Mac OS until OS X crashed continuously on even moderate use. Thankfully Steve did manage to build better systems at NeXT and brought that technology back when Apple acquired NeXT and was able to substantially improve Apple’s Mac product as a result.

It’s still far from “perfect products”, though, even during the time period that Steve was still alive and at Apple. To your point, I do agree that things have gone downhill quality-wise since his death, but I attribute this as much to being completely schedule driven as I do to the personalities involved in managing the projects.

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#127

Post by progmetaldev »

rollcat wrote: post #74
colejohnson66 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Premium does not have ads. I know because I don’t see them. Sponsorships do not count because they’re placed by the creators themselves.

> Premium does not have ads. Yet. The keyword of the times seems to be enshittification, and the only companies that take a step back from it seem to be doing so just to double down on it the moment the outrage calms down.

Currently Premium really only gets you no ads, along with YouTube Music. If they start having ads, I don't really see that being a viable product. Of course they could stuff 12 ads in a 20 minute video, but I think they would lose most of their subscribers.

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#128

Post by Veserv »

helloooooooo wrote: post #92
Veserv wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that was all marketing nonsense meant to confuse laypeople. TCSEC Level C2 was intentionally designed to be a “baby’s first security certification” level meant to allow existing known insecure products to get a (low) rating so that commercial vendors could get familiar with the concept [1]. It, at no point, was ever meant to indicate any meaningful level of security was achieved, just that you filed the paperwo…

Frankly, those are just box ticking exercises. Same with SOC certifications. Security is not a state of being, it is a process.

In what world are formal proofs of correctness “box ticking exercises”?

You are wrongly extrapolating that the lowest levels of certification, that were literally designed to allow people incapable of more than box ticking to be rated on a unified scale, somehow applies to the levels that were designed to evaluate actual security.

That is like saying the Richter scale is useless because you can not even feel a 1.0 earthquake. That is the entire point. The scale can measure from very low to very high. You are complaining that the scale is useless because the lowest ratings are easy to get, yeah, duh, that is why they are low ratings.

However, you are correct for SOC. That is because the highest ratings are easy to get and are mere box ticking exercises. If the highest rating is easy, then the standard is useless for evaluating anything beyond that. This logic does not apply when a low rating is easy to get; that just means anything which can only get a low rating sucks.

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#129

Post by hayley-patton »

mikewarot wrote: post #106
Philpax wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to think we'd eventually get to capability based security, but now I see we'll always be stuck with application permission flags, the almost worthless bastard cousin, instead. My hope is that WASI will introduce capability based security to the mainstream on non-mobile computers [0] - it might just take some time for them to get it right. (And hopefully no half-baked status-quo-reinforcing regressive single-…

Strong agree. My main concern is that someone will "fix" WASI by grafting on a POSIX extension and kill its security.

WASIX?

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#130

Post by philjohn »

bitwize wrote: post #112
eismcc wrote: post #78

I 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 i…

Thinking about instruction packing and if this is something a JIT could have helped with, if we'd had state-of-the-art JIT's at the time.
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