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Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

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Re: Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

#21

Post by ZoFreX »

pud wrote: post #2

One of the things that's held back Windows and made it so complex, according to an MS engineer I recently spoke with who's been with the company since the 80's, is that it contains thousands of pieces of code to fix bugs in third-party software. In other words, there's code in Windows 7 that prevents crashing due to a rare bug in Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego v1.3 (hypothetical example). And so on.

Windows 95 contains special memory management code for the original Sim City, but I suppose that probably got removed with all the other 16-bit supporting files in x64 versions of Windows, at least. Perhaps it's still hanging around in 32-bit Windows 7, though?

Re: Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

#24

Post by wslh »

pud wrote: post #2

One of the things that's held back Windows and made it so complex, according to an MS engineer I recently spoke with who's been with the company since the 80's, is that it contains thousands of pieces of code to fix bugs in third-party software. In other words, there's code in Windows 7 that prevents crashing due to a rare bug in Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego v1.3 (hypothetical example). And so on.

Imagine legacy stuff and standards on the web after 32 years!

Re: Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

#25

Post by lucian1900 »

MarkSweep wrote: post #17
wamatt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or sad. Depending on your outlook ;)

Is Mach-O on OS X or ELF on Linux any more or less sad?

Don't know about Mach-O, but ELF is actually a rather nice and clean design.

Much of the hate PE gets is because of the silly overloading with .NET assemblies.

Re: Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

#26

Post by kabdib »

rburhum wrote: post #5
quotemstr wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant Old New Thing post: "The real cost of compatibility is not in the hacks; the hacks are small potatoes" (The Old New Thing is a blog by veteran Microsoft shell team developer Raymond Chen, and it's a must-read for all developers.) https://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/07/23/4003...

"a must read" for all Windows developers.

If you find yourself doing a platform, you're going to run into these issues.

The biggest problem seems universal: You were an idiot and cut a corner three years ago, and you have to break something to move forward. Now what?

The Mac has some classic and poignant examples of this that have actually been trapping people for 50 years. Such as: Use of the high byte of a pointer to have non-pointer meaning (some 1980s ear Mac callbacks set flags in the "unused" high bits of a pointer, and the IBM 360 team made the same mistake in some of their OS data structures). In both cases, fixing this issue was pretty nasty.

Study history or repeat it, your choice. :-)

Re: Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

#27

Post by Simucal »

iso-8859-1 wrote: post #15
Simucal wrote: post #4

This is great but why is English the only version that is in jpg rather than png?

because you do not deserve better if your browser supports neither PDF nor SVG?

I was browsing on the original iPad. For some reason, certain PDFs seem to stress it out when rendering and it really lags. It also did not correctly display the SVG link.

So all I was left with was the JPG link which was unfortunate because of the lossy compression which makes the finer details slightly blurred.

A PNG would have been perfect and I noticed that all other languages had a link to a PNG but english.

Re: Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

#28

Post by stinky613 »

Simucal wrote: post #27
iso-8859-1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because you do not deserve better if your browser supports neither PDF nor SVG?

I was browsing on the original iPad. For some reason, certain PDFs seem to stress it out when rendering and it really lags. It also did not correctly display the SVG link. So all I was left with was the JPG link which was unfortunate because of the lossy compression which makes the finer details slightly blurred. A PNG would have been perfect and I noticed that all other languages had a link to a PNG but english.

I was browsing on an iPad 2 in Chrome and had similar problems. SVG displayed as text, PDF and JPG were blurry and wouldn't zoom correctly. Once I got on my laptop the SVG still displayed as text but the PDF and JPG were perfectly clear. Still not sure why the others are PNGs and the english version is JPG; clearly PNG is better suited.

Re: Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

#30

Post by kbolino »

- The PDF takes forever to render in Adobe PDF Reader 9.

- The Content-Type of the SVG is text/plain so Firefox doesn't render it.

- The JPG has a Content-Disposition of "attachment" so Firefox forces me to download it locally.

Not a pleasant experience.

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