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A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#31

Post by poizan42 »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #18
saurik wrote: post #5

Frankly, it is really annoying when developers working at one of the large closed-source platform oligopolists blame their users for trying to work around the deficiencies (or even outright hostile "business model" optimizations) in their software by whatever scant means are left to them: maybe if Microsoft didn't keep removing good functionality and stopped forcing bad "features" on everyone, fewer people would see…

A reply from the article author sort of communicates why they don’t work with the patcher: > They don’t use the shell extension mechanism to get into the process. They sneak in by nefarious means. Patching is not supported. There is no “correct” way of doing it. Just different levels of bad. I assume the “nefarious” ways are similar to rootkits in that they exploit vulnerabilities to gain system access they’re not in…

No, the "nefarious" means they are simply using APIs like WriteProcessMemory/ VirtualProtectEx/CreateRemoteThreadEx to modify the memory of runing programs or use SetWindowsHookEx to install global hooks (which inject your dll into every process for the non low-level events)

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#32

Post by stronglikedan »

jackewiehose wrote: post #11

There is an interview with Raymond Chen where he is trying to defend the reason why they crippled the taskbar with Windows 11 [1]. Watching that I was just thinking NO NO NO - it worked fine for the last 25 years and there can be absolutely no reason why they had to destroy the taskbar now. He deserves every headache he gets with these support requests. Or to quote this comment of the linked article: > There wouldn’t…

Not being able to drag items onto the taskbar is the reason that I refuse to "upgrade".

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#33

Post by 13of40 »

saurik wrote: post #5

Frankly, it is really annoying when developers working at one of the large closed-source platform oligopolists blame their users for trying to work around the deficiencies (or even outright hostile "business model" optimizations) in their software by whatever scant means are left to them: maybe if Microsoft didn't keep removing good functionality and stopped forcing bad "features" on everyone, fewer people would see…

In the open source world, I think the equivalent here would be to export an internal function in the desktop environment so you can call it with a third party extension. Open source might help you choose the function, but that's not a ton of help if the project owner rejects your pull request because it doesn't mesh with their worldview.

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#34

Post by Vvector »

poizan42 wrote: post #31
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reply from the article author sort of communicates why they don’t work with the patcher: > They don’t use the shell extension mechanism to get into the process. They sneak in by nefarious means. Patching is not supported. There is no “correct” way of doing it. Just different levels of bad. I assume the “nefarious” ways are similar to rootkits in that they exploit vulnerabilities to gain system access they’re not in…

No, the "nefarious" means they are simply using APIs like WriteProcessMemory/ VirtualProtectEx/CreateRemoteThreadEx to modify the memory of runing programs or use SetWindowsHookEx to install global hooks (which inject your dll into every process for the non low-level events)

Is this any different than what a virus would do?

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#35

Post by dist-epoch »

jackewiehose wrote: post #11

There is an interview with Raymond Chen where he is trying to defend the reason why they crippled the taskbar with Windows 11 [1]. Watching that I was just thinking NO NO NO - it worked fine for the last 25 years and there can be absolutely no reason why they had to destroy the taskbar now. He deserves every headache he gets with these support requests. Or to quote this comment of the linked article: > There wouldn’t…

If you are talking about button grouping, Windows 11 has an option now to un-group and label the buttons.

Also, "crippled", "destroyed", quite some heavy words. 99.9% of users don't care.

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#36

Post by Drakim »

daemin wrote: post #20
jackewiehose wrote: post #11

There is an interview with Raymond Chen where he is trying to defend the reason why they crippled the taskbar with Windows 11 [1]. Watching that I was just thinking NO NO NO - it worked fine for the last 25 years and there can be absolutely no reason why they had to destroy the taskbar now. He deserves every headache he gets with these support requests. Or to quote this comment of the linked article: > There wouldn’t…

Unfortunately it's the designers that are screwing up the UI/UX of Windows, not the programmers. If you give more time to the designers then you're just going to get more of a clone of OSX rather than something useful.

All the while they use OSX themselves and don't feel any of the pain of their half-baked copy.

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#37

Post by nottorp »

magicalhippo wrote: post #30
nottorp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For one thing, it allows you to move the taskbar again. But but... think of their support costs if people accidentally move the taskbar! They have to remove your options or they'll starve!

I've literally spent over 30 minutes on a support call with someone who had accidentally moved and resized their taskbar. All I could get out of the user was "half the screen is grey". I quickly figured out it was probably the taskbar, and I tried asking if it was the top or bottom half, or left or right. "Half" was the reply... After a lot of attempts and little progress, I made a breakthrough by asking in which cor…

Are you the original? This story is very old :)

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#38

Post by praptak »

adrian_b wrote: post #15

While in this case the jump into the middle of an instruction was not intentional, several decades ago many Microsoft programs for MS-DOS, like their BASIC interpreter, contained frequent intentional jumps into the middle of instructions. This technique had already been used in many Microsoft programs for CP/M, i.e. for Intel 8080 or Zilog Z80 CPUs. There were two reasons for the use of such jumps in the middle of in…

Biology sometimes "jumps into the middle of instructions" when decoding DNA/RNA. The "instruction" length is always 3 nucleotides and the sequence usually has only one valid "entry point".

There are exceptions though. Some sequences do encode biologically useful information with sequences which not only overlap but do so with the starting points differing by a number not divisible by 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_frame#Multiple_reading...

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#39

Post by praptak »

bombcar wrote: post #19

Kind of sad. Even from this blog, he admits that the Microsoft of old would test software and see if it worked; the Microsoft of now obviously knows of the existence of these shell enhancements, but clearly doesn’t test patches against them at all.

A relevant quote about the lenghts they went to to assure stuff not getting broken:

"Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95."

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

Re: A jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere (2023)

#40

Post by jonhohle »

daemin wrote: post #20
jackewiehose wrote: post #11

There is an interview with Raymond Chen where he is trying to defend the reason why they crippled the taskbar with Windows 11 [1]. Watching that I was just thinking NO NO NO - it worked fine for the last 25 years and there can be absolutely no reason why they had to destroy the taskbar now. He deserves every headache he gets with these support requests. Or to quote this comment of the linked article: > There wouldn’t…

Unfortunately it's the designers that are screwing up the UI/UX of Windows, not the programmers. If you give more time to the designers then you're just going to get more of a clone of OSX rather than something useful.

I don’t use windows often, but I was using it to check some hardware the other day and had to dig through nests of settings to get back to back to what was more or less the display settings screen from the Windows 9x/NT era, albeit with a less efficient layout and lots of superfluous white space.

Unfortunately, macOS has gone this direction as well and it’s settings have become inscrutable. Simple things like using drag and drop to reorder network interface priorities are luxuries of the past. It seems like those designing have never used them and never plan to.

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