iirc, the installer is 16-bit, there's problems with too much disk space and/or too much ram, and then there's cryptic error messages. Oh and the please don't run this on WindowsNT message.

We did find something 3rd party that uses the assets, so all wasn't lost, but ...

Windows has a reputation for amazing back compat, and it's pretty good, but it's not really surprising to find things that don't work. Especially games from that era, there are common issues that come up a lot, but afaik, there's no microsoft compat option to lie about disk space, ram, or vram ... or it doesn't automatically trigger at least.

You didn't even mention pressure. Space is only 1 atm off of sea level. 100 meters below the surface is 10 atm more than at sea level ... all sorts of cool stuff you might want to explore is way deeper than that.

Less of a problem for robots than people, but still a problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_winds

Probably because I had run into some apps with bugs when animations are disabled, and making them run twice as fast as normal is more compatible and reduce the annoyance enough that I forget its enabled. Apps that animate at normal speed in defiance of my settings get deleted.

But I also set windows not to show window content while moving or resizing, because I find that to be annoying too.

Reducing duration or eliminating animation is one of the first settings I do on a new install.

They do. After a substantial delay. Pretty handy for geneological research, while protecting privacy for the living.

If you have a degree from a 'good school', that gets you some credibility by itself, but mostly a 4 year degree says 'this person can commit to doing difficult things without an immediate payoff for around 4 years' which is a valuable thing for employers.

Well also more numerous than human legs... And the whole two torsos thing

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Te...

Skimming the page, also note that the quoted prices are for marketting messages, other types of messages are much less expensive.

So I have to debug other people's libraries and operating systems. And other people's networks. Turns out other people often make similar mistakes. Some people say 'select isn't broken', but lots of things are[1]. Most of my debugging stories would tend to be centered around a problem that my team found/uncovered, not one that we created... although certainly I did make some bugs in my youth (definitely none lately!).

I put 5-10 years there because someone under 5 years of experience could maybe not have ever run into a troublesome issue, or they always had a senior to do the hard stuff. Between 5 and 10 years, maybe they find their first tricky bug. After 10+ years, you've got to have run into something.

[1] Here's some war stories:

I fixed an interop issue between OpenSSL and Microsoft schannel where rsa dhe would fail if the generated public key had leading zeros; OpenSSL would encode it in fewer bytes and schannel would return 'out of memory'. The RFC was vague. People had observed the failures for years, but I had to fix it. At the time, it was considered a reasonable optimization to generate a dhe keypair and reuse it for the lifetime of the server process... If we generated a problematic keypair on a given server, windows clients couldn't connect at all. Now, if I run into an issue and a working trace has structures of nice power of 2 lengths and a broken trace has one a little smaller, that's where I dig.

I found (but didn't make a patch) a bug in Firefox where POSTs to an http/2 server with tls 1.3 early data enabled would stall for about a minute when there was no connection to reuse. Fixing it was out of my league, but I was able to get it fixed by giving a clear bug report. This one was fairly new when I saw it, but there was a much less clear bug open against Thunderbird caused by the underlying issue. Not sure what I learned here really other than if you're expecting data sent to the network and it doesn't happen, it's usually an application problem... and clear bugs with clear logs help get things fixed.

I fixed an issue with FreeBSD where it would send the whole sendq when it received an icmp needs frag message, even when the maximum mtu sent in the icmp was the same as or greater than the current path mtu. This was happening when a Linux router was using large receive offload to aggregate inbound packets on a flow and then they were too large to forward; that bug was fixed long before I experienced it, but the router in question never got updated. I could not get ahold of the operator for them to fix the broken machine, but I was able to get a patch into FreeBSD so that the broken router(s) only impacted our customers that were behind it. ... this is another indication that PathMTU is hard, but also it helped me tune methods of sampling packets from production. PS, pathmtu issues are their own repetitive problem space.

That one time FreeBSD broke syncookies, so connections got reformed after close, and the tcp state was unsynchronizable between peers so they kept sending challenge acks... and IIRC, they broke it a second time, too. But maybe it was just we ran into it in a different context.

I've recently found some issues leading to out of order packet delivery with FreeBSD's dummynet traffic shaping; again, other people already experienced it, but nobody wrote a good bug report or submitted a patch, so I guess I'll have to do it, if it's still broken when I have time for it. This one is probably not going to be a repeating bug... not a lot of traffic shapers, but maybe there will be something learned about scheduling i/o

What processes could I use to avoid bugs like these? Hoping things magically get fixed in an update does sometimes work, and sometimes the bug becomes less relevant as the industry moves on (ecdhe has almost completely replaced rsadhe, but it hadn't at the time that my customers ran into the bug).

One of the things though is when most peopley play SMB 1-3 today, they're playing with input lag. Mario Wonder was designed with input lag in mind, SMB 1 was not and it increases the difficulty.

Mario Wonder lets you choose to use invulnerable characters, etc. There was only one level I remember needing to try many times to beat. OTOH, there's lots of difficult levels in smb 1...

I also don't care for writing that could have been made a lot more concise. It's a lot of work to make things shorter, but I think it's worthwhile.

Sorry, but the notion exists, and the bombs exist. With n=2, likelyhood of nuclear escalation is hard to predict, but access to tactical nukes certainly hasn't increased the incidence of nuclear war so far.

I do think it's pretty hard to actually use a tactical nuke. If you use one against a nuclear power, it seems likely to escalate to mutually assured destruction. If you use one against a non-nuclear power, it seems likely to result in reprisal from the world, including potential nuclear response and therefore escalation to mutually assured destruction. I would think that the yield of the weapon barely matters, it's the fact that it's a nuclear weapon.

Remembering and being able to tell the narrative about how I figured out why something that people like to do is a really bad idea is very helpful to convince people not to repeat the mistakes of the past when they aren't receptive to "trust me, this is a bad idea and we shouldn't do it" or "if you do that, let me know when you undo it, otherwise don't call me"

Personally, I don't have any skill at giving this kind of story time interview question, so I don't. But it does seem concerning to me if someone has 5-10 years of software experience and can't articulate any debugging stories. How were you working where you never ran into a problem that took you/your team 2 weeks of pain to figure out?

Traditional residential electric utility billing puts a lot of emphasis on usage, but when there's a lot more residential solar, that ends up not reflecting the costs very well. I think, over time, you'll see things where you pay a distribution fee per kWh in either direction, and then also pay for energy input and get paid for energy output. You might also see a demand charge that scales with your connection size or your maximum load/generation. If you don't have local generation with export, everything kind of mushes into the usage charge, especially if it's tiered... but when you exporting with net metering, you pay the same bill for exporting 950kWh and importing 1000kWh as someone who imports 100kWh and exports 50kWh, but one customer is using the grid a lot more than the other.

You see something like that with California's NEM 3.0 tarrif setting export price to the 'avoided cost' instead of offsetting import one for one. Under NEM 3.0, the utility is disincentivizing using production credits as long term storage. They prefer you use or store your energy onsite; if you can export while costs are high, that's nice too.

Personally, I prefer to go ahead and reassemble, but with a very minimal reassembly buffer.

Very few packets get fragmented, so if you have more than 16 fragments in your reassembly buffer, you're probably being ddosed and you can toss them. OTOH, if you have a 16 deep reassembly buffer, you're probably more generous than most services that have no buffer for reassembly.

It's not what the RFCs say to do, but the IPv6 RFCs are like 30 years old, and the IPv4 RFCs even older. They were written in a different time for an internet that was less adversarial; some things don't make sense to keep doing.

After hitting broken pmtud enough, I resolved to make a browser based test, and eventually I did. http://pmtud.enslaves.us/

But that wouldn't help this investigation, since there's no attempt to find the path mtu in webrtc-rs (or general webrtc)

WebRTC also uses small packets for ICE pings, so if you have a path mtu problem, it won't affect connection selection, so that's also fun.

People looking for a four door will walk away from a two door, and people looking for a two door will grudgingly accept it? Because either you get a small four door truck, or you pay for a f-150 cause you can still get that with two doors... but not if you want any of the neat features... no electric single cable f-150, no single cab f-150 with the generator output. (at least when I last looked)

But if part of the pitch for the Slate is it shouldn't be very long, you can't put four doors and have any bed left. Unless you go cabover, but I don't know how many people would consider a cabover these days... VW and Toyota vans were cabover through the 80s, but I don't know how you pass safety tests when the drivers knees are the crumple zone.