Friday Q&A Is On Vacation

Friday Q&A Is On Vacation

Friday Q&A is on vacation at the moment, so there will be no article today. Never fear: although he's busy relaxing today, Friday Q&A will return, and soon. To keep my loyal readers from being too upset, here is a collection of links to interesting articles to keep you occupied.

• How did real-mode Windows implement its LRU algorithm without hardware assistance? - A fascinating look at how a really old system pulled off a good chunk of virtual memory with no hardware assistance.

• Data in crash dumps are not a matter of opinion - A case study in challenging your assumptions and believing the evidence over your preconceptions when debugging code. This is another Old New Thing link, and I could easily give dozens of links to great articles just on that blog. Don't mind the Windows-centric topics, it's well worth your time.

• Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than - Pretty self-explanatory. Old software is small.

• Synchronization on the local variables - A construct that makes absolutely no sense in general ends up providing an important speed gain through the magic of JIT compilation and lock elision.

• Errors detected in Open Source projects by the PVS-Studio developers through static analysis - Makers of a static code analyzer run their code on a lot of open source projects and summarize the results. Great list of common errors to watch out for in your own code.

• Weird Machines - Breaks down the process of exploiting security bugs, and describes "weird machines" that result: accidental general-purpose computers formed by manipulating programs in ways they weren't intended to be used.

• The world's longest cells? Speculations on the nervous systems of sauropods - Without clicking the link, take a guess as to how long the longest cell that ever existed was. I won't spoil it, but if you're like me, your guess is off by many orders of magnitude.

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