h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As of yesterday, I have taken nine days vacation. At about this same time, my brand new computer has decided to become particularly flaky - aside from spontaneously crashing for no bloody reason, it has now decided to corrupt the hard drive from time to time, forcing me to re-format the partition and re-install Windows 98. Again. One might think that some bizarre program that I have installed is causing this problem, but I haven't actually gotten to the point of installing anything other than new device drivers. I managed to get to the point of installing my Intellimouse Explorer driver and then the system crashed a couple of restarts later, again corrupting my hard drive and forcing me to start over.

Where did I want to go today? I don't recall wanting to drag my computer to the repair shop today.

At least I managed to back up my important stuff to the Linux partition. Unfortunately, Windows' dictatorial installation rewrites the Master Boot Record and I lose lilo, thus denying me access to Linux until I use my Linux rescue disk, which is currently crashing when I try to use it.

Needless to say, it's certainly been a very relaxing and enjoyable vacation.

Blimey, Nick, it sounds as if your day has been a big pile of pants. Doesn't sound like much fun to me

Good luck!

Well, recent events have certainly ruined the joy and excitement of having a brand new computer.

Just five minutes ago, my keyboard stopped working. Even restarting Windows didn't help; I had to shut down and yank the power cord in order to un-crash the keyboard. *sigh*

Maybe I'm playing with too much power, or maybe I shouldn't be playing with power.

Do you think it's to do with the dual whatnot thingy set-up you've got then? I read something somewhere about windows problems with 2 processors - but I think that was 95 rather than 98?

But then again - I may not know what I'm talking about (the currently favoured option).

It doesn't sound all too good though. Has it EVER worked consistently?

No, it hasn't worked consistently since I got it. One friend of mine is certain the problem lies with the Soundblaster Live card. Someone else suggested that my memory is bad. Then again, it could just be an IRQ conflict of some kind. I'm going to have the ITech guys at work have a look at it, hopefully tomorrow.

The only problem with Windows 98 on a dual processor machine is that Windows 98 only sees (and uses) one of them. This becomes apparent when I go into the BIOS menu and examine the operating temperatures of both processors. One is hot (but well within tolerable levels) and the other is not.

I've been playing around on and off with Windows programming for about a year now, and I've yet to see a single usage of linked lists. Are the Microsoft programmers mad? Methinks they just might be. Sorry, I'm waxing technical again.

Ahh, programmers today. They wouldn't know a copy of Knuth if someone smashed them round the head with it. Theres a whole group of people these days who consider themselves programmers because they moved some buttons around on a Delphi form, and attached a callback to it. Linked lists and data structures are foreign languages to them.

Knuth? Delphi? callback? linked lists?

Boys!

I love the Microsoft concept of "signalling". Apparently, having Windows directly invoke a function in your program (ie, a callback) is considered "signalling".

Aaah, but the "Freedom To Innovate" has given us a splendid replacement for signals, pipes and inter-process communication. Simply add some 16bit Windows function calls and the appallingly memory protection will enable you to write directly to other applications memory[1]. Yay! All those semaphores are a thing of the past.[2]

[1] Any application, not just ones you're running.
[2] This will, of course, make your system extremely unstable. But how would you notice?

Well, I suppose that since it's just not cool to directly manipulate device hardware registers, we needed something else to directly manipulate, such as other programs' memory.

I still just can't fathom how an operating system could be created without using linked lists. The code design must be a horror show beyond my conception.

I played with Direct Sound a while ago and found that, unlike my Amiga (where you had RAM and you allocated some and put some sound data there and then told the sound device to play it using a specific audio channel), you have these "buffers", and you create a "buffer", providing a sampled sound, and then you say "play the buffer". Except that there is no concept of channels anymore, so if you play the buffer again, it stops its current playing and restarts.

So how do you implement polyphonic music? Well, according to the Direct Sound book I was reading (I'm paraphrasing) you "determine how many instances of each sound you intend to have playing simultaneously and then pre-create that many buffers for each sound..."

I weep...