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Careful with that Buffer

os2museum.com

152 pointsAloha13 comments

The "kill him with hammers" stuff is from a 1988 Dave Barry column, reprinted at e.g. http://articles.philly.com/1988-02-17/news/26239559_1_crates...

Wow, that's both sad and funny. A bit of a time capsule, though when the pressure is on is there ever a team that wouldn't have that kind of interaction?

In a couple of past projects I was involved with, email had been sent around among "team" members that by comparison makes those old MS messages look pretty tame. I plan not to leak potentially embarrassing emails, at least while some of the individual authors are still around, but keeping info safe requires an effort to make sure it really is secure.

The article does show the need to be careful when constructing things and make sure there are no leaks. Maybe that's more easily said than done.

That site is pretty interesting. There are some interesting articles about older PC unixes on there as well.

Every time I read something about OS/2, I'm just waiting to see one of my old friends from IBM Boca Raton names pop in there. Man I loath of those days again. What a great bunch of people to work with. I loved it there and to this day LOVE OS/2.

Yea, the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics and I do have bad opinions against MS for it.

In addition, there are numerous games that shipped with random plain text (including uncompiled source code) in their binary images:

http://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_uncompiled_source_code

http://www.pagetable.com/?p=28

Wasn't this the case with older compilers not zeroing padding space too?

Hell, old compilers? Even modern compilers don't do that. I once fixed a bug that occurred because someone was doing a memcmp() between two structures to check if they were the same, and it was returning false because some of the padding between variables differed between the two. This was in C++ in a modern version of Visual Studio.

That's not so unreasonable within the process' own heap. I was thinking more about padding inside .exe files on disk with the risk of redistributing that - either from nonzeroed drive slack or from random memory at build time (ms-dos/win95?)

poor erikl...

Can someone please add Eugene to the end of the title?

Eugene?

It's a reference to a Pink Floyd track: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careful_with_That_Axe,_Eugene

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