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Re: OLE, was Re: G3 vs the world (Was Re: Apple G# machines -- the bad part...


> From: "Lawson English" <[email protected]>
> Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy,comp.sys.mac.advocacy
> Subject: Re: OLE, was Re: G3 vs the world (Was Re: Apple G# machines -- the 
>         bad part...
>
> Chuck Swiger wrote:
>
>> Ugh-- that story is horrifying!
>> 
>> Do you know any more technical details about what was going on?  What in
>> the  world could OLE be doing that would cause remote machines to crash?
>
> Here is my understanding of what happened. The company I worked for was a
> medical imaging R&D house. They had designed a high-end NuBus 3D graphics
> card to work with MRI images and create 3D images from CAT scans (or
> something like that). These were meant to be part of $100,000 workstations
> in hospitals so they had to be rock-solid. One day, the machines that they
> had in-house with these cards installed, started crashing. The engineers
> that designed the cards were brought in to trouble-shoot them. After
> exhaustive testing, they decided that it must be a software problem and
> finally did a clean install on ALL the systems on the network. That solved
> the problem, but as soon as the secretary installed Word 6.0 on her
> machine, the crashing started again. 
> 
> When I worked there, they had some weird procedure worked out where she did
> most of her work in Word 5.1 but if she needed to save it in Word 6.0
> format, she had to take her system off the network, boot from a zip drive
> and use Word 6.0 that way. Before she could access the network again, she
> had to boot from the Word 5.1 system. I was afraid to ask for the gory
> details, so this is what I picked up from osmosis and watching her work and
> listening to her muttered comments...
> 
> Near as anyone could guess, OLE patches AppleTalk drivers or something and
> occassionally sends out some weird packet that did odd things to the rest
> of AppleTalk on other systems. They never tried to figure out what.
> 
> There are worse stories about MS on the Mac, IMHO. OLE is a complicated
> beast, so the fact that it does weird things isn't THAT surprising
> (strange, maybe). What is weird is the fact that when Apple was trying to
> switch their GUI during the transition to PPC, they found a strange
> incompatibility with "a major word-processing application." Seems that this
> application wanted to provide its own GUI appearance, and added 3D buttons
> to all dialog boxes, even the Alert dialogs. 
> 
> The company was so arcane in its programming practices on the Mac that
> instead of bypassing the Alert dialog box and creating their own
> single-button dialog with a custom 3D control, they *PATCHED* the Alert
> Manager and monitored when it was about to draw the "OK" button and
> substituted a pointer to their own 3D control, on-the-fly.
> 
> Naturally, when Apple tried to redo the entire GUI of the Mac, it broke
> this word processor (this is why there is STILL no system-wide appearance
> manager in the Mac, I'll bet).
>
> I'd be crying conspiracy at this point, and with some justification, but
> from what I've heard, MS screws itself over just as badly. A few years ago,
> on comp.sys.mac.programmer [RIP], a former MS employee who was no longer
> under NDA, described how MS did its programming. Since MS applications and
> system software are both part of the same software house with no firewall,
> MS applications developers could request source code for most aspects of
> the OS and Toolbox and work from them.
> 
> One MS applications developer found that the built-in text-editing routines
> were too confining and that he needed to set a specific internal variable
> for which there was no external access. Rather than putting through a
> request for the code to be changed so that he could access and set this
> variable, he merely obtained the source code, evoked some kind of callback
> to his own application from the offending function, and walked the stack
> frame to manually set the local variable of the text edit Toolbox code from
> within his own application.
> 
> You were saying something about "horrifying?"

-- 
Eric Bennett ( [email protected] ; http://www.pobox.com/~ericb )
Cornell University

Egotist, n.  A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
-Ambrose Bierce
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