Slashdot Mirror
Debugging Microsoft.com
teslatug writes "Channel 9 has an interesting video interview with Chris St.Amand and Jeff Stucky who test and debug Microsoft.com. They reveal some of the big problems they used to face such as recycling processes every 5 minutes due to memory leaks and 32 bit limitations, and being unable to push more than 10 Mbits of data to their datacenters due to Windows' networking stack limitations."
WMV? You serious?
How the hell am I supposed to watch that?
The next post will be about debugging slashdot.
I think the term is, "Pissing into the wind"....
Why don't they just migrate to Apache on OpenBSD? :)
Oh, right...
I suppose that, transitively, it is due to a limitation in an archaic version of the BSD stack.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
Is anybody really suprised here? What they didn't tell us is that there's a top-secret Debian redundancy server running behind it just in case all hell breaks loose. Nothing to see here, move along.
( I
Did anyone notice the desk? What kind of soda cans are those on his desk? I thought they were Hansens, but it does not look like any I have ever seen.
M
Is that not one of the most ironic things you've ever heard? The limitations of the operating system made by the same company holding back another division? Shock and awe.
It's also missing the fact that more problems would go away if they upgraded to Linux with it's improved everything.
Life is incomplete.
Interviewer: "Hey dude."
Chris St.Amand "What up bro"
Interviewer: "So like what happened when you worked on microsoft.com? Oh but first...Did you get all the chicks at the bars when you mentioned your job or what?"
Chris St.Amand "Oh totally. I'd just say, 'what up babe. I work on the microsoft.com web portal' and she'd degfrag my harddrive all night."
Interviewer: "Sweet. So what was your biggest hurrdle writing all that HTML? After all that's a complicated langaguage to master."
Chris St.Amand "It'd definelty have to be that F'ing page not found shit. You don't know how many times I'd go to microsoft.com after doing a big update and it'd just say four-oh something and the page just wouldn't show up. You know we tried to put up a 420 page not found but got in trouble with our boss."
Interviewer: "Yea totally! That would have been cool. Oh ummm let's see here. So what other problems did you have?"
Chris St.Amand: "Not being able to use FreeBSD to serve that shit. When I first heard I actually had to use Microsoft I was completely like, 'Not cool Bill. Not F'ing cool, Bill.'
Interviewer: "Any thing else? Like was it hard to get up every day in the morning knowing that your existence was updating microsoft.com HTML?"
Chris St.Amand: "Yea I tried sucicide a number of times. But then I discovered that I could just completely make up new HTML tags and that was a lot of fun."
Interviewer: "Make up HTML?"
Chris St.Amand: "Oh yea, we're microsoft. When I first started they told me that no other browsers exist other then that big blue F'ing E and that no other operating systems exist. And that I could do whatever I wanted to do. So I just started making up *ALL KINDS* of crazy ass HTML.
Interviewer: "Cool dude. You rock. Anything else you want to mention?"
Chris St.Amand: "Yea you know all that crazy F'ed up HTML that all of our products output? You know without indention and messed up question marks everywhere? That was me. I was all hung over the day I added that. And that's about it."
Interviewer: Thanks Chris, I'm sure you'll go down in infamancy for such a piece of F'ing shit web page and end up in some lame ass 'Don't write web pages like this' hall of fame.
Chris St.Amand: "Peace out and remeber to eat your greens not smoke 'em!"
Yes, I know. I put mine in the wheelie bin last night...
Am I the only one who looked at the title and thought: "debug microsoft.com? Who still uses .com files any more?"
Yup, thought so. I suck.
Well do you think want to give us Linux users the satisfaction of seeing Microsoft employees admitting faults in their software?
Yeah, in those cases they've broken from the official spec...those embace and extend OSS bastards!!!!!! ;-)
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Hmm, nearly-direct link to a 145-megabyte video file on the /. front page, posted right as the geeks of the world are getting home from work. What are you, crazy? Are you trying to Slashdot Microsoft?
Don't answer that.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
After having this video playing in the background for awhile, one interview question caught my ear:
"So is your security getting better?..."
Aside, its funny to hear them concede that they're actually having to adjust for other browsers visiting their home page.
"Use standard-compliant code? Heresy!..."
Slashdot has turned from "Microsoft sucks" to waxing poetically about how Microsoft used to suck.
How times change...
all everyones problems went away when they switched to winxp ?
Sorry i though everyones problems went away when they switched to winme?
Sorry i though everyones problems went away when they switched to win98
Sorry i though everyones problems went away when they switched to win95.
all i seem to hear before a new windows release is how xxxx is stable now xxxx starts up in only 4 seconds xxxx doesnt have this problem xxxx doesnt have that problem.
Windows has had commercial server software for how long ?
and its just fixing a stack limitation when ?
Heh, if you had to pay those MSFT licensing fees, I'm sure you'd find a way to reduce the number of Windows Servers you used too. ;)
It gracefully "cycles" your process so you have your memory leaks. If only other apps were coded for memory leaks.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
yeah, just what's his angle anyway?! I mean, no one should post Microsoft papers that explain Microsoft software and get away with it. Something is DEFINITELY weird here. I would suggest that Microsoft is paying him off to post messages to slashdot, that's really the only answer.
At around 10:25 in the video Chris St. Amand, who runs Microsoft's website and data center, types in his password, which the camera recorded. And the video is hosted off of Microsoft's website...although I don't know how long that'll still be operational.