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In a Throwback To the '90s, NTFS Bug Lets Anyone Hang Or Crash Windows 7, 8.1 (arstechnica.com)
Windows 7 and 8.1 (and also Windows Vista) have a bug that is reminiscent of Windows 98 age, when a certain specially crafted filename could make the operating system crash (think of file:///c:/con/con). From an ArsTechnica report: The new bug, which fortunately doesn't appear to afflict Windows 10, uses another special filename. This time around, the special filename of choice is $MFT. $MFT is the name given to one of the special metadata files that are used by Windows' NTFS filesystem. The file exists in the root directory of each NTFS volume, but the NTFS driver handles it in special ways, and it's hidden from view and inaccessible to most software. Attempts to open the file are normally blocked, but in a move reminiscent of the Windows 9x flaw, if the filename is used as if it were a directory name -- for example, trying to open the file c:\$MFT\123 -- then the NTFS driver takes out a lock on the file and never releases it. Every subsequent operation sits around waiting for the lock to be released. Forever. This blocks any and all other attempts to access the file system, and so every program will start to hang, rendering the machine unusable until it is rebooted.
Good on you, but you do know that that is just the first step in the 5 Whys of mea culpa?
The 32-bit uptime bug in Windows 95 was the poster child of a toy operating system.
NTFS (and the giant NT/2000/XP fork in the road) was the poster child for Microsoft escaping their toy reputation.
The entire joke here is that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Now this new $MFT fiasco is just a stupid edge case in something that actually works well enough, most of the time.
The joke under the joke here is that Microsoft has a predilection for death by self-inflicted edge case that beggars imagination, almost as if its a fixture of the organization's eternal DNA.
The whole point of the Emperor's New Clothes was Microsoft attempting to sell the world on the innovation that they had finally put away their childish things. But no, not entirely. You can still see the boy in the man. Bigger and hairier, but still flopping around like a fish out of water.
You reveal that you were actually afflicted with this problem in a big way (the time overflow bug) and yet somehow the larger story around it was going whoosh over your head (no one who cottoned onto this story at the time would have filed this Out of Africa II family-tree distinction under "minor detail").
Stage two of the 5 whys of mea culpa: Where was your head at the time?
Stage three: Whatever happened then, are you still captive to childish things?
etc. etc.
For our purposes here, there's an extremely interesting fork in the road upon entering stage five.
A) man, I was such an ass
B) look Ma, we made a trillion dollars
An honest-to-God trillion dollars.
Microsoft has hit $1 trillion in all-time revenue, and with more profit than Apple — 9 May 2016
Revenue 1, zipper 0.