Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac.misc:3347 comp.sys.mac.programmer:17509 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!know!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!pequod.cso.uiuc.edu!dorner From: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc,comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: MEMORY FAULTS - any way to check ram for intermittent faults?? Message-ID: <1990Sep17.180738.8599@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: 17 Sep 90 18:07:38 GMT References: <1990Sep11.174118.12194@Neon.Stanford.EDU> <615@keele.keele.ac.uk> <1990Sep12.185459.15694@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1990Sep13.154744.2277@midway.uchicago.edu> <10242@goofy.Apple.COM> Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News) Reply-To: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner) Distribution: comp Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Lines: 47 In article <10242@goofy.Apple.COM> Greg@AppleLink.apple.com (Greg Marriott) writes: >a VBL task, I think). It keeps writing the value there in case an errant >program writes to location 0, blasting the bus error causing value. And therein lies an interesting tale. My mail program, Eudora, puts a longword of 0 at location 0, on the theory that, should something go wrong and a nil pointer be dereferenced, 0 could be less harmful than random junk (after all, random junk will give you a bus error on 68000's half the time). Marginal, I know, but I figured that it wouldn't hurt anything, and might help somebody sometime. [PLEASE read on BEFORE billy-uns of you post that I shouldn't do it.] Friday I received a call from a guy at some software company. Him: "Does your program write to location 0?" Me: "Yep." Him: "We are working on a commercial application, and this gives us trouble." Me: "Too bad." Him: "But Apple says you shouldn't write to location 0." Me: "Well, then you shouldn't be using it either, should you?" Him: Me: Anyway, he never would tell me what the program was, and made several comments along the lines of: "Well, we're developing a commercial app, so we have testing cycles, and can't just release a new version." (Implying that I didn't test, and could release a version every time I blew my nose.) "Well, WE don't leave debugging code in our production apps." (My response was, neither do I; my *debugging* code puts *odd* values at 0.) Anyway, I'm going to remove the code from Eudora, because he also pointed out that it bothers "The Debugger" (Jasik's). The benefit was really minimal to nonexistent anyway. But the guy left me more than a little ticked off; I didn't appreciate his "we make people pay so we're better than you" attitude. [By the way, the reason this guy cared in such a big way about Eudora is that one of his customers was using Eudora and didn't want to give it up.] -- Steve Dorner, U of Illinois Computing Services Office Internet: s-dorner@uiuc.edu UUCP: uunet!uiucuxc!uiuc.edu!s-dorner