In 32-bit windows, you used to be able to see if a pointer was valid or not by seeing if it pointed to the last 2GB of address space. If it did, it was pointing to Kernel memory that was not valid for user mode code.

But then Large Address Aware (4GB limit) changes everything, and you can't do that anymore. In order for a program to be Large Address Aware, you need to not try to do things like check high bits of pointers, then every single library and DLL you use also needs to do the same.

That sounds like the same ugly hack that caused programs not to be “32 bit clean” back in the day for Macs

One difference is that the Mac OS itself was not initially 32-bit clean, with the top byte being used by the Memory Manager.

Ah yes, these 68000 pointers have a spare 8 bits for me to use! Because nothing will ever need more than 16 MB of memory. Sigh.

It's all good if you have 128kb ram but they should have had a plan to escape it from day one.

This is how pointer authentication codes work on Arm64.

JS and WASM share the main arraybuffer. It's just very not-javascript-like to try to use an arraybuffer heap, because then you don't have strings or objects, just index,size pairs into that arraybuffer.

Anyway, Javascript is no stranger to breaking changes. Compare Chromium 47 to today. Just add actual integers as another breaking change, then WASM becomes almost unnecessary.

Is there a list of these that are actually in real shipped software and not created as a joke?

New TI graphing calculators are sold today for the same price as they were in 1999.

(Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/768/)

Blocking applications from interacting with each other when it already has full access to the other process's memory via /proc/<pid>/mem is just silly. Save the blocking for when it doesn't already have that level of access.

Medical apps (such as those that talk to insulin pumps) also refuse to run when developer mode is turned on.

The word YouTube really depends a lot on good kerning. The "YouTube Display" font has much better kerning around the uppercase T than the other three fonts that mention YouTube.

Audio delay for most Bluetooth headphones is downright atrocious. Yes, there are some out there which support low delay modes (under 40ms), but the vast majority of them do not.

This time, it has more to do with diminished supply combined with heavy demand rather than a trade war.

Are we back to the days of RDRAM when having a blank memory module was actually required?