This is the next part of my previous post about the issue with the Crowdstrike.

Because many people saw that Windows was crashing they assumed that it was a Windows issue. Later, after the root cause of the problem was found, they still blamed Windows and said that nothing like that happened to other OSes.

But exactly the same issue happened 19th of April 2024 but with Linux this time. After that issue, Linux machines were not able to boot as well. Then another issue happened 13th of May 2024 affecting another Linux distro. The last case wasn’t as bad and there were only freezes but it was still bad. And it is not just something I read on

When I wrote my first post about Crowdstrike I had a feeling that it was not as simple as it looked. My initial assumption was that their driver has a bug, but I have the following issues with this assumption:

  1. How can they deploy a new driver to many computers and never see any issues if this driver prevents Windows from starting up?
  2. How driver can update itself? Technically it is possible but I never heard of that. Keep in mind, that updating the driver from the user mode application could be a potential vulnerability.
  3. Also, I was thinking about how the driver can identify a crash during Windows startup and switch to some kind of safe mode to avoid this problem in the first place. But it also looks like a vulnerability. All you need to force the driver into this mode to disable it.

I think everybody is aware of the chaos that CrowdStrike created in the last few days. This is truly a tragic situation because there are people who died because of that and I would like to share my point of view on all of that. But I would like to state that it is based on what I read on the internet and the situation may change.

Firstly, it does not look like there is any fault of the Microsoft. CrowdStrike installs a kernel mode driver and the code in this driver works with the highest possible privileges. If this driver has a bug, then the whole system will crash and there is nothing Microsoft can do about it. Basically,

Some time ago I wrote an article about issues with JavaScript and stated that nobody should write in JavaScript. But in this article, I shared my experience of using JavaScript several years ago. And by a strange twist of fate, I had to write a lot of JavaScript code last 3 weeks and I would like to share my experience with the latest and greatest.

Firstly, I was absolutely sure that the situation would be way better than I described. Those were real problems and developers would put pressure on JavaScript developers to make the language better and easier to use

But I didn’t find the situation any better. There are still no types in the language and as

Accidentally I found this video named: “"Clean" Code, Horrible Performance”. In this video the author explains that almost all postulates of the so-called “Clean Code” are wrong because they negatively affect performance (up to 25 times in his video), and he finishes the video with words: “You should never actually do them”.

Well, the author is right that all techniques explained in “Clean Code” will negatively affect performance. The same as writing code in C++ will make your code slower compared to assembler.

But there are a lot of reasons why most developers switched to languages like C even though their apps became slower and bigger. One of those reasons is portability. For example, there were several examples of

A long time ago around 90’s Intel was king. Sure you can buy Intel-compatible CPUs like AMD, Cyrix, and others but that was mostly a choice for poor people. If you want real quality you will have to pay for it. At least it was the message from Intel.

They and their fans consistently push this message that true quality is only available from Intel and any other choice is a compromise that will lead to strange problems and most importantly to instability. If you want a trouble-free system then you must buy Intel.

To a certain degree, this was the case because Intel systems were more popular and they cost much more. As a result, other systems must cut

Recently I watched this video that has the title “Hyundai Is Putting Tesla To Shame...What Happened?” and decided to watch it. I saw a few other videos from this channel and I got a very good impression. Right now I want to buy a new EV but I’m somewhat reluctant to give my money to Musk. Also, I know a few people who were happy owners of Hyundai cars. So everything was telling me to watch this video.

But that video turned out to be quite strange. In the beginning author stated that Korean cars have a quite bad reputation and have a lot of issues with reliability. Especially with engines and transmissions. And these are the most expensive

I’ve been messing with PC hardware for tens of years. I always built my computers from parts and sometimes I do this for other people. Maybe I’m not a real pro, but I know a lot about this area and I follow all computer news and I think I know quite a lot.

I often read about a situation when somebody is trying to take the cooler off the CPU but thermal paste is practically glued to the CPU and eventually, that person applies so much force that it just rips off the cooler with the CPU from the socket. I’m sure many people saw this.

I was always laughing when I see such stories and I always thought that

But before I provide these tips, please note that these tips are for regular people who probably don’t have many spare computer parts to test different parts to quickly find faulty components.

Tip #1

Always buy a motherboard with some kind of debug indicators. They will not increase the cost of the motherboard by any meaningful amount but they will save a lot of time if you will have any issues.

Tip #2

If you buy a motherboard for AMD CPU then always with BIOS flashback unless you know that this platform will not receive any new CPUs. For example, there is not much point in buying a motherboard with a BIOS flashback for the 5000 series. Any new AMD