I was watching quite an interesting video and they mentioned Microsoft as a company that bought a lot of companies and killed their products. As a person familiar with that process I would like to share some insights on why the product will die when the company is acquired.

But before I start I will introduce some acronyms. C –company that was acquired. P – the product that company C is producing. M – the company that acquired company C.

Data

Sometimes a company is acquired because the company has some specific knowledge or data. For example, company M can acquire company C solely to get access to its client database. Surely they will “support” the product P for

Recently my relative started complaining about video freezes in games and I started investigating. After a short investigation, I found that Windows created a dump file after each of such cases and after checking them I found that the crash in 90% of cases was in the video driver. Moreover, 10% could also be related to the video driver.

My relative confirmed that recently they updated the video driver and my natural guess was that it is a bug in the video driver. I have shown my relative how to install the previous video driver and I thought that problem is fixed.

But the problem returned in a few hours. We tried one version of the video driver before that

Recently I was asked to investigate quite an interesting case. I had a dump file that Windows created, I started WinDbg and opened that dump file and I saw this:

(7b9c.ab4): Access violation - code c0000005 (first/second chance not available)
For analysis of this file, run !analyze -v
MyProgram!MyModule.SomeClick+0x71:
00000014`00ace011 5b              pop     rbx

Usually, an Access violation happened when there is an attempt to read or write from memory.  But in this, quite a rare case application crashes on pop instruction. But as everybody knows pop and push instructions do read from and write to memory because the stack is located in the same memory as everything else. So my next

I’m pretty sure that many of you have heard about self-driving becoming a reality soon. Famous Elon Musk promised it first in 2013 and his “release date” is getting sooner and sooner. And it is not baseless blabbing. Recent videos from Tesla in fact are looking quite promising. Will we have full autonomy soon? I’m sure a lot of people will pay quite good money for it. But unfortunately, the answer is hard NO. Not in the next 10-20 years unless some major breakthrough happened. And let me explain why.

Cost

The main reason why Elon pushed so heavily for autonomous driving is to make Tesla cheaper. If you compare Tesla with any car even a very basic one you

When I was thinking about a new PC in 2018, one of the decisions I had to make was how much memory I need. And that time I decided that 16 Gb is enough, and I didn’t see any reason why I should buy more. And my choice was correct.

But now I see a very good reason to increase my memory size in my next build and that reason is simple – browsers. Let me explain. For example, I have Firefox with 4 windows and around 10 tabs each. And that consumed 6.5 Gb in Firefox. And very often I can open much more, when I research some problem, or when I would like to buy something.

And I’m

Imagine you would like to develop your own game. What tool is the best for you to use: Unity or Unreal? Some time ago I wrote this post and compare the development side of Unity and Unreal and I would like to update. Both Unity and Unreal are equivalent and it is possible to do the same things in both. Some things are easier in Unreal, and some are easier in Unity.

No visual tool, please

As I wrote before, don’t even try any visual programming unless your game has extremely basic programming. Visual programming is like hammering nails into a board using rock. Yes, you can do it and if you have only a pair of them, then

Firstly some history. About 9 years ago I bought an Epson XP-810 printer. It cost me around $120 if memory serves me right. It is quite a versatile multifunctional device. Especially I like that it can scan documents on both sides 2 sides which I found quite rare these days because some time ago I was looking for a printer for my relative and it was quite hard to find a consumer-grade printer that does this while costing reasonable money.

But the most important feature is that I can buy 2 full sets of aftermarket printer ink of XL size for $12-$15. Right now the same set of original Epson ink cost $99. And from my memory 9 years ago

Recently I found that more and more different websites switched to 2-way authentication. I completely understand why and I support this movement because it is way more secure but there are a few things I hate in 2-way authentication for quite a long time.

The first and most important thing is a lack of focus on the website. I entered the username and password and now I’m prompted to enter the security code that the website sent as SMS. I’m gabbing my phone, type code and press Enter just to find that the edit box is not focused and I have to click on it first and then switch on and unlock my phone, then go to iMessage and find

The company where I work is actively using AWS for many services. Our monthly bill is many hundreds of thousands of dollars. We are using many different techniques to reduce our bill and one of them is “Savings Plans”. But there is one problem with it. When you create a “Cost and usage report” you will see prices without it.

Why is this a problem? Well, imagine you would like to see the real cost of EC2 instances because it has sense to start optimization from the most expensive instances. But Savings Plan applies automatically to the most expensive instances and effectively their cost is zero. As a result, you don’t see real cost and if you are not familiar