Re: Utilities vs Applications

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From: John Sinteur
Subject: Re: Utilities vs Applications
Date: 05:50 on 29 Apr 2005
On Apr 29, 2005, at 1:31, Michael G Schwern wrote:

> money wasting support calls.  Ok, maybe I can see that... but  
> Grab?  Just
> how much trouble can you get into making screenshots?


Back in the days of Mac OS 7 or 8 or so, all memory space was shared,  
and virtual memory wasn't really something you could count on.  
Somebody I know had an application out that reserved some memory at  
startup (32K to be exact), and whenever a memory allocation call  
failed, he would free that 32K so the application would be able to  
run for just a little while longer, and he would put up an alert:  
"memory is getting too low to continue. please save your work and  
stop the application. do not try to do anything else". Not this exact  
words, but it would get the message across, or so we hoped.

Until one day when we got a support call from a user who attemted to  
make a screen shot at this point, to show to support with the  
question what to do.

The screenshot utility starved the machine of memory to the point  
where it crashed totally, hosing the users work.

I recall the walls getting some extra dents that day from us banging  
our heads against it.

-John

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