but i need to back up let's jump in the wayback machine and travel to the year of my retirement from microsoft NUMBER_TOKEN so i can set the stage now when it comes to a huge project like microsoft windows ultimately every component needs to have an owner there was even an excel spreadsheet somewhere on a server that listed each component to the operating system and its owner along with their name email address and sometimes even their home phone number in case of emergency like if it was an important component such as the thread scheduler or the heap manager some components are not under active development anymore but they still need an owner assigned to them in case something comes up with them so for example i might own task manager and product activation and even the shell copy engine and stuff like that all of which are generally getting feature work or changes made during the current release but at the same time i would be assigned a number of what i'd call legacy components just for the sake of them being able to have a responsible adult's name assigned to them so i wound up owning things like calculator and cd auto run and those of you who know a little bit about the sony root kit probably already sensed where this is going and that it has nothing to do with calculator and you're right as an aside you might think that owning something like calculator would be dry and boring and it probably is until one day when someone finds an edge case bug and calc returns a bad result well it's never happened yet thankfully i mean there are odd edge cases like subtracting two from the root of four doesn't always yield exactly zero that sort of thing but nothing like the old pentium floating point bug where you'd get an outright wrong answer back from f div but trust me checking code into calculator or being the name on the code review line can have a certain amount of pucker factor because the stakes involved are really high and the press would be really bad if you did make a mistake cd auto run was more like what you're thinking a boring state-old component that nobody loved maybe a few people hated and that normally just did his job year after year with few people noticing it as this name implies cd autorun is code that runs inside the shell's explorer process and when a new cd is inserted into the drive it raises an event that the shell monitors for so it knows when and what has happened when the drive is ready the disk spins up the shell suddenly takes a peek of the disk to see if there's a setup program or similar that should be launched automatically that way when you put in a cd for a program or a game it just starts your mom doesn't have to look up the name of the program to run in a manual or search around the disk for it with file explorer so it sounds like it could be a handy feature and indeed most of the time it is but it could also be the source of bugs if whomever authored the cd didn't do it properly or if a cd that really shouldn't even be auto running keeps popping up a useless window every time you insert it most of the time however autorun was just something that people didn't think about at all because like i said it just did the same predictable thing every year so while there was no major feature work planned for autorun there was still periodic maintenance done on it to make it easier for developers a better
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