The Old New Thing

Sometimes you just have to make a snap decision

Saturday afternoon, my phone rings. "Hello?" "Quick! We're on our way to the nursery. Do you want to come?" I recognize the voice as one of my friends who recently bought a house and presumably is doing some spring landscaping. But I have to answer fast. Time for a snap decision. "No." My friend seems surprised that I give my answer so ...

It's more efficient when you buy in bulk

The Windows XP kernel does not turn every call into into a packet on the network. Rather, the first time an application calls , it issues a bulk query to the server and returns the first result to the application. Thereafter, when an application calls , it returns the next result from the buffer. If the buffer is empty, then issues a ...