The Old New Thing

April 2006 - Page 4 of 4 - The Old New Thing

German adjectives really aren't that hard; they just look that way

April 4, 2006 Apr 4, 2006 04/4/06
Raymond Chen
I may have scared a bunch of people with that chart of German adjective endings, but as several commenters noted, native speakers don't refer to the charts; they just say what comes naturally. (Well, except for Leo Petr, who claims that native Russian speakers actually study these charts in grade school.) Commenter Helga Waage noted that ...

Spamming the event log doesn't make things any better

April 4, 2006 Apr 4, 2006 04/4/06
Raymond Chen
A common suggestion is that if a problem is detected which the system automatically recovered from but which an administrator might be interested in knowing about, then an event log entry should be created. Be careful, however, not to abuse the event log in the process. If the problem is not security-related and it can occur, say, more than a...

Doing the best we can until time travel has been perfected

April 3, 2006 Apr 3, 2006 04/3/06
Raymond Chen
Mistakes were made. Mistakes such as having Windows NT put Notepad in a different location from Windows 3.1. (Though I'm sure they had their reasons.) Mistakes such as having a when there is already a style. Mistakes such as having listview state images be one-biased, whereas treeview state images are zero-biased. But what's ...