Showing results for April 2006 - Page 4 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Apr 5, 2006
0
0

Adding flags to APIs to work around driver bugs doesn't scale

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Some people suggested, as a solution to the network interoperability compatibility problem, adding a flag to to indicate whether the caller wanted to use fast or slow enumeration. Adding a flag to work around a driver bug doesn't actually solve anything in the long term. Considering all the video driver bugs that Windows has had to work arou...

Other
Apr 4, 2006
0
0

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

Raymond Chen
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 one qui...

Non-Computer
Apr 4, 2006
0
0

Spamming the event log doesn't make things any better

Raymond Chen
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 few ...

Other
Apr 3, 2006
0
0

What seventh-grade students want to be when they grow up

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Another episode in the sporadic series on the wisdom of seventh graders: The topic this time is "What do you want to be when you grow up?" The students really enjoyed this topic because, as one young man put it, "I could write a book about myself!" Here are what some students had to say. Spelling mistakes are intact, but ellipses are editorial. (I ...

Non-ComputerThe wisdom of seventh graders
Apr 3, 2006
0
0

Doing the best we can until time travel has been perfected

Raymond Chen
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 done is ...

Other