The Old New Thing

June 13, 2006 - The Old New Thing

Lies and statistics: 600,000 Chinese engineers

June 13, 2006 Jun 13, 2006 06/13/06
Raymond Chen
Everybody "knows" that China produced 600,000 engineers in 2004 (as compared to 70,000 in the United States), but Carl Bialik at the Wall Street Journal [corrected 9:30am] smelled something funny, so he chased the source of the numbers to see whether this "fact" was indeed true. It wasn't. NPR interviewed a Duke professor whose class ...

Fumbling around in the dark and stumbling across the wrong solution

June 13, 2006 Jun 13, 2006 06/13/06
Raymond Chen
I don't mean to pick on this series of entries, but it illustrates an interesting pattern of stumbling across the wrong "solution". The series begins by attempting to trigger the system's monitor blank timeout by posting a message to the desktop window. As we saw earlier, the desktop window is a very special window and as a rule should be...