The Old New Thing

October 2006 - The Old New Thing

So that's what daddy does at work

October 31, 2006 Oct 31, 2006 10/31/06
Raymond Chen
As many people have pointed out, Hallowe'en at Microsoft is a very family-oriented affair. The parents love it because the kids are in a safe environment; the kids love it because instead of having to go from house to house, you just have to walk to the next office, and then there's a big party in the cafeteria afterwards. Though it does ...

Руками не трогать!

October 30, 2006 Oct 30, 2006 10/30/06
Raymond Chen
Former Microsoft "big-time important guy" Charles Simonyi wants to be the first nerd in space. In this BBC article, he says that he is even learning Russian so he can better understand the systems aboard the Soyuz spacecraft that will take him up and back. (Note to the humor-impaired: Joke begins here.) When his Russian hosts learned this...

Why can't I get my program to use more than 50% of the CPU?

October 30, 2006 Oct 30, 2006 10/30/06
Raymond Chen
This is sort of the reverse of Why is my CPU usage hovering at 50%?, but the answer is the same. When I run a CPU-intensive task, the CPU percentage used by that process never goes above 50%, and the rest is reported as idle. Is there some setting that I set inadvertently which is preventing the program from using more than half of the CPU...

Now it looks like I speak far more languages than I actually do

October 27, 2006 Oct 27, 2006 10/27/06
Raymond Chen
The folks over at TechNet Magazine have done something really cool: They've started translating all their articles into Spanish, French, German, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese. (But no Swedish.) You can change your language on the fly with the combo box in the corner. (MSDN Magazine is doing the same thing. It's ...

Let the dead computer scavenging commence!

October 26, 2006 Oct 26, 2006 10/26/06
Raymond Chen
Now that my old computer is up on bricks in the virtual front yard, the scavenging has begun. I got a piece of email from one of my colleagues saying, "Say, you aren't using that PC-2100 memory any more are you?" Why no, in fact, I wasn't. Christmas comes early. (He offered to buy the memory off of me, but since I had already written the old...

For a brief shining moment, DirectX was more popular than another word that ends in x

October 26, 2006 Oct 26, 2006 10/26/06
Raymond Chen
In the month after DirectX 3 was released, "directx" became the number one most-searched-for term on microsoft.com. That in itself wasn't too surprising. What was more surprising was the word in sixth place: "sex". That puzzles me to this day. What kind of people search for "sex" on microsoft.com? And what were they expecting to find...

Non-resolution of the dead home desktop problem

October 25, 2006 Oct 25, 2006 10/25/06
Raymond Chen
Last time, I told of attempting to upgrade my home computer and failing. I ultimately gave up and returned the parts to the store, telling them that I thought the IDE controller on the motherboard was dead. They refunded my money after a false step where they refunded me more than I paid for the components in the first place! (I bought the ...

Offline mode silently prevents you from streaming media content

October 25, 2006 Oct 25, 2006 10/25/06
Raymond Chen
Into Windows Media Player (version 9 if you're keeping score at home), I type the URL of an MP3 file (poor man's podcast) and get the error message "The download of the specified resource has failed." On this dialog there two buttons: Close and Web Help. Close closes the error dialog, of course. Web Help does nothing. Turns out the real...