Showing results for April 2007 - Page 2 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Shankar Vedantam wrote a Washington Post article and also appeared on NPR to discuss The Decoy Effect: Given a choice between two options, introducing a third, clearly inferior, option can influence your original decision. You won't pick the third option, but a clever choice of the bad third option can sway the decision toward either of the oth...

You may be called in to study a problem in code you've never seen before or be asked to look over a proposed change to some code you've never seen before. When this happens, you have to take shortcuts in your analysis because following every function call to the bottom would not only take far too much time, but also take you so far away from the c...

Last month, I spent a few hours reading essays written by seventh graders (ages 12 and 13) on the following subject: Electives are often fun and different from our normal core classes. Imagine you have been chosen to create one new elective for our school. In a multi-paragraph essay, explain what the new elective would be like and what students w...

The next entry in the continuing sporadic series on resource formats is the bitmap. You thought accelerator tables were simple; bitmaps are even simpler. A bitmap resource takes the same form as a file, except that there is no . That's all.

Arabic in the movie True Lies.

Pea, marble, dime, nickel, quarter, half dollar, walnut, golf ball, hen egg, tennis ball, baseball, teacup, grapefruit, softball. What is this a list of? Answer. Note that the list is different in Britain. (Original story that tipped me off to this list.)

Here's a problem that floated past a few years ago. We switched our wizard from using dialog resource IDs to using because [reasons deleted since they aren't important]. But once we did that, the Next button doesn't work! Anybody have any ideas what's going on? I made things a little easier by deleting the information that isn't relevant to the...

Apparently, when translating their Pokémon game from Japanese to English, Nintendo changed a question in an in-game personality test that asked you what you would do if you farted. In the English-language version, you merely broke a rotten egg. What, do they think kids in the U.S. don't fart? Or that they don't enjoy fart jokes. Allow me to...

About every ten months, somebody new discovers the Notepad file encoding problem. Let's see what else there is to say about it. First of all, can we change Notepad's detection algorithm? The problem is that there are a lot of different text files out there. Let's look just at the ones that Notepad supports. 8-bit ANSI (of which 7-bit ASCII is...

If you missed it on Saturday and Sunday night, you have a few more chances left. Set your DVR to record Seattle Symphony from Benaroya Hall: Brahms, Kernis and Kodály on one of its handful of repeat airings this week (the next one is tonight at 6pm on KCTS-HD). According to the story in the Seattle Times, it includes close-ups of nearly e...