The Old New Thing

October 11, 2007 - The Old New Thing

Unlikely excuses: A faulty microchip

October 11, 2007 Oct 11, 2007 10/11/07
Raymond Chen
Last year, a talking action figure was discovered to utter a curse word. A spokesperson for the store said that the problem might be a faulty microchip. Huh? What microchips fail by saying curse words? I mean, I can see the voice chip failing by generating static or chopping up the audio so as to become unintelligible, but what are the odds...

Whose idea was it to make Ctrl+Backspace delete the previous word?

October 11, 2007 Oct 11, 2007 10/11/07
Raymond Chen
James Manning mentioned in a footnote to a blog entry on PowerShell and WMI that he considers the Ctrl+Backspace shortcut key a Windows-ism. Where did this shortcut key come from? From a fan of the Brief editor. A few people in the early days of the Internet Explorer group used the Brief editor, which uses Ctrl+Backspace as the shortcut ...