The Old New Thing

January 2008 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

In order to serve you better: Chase resets your marketing preferences

January 11, 2008 Jan 11, 2008 01/11/08
Raymond Chen
Whenever a company says "In order to serve you better", you can be pretty sure they're about to do something that will make your life more miserable. This time, I'm going to call out Chase Financial Services, who recently sent out notices to customers who had specified that they did not want to receive marketing materials informing them that ...

Windows is not an MFC delivery channel

January 11, 2008 Jan 11, 2008 01/11/08
Raymond Chen
Depending on what version of Windows you're running, there may be a variety of support DLLs for things that aren't formal product components, but which are merely along for the ride. For example, Windows 95 came with MFC30.DLL because the Fax Viewer was written with the help of MFC 3.0. But if you look at Windows 98, MFC30.DLL ...

The impact of hardworking employees on their less diligent colleagues

January 9, 2008 Jan 9, 2008 01/9/08
Raymond Chen
Slate investigates the question "Do hardworking employees make their slacker colleagues more productive?" Tim Harford cites the study Peers at Work by Alexandre Mas and Enrico Moretti which used a grocery store check-out line as its laboratory, and the results are illuminating. (It may be hard to find, but the key paragraph is in the middle...

Jag är inte heller en Microsoft-talesman på svenska

January 9, 2008 Jan 9, 2008 01/9/08
Raymond Chen
The Swedes haven't quite figured out that my blog entries do not constitute the official position of Microsoft Corporation. I like how they don't even mention my name anywhere. They just say "Microsoft doesn't this" and "Microsoft doesn't that". If you go back to the article they used as a source, you'll see that I provided a variety of ...

Generating initials from a name is trickier than you think

January 8, 2008 Jan 8, 2008 01/8/08
Raymond Chen
Even though I'm signed in, the page claims that anonymous comments are not allowed, so I'm reduced to posting my comment here and generating a trackback. Some time ago, Robert McLaws wrote a function that generates initials from a name. Let's set aside completely the issue of non-U.S. names; the function doesn't even handle U.S. names ...

Taxes: Files larger than 4GB

January 8, 2008 Jan 8, 2008 01/8/08
Raymond Chen
Nowadays, a hard drive less than 20 gigabytes is laughably small, but it used to be that the capacity of a hard drive was measured in megabytes, not gigabytes. Today, video files and databases can run to multiple gigabytes in size, and your programs need be prepared for them. This means that you need to use 64-bit file offsets such as those ...