Showing results for January 2008 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

There are advanced settings in Windows, settings which normal users not only shouldn't be messing with, but which they arguably shouldn't even know about, because that would give them just enough knowledge to be dangerous. And no matter where you put that advanced setting, somebody will tell you that you are an idiot. Here they are on an approxima...

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 they ...

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 is gon...

The same way it does on a cheap calculator.

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 of p...

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 reasons f...

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 correctly. ...

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 used b...

The Saint Petersburg Times purchased fish from several local restaurants and found that nearly half of the time, the fish they got wasn't what they ordered. A state DNA lab came to the same conclusion.

Commenter Matt asks how you're supposed to handle failures in functions like or . Obviously, you can't. If a clean-up function fails, there's not much you can do because, well, how do you clean up from a failed clean-up? These clean-up functions fall into the category of "Must not fail for reasons beyond the program's control." If a program trie...