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

One of the proposals for adding hidden features to Windows Setup is to have a bunch of hidden function keys, one for each hidden option. Well, first of all, there are only twelve function keys and there are way more than twelve possible Setup features. (Yes, there may be a few function keys still active during Setup, but they exist only for compat...

It appears that the country of Burundi used a freelance photographer's image on their currency without permission. (If the article goes down, BoingBoing saved a side-by-side comparison for your inspection.) The article adds that Fajack says he's talked about his case with several lawyers, editors and people experienced in photography and none of...

This is really just a corollary to Why are DLLs unloaded in the "wrong" order. Exactly the same logic that explains why DLLs are unloaded in the "wrong" order also explains why they are uninitialized in the "wrong" order. Once you understand the first issue, the second comes for free; just change to in your analysis. Apply the logic to the sc...

Password was one of the classic game shows. Its methodical pace encouraged thoughtful play, as opposed to today's game shows which appear to rely on dramatic music and ominous spotlights for their appeal. This is not a clip from the game show but rather a scene from the comedy The Odd Couple in which the two characters are contestants, and as you...

A customer noticed that if you add three to a process ID and pass it to the function, it still succeeds. Why is that? Well, first of all, I need to say up front that the behavior you're seeing is an artifact of the implementation and is not part of the contract. You're passing intentionally invalid parameters, what did you expect? The context of...

Back in March, I agreed to make a brief appearance at Portugal TechDays 2008. My arrival was delayed due to heavy traffic: I had taken the number 15 tram, which was jam packed, and the traffic on the road didn't help either. And then when I found the building labelled Centro de Congressos, I found the doors locked. That's because the big sign fac...

Marketplace's Cash Peters pays a visit to The Learning Annex, home to classes like Bending Spoons with Your Mind and Lap-Dancing 101. But he signs up for How to be a TV producer. Listen to the story and you can save yourself twenty bucks.

You may be minding your own business and discover that your clipboard has stopped working. You try to copy something to the clipboard, and it's not there. You try to paste something from the clipboard, and nothing comes out. What's going on? The clipboard is a shared resource. (More specifically, shared among programs that run on the same desktop....

Yes, it's another entry in the extremely sporadic series of food products that are offenses against nature. Today it's the incorrectly-punctuated Bisquick Shake 'n Pour. For people for whom adding a half cup of milk and one egg to two cups of Bisquick powder is too complicated, now they've even dehydrated the milk and egg and pre-measured the m...

A colleague of mine stopped by my office to tell me that he got a telephone call from his father in Poland asking him why Microsoft sunk Poland. My colleague was somewhat baffled by this question, since his father isn't a computer nerd, but his father explained that he saw the story on the front page of the newspaper. Apparently, the story ran i...