The Old New Thing

If everything is top priority, then nothing is top priority

Last time, I mentioned that eventually everything is top priority. A similar topic is what I'm calling priority inflation, which takes more than one form. Today's priority inflation is the introduction of new "top priority" items. (Chris Becker has some thoughts on this topic as well.) "XYZ is very important to our project. Please make ...

If you wait long enough, everything is our top priority

I always crack a smile whenever I hear or read someone say that "XYZ is our top priority." The person may believe it at the moment they say it, but just wait a little while, and soon there will be a new top priority. If you call the person out on their shifting priorities, they usually come up with some hand-waving explanation that the two "...

Is second-hand advice better than no advice at all?

Commenter Grow Up (if you're so grown up yourself, why not use your real name?) took issue with the second-hand advice I gave when the discussion of protecting sensitive data. In that discussion, I gave second-hand advice on how one could protect information, and one reader apparently thought I was trying to malign said second-hand advice or ...

Email tip: If you ask a question that can be answered in only one way, but that’s not the answer, don’t be surprised that nobody responds at all

It's not infrequent that I see somebody ask a question that can be answered in only one way. But if that's not the answer, then nobody will respond. Is there a module that does XYZ? This question can be answered in only one way: "Yes, here it is." If nobody has written such a module, nobody is going to reply saying, "No, nobody has ...

Rearranging the cities into a much more visually pleasing arrangement

My friend the seventh grade teacher gave an assignment wherein students were to produce a map of the state of Washington with various required elements, among them, a selection of major cities in the state. Some students failed to understand that the purpose of a map is to represent where the cities are and not to dictate to the cities where ...

Why is the maximum boot.ini delay 11 million seconds?

I mentioned in passing that the maximum delay you can specify in boot.ini is about 11 million seconds. I'm disappointed but sadly not surprised that everybody focused on that number and completely missed the point of the article. First of all, the value of 11 million was not a conscious limitation. It's just an artifact of other limitations...

Doesn’t matter what your marketing technique is for your compiler if nobody actually writes code in your language any more

I mentioned Terry Zink's Anti-spam blog ("Protecting your mail from the scum of the internet") during one of my quarterly "borg-edition" linkfests. The article about how much money a spammer actually makes was quite interesting. One thing that caught my eye was the insanely low sales rate that was needed in order to make the enterprise ...