Showing archive results for 2008

Commenter John Topley wondered why clearing document history also clears Run history. Simple: Because people wanted it to. Originally, the button merely erased your recent document history, but with the increasing paranoia over what records the computer kept on your past usage, people began to expect more and even filed beta bugs saying, "I clear...

Earlier, we saw that alumni give money to universities in order to increase the likelihood that the university will admit their children. Today, we learn that the tactic works. The children of big-donor alumni are more likely to be accepted. In fact, you don't even have to be the child of alumni. Just make sure you parents give lots of money.

One of the frustrations I have is people who don't see the relationship between specific cases and general cases. Statement: In general, you can't do X. Refutation: You're wrong. Y can do X. Example: The statement "In general, you can't trust the return address" comes with the refutation "You're wrong. .NET trusts the return address." (Somet...

Today is the fourth thursday of April, which is national Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. The main Microsoft campus is not participating today, but there's a good reason for this. The Washington State Assessment of Student Learning, better known as the WASL (pronounced "WAH-s'l"), is a four-day battery of standardized tests administered ...

Multi-threaded apartments do not pump messages.

April is the time of year when applicants to colleges and universities in the United States typically find out whether they have been admitted or not. Researchers have determined that alumni give money to colleges and universities in order to increase the likelihood that the school will admit their children.

The double-click time is sort of the dialog unit of time. It's used as the basis for many user interface time values that don't have their own custom setting. Here are just a few examples, along with the values you get if you leave the double-click time at its default of 500ms: If you go into the mouse control panel and speed up your double-clic...

Low bridge, everybody down.

I was installing a program and its setup wizard said, and I am not making this up, Click Finish to begin installation. But wait, the weirdness doesn't end there. After you click Finish, the program installation completes, and then you get another page that tells you to click Close. This is misuse of the Finish button. Finish does not mean Almos...

Engrish, the whimsical term applied to poorly-translated or downright bizarre English used in non-English-speaking countries, is not restricted to East Asia, although the most well-known examples certainly come from there. While in Lisbon, I saw someone wearing a t-shirt that said Fell the force.