Showing results for June 2009 - Page 2 of 5 - The Old New Thing

Jun 23, 2009
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Oh great, and my phone even has a CPU meter

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

These fancy-dancy IP phones never cease to make me wonder what our world has come to. I remember when a telephone was a bucket of carbon granules and a momentary switch, and the rotary dial was just a mechanism for going on and off hook at a precise frequency. (Indeed, sometimes for fun, I'll pulse-dial a phone by tapping on the hook.) The other ...

Non-Computer
Jun 22, 2009
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High school students guess what happens to money deposited into checking accounts

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

In August 2007, the results of the first nationwide high school economics graduation tests were released. (Download the report [pdf].) It appears that the results were better than expected, but let's not celebrate too quickly: The results were that 42% of students rated "Proficient" and 3% "Advanced". And only 52% of the students could answer this...

Non-Computer
Jun 22, 2009
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Why does a flashing taskbar result in a fullscreen console returning to windowed mode?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Commenter Daniel wonders why a flashing taskbar results in a fullscreen console returning to windowed mode. I didn't know the answer to this, but I formulated a guess, and I was ready to just post my guess. (Because everything I write is just conjecture anyway. Informed conjecture, but still.) But I had some time, so I went spelunking through th...

Other
Jun 19, 2009
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The butter and the money for the butter

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

In a discussion a few years ago, I saw the phrase, "Now you have the butter and the money." This was new to me, and a little Web searching (guided in part by a guess at the author's nationality) revealed it to be a French proverb, the full version of which is On ne peut pas avoir le beurre et l'argent du beurre: "You can't have the butter and the ...

Non-Computer
Jun 19, 2009
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You can’t leave a critical section you never entered

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

If you call on a critical section you never entered, the behavior is undefined. Critical sections are an extremly high-traffic code path. Intense work goes into making them as fast as possible. Customers like to ask questions like "Exactly how many cycles does it take to enter a critical section? We're not going to use them if they're too slow."...

Code
Jun 18, 2009
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Don’t you hate it when someone leaks a ref to your clothes?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The other night I had a dream in which one of my friends said, "Check out my clothes closet. This dress is hideous, but I can't get rid of it because there's still a reference to it from my blog." The dresses were labeled through .

Non-Computer
Jun 18, 2009
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The dangers of mixing synchronous and asynchronous state

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The window manager distinguishes between synchronous state (the state of the world based on what messages your program has received) and asynchronous state (the actual state of the world this very instant). We saw this earlier when discussing the difference between GetKeyState and GetAsyncKeyState. Here are some other functions and their relation...

Code
Jun 17, 2009
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Welcome to Leavenworth, Washington’s faux-Bavarian village

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The dying logging town of Leavenworth, Washington reinvented itself in the 1960's as a faux-Bavarian village. Today, over a million tourists visit annually to enjoy the scenic mountain views, soak in the fake Bavarian atmosphere, and revel in events like the Leavenworth International Accordion Celebration which starts tomorrow, or the three-weeke...

Non-Computer
Jun 17, 2009
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Sure, I can get spurious WM_MOUSEMOVE messages, but why do they keep streaming in?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

I wrote some time ago that the window manager generates spurious messages in order to let programs know that the mouse has entered the window even if the reason was a window hierarchy reshuffle rather than a physical motion of the pointing device. But some people have noticed that that explanation fails to account for all the messages that are ...

Other
Jun 16, 2009
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Management-speak: Upping the sats and stimulating the ecosystem

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Here's another sentence that's so loaded with buzzwords and buzzphrases I'm not sure what language it's written in. I just want to have creative control over how my audience can interact with me without resorting to complex hacking in a way that is easy to explain but ups our blogging audiences sats to a new level that may also stimulate a devel...

OtherMicrospeak