The Old New Thing

June 2009 - Page 3 of 5 - The Old New Thing

Why do some file operations take file names and others take handles?

June 15, 2009 Jun 15, 2009 06/15/09
Raymond Chen
Commenter Brian Friesen asks why some functions (like SetFileAttributes) take a file name, while others (like SetFileTime) take a handle and why we can't have two versions of every API, one for each pattern. Second question first: No need to wait for the kernel folks to write such a function; you can already do it yourself! // Following...

Spam trackback attack week 2 statistics

June 11, 2009 Jun 11, 2009 06/11/09
Raymond Chen
The trackback spam attack is well into its second week now. The people who run blogs.msdn.com blocked all access from the IP address block, which not only blocks trackbacks but also prevents them from reading the content (and therefore prevents them from scraping). Undaunted, the sites just moved to a new IP address...

Why does Explorer use the term KB instead of KiB?

June 11, 2009 Jun 11, 2009 06/11/09
Raymond Chen
Although the International Electronic Commission established the term kibibyte for 1024 bytes, with the abbreviation KiB, Windows Explorer continues to use the abbreviation KB. Why doesn't Explorer get with the program? Because nobody else is on the program either. If you look around you, you'll find that nobody (to within experimental ...

Why does MS-DOS use 8.3 filenames instead of, say, 11.2 or 16.16?

June 10, 2009 Jun 10, 2009 06/10/09
Raymond Chen
When I discussed years ago why operating system files tend to follow the old 8.3 file name convention, I neglected to mention why the old MS-DOS filename convention was 8.3 and not, say, 11.2 or 16.16. It's a holdover from CP/M. As I noted when I discussed the old MS-DOS wildcard matching rules, MS-DOS worked hard at being compatible ...

Mixed messages from the IT department regarding email safety

June 9, 2009 Jun 9, 2009 06/9/09
Raymond Chen
TipTalk wrote some time ago about the urban legend of the Reading Pane. In the conclusion, the article mentions the "read all standard mail in plain text" setting. And that reminded me of a story. Some time ago, the IT department sent out a message to all users on the subject of email safety. The gist of the message was that for increased ...

On the importance of sanity-checking values where money is involved

June 8, 2009 Jun 8, 2009 06/8/09
Raymond Chen
Last year, one of my colleagues noticed that one particular company's stock, which normally trades in the mid- to upper-$20 range, showed one day of extremely unusual results, very similar to the last example in this series of funny screenshots. Closer inspection revealed that there was an order to buy 28 shares at $100,000. Obviously...