The Old New Thing

July 2009 - Page 4 of 5 - The Old New Thing

MS-DOS also allowed spaces in file names, although vanishingly few programs knew how to access them

July 9, 2009 Jul 9, 2009 07/9/09
Raymond Chen
A little-known fact about MS-DOS is that it allowed spaces in file names. Sure, you were limited to 8.3, but a file called "" was legal in MS-DOS, and you could indeed create such a file. Good luck finding programs that didn't treat you as insane when you asked for that file, though. Although the file system supported files with spaces, ...

Up and down often substitute for compass directions, but you have to know when you've taken it too far

July 8, 2009 Jul 8, 2009 07/8/09
Raymond Chen
The official curriculum for seventh grade students in the state of Washington includes Washington history and geography. My friend the seventh grade teacher typically includes as part of this curriculum an assignment wherein each student is assigned one of the state's counties on which to produce a brief report. It is common to substitute ...

Attack of the rogue feature: Oh no, where did my Explorer icon labels go?

July 8, 2009 Jul 8, 2009 07/8/09
Raymond Chen
A customer reported that on Windows Vista, if you hold down the shift key and repeatedly click the View button in the command bar of an Explorer window, you will eventually reach a state where all the labels under the icons have disappeared! Where did they go, and how do I get them back? Congratulations, you stumbled across a rogue feature...

Command line parsers look at what you typed, not what what you typed looks like

July 7, 2009 Jul 7, 2009 07/7/09
Raymond Chen
Command line parsers are stricter than human beings. The computer cares about what you typed. If you type something else that superficially resembles what you want, but is not actually what you want, then you won't get what you want, even though it sure looks like what you want. I covered a special case of this topic earlier when I ...

A 32-bit application can allocate more than 4GB of memory, and you don't need 64-bit Windows to do it

July 6, 2009 Jul 6, 2009 07/6/09
Raymond Chen
Commenter Herb wondered how a 32-bit program running on 64-bit Windows can allocate more than 4GB of memory. Easy: The same way it allocates more than 4GB of memory on 32-bit Windows! Over a year before Herb asked the question, I had already answered it in the tediously boring two-week series on the myths surrounding the /3GB switch. Here's...
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The most unwanted song ever

July 3, 2009 Jul 3, 2009 07/3/09
Raymond Chen
A follow-up to why ABBA songs are so catchy: Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid, and David Soldier developed a song scientifically engineered to be the most unwanted song ever: By their calculations, "fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece." Ah, opera rap. Also check out The Most Wanted Paintings. ...

Why does my screen go black when an emergency hibernation is in progress?

July 3, 2009 Jul 3, 2009 07/3/09
Raymond Chen
Sometime last year a customer wanted to know why the screen goes black when the system automatically hibernates due to critically low battery power. Shouldn't there be some sort of feedback to tell the user, "Hey, like, I'm hibernating, don't worry"? The power management folks explained that they turn off the screen for a reason: They're ...

Foreign languages can be used to impede communication

July 2, 2009 Jul 2, 2009 07/2/09
Raymond Chen
One of the reasons people give for studying a foreign language is to increase the number of people one can communicate with. But what people don't mention is that foreign languages can also be used to impede communications, and that can be just as useful. (Be careful, though, because it can backfire.) During my visit to Sweden some years ago...