The Old New Thing

December 2009 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

You are listening to Radio Free Bob, a pirate radio station broadcasting on the Microsoft corporate network

December 15, 2009 Dec 15, 2009 12/15/09
Raymond Chen
Back in the late 1980's, when NETBIOS ruled the land at Microsoft, one of my colleagues ran a pirate radio station on the Microsoft corporate network. Let's call this colleague Bob, my generic name for a Microsoft employee. Bob had converted a bunch of songs to format (mp3 not yet having been invented) and kept them on his machine to listen...

Why did the word Start disappear from the Start button?

December 14, 2009 Dec 14, 2009 12/14/09
Raymond Chen
Commenter Mike Dunn would like to know why the word Start disappeared from the Start button in Windows Vista. After all, adding the word Start helped new users figure out what they should click first. I don't know but I can guess. To emphasize that these are guesses, I went back in after I wrote them and added all sorts of weasel words. ...

The format of bitmap resources

December 11, 2009 Dec 11, 2009 12/11/09
Raymond Chen
Another in a sporadic series on the format of Win32 resources. Here's a question from a customer: I'm noticing some strange behavior: When I call then on an embedded bitmap, the data being returned by is not a properly formatted bitmap. The data is missing the , but the rest of the file is there. also states that the bitmap resource is ...

Those houses are too small for anyone to live in

December 10, 2009 Dec 10, 2009 12/10/09
Raymond Chen
Not Always Right is a collection of brief stories told by people in customer service. One of my favorites is from somebody who lives on Catalina Island and had to answer the question, "What time does the island close?" Runners-up: (I've left off the punch lines so as not to spoil the surprise.) The stories have been collected into a book...

What are those little overlay icons: Windows 7 edition

December 9, 2009 Dec 9, 2009 12/9/09
Raymond Chen
Some time ago, I summarized the overlay icons that come with Windows. There have been some changes in Windows 7, so I figured it'd be worth coming up with a new list. A private item is an item where the only user account with access is you.¹ You create one of these, for example, by going to the sharing wizard and saying Share ...

How do I determine the processor's cache line size?

December 8, 2009 Dec 8, 2009 12/8/09
Raymond Chen
When doing high-performance computing, you need to worry about the CPU cache line size in order to avoid issues like false sharing. But how can you determine the processor's cache size? The function will give you characteristics of the logical processors in use by the system. You can walk the returned by the function looking for entries of...