The Old New Thing

One of the consequences of accepting a job offer is that you might end up working with an interviewer who didn't like you

At an informal gathering, my colleagues and I started talking about our experiences being interviewed at Microsoft. One of the people there remembered how one of the pieces of feedback on the interview lo these many years ago was that although my colleague was certainly smart enough and hardworking enough, there seemed to be insufficient ...

Why is the fine for a basic traffic infraction in the state of Washington such a random-looking number?

Willy-Peter Schaub was puzzled by a sign reminding drivers that the fine for obstructing an intersection is $101 and wonders what the extra $1 is for. The laws of the State of Washington defer the monetary value of traffic fines to the Infraction Rules for Courts of Limited Jurisdiction (more commonly known as the IRLJ), specifically ...

Why doesn't double-right-click bring up the Properties dialog?

kip asks why double-right-click isn't a shortcut for Properties. Recall the logical consequences of the way Windows converts single-clicks into double-clicks. The double-click action is an extension of the single-click action. In the case of context menus, the proposed double-right-click action is not an extension of the single-right-click...

How do I access the magic IEEE floating point values like NaN in code?

There are functions like , , , and for detecting that a floating point value is one of the special values like NaN, but how do you actually generate one of these values? You can access these values from the template. Wait, where's negative infinity? The compiler folks provided these handy little definitions for when you need to ...