The Old New Thing

May 2010 - Page 2 of 4 - The Old New Thing

If you can detect the difference between an emulator and the real thing, then the emulator has failed

May 19, 2010 May 19, 2010 05/19/10
Raymond Chen
Recall that a corrupted program sometimes results in a "Program too big to fit in memory" error. In response, Dog complained that while that may have been a reasonable response back in the 1980's, in today's world, there's plenty of memory around for the MS-DOS emulator to add that extra check and return a better error code. Well yeah, but ...

No good deed goes unpunished, part 2, redux

May 18, 2010 May 18, 2010 05/18/10
Raymond Chen
I noted some time ago that I have taken to "blaming" Exchange when someone assumes that my reply to a thread on a distribution list implies that I have taken responsibility for resolving their problem. One of my colleagues in another group is in a similar situation with respect to a different product, and he has taken to using the same basic...

An insight into the balance between forgiveness and permission

May 18, 2010 May 18, 2010 05/18/10
Raymond Chen
One of my colleagues shared this valuable insight into the balance between forgiveness and permission, which he in turn learned from a high-level manager in his organization: The statement that it is better to ask for forgiveness than to obtain permission is true 90% of the time. The key to success is knowing where the other 10% is...

Maxing out the upsell-o-meter

May 14, 2010 May 14, 2010 05/14/10
Raymond Chen
Many grocery stores in the United States have a printer next to the cash register which prints out coupons customized to your purchases. If you buy the house brand of spaghetti, it might print out a coupon for a slightly more expensive brand of spaghetti. The goal with these coupons is to get you to try a fancier (and therefore more profitable...

How do I prevent users from dragging and dropping files in Explorer?

May 14, 2010 May 14, 2010 05/14/10
Raymond Chen
More than once, I've had a customer ask, "How do I prevent users from dragging and dropping files in Explorer?" Actually, three of them in the past year phrased it in an even more provocative way: "I want to write a program that hooks Explorer and displays a prompt before every drag/drop operation." This is one of those cases where you have ...

Things the locals know: How to have lunch at El Brillante

May 13, 2010 May 13, 2010 05/13/10
Raymond Chen
One of my colleagues moved to Granada last year, and he kindly provided me some recommendations for places to eat in Madrid. We found El Brillante easily, positioned across the street from the Atoche train station, with its back door and terrace facing the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (which mercifully goes by the nickname Museo...

The problem with setting up a story is that people focus on the set-up and miss the point of the story

May 12, 2010 May 12, 2010 05/12/10
Raymond Chen
In writing, one of the steps you need to perform is motivating the discussion. Now, technically, you don't have to do that, but if you just dive into the guts of a topic right off the bat, people are going to say, "What the heck is going on and why should I care?" Consider, for example, an article I wrote a while back on how to use WMI to ...