Showing archive results for 2010

A while back, I wrote on the impact of hardworking employees on their less diligent colleagues. Slate uncovered a study that demonstrated the reverse effect: How Tiger Woods makes everyone else on the course play worse. The magic ingredient is the incentive structure. If you have an incentive structure which rewards the best-performing person, a...

Windows UNC notation permits you to use a raw IPv4 address in dotted notation as a server name: For example, will show you the shared resources on the computer whose IP address is 127.0.0.1. But what about IPv6 addresses? IPv6 notation contains colons, which tend to mess up file name parsing since a colon is not a valid character in a path compone...

I introduced this Microspeak last year as part of a general entry about management-speak, but I'm giving it its own entry because it deserves some attention on its own. I just want to have creative control over how my audience can interact with me without resorting to complex hacking in a way that is easy to explain but ups our blogging audiences...

As a thank-you for presenting at TechReady11, the conference organizers gave me (and presumably the other speakers) a portable speaker with the Windows logo printed on it. The speaker underneath the logo is the X-Mini II Capsule Speaker, and I have to agree with Steve Clayton that they pack a lot of sound in a compact size. Great for taking on ...

Yuhong Bao asked, via the Suggestion Box, "Why not implement delay-loading by having a flag in the import entry specifying that Windows should mimic the Windows 3.1 behavior for resolving that import?" Okay, first we have to clear up the false assumptions in the question. The question assumes that Windows 3.1 had delay-loading functionality ...

Consider a system where you have a lot of secured objects, and suppose further that checking whether a user has access to an object is a slow operation. This is not as rare as you might think: Even though a single access check against a security descriptor with a small number of ACEs might be fast, you can have objects with complicated security des...

Some time ago, Larry Osterman discussed the severe performance consequences of flushing the registry, which is a specific case of the more general performance catch: Flushing anything will cost you dearly. A while back, I discussed the high cost of the "commit" function, and all the flush-type operations turn into a commit at the end of the day...

One of the fun parts of meeting with other developers, either at conferences or on my self-funded book tour, is exchanging war stories. Here's one of the stories I've collected, from somebody describing a former company. As is customary, I've removed identifying information. One day, the engineering team were instructed that the team was being i...

The items in the All Programs section of the Start menu are grouped into two sections, although there are no visible divider lines between them. We saw earlier that the Fast Items lost their special status in Windows Vista and are sorted with the regular items. Another change from Windows XP is the order of the remaining two groups: W...

Maybe somebody took a picture.c