Showing results for February 2011 - The Old New Thing

Feb 28, 2011
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On the linguistic productivity of the word spam

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The word spam has spawned off its own corner of the English language. I'm impressed by how productive the root word spam has become. Gratuitous cross-promotion: My colleague Terry Zink occasionally writes about spam on his Cyber Security Blog...

Non-Computer
Feb 28, 2011
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If you want to use GUIDs to identify your files, then nobody's stopping you

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Igor Levicki proposes solving the problem of file extensions by using a GUID instead of a file name to identify a file. You can do this already. Every file on an NTFS volume has an object identifier which is formally 16-byte buffer, but let's just call it a GUID. By default a file doesn't have an object identifier, but you can ask for one to be...

Other
Feb 24, 2011
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iPhone pricing as economic experiment

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Back in 2005, Slate's Tim Harford wondered why Microsoft didn't raise the introductory price of Xbox 360 game consoles. With the price set at $300, lines were long and shortages were many. Harford's readers came up with their own theories for resisting the laws of supply and demand and holding to a fixed price. The Xbox 360 is hardly ...

Non-Computer
Feb 23, 2011
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How long does an idle UNC connection remain active before it is automatically disconnected?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

When you access a resource via a UNC, the Windows network redirector keeps the virtual circuit open for a while even after you close the resource. This is done to take advantage of locality: If you access a network resource once, you're probably going to access it again in a short time, so the redirector leaves the connection open for a little bit...

Tips/Support
Feb 22, 2011
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Dr. Watson and the bluescreen – a story from the trenches

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A fellow Microsoft employee volunteered a story from his prior work at a hospital as their enterprise architect. I received an escalation from our Tier 1 service desk on a Dr. Watson. Why would I get a simple escalation? Strange... Since I hadn't seen the outside of my cubicle for a while, I decided to walk over to talk to the ...

Non-Computer
Feb 21, 2011
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Sharktopus: Just when you thought it was safe to see what movies are coming out

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Sharktopus: Half-shark. Half-octopus. All-killer. I am not making that up. The Web site is sharktopusmovie.com, presumably because sharktopus.com was already taken. I am not making that up. I guess they wanted to ride the coattails of Megashark vs. Giant Octopus? Even more disturbing discovery: Megashark vs. Giant Octopus has a sequel: ...

Non-Computer
Feb 21, 2011
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If an operation results in messages being sent, then naturally the target window must be processing messages for the operation to complete

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

If an operation includes as part of its processing sending messages, then naturally the target window for those messages must be processing messages (or more precisely, the thread which owns the target window must be processing messages) in order for the operation to complete. Why? Because processing messages is the only way a window can receive ...

Code