The Old New Thing

January 2012 - Page 4 of 4 - The Old New Thing

The new business model: Intentional billing errors

January 3, 2012 Jan 3, 2012 01/3/12
Raymond Chen
Just in the last month, I had to call a bank to reverse four erroneous "Account Maintenance Fees" across two different accounts. It appears that intentional billing errors is the new business model for our struggling economy. (For the record, although I am responsible for maintaining these accounts, I did not open the accounts at the bank in ...

Why don't ZIP files have the FILE_ATTRIBUTE_COMPRESSED attribute?

January 3, 2012 Jan 3, 2012 01/3/12
Raymond Chen
A customer reported that when they called Get­File­Attributes on a ZIP file, the FILE_ATTRIBUTE_COMPRESSED attribute was not returned. But ZIP files are compressed. Why isn't the FILE_ATTRIBUTE_COMPRESSED attribute being set? Because FILE_ATTRIBUTE_COMPRESSED tells you whether the file was compressed by the file system. It is not a ...

Why wasn't the Windows 95 shell prototyped on Windows NT?

January 2, 2012 Jan 2, 2012 01/2/12
Raymond Chen
Carlos wonders why the Windows 95 shell was prototyped as 16-bit code running on the still-under-development 32-bit kernel, USER, and GDI as opposed to being prototyped as fully 32-bit code on Windows NT. There were a number of reasons, some good, some bad. One reason was that the Windows 95 shell was being developed by the Windows&...