Slate investigates the question "Do hardworking employees make their slacker colleagues more productive?" Tim Harford cites the study Peers at Work by Alexandre Mas and Enrico Moretti which used a grocery store check-out line as its laboratory, and the results are illuminating. (It may be hard to find, but the key paragraph is in the middle of p...

The Swedes haven't quite figured out that my blog entries do not constitute the official position of Microsoft Corporation. I like how they don't even mention my name anywhere. They just say "Microsoft doesn't this" and "Microsoft doesn't that". If you go back to the article they used as a source, you'll see that I provided a variety of reasons f...

Even though I'm signed in, the page claims that anonymous comments are not allowed, so I'm reduced to posting my comment here and generating a trackback. Some time ago, Robert McLaws wrote a function that generates initials from a name. Let's set aside completely the issue of non-U.S. names; the function doesn't even handle U.S. names correctly. ...

Nowadays, a hard drive less than 20 gigabytes is laughably small, but it used to be that the capacity of a hard drive was measured in megabytes, not gigabytes. Today, video files and databases can run to multiple gigabytes in size, and your programs need be prepared for them. This means that you need to use 64-bit file offsets such as those used b...

The Saint Petersburg Times purchased fish from several local restaurants and found that nearly half of the time, the fish they got wasn't what they ordered. A state DNA lab came to the same conclusion.

Commenter Matt asks how you're supposed to handle failures in functions like or . Obviously, you can't. If a clean-up function fails, there's not much you can do because, well, how do you clean up from a failed clean-up? These clean-up functions fall into the category of "Must not fail for reasons beyond the program's control." If a program trie...

When you call the function, you can pass the flag to indicate that the change is temporary. But if you don't also save the changes in the registry, how can they be permanent? What does temporary mean? A temporary display change is one that your program has entered because it has gone into a fullscreen mode, a change which it will undo when it re...

Commenter BryanK notes that only already-technical people (re)install Windows; commenter Stu estimates the percentage at 99%. That may be true in the steady state, but the hard part is getting to that steady state. When a new version of Windows is released, the steady state is disrupted. At that point, most people installing Windows aren't techn...

In case you missed it, a former Seattle police detective was arrested in early 2007 for driving with a state record high blood-alcohol level of 0.47 percent. (The legal limit is 0.08 percent, most people black out at 0.35 percent, and 0.40 percent is lethal for 50% of adults.) She was subsequently arrested and held on $250,000 bail (story contai...

The following request for assistance came in from a customer, and given what you know about window destruction, you should eventually be able to figure it out yourself once all the pieces are in place, though it takes some time for all the clues to be revealed. We are hitting this exception in our program. This is urgent; please give it priorit...