Q: How do you know when a lawyer is lying? A: His lips are moving. This is of course a completely unfair and discriminatory joke. Many lawyers are women. Anyway, today I'm going to rant about the phrase "In order to serve you better." Whenever you hear this phrase, you are pretty much guaranteed that whatever follows will in fact not serve you ...

Because one thread is all it needs.

The Russian constitution limits the president to two consecutive four-year terms, and Vladimir Putin is coming up on the end of his third. When he ran for his third term, he explained that his first term didn't count since it was served under the old constitution. This explanation appears to have been widely accepted because everybody reports that ...

Commenter Brian Reiter asks a duplicate of a question that was already submitted to the Suggestion Box: Darren asks why operating system† files still (for the most part) adhere to the old 8.3 naming convention. There are a few reasons I can think of. I'm not saying that these are the reasons; I'm just brainstorming. First, of course, ...

The Improbable Research blog alerted me to a news report on the effect of dandruff and other cellular material on climate (full report).

On Windows Vista with User Account Control enabled, when you right-click a program and select Run as Administrator, the elevation prompt contains a particular snippet of warning text and a corresponding color-coding. Here are what the four colors mean. You can learn about the philosophy behind UAC in this Channel9 interview. Pre-emptive snarky...

The great thing about Marketing is that you get to use words and phrases that normal human beings never use. Here's an example from over a decade ago: XYZ fit the installed base of web browsers we were targeting, and worked well in an awareness space. I have no idea what an "awareness space" is. The punch line? This sentence came from a person ...

The function takes a pointer to a buffer () and a size (), and that size is the size of the buffer, in bytes. No really, that's what it is. The application compatibility folks found one popular game which wasn't quite sure what that parameter meant. The programmers must have thought it meant "The size of the version resources you want to loa...

Last summer, one of my colleagues thought it would be fun to have an informal "lunch chat with Raymond" as a special treat for our summer interns. One of the interns reacted to the invitation a bit unexpectedly, asking meekly, "Is he going to yell at us?"

There are two ways to make a vertical toolbar. You can use the common style, or you can use the extended style which is specific to the toolbar. Why are there two ways of doing the same thing? Because we messed up. Whoever created the extended style didn't realize that there was already a perfectly good way of specifying a vertical toolbar (na...