It's the time of year where you may find yourself attending a party where you know hardly anyone. Jeanne Martinet, author of The Art of Mingling, walks Steve Inskeep through a mock-party with tips on how to join a conversation, and (perhaps more importantly) exit one. Don't just read the article; you need to listen to the story. The mock-party is...

Nobody can make any progress because they keep getting stuck.

Internally, a critical section is a bunch of counters and flags, and possibly an event. (Note that the internal structure of a critical section is subject to change at any time—in fact, it changed between Windows XP and Windows 2003. The information provided here is therefore intended for troubleshooting and debugging purposes and ...

Manufacturer of commercial and home blenders Blendtec has produced a marketing web site Will It Blend? which features short videos of the company's CEO and new Internet blending icon Tom Dickson throwing all sorts of unusual objects into one of their blenders, to see what happens. (The videos are also on YouTube, and of course they have a blog, ...

One of the more subtle ways people mess up is returning when the problem wasn't actually an unsupported interface. The return value has very specific meaning. Do not use it as your generic "gosh, something went wrong" error. (Use an appropriate error such as or .) Recall that the rules for are that (in the absence of catastrophic errors such...

The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows

(Continuing from part 2.) Here are more sentences from seventh grade time travel essays. Remember, these sentences are not representative of seventh grade writing in general; these are just the funny bits. World History The Future: Most students who travelled to the future wanted to meet themselves. Letter Format: Some students took advan...

Here's a question that floated past my view: How do I set the ACLs on a file so users can read it but can't copy it? I can't find a "Copy" access mask that I can deny. If I can't deny copying, I'd at least like to audit it, so I can tell who made a copy of the file. There is no "Copy" access mask because copying is not a fundamental file operati...

(Make sure you've read Part 1 for background information.) On the subject of where they would go in a time machine, many students wrote well-thought-out essays, beautifully composed. These sentences below did not come from those essays. I've categorized the snippets roughly by theme, though I had to guess at some of them since the sentences are...

You already know how to do this, you just don't realize it. How do you find files with an "x" in their name? That's right, you use . Now you just have to change that x to a space. And since spaces are command line delimiters, you need to quote the sequence so it gets treated as a single parameter rather than two "*" parameters: Stick in a ...