I'm sort of the ringleader of a group of friends who go in together on a block of tickets to the Seattle Symphony. I bought a pair of tickets in the block, one for myself, and one for a rotating guest. And for some reason, I had a hard time finding a guest for last weekend's concert. Of course, six of my friends have already been ruled out as g...

One suggestion for addressing the network compatibility problem was returning an error code like which means "Um, the server ran into a problem. Please start over." This is basically the same as the "do nothing" option, because the server is already returning an error code specifically for this problem, namely, . Now, sure, that error doesn't act...

Another use of decoys.

I'm probably the only person who uses the "News for dummies" links in the navigation pane on this page, and now I'm going to use them even less. The Swedish news for dummies recently became available in podcast form [RSS], joining the German news for dummies, which has been available as a podcast [RSS] since the beginning of the year. (Both the...

One of the big complaints about Explorer we've received from corporations is how often it accesses the network. If the computer you're accessing is in the next room, then accessing it a large number of times isn't too much of a problem since you get the response back rather quickly. But if the computer you're talking to is halfway around the world,...

Saturday afternoon, my phone rings. "Hello?" "Quick! We're on our way to the nursery. Do you want to come?" I recognize the voice as one of my friends who recently bought a house and presumably is doing some spring landscaping. But I have to answer fast. Time for a snap decision. "No." My friend seems surprised that I give my answer so quickl...

The Windows XP kernel does not turn every call into into a packet on the network. Rather, the first time an application calls , it issues a bulk query to the server and returns the first result to the application. Thereafter, when an application calls , it returns the next result from the buffer. If the buffer is empty, then issues a new bul...

My colleague Nick Kramer who works over on WPF has the first of what will be a series of articles on USER and GDI compatibility in Windows Vista. The changes to tighten security, improve support for East Asian languages, and take the desktop to a new level with the Desktop Window Manager (among others) make for quite an interesting compatibility ...

Some people suggested, as a solution to the network interoperability compatibility problem, adding a flag to to indicate whether the caller wanted to use fast or slow enumeration. Adding a flag to work around a driver bug doesn't actually solve anything in the long term. Considering all the video driver bugs that Windows has had to work arou...

I may have scared a bunch of people with that chart of German adjective endings, but as several commenters noted, native speakers don't refer to the charts; they just say what comes naturally. (Well, except for Leo Petr, who claims that native Russian speakers actually study these charts in grade school.) Commenter Helga Waage noted that one qui...