When Australian Channel Seven aired a blank screen for 41 minutes [indirect report], you'd think its competition would pick up some viewers. But it didn't. But the glitch did not result in a ratings boost for public broadcaster SBS, with figures showing viewers preferred Seven's blank screen. To Seven's astonishment more than 900,000 viewers...

Earlier, we learned about roaming user profiles, wherein the master copy of the user's profile is kept on a central server (which for the purpose of discussion I will call the "profile server") and is copied around to follow the user as she logs onto computers throughout an organization. In the comments, many people said that what they really want...

I read with some fascination Steven Yi's Mysterious Things I Have Eaten, since I have had four out of five of them myself. And I love the little story he tells about sea cucumber. Kimchee, like lutefisk and surströmming, most likely comes from the days before refrigeration. The acid produced by fermentation preserves (what's left of) the ...

A while back, I demonstrated that you can't trust the return address. What's more, you can't even trust the identity of the calling executable. I've seen requests from people who say, "I want to check whether I'm being called from MYAPP.EXE. I'm going to make a security decision based on the result." Although you can do this, all it does is give ...

While it's true the function can be used to check whether a particular security descriptor grants access to a token, you need to be aware of where that security descriptor came from. If the security descriptor came from another machine (for example, if you got it by calling and passing the path to a file on a network share), calling the function...

On the Media picks up on the Harper's Magazine article Debbie Does Salad and chats with Frederick Kaufman, the article's author, on the curious similarity between the way cooking shows and pornographic films present their subject matter. Cooking shows target the 18–35 male, even though these people are unlikely to be cooks themselves. The...

The marriage of convenience is alive and well, not that is really a surprise to anybody. I found interesting this story on how some young members of the US military are getting married for purely economic reasons. By getting married, he would get a housing stipend and permission to move off-base. And as his legal wife, she would get health cove...

Earlier, I discussed which window style bits belong to whom. One detail of this that I neglected to emphasize is that since the lower 16 bits of the window style are defined by the class, you can't just take styles from one class and apply them to another. For example, you can't create a button control and pass the style expecting to have the te...

On FAT drives, the directory that stores files in the Recycle Bin is called , but on NTFS drives, its name is . Why the name change? The FAT and NTFS Recycle Bins have different internal structure because NTFS has this thing called "security" and FAT doesn't. All recycled files on FAT drives are dumped into a single directory, whereas recycled fi...

If you dare, spend eleven minutes of your life watching the most painfully compelling mockumentary on the lives of two basement fantasy role playing gamers. (via Chris Williams.)