Why do door lock manufacturers mess up the lock handle design?

Last time, we ended a discussion of vending machine design with a short puzzle: What problems do you see with numbering the products from 1 to 99? I'm not saying that these are the only possible answers, but they are ones that came to mind when I thought about it. Ilya Birman was the first to point out the "bounce-effect" problem, thereby rul...

How hard can it be to design the user interface of a vending machine? You accept money, you have some buttons, the user pushes the button, they get their product and their change. At least in the United States, many vending machines arrange their product in rows and columns (close-up view). To select a product, you type the letter of the row and...

Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt have decided to besmirch the institution of marriage by deciding that the "until death do us part" thing was neither legally nor morally binding. "Brad said that they spent the rest of the holiday working out how they would release the news of the split. They worked out together the reasons they would give and how t...

Wes Haggard wishes that \ would autocomplete to all the computers on the network. [Link fixed 10am.] An early beta of Windows 95 actually did something similar to this, showing all the computers on the network when you opened the Network Neighborhood folder. And the feature was quickly killed. Why? Corporations with large networks wer...

Wes Haggard wishes that \ would autocomplete to all the computers on the network. [Link fixed 10am.] An early beta of Windows 95 actually did something similar to this, showing all the computers on the network when you opened the Network Neighborhood folder. And the feature was quickly killed. Why? Corporations with large networks wer...

As others have reported, it snowed here in the Seattle area yesterday. One whopping inch. You'd think that Seattle, which gets snow a few times a year, wouldn't go completely apoplectic the moment the flakes starts falling from the sky. Especially since it all melts away in a few hours anyway. I didn't watch the local news last night, but I sus...

The function is used to do various things, among them, displaying a balloon tip to the user. As discussed in the documentation for the structure, the uTimeout member specifies how long the balloon should be displayed. But what if the user is not at the computer when you display your balloon? After 30 seconds, the balloon will time out, and the...

The function is used to do various things, among them, displaying a balloon tip to the user. As discussed in the documentation for the structure, the uTimeout member specifies how long the balloon should be displayed. But what if the user is not at the computer when you display your balloon? After 30 seconds, the balloon will time out, and the...

What's the deal with those ...ncpy functions anyway?