The Old New Thing

The difference between a junior and senior position at a video card company

June 25, 2008 Jun 25, 2008 06/25/08
Raymond Chen
Here are the descriptions (verbatim) of two job positions open at a major video card manufacturer back in the late 1990's: Software Engineer - Drivers The way in to a "hot" company in a "hot" field. This entry level position requires some programming experience with graphics preferred. Senior Software Engineer - Applications (Demos) ...

Don't require your users to have a degree in philosophy, episode 3

June 24, 2008 Jun 24, 2008 06/24/08
Raymond Chen
While signing up for online bill payment for one of the services I use, I encountered the following check box: Uncheck this box if you do not wish to receive electronic communications from XYZ. This is not simply a negative-sense checkbox; it's a double-negative-sense checkbox! What's wrong with this: Send me electronic communications from...

Raymond misreads acronyms: MSPP-PVP

June 23, 2008 Jun 23, 2008 06/23/08
Raymond Chen
I was looking up some information about the Microsoft Partner Program, commonly abbreviated MSPP. I stumbled across an internal wiki called . My first reaction upon seeing the name was, "What, it's player versus player?" I got this images of the CEOs of the various partners wearing VR goggles and running around playing laser tag. No, it's ...

Just because you're using a smart pointer class doesn't mean you can abdicate understanding what it does

June 23, 2008 Jun 23, 2008 06/23/08
Raymond Chen
It's great when you have a tool to make programming easier, but you still must understand what it does or you're just replacing one set of problems with another set of more subtle problems. For example, we discussed earlier the importance of knowing when your destructor runs. Here's another example, courtesy of my colleague Chris Ashton. ...

Donations to the Microsoft Archives: Pens, CDs, and paperweights

June 20, 2008 Jun 20, 2008 06/20/08
Raymond Chen
Among other responsibilities, the Archives department preserves Microsoft history, be it old hardware, old software, old documentation, or ephemera. Last year, one of my colleagues was cleaning out his office because he was moving to Granada, and of the junk he was going to throw out, the Archives asked me to save the following: and my ...

MSDN-speak: What does it mean when a parameter contains a value?

June 18, 2008 Jun 18, 2008 06/18/08
Raymond Chen
I've seen some confusion over this, heck I've been confused by this, so I figured I'd share what I've learned. In MSDN, you may see wording like this: pdwResult [out] When the function returns, contains a pointer to a value that contains the result of the computation. What they're trying to say is that the is a pointer to a that ...

Microspeak: Pricing uplift

June 17, 2008 Jun 17, 2008 06/17/08
Raymond Chen
In a conference call with investors last year, investor relations general manager Colleen Healy described the effect of business editions of Windows thus: As we shared with you previously, Windows Vista business generates over five times the pricing uplift over Windows Vista Home Basic than does Windows Vista Home Premium. Also known as ...

Blinding bank robbers with kindness

June 16, 2008 Jun 16, 2008 06/16/08
Raymond Chen
Despite the friendliness of people in the Pacific Northwest (or perhaps because of it), bank robberies in the area are above the national average. But in the Seattle area they went down by nearly half in the beginning of 2007. The reason isn't known for certain, but one factor may be a new approach to thwarting bank robbers by employing "...

How do the common controls convert between ANSI and Unicode?

June 16, 2008 Jun 16, 2008 06/16/08
Raymond Chen
Commenter Chris Becke asks how the common controls convert ANSI parameters to Unicode, since the common controls are Unicode internally. Everything goes through , pretty much by definition. The ANSI code page is . That's what ACP stands for, after all. Now, there are some function families that do not use ANSI. The console subsystem, for ...