The Old New Thing

Why has my clipboard stopped working?

June 4, 2008 Jun 4, 2008 06/4/08
Raymond Chen
You may be minding your own business and discover that your clipboard has stopped working. You try to copy something to the clipboard, and it's not there. You try to paste something from the clipboard, and nothing comes out. What's going on? The clipboard is a shared resource. (More specifically, shared among programs that run on the same ...

Food products that are offenses against nature: Bisquick Shake 'n Pour

June 3, 2008 Jun 3, 2008 06/3/08
Raymond Chen
Yes, it's another entry in the extremely sporadic series of food products that are offenses against nature. Today it's the incorrectly-punctuated Bisquick Shake 'n Pour. For people for whom adding a half cup of milk and one egg to two cups of Bisquick powder is too complicated, now they've even dehydrated the milk and egg and pre-measured ...

Dlaczego Microsoft zatopił Polskę?

June 3, 2008 Jun 3, 2008 06/3/08
Raymond Chen
A colleague of mine stopped by my office to tell me that he got a telephone call from his father in Poland asking him why Microsoft sunk Poland. My colleague was somewhat baffled by this question, since his father isn't a computer nerd, but his father explained that he saw the story on the front page of the newspaper. Apparently, the story ...

Raymond misreads newspaper headlines, episode 3

June 2, 2008 Jun 2, 2008 06/2/08
Raymond Chen
The headline: First lady to speak at Ala. school hit by tornado. My interpretation: There's a woman who was the first woman to speak at an Alabama school. This is notable presumably because she had to break some historical gender barrier in order to be invited to give an address there. That woman was hit by a tornado. My reaction: Man, what...

Why are accelerators for hidden controls still active?

June 2, 2008 Jun 2, 2008 06/2/08
Raymond Chen
In the suggestion box, Serge Wautier asked why accelerators for hidden controls remain active. He's apparently rather insistent because he asked the question again a few months later. Asking the same question multiple times reduces the likelihood that I'll answer it. Consider yourself lucky that I wrote this answer before I noticed the ...

Why are some GDI functions named ExtXxx instead of XxxEx?

May 30, 2008 May 30, 2008 05/30/08
Raymond Chen
By convention, an enhanced version of a function is called , but there are many GDI functions that don't follow this conventions, most notably , which should have been named under the convention. Why don't the GDI functions follow that convention? Because they were named before the convention was established. Nothing nefarious, just an ...

The sad demise of whimsical teasing in Comic Chat

May 29, 2008 May 29, 2008 05/29/08
Raymond Chen
Internet Explorer 3 came with the IRC client Comic Chat, a product from the research division. And it's not surprising that a program as goofy as Comic Chat would put something goofy in the default profile. If you didn't set a profile when you created your character, it defaulted to "This person is too lazy to create a profile entry." Of ...

India Calling: Call centers from the Indian point of view

May 28, 2008 May 28, 2008 05/28/08
Raymond Chen
In the United States, the growing relocation of call centers to India has been the source of much hand-wringing, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction: What effect is this having on India? The primetime soap opera India Calling looks at the effect of a 600,000-person industry, the eyebrows raised when neighbors see a ...