The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Fortune cookie fortunes are getting less and less interesting all the time
I remember reading a story about the history of fortune cookie fortunes, and how the pool of fortunes has been getting smaller because people keep complaining about them. In the article, they gave as an example that the fortune "You will meet a stranger" was removed from the fortune library because somebody complained that it was too scary. The effects of this trend toward meaningless fortunes continue to be felt. A few years ago, I opened a fortune cookie and looked at the slip of paper inside. It read simply Someone will give you something.
A concrete illustration of practical running time vs big-O notation
Memory access time changes the math.
Spam trackback attack week 2 statistics
The trackback spam attack is well into its second week now. The people who run blogs.msdn.com blocked all access from the IP address block, which not only blocks trackbacks but also prevents them from reading the content (and therefore prevents them from scraping). Undaunted, the sites just moved to a new IP address.
Why does Explorer use the term KB instead of KiB?
Although the International Electronic Commission established the term kibibyte for 1024 bytes, with the abbreviation KiB, Windows Explorer continues to use the abbreviation KB. Why doesn't Explorer get with the program? Because nobody else is on the program either. If you look around you, you'll find that nobody (to within experimental error) uses the terms kibibyte and KiB. When you buy computer memory, the amount is specified in megabytes and gigabytes, not mebibytes and gibibytes. The storage capacity printed on your blank CD is indicated in megabytes. Every document on the Internet (to within experimenta...
Foreign languages can be used as a secret code, but it’s not always a good secret code
Some years ago, I went out to dinner with a group of friends to a Chinese restaurant, and when the check was delivered to the table, one of my friends looked at it and handed it to me. "It appears to be written in some sort of secret code." It was written in Chinese. I pointed out that they probably chose the worst possible code in the world, seeing as they chose something known to over a billion people. Using a foreign language as a secret code is common when walking around out in public. You can say whatever you want about the people around you, and you can have a certain degree of confidence that your ...
Why does MS-DOS use 8.3 filenames instead of, say, 11.2 or 16.16?
When I discussed years ago why operating system files tend to follow the old 8.3 file name convention, I neglected to mention why the old MS-DOS filename convention was 8.3 and not, say, 11.2 or 16.16. It's a holdover from CP/M. As I noted when I discussed the old MS-DOS wildcard matching rules, MS-DOS worked hard at being compatible with CP/M. And CP/M used 8.3 filenames. Why did CP/M use 8.3 filenames? I don't know. There's nothing obvious in the CP/M directory format that explains why those two reserved bytes couldn't have been used to extend the file name to 10.3. But maybe they figured that eigh...
Mixed messages from the IT department regarding email safety
TipTalk wrote some time ago about the urban legend of the Reading Pane. In the conclusion, the article mentions the "read all standard mail in plain text" setting. And that reminded me of a story. Some time ago, the IT department sent out a message to all users on the subject of email safety. The gist of the message was that for increased safety, everybody should go to that options dialog and check the box to set Outlook to read email in plain text mode. It's not clear whether they expected anybody to take their message seriously, though: They sent the message in HTML format.
On the importance of sanity-checking values where money is involved
Last year, one of my colleagues noticed that one particular company's stock, which normally trades in the mid- to upper-$20 range, showed one day of extremely unusual results, very similar to the last example in this series of funny screenshots. Closer inspection revealed that there was an order to buy 28 shares at $100,000. Obviously, somebody got the "number of shares" and "bid price" fields backwards and ended up losing over two million dollars for the error. If this were an NYSE stock, this error would have been caught because trades on the New York Stock Exchange are still executed by human beings on...
Why isn’t there a separate British English version of Windows?
My friend ::Wendy:: asks why there is an American English version of Windows but not a British English version. I am not the expert on this subject (Michael Kaplan might be a bit closer), but I can speculate on the reasons for this. This is all conjecture, so who knows how accurate it is. (Actually, most of what I write is conjecture; I just don't bother calling it out each time it happens.) Let's look at it this way: You have the time and money to translate the American English version of Windows into 20 other languages. Do you spend one of those slots to translate it into a language that is mutually intel...