The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
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...
I’m sorry, Brian George, but we got cut off and I couldn’t call you back
Yesterday, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I receive a telephone call at work. There is that characteristic pause after connecting which tells me that I have probably just been called by a telemarketer. "Hello?" — Hello, I'm Brian George from Liquid Capital Management. Our company founder, Brian Kim, has been working closely with Microsoft employees to help them with financial matters. Are you familiar with hedge funds? I hear another voice in the background. This is almost certainly a boiler room operation. "There appears to be another voice on the line, do you hear it? Oh wait, it's gone. Could...
Bonus chatter about that virus that is responsible for the top six Explorer crashes
Last year, I wrote about a virus that is responsible for the top six Explorer crashes, by a wide margin. I learned later how the authors of this XYZ Virus operate, and it happens to answer a question posted by commenter SteveL as to why these virus writers are so incompetent that they crash so much. First, the virus authors infect your computer and crash your system every so often on purpose. Meanwhile, they also set up a legitimate-looking Web site which sells anti-virus software that claims to remove this virus. You send them your money, they send you the software. The kicker is that the removal softw...
Cool guys don’t look at explosions
Thanks to NPR's Monkey See blog for finding this:
Why can’t I rotate the display with ChangeDisplaySettingsEx?
If you have one of those cool swively LCD displays (or if you decided to build your own), you naturally want to tell your video card to display rotated output, so you can take advantage of the portrait orientation. And naturally you would think that calling the and using the field of the structure would do the trick. And then you would find that it doesn't work. Yet the annoying utility program (which gets shoveled onto your computer when you install the driver) can rotate the video output. How come they can do it, but can't? Because the video card vendor decided to do it in a nonstandard way so that...