The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Email tip: If you ask a question that can be answered in only one way, but that’s not the answer, don’t be surprised that nobody responds at all
It's not infrequent that I see somebody ask a question that can be answered in only one way. But if that's not the answer, then nobody will respond. Is there a module that does XYZ? This question can be answered in only one way: "Yes, here it is." If nobody has written such a module, nobody is going to reply saying, "No, nobody has written the module you request," because that would require the responder to prove a negative. "I have scoured the entire planet, including code sitting on a hard drive in somebody's mother's basement, and have verified that there is no module that does XYZ. Furthermore, I have...
Rearranging the cities into a much more visually pleasing arrangement
My friend the seventh grade teacher gave an assignment wherein students were to produce a map of the state of Washington with various required elements, among them, a selection of major cities in the state. Some students failed to understand that the purpose of a map is to represent where the cities are and not to dictate to the cities where they should be, for they moved the cities around in strange ways. Moving the dots around to make a more visually pleasing arrangement might work if you were designing, say, a transit map, where the topology of the connections is the important thing rather than their phy...
Why is the maximum boot.ini delay 11 million seconds?
I mentioned in passing that the maximum delay you can specify in boot.ini is about 11 million seconds. I'm disappointed but sadly not surprised that everybody focused on that number and completely missed the point of the article. First of all, the value of 11 million was not a conscious limitation. It's just an artifact of other limitations. The delay is specified in seconds in boot.ini, but internally it is converted to BIOS clock ticks. (Remember, this is a boot loader; there's not much infrastructure available yet.) The conversion is done in 32-bit arithmetic, and 4 billion BIOS clock ticks at 18.2 ticks pe...
Doesn’t matter what your marketing technique is for your compiler if nobody actually writes code in your language any more
I mentioned Terry Zink's Anti-spam blog ("Protecting your mail from the scum of the internet") during one of my quarterly "borg-edition" linkfests. The article about how much money a spammer actually makes was quite interesting. One thing that caught my eye was the insanely low sales rate that was needed in order to make the enterprise lucrative. Only 0.12% of the messages get clicked on, and of those, only 0.5% result in a sale, yet with a sales rate of just 0.0006%, the spammer pulled down an impressive $7690 per week, or over $300,000 per year. (Researchers who infiltrated the Storm botnet have their own est...
Now it’s like people buy sneakers to make money out of them
Where there are sneaker addicts you will have sneaker speculators. And not all the sneakerheads appreciate it. Such trading bothers purists like Raymond Chen, 26. "People used to buy sneakers because they love them," Chen said. "Now it's like people buy sneakers to make money out of them." Chen, an engineer from Shoreline, owns about 120 pairs of sneakers and spends about $100 a month on his hobby. If there are a number of shoes releasing within the same month, he spends more.
You can’t fight in here; this is the War Room!
(Video clip for those who don't get the reference.) The term War Room is attributed to Winston Churchill, used to describe the underground meeting room where the war effort was directed. It is the "crucial meeting room where important decisions are made" sense of the term that is used at Microsoft. Many software products (or even just components of software products) have a meeting room designated as its War Room. Depending on the stage of the project, War Meetings might be held weekly, daily, or even several times a day. The meeting is run by the War Team, with representatives from all product components i...
What do these topics have in common?
Update: The first correct answer is from Tom Smith who correctly identified the articles as having ridiculous In Popular Culture sections which mention The Simpsons. Lazbro was right: There needs to be a bot that deletes all "In Popular Culture" sections from Wikipedia.
How slow do you have to slow-double-click for it to be a rename?
In many parts of the system, you can rename an item by first selecting it, then clicking on its name. The selection step is typically done by clicking on the item, which creates the risk that your second click will be interpreted as a double-click rather than as a rename click. How slow do you have to slow-double-click for it to be a rename? Slow enough that it's not a regular double-click. The double-click time is set in the mouse control panel; I believe the current default is 500 milliseconds. If your two clicks are within a half second of each other, they will be treated as a double-click. If they occur ...
What I don’t get about bank robbers
My reaction to the news story about the so-called Barbie Bandits wasn't disbelief or shock at the crime, but rather confusion over their over-arching plan. People rob a bank and use the money to buy stuff. Dude, cut out the federal crime; just steal the stuff directly. When I expressed this disbelief at the lunch table, one of my colleagues took issue with my assessment. "Oh, no, the food in state prison is awful. Federal is much better."