The Old New Thing

How many floppy disks did Windows 95 come on?

August 19, 2005 Aug 19, 2005 08/19/05
Raymond Chen
Thirteen. In case you were wondering. And those were thirteen of those special Distribution Media Format floppies, which are specially formatted to hold more data than a normal 1.44MB floppy disc. The high-capacity floppies reduced the floppy count by two, which resulted in a tremendous savings in cost of manufacturing and shipping. (I...

Let’s just make up some dollar values and print them as fact

August 18, 2005 Aug 18, 2005 08/18/05
Raymond Chen
Everybody is going nuts over a patent decision regarding the iPod interface, but that's not what I'm writing about (so don't ask me for my opinion). Rather, I'm reacting to the claims being made by many people that Apple will have to pay Microsoft $10 for every iPod. What I want to know is where this amount "$10" came from. Multiple ...

What I’ll be doing at this year’s PDC

August 17, 2005 Aug 17, 2005 08/17/05
Raymond Chen
I will be heading down to Los Angeles the Friday before the PDC in order to visit friends and relatives and to check out the King Tut exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The last time Tutankhamun came to the United States was back in the late 1970's. I was an elementary school student and a few of my classmates were lucky enough...

Why is processor affinity inherited by child processes?

August 17, 2005 Aug 17, 2005 08/17/05
Raymond Chen
Consider why a typical program launches child processes. (Shell programs like Explorer aren't typical.) It's because the task at hand is being broken down into sub-tasks which for whatever reason has been placed into a child process. An Example of this would be, say, a multi-pass compiler/linker, where each pass is implemented as a separate ...

When people ask for security holes as features: Silent install of uncertified drivers

August 16, 2005 Aug 16, 2005 08/16/05
Raymond Chen
Probably the single greatest source of bluescreen crashes in Windows XP is buggy device drivers. Since drivers run in kernel mode, there is no higher authority checking what they're doing. If some user-mode code runs amok and corrupts memory, it's just corrupting its own memory. The process eventually crashes, but the system stays up. On ...

On being attacked by a sidewalk

August 15, 2005 Aug 15, 2005 08/15/05
Raymond Chen
Yesterday, I was attacked by a sidewalk. I was cycling from work to a friend's house for dinner and was northbound in the shoulder on 172nd Ave NE in Redmond. As I reached the intersection with NE 138th St., I was momentarily distracted, perhaps by my water bottle, I forget. This lapse of attention resulted in my failing to notice...

The poor man’s way of identifying memory leaks

August 15, 2005 Aug 15, 2005 08/15/05
Raymond Chen
There is a variety of tools available for identifying resource leaks, but there's one method that requires no tools or special compiler switches or support libraries: Just let the leak continue until the source becomes blatantly obvious. Nightly automated stress testing is a regular part of any project. Some teams use screen savers as the ...

Adding a lookup control to the dictionary: Searching Pinyin

August 12, 2005 Aug 12, 2005 08/12/05
Raymond Chen
Finally we start searching. For now, the search algorithm is going to be very simple: The string you type into the edit control will be treated as the start of a Pinyin word or phrase. We'll make it fancier later. Here is where a lot of the groundwork (some of which I called out explicitly and some of which I slipped in without calling ...