The Old New Thing

Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.

Latest posts

Marymoor Park summer movie series 2005 is nearly over
Aug 24, 2005
0
0

Marymoor Park summer movie series 2005 is nearly over

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Every Wednesday evening in August of this year, Marymoor Park will be showing a movie. Tonight's movie is Bend It Like Beckham. The movie begins at dusk, and a $5 donation is suggested, proceeds to be shared between the park and a local charity. The charity tends to be thematically related to the movie; for Beckham, for example, part of the money will go to the Lake Washington Youth Soccer Association.

A ticket to the Windows 95 launch
Aug 24, 2005
0
0

A ticket to the Windows 95 launch

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A limited number of seats at the Windows 95 launch were available to the product team, so there was a lottery to see who would get one of those tickets. The remainder of the team would be standing on bleachers hidden behind the stage, to be unveiled at the grand climax of the product launch festivities. I happened to have been a winner in the ticket lottery, but the fact that there weren't enough seats for everybody created some degree of grousing among the have-nots. As a show of solidarity, I forewent the special VIP pass and ticket, instead taking my place in the crowd of red, blue, yellow, and green T-...

Buying an entire Egghead Software store
Aug 24, 2005
0
0

Buying an entire Egghead Software store

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

During the development of Windows 95 (which released to the public ten years ago today), application compatibility was of course a very high priority. To make sure that coverage was as broad as possible, the development manager for Windows 95 took his pick-up truck, drove down to the local Egghead Software store (back when Egghead still existed), and bought one copy of every single PC program in the store. He then returned to Microsoft, unloaded all the software onto tables in the cafeteria, and invited every member of the Windows 95 team to come in and take responsibility for up to two programs....

Why are icons multiples of 8 pixels in width?
Aug 23, 2005
0
1

Why are icons multiples of 8 pixels in width?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Icons are all multiples of eight pixels in width. It's not just because computer people like powers of two. Back in the early days of Windows, video cards were monochrome or, if you were lucky, 16-color. These were all planar video modes, the mechanics of which were discussed earlier. Now imagine copying a bitmap to the screen where both the bitmap and the screen are planar. If the starting coordinates of the destination was an exact multiple of eight, then the bitmap could be copied via block transfer instructions. On the other hand, if the destination was not a perfect multiple of eight, you had to do a lot ...

How do you convince developers to pay their “taxes”?
Aug 22, 2005
0
0

How do you convince developers to pay their “taxes”?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The Tablet PC team have a tough task ahead of them at this year's PDC: They have to get people to care about power management. The reason why this is tough is that power management is rarely a deal-maker. If a user is evaluating, say, personal finance software, how much weight are they going to place on which program consumes less battery power? That's probably a third- or fourth-level tiebreaker. No amount of power management is going to overcome the fact that your program's interface is harder to use than your competitor's. Nobody ever said, "Oh, yeah, I switched my word processor from X to Y because X...

This might be for real, even though it comes out at 7am
Aug 19, 2005
0
0

This might be for real, even though it comes out at 7am

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

One of our researchers IM'd me yesterday to let me know that someone she interviewed mentioned that some people suspected that I wasn't real because most of my posts are published at the same time every day. I dunno. The evening news comes on at the same time every day, but I'm pretty sure they're real. Maybe I should be more suspicious. If I were real.

How many floppy disks did Windows 95 come on?
Aug 19, 2005
0
0

How many floppy disks did Windows 95 come on?

Raymond Chen
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'm sure there are the conspiracy-minded folks who think that DMF was invented as an anti-piracy measure. It wasn't; it was a way to reduce the number of floppy disks. That the disks were difficult to copy was a side-effect, not a design goal.) (For comparison, Windows&nbs...

Justifiable assault with folding chair
Aug 19, 2005
0
0

Justifiable assault with folding chair

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Everybody's lunchtime conversation a few days ago was the riot at a used laptop sale in Richmond, VA. [Local coverage.] What got me was this fellow Jesse Sandler: "I took my chair here and I threw it over my shoulder and I went, 'Bam,'" the 20-year-old said nonchalantly, his eyes glued to the screen of his new iBook, as he tapped away on the keyboard at a testing station. "They were getting in front of me and I was there a lot earlier than them, so I thought that it was just," he said. Because if somebody cuts in front of you in line, you are perfectly justified in assaulting them with a folding chair. Th...

What are the access rights and privileges that control changing ownership of an object?
Aug 18, 2005
0
0

What are the access rights and privileges that control changing ownership of an object?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Changing the ownership of an object (typically a file) is not difficult in principle: You call the function with the new security descriptor. The hard part is getting to that point. (Thanks to John, a colleague in security, for correcting an earlier draft of this entry.) If you have access on an object, then you can change the owner of the object to yourself (or to any SID in your token that has the SE_GROUP_OWNER attribute): you can take ownership. However, you cannot change the owner to somebody else: you cannot give ownership to another person. Doing that would allow you to violate quota restrictions....