Showing tag results for History

Feb 12, 2013
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What’s the story of the onestop.mid file in the Media directory?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

If you look in your folder, you'll find a MIDI file called . What's the story behind this odd little MIDI file? Aaron Margosis considers this file a security risk because "if an attacker can cause that file to be played, it will cause lasting mental pain and anguish to everybody within earshot." Despite Wikipedia's claims[citation needed], the ...

History
Feb 8, 2013
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For the Nitpickers: Enhanced-mode Windows 3.0 didn’t exactly run a copy of standard-mode Windows inside the virtual machine

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Generally speaking, Enhanced-mode Windows 3.0 ran a copy of standard-mode Windows inside the virtual machine. This statement isn't exactly true, but it's true enough. Commenter Nitpicker objected, "Why are you threatening us with the Nitpicker's Corner for asking about this issue instead of explaining it once and linking it everywhere?" Okay...

History
Jan 23, 2013
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Why was WHEEL_DELTA chosen to be 120 instead of a much more convenient value like 100 or even 10?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

We saw some time ago that the nominal mouse wheel amount for one click (known as a "detent") is specified by the constant , which has the value 120. Why 120? Why not a much more convenient number like 100, or even 10? Because the value 120 made it easier to create higher-resolution mouse wheels. As noted in the documentation: The delta...

History
Jan 17, 2013
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A brief history of the GetEnvironmentStrings functions

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The Get­Environment­Strings function has a long and troubled history. The first bit of confusion is that the day it was introduced in Windows NT 3.1, it was exported funny. The UNICODE version was exported under the name Get­Environment­StringsW, but the ANSI version was exported under the name Get­Environment­...

History
Dec 21, 2012
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Why do BackupRead and BackupWrite require synchronous file handles?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The and functions require that the handle you provide by synchronous. (In other words, that they not be opened with .) A customer submitted the following question: We have been using asynchronous file handles with the . Every so often, the call to will fail, but we discovered that as a workaround, we can just retry the operation, and it will ...

History
Dec 4, 2012
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The QuickCD PowerToy, a brief look back

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

One of the original Windows 95 PowerToys was a tool called QuickCD. Though that wasn't its original name. The original name of the QuickCD PowerToy was FlexiCD. You'd think that it was short for "Flexible CD Player", but you'd be wrong. FlexiCD was actually named after its author, whose name is Felix, but who uses the "Flexi" anagram as a whi...

History
Dec 3, 2012
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Have you found any TheDailyWTF-worthy code during the development of Windows 95?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Mott555 is interested in some sloppy/ugly code or strange workarounds or code comments during the development of Windows 95, like "anything TheDailyWTF-worthy." I discovered that opening a particular program churned the hard drive a lot when you opened it. I decided to hook up the debugger to see what the problem was. What I discovered was...

History
Nov 28, 2012
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Why are there both FIND and FINDSTR programs, with unrelated feature sets?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Jonathan wonders why we have both and , and furthermore, why the two programs have unrelated features. The program supports UTF-16, which doesn't; on the other hand, the program supports regular expressions, which does not. The reason why their feature sets are unrelated is that the two programs are unrelated. The program came first. As I ...

History