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One of my colleagues was a fount of ideas, some of them crazy, some of them clever, and some of them both. I think this one counts as both. To render multimedia content with DirectShow, you build a so-called filter graph. A filter graph represents a series of transformations that are applied to data as it travels through the graph. For example, b...

Gosh, that floppy insertion article generated a lot of comments. First, to clarify the table: The table is trying to say that if you had a Style A floppy drive, then issuing the magic series of commands would return 1 if a floppy was present, or 0 if the floppy was not present. On the other hand, if you had a Style B floppy drive, the...

One feature which Windows 95 almost had was floppy disk insertion detection. In other words, Windows 95 almost had the ability to detect when a floppy disk was present in the drive without spinning up the drive. The person responsible for Windows 95's 32-bit floppy driver studied the floppy drive hardware specification and spotted ...

One of the things that may strike you if you visit Microsoft's Redmond North campus is that there's a large, dry fountain outside the cafeteria. Why isn't the fountain running? The Redmond North campus was purchased from Safeco, and with the purchase, Microsoft obtained title to a fountain whose design had two fatal flaws: Having large qu...

Commenter c_e_pizano asks what the purpose of the registry value is. Well, for starters, it isn't documented, so the official answer to that question is "Don't mess with it." Kind of makes me wonder why you're asking about the registry value anyway, seeing as it's undocumented in the first place. Are you trying to reverse-engineer Windows? To...

The original IBM PC came with 16KB of memory. That's not a lot of space in which to squeeze an operating system, especially since you had to leave enough memory for the user to actually get work done. A product of its time, the MS-DOS kernel is written entirely in assembly language, pretty much standard procedure for programs of the era. It also...

When the file association Web service was first being developed, the programmer responsible for implementing the feature just scrounged around and found an old unused computer and set it up as a simple Web server under his desk, so there would be something to test the code against. That server happily churned away serving out file extension inform...

A friend of mine told me a story of a project from over ten years ago. Part of the product design was that it would include a bunch of skins (visual styles). The development team had written up the skinning infrastructure, but the company which was hired to create the actual skins hadn't delivered anything. My friend's assignment was to test the sk...

Welcome, Slashdot readers. Remember, this Web site is for entertainment purposes only. Who spends all day formatting floppy disks? From the reaction of geekdom, it appears that there are lots of geeks who sit around formatting disks all day. (Psst, you can buy them pre-formatted.) But why did Windows 95 get all sluggish when you formatted a fl...

In my earlier discussion on the variety of symbols that describe the target Windows version, I pointed out that the symbols attempt to cut through the mess and consolidate everything into a single symbol. But why the name ? One of my colleagues contacted me privately with the story. When setting out to change the operating system version number...