Showing tag results for History

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...

Commenter Joshua Blake wonders why Word's status bar says "Word is preparing to background print the document", wondering whether there used to be other types of printing like foreground. Well, first of all, this is a question about Office, something I explicitly deny any special knowledge of: Topics I am not inclined to cover: [...] But...

Back in the late 1990's one of my colleagues (who is now in Office Labs—check it out, they've got some pretty cool stuff) filed an expense report for a hair dryer, and it was accepted. But what valid business purpose would there be for a tester to buy a hair dryer? At the time, my colleague worked as a tester for Windows power management. ...

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...

(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 compone...

Today is Election Day in the United States. Don't forget to vote. (Void where prohibited.) In honor of Election Day, I figured I'd tell a story about voting. One of the complimentary beverages available in Microsoft kitchens is Spicy Hot V-8. (Sure it's tasty, but watch out for the sodium content!) I remember well when Spicy Hot V-8 was adde...

Commenter ulric suggested that two functions for obtaining the "current" window should exist, one for normal everyday use and one for "special use" when you want to interact with windows outside your process. I'd be more at ease however if the default behaviour of the API was to return HWND for the current process only, and the apps that really ...

If the documentation says that you have to call a function, then you have to call it. It may be that the function doesn't do anything, but that doesn't prevent it from doing something in the future. Today's example is the function , which returns you all the environment variables of the current process in a single block, which you can then study ...

Earlier this year I received a piece of email from a programmer at a major software firm, reprinted below (suitably redacted) with permission. It was a sort of a mea culpa. (Remember: no guessing allowed.) Hi, Raymond. I'm a dev on Product X and recently we were sitting around having a beer after work, discussing the long and sordid hist...

Commenter Travis Owens asks, "Why was the RAM drive removed from Windows 95?" As with many of these types of accusatory questions, this comes with a false hidden assumption, in this case, that the RAM drive was in Windows 95 to begin with. Remember that Windows 95 introduced a new driver model, so any RAM drive would have had to be w...