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Another use of decoys.

You may have noticed that there's a copy of Notepad in and another in . Why two? Compatibility, of course. Windows 3.0 put Notepad in the Windows directory. Windows NT put it in the System32 directory. Notepad is perhaps the most commonly hardcoded program in Windows. many Setup programs use it to view the Readme file, and you can use...

Phil Belanger tells the story behind the name WiFi (and it is not short for "Wireless Fidelity"). Meanwhile, Michael Johas Teener tells the story of where the name FireWire came from. (Scroll down to "Why all these names?") [9:30am - I originally had a link to a NY Times article, but it was the wrong article and I can't find the right one, so ...

Many people are surprised to discover that when you create a combo box (either in code via or indirectly via a dialog box template), the size you specify describes the size of the combo box including the drop-down list box, even though the drop-down list box is not visible on the screen. For example, if you say that you want the combo box to be 20...

When writing the entry on Windows Integration Meetings, I was reminded of a team integration that didn't go quite so smoothly. I will not identify the teams involved because this is not an outlet for finger-pointing but rather a cautionary tale for managers and developers everywhere. Once upon a time, there were two teams developing projects that...

Somewhat belatedly riffing on Larry and his discussion of time bombs in beta products, I'm reminded of one instance of a major PC manufacturer who apparently couldn't wait for Windows 95 to RTM. Tired of waiting, they shipped several thousands of machines with a late beta version of Windows 95 instead. That worked out really great. For...

On FAT drives, the directory that stores files in the Recycle Bin is called , but on NTFS drives, its name is . Why the name change? The FAT and NTFS Recycle Bins have different internal structure because NTFS has this thing called "security" and FAT doesn't. All recycled files on FAT drives are dumped into a single directory, whereas recycled fi...

Because the program isn't actually corrupted. Sort of.

Stephen Tolouse (known around Microsoft as "stepto", pronounced "step-toe") from the Microsoft Security Response Center reminisces about Windows 95 RTM. Stephen mentions that "the build numbers were artificially inflated to reach 950". There's actually a technical reason for this inflation, which I intend to write about when I have the time to ...

Perhaps the biggest risk when making a change in the name of security is all the things that may have been relying on the previously-lax security settings. After all, disabling an insecure feature is easy. The hard part is disabling it while retaining compatibility with people who were relying on that feature. In the security investigations I've be...