Showing tag results for History

Aug 27, 2004
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Importance of alignment even on x86 machines

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Sometimes unaligned memory access will hang the machine. Some video cards do not let you access all the video memory at one go. Instead, you are given a window into which you can select which subset of video memory ("bank") you want to see. For example, the EGA video card had 256K of memory, split into four 64K banks. If you wanted to access memo...

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Aug 23, 2004
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The kooky STRRET structure

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

It was designed when computers were a lot slower.

History
Jul 26, 2004
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A twenty-foot-long computer

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Pushing the specification to extremes.

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Jul 21, 2004
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Why was nine the maximum number of monitors in Windows 98?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Windows 98 was the first version of Windows to support multiple monitors. And the limit was nine. Why nine? Because that allowed you to arrange your monitors like this. You have early seventies television to thank. [Raymond is currently on vacation; this message was pre-recorded.]

History
Jul 13, 2004
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Watch out for those sample URLs

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

When writing documentation, one often has need to come up with a sample URL to illustrate some point or other. When you do, make sure the sample URL is under your control. I remember a Windows beta that used the sample URL http://www.xxxxx.com/ in a dialog box. You can imagine where that actually goes. This web site uses www.wallyworld.co...

History
Jul 2, 2004
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Don't name your DLL "Security.dll"

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Reaching back into the history bucket... Some people have discovered that strange things happen if you name your DLL "security.dll". The reason is that there is already a system DLL called "security.dll"; it's the Security Support Provider Interface DLL, and it used to go by the name "security.dll", though nowadays the name "secur32.d...

History
Jul 2, 2004
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Don’t name your DLL “Security.dll”

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Reaching back into the history bucket... Some people have discovered that strange things happen if you name your DLL "security.dll". The reason is that there is already a system DLL called "security.dll"; it's the Security Support Provider Interface DLL, and it used to go by the name "security.dll", though nowadays the name "secur32.d...

History