Showing tag results for History

Apr 7, 2004
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A very brief anecdote about Windows 3.0

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

In an earlier comment, Larry Osterman described why Windows 3.0 was such a runaway success. He got a little of the timeline wrong, so I'll correct it here. Windows 2.0 did support protected mode. And it was Windows/386, which came out before Windows 3.0, which first used the new virtual-x86 mode of the 80386 processor to support pre-empti...

History
Apr 2, 2004
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Why a really large dictionary is not a good thing

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Sometimes you'll see somebody brag about how many words are in their spell-checking dictionary. It turns out that having too many words in a spell checker's dictionary is worse than having too few. Suppose you had a spell checker whose dictionary contained every word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then you hand it this sentence: Therf ...

History
Apr 1, 2004
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The martial arts logon picture

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Along the lines of Windows as Rorschach test, here's an example of someone attributing malicious behavior to randomness. Among the logon pictures that come with Windows XP is a martial arts kick. I remember one bug we got that went something like this: "Windows XP is racist. It put a picture of a kung fu fighter next to my name - just ...

History
Mar 31, 2004
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The look of Luna

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Luna was the code name for the Windows XP "look". The designers did a lot of research (and got off to a lot of false starts, as you might expect) before they came to the design they ultimately settled upon. During the Luna studies, that people's reaction to Luna was often, "Wow this would be a great UI for X," where X was "my dad" or "my em...

History
Mar 26, 2004
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The ways people mess up IUnknown::QueryInterface

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

When you're dealing with application compatibility, you discover all sorts of things that worked only by accident. Today, I'll talk about some of the "creative" ways people mess up the IUnknown::QueryInterface method. Now, you'd think, "This interface is so critical to COM, how could anybody possible mess it up?" Forgetting to respond to IUnk...

History
Mar 24, 2004
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Some files come up strange in Notepad

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

David Cumps discovered that certain text files come up strange in Notepad. The reason is that Notepad has to edit files in a variety of encodings, and when its back against the wall, sometimes it's forced to guess. Here's the file "Hello" in various encodings: This is the traditional ANSI encoding. This is the Unicode (little-endian) ...

History
Mar 19, 2004
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Why does the Resource Compiler complain about strings longer than 255 characters?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

As we learned in a previous entry, string resources group strings into bundles of 16, each Unicode string in the bundle prefixed by a 16-bit length. Why does the Resource Compiler complain about strings longer than 255 characters? This is another leftover from 16-bit Windows. Back in the Win16 days, string resources were also grouped into bu...

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Mar 18, 2004
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Why is the line terminator CR+LF?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

This protocol dates back to the days of teletypewriters. CR stands for "carriage return" - the CR control character returned the print head ("carriage") to column 0 without advancing the paper. LF stands for "linefeed" - the LF control character advanced the paper one line without moving the print head. So if you wanted to return the print head to ...

History