The Old New Thing

I thought you said people don't know how to read analog clocks

October 30, 2003 Oct 30, 2003 10/30/03

Raymond Chen

I had mentioned in passing in a comment on 10/10/2003 10:07PM that one of the reasons the clock on the taskbar isn't analog is that some disturbingly high percentage of people (30%? 40%? I forget exactly) do not know how to read an analog clock. Yet there is is in the Longhorn sidebar. ...

When vendors insult themselves

October 28, 2003 Oct 28, 2003 10/28/03

Raymond Chen

During Windows 95, when we were building the Plug and Play infrastructure, we got an angry letter from a hardware vendor (who shall remain nameless) complaining that we intentionally misspelled their company name in our INF files in a manner that made their company name similar to an insulting word...

What's the deal with those reserved filenames like NUL and CON?

October 22, 2003 Oct 22, 2003 10/22/03

Raymond Chen

Set the wayback machine to DOS 1.0. DOS 1.0 didn't support subdirectories, lowercase, or filenames longer than 8.3. When you ran the assembler (or compiler if you were really fancy) the conversation went something like this:    the ".asm" extension on "...

What is the Alt+Tab order?

October 20, 2003 Oct 20, 2003 10/20/03

Raymond Chen

What determines the order in which icons appear in the Alt+Tab list? The icons appear in the same order as the window Z-order. When you switch to a window, then it comes to the top of the Z-order. If you minimize a window, it goes to the bottom of the Z-order. The Alt+Esc hotkey (gosh, does ...

Don't let Marketing mess with your slides

October 17, 2003 Oct 17, 2003 10/17/03

Raymond Chen

It's PDC season, so I thought I'd relate an anecdote about a conference from many years ago. I forget which conference it was, maybe GCDC 1996, we were all busy preparing our presentations and submitted them to the Microsoft conference representatives so they could apply the standard ...

What about BOZOSLIVEHERE and TABTHETEXTOUTFORWIMPS?

October 15, 2003 Oct 15, 2003 10/15/03

Raymond Chen

More strange function names.

Why don't notification icons get a message when the user clicks the "X" button?

October 14, 2003 Oct 14, 2003 10/14/03

Raymond Chen

If such a notification were generated, ill-behaved programs would just react to a click on the balloon's "X" button with an annoying follow-up dialog like, "Are you sure you want to ignore my wonderful message?" So there was a conscious decision not to give them the chance. In the Before...

Why doesn't the clock in the taskbar display seconds?

October 10, 2003 Oct 10, 2003 10/10/03

Raymond Chen

Early beta versions of the taskbar clock did display seconds, and it even blinked the colon like some clocks do. But we had to remove it. Why? Because that blinking colon and the constantly-updating time were killing our benchmark numbers. On machines with ...

Why is address space allocation granularity 64KB?

October 8, 2003 Oct 8, 2003 10/8/03

Raymond Chen

You have RISC processors like the Alpha AXP to thank for that.