Showing results for Other - The Old New Thing

May 23, 2007
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Microspeak: The forcing function

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

At Microsoft, you'll hear the phrase "forcing function" and it won't be in reference to differential equations or to user interface design. Rather, it means a set of circumstances that forces a decision to be made or which forces an action to be taken that previously had no hard deadline. Example: "The impending Y2K threat served as a forcing f...

OtherMicrospeak
May 22, 2007
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You're not my manager, so I'm not going to ask how high when you tell me to jump

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

This happens a lot. I'm minding my own business and then I start getting nag mail from somebody I've never heard of. It usually is marked "High Priority" and the content has lots of boldface and wording that makes it sound like the world is going to end tomorrow. (Pretend "elephant"† is some new buzzword.) URGENT - ACTION REQUIRED Your c...

Other
May 18, 2007
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Getting in on the action while it's still there

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Remember day trading? All the cool people were doing it. Glamour stories of people who tripled or quadrupled their stake in a single day. With all this money available for the taking, you'd be a fool not to be day-trading! During the era of day trading frenzy, I got a particular chuckle out of one PC manufacturer who produced a Precision Online T...

Other
May 17, 2007
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We're all in this together: No good deed goes unpunished, redux

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

There were several suggestions as to how I could avoid being tagged as the owner of an issue because I helped route the problem. Many of them involved assigning the bug back to the testers to "teach them a lesson". Punishing the tester doesn't help the product. Remember, we're all in this together. The goal is to fix bugs and ship a quality prod...

OtherNo good deed goes unpunished
May 15, 2007
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Command lines need to be quoted; paths don't

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

While it's true that one category of problems comes from failing to quote spaces in command lines, it is a false statement that "path names in the registry should have quotation marks around them for obvious reasons." In fact it's the opposite. Path names should not be quoted. Think about it: Quotation marks are a parsing issue, not a file name i...

Other
May 9, 2007
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Don't be helpless: At least look at the function you're using

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Sometimes I see people ask a question and get an answer, but the answer doesn't quite work. But instead of trying to understand the answer in order to see why it doesn't work and develop a better solution, they just play stupid. Here's an example. The names have been changed but the story's the same. How do I get a handle to a bright pink elepha...

Other
May 8, 2007
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The administrator is an idiot

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Nearly all computer administrators are idiots. That's not because the personnel department is incompetent or because it's impossible to train competent administrators. It's because, for a consumer operating system, the computer administrator didn't ask to be one. In nearly all cases, the computer administrator is dad or grandma.† They didn'...

Other
May 3, 2007
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Quick overview of how processes exit on Windows XP

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Exiting is one of the scariest moments in the lifetime of a process. (Sort of how landing is one of the scariest moments of air travel.) Many of the details of how processes exit are left unspecified in Win32, so different Win32 implementations can follow different mechanisms. For example, Win32s, Windows 95, and Windows NT all shut down...

Other
May 1, 2007
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Microspeak: Operationalize

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Here are a few citations for the word operationalize. A lot of work lies ahead to operationalize this plan. Provide security guidance and tools to help operationalize security for enterprise environments. I thought it meant "carry out" or "put into effect", and then I saw this sentence: Operationalize the demo (get computers configured, insta...

OtherMicrospeak