Showing tag results for Other

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...

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...

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...

Because most fonts don't work in command prompts.

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...

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...

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'...

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...

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...

Somebody says, "Your program is consuming 100% CPU" and hands you a debug session. Usually, this happens because one thread has gotten stuck in an infinite loop. And if you're lucky it's the type of infinite loop that's easy to diagnose because it's just one function that isn't returning. (The more complicated types are where a function does some ...