Showing tag results for Other

Dec 25, 2006
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The Old New Thing book will also be available electronically

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

We interrupt this religious holiday for an important commercial announcement. As a special Christmas present, my new best friends at Addison-Wesley sent me an advance copy of the dead-tree edition of my book. (Obligatory plug: Order it from Amazon. You know I want you to.) One commenter asked whether my book would be available electronically. O...

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Dec 19, 2006
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I bet somebody is looking to get a really nice bonus for that feature: Attention

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

"I bet somebody is looking to get a really nice bonus for that feature." A customer was having trouble with one of their features that scans for resources that their program can use, and, well, the details aren't important. What's important is that their feature ran in the Startup group, and as soon as it found a suitable resource, it displayed a ...

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Dec 11, 2006
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What does an invalid handle exception in LeaveCriticalSection mean?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Internally, a critical section is a bunch of counters and flags, and possibly an event. (Note that the internal structure of a critical section is subject to change at any time—in fact, it changed between Windows XP and Windows 2003. The information provided here is therefore intended for troubleshooting and debugging purposes and ...

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Dec 6, 2006
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If you let people read a file, then they can copy it

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Here's a question that floated past my view: How do I set the ACLs on a file so users can read it but can't copy it? I can't find a "Copy" access mask that I can deny. If I can't deny copying, I'd at least like to audit it, so I can tell who made a copy of the file. There is no "Copy" access mask because copying is not a fundamental file operati...

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Dec 1, 2006
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Nailing down what constitutes valuable consideration

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Last time, I introduced a friend I called "Bob" for the purposes of this story. At a party earlier this year, I learned second-hand what Bob had been up to more recently. The team Bob worked for immediately prior to his retirement gave him a call. "Hi, Bob. We're trying to ship version N+1 of Product X, and we really need your help. I k...

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Nov 30, 2006
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It took two of us to keep up with one Bob

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

One of my friends (let's call him "Bob") retired from Microsoft many years ago. Bob is an amazing programmer whose skills I remain in awe of. I remember visiting his office one evening with a mutual friend ("Fred") to catch up on things. When we turned up, he showed us a problem that he was working on. He was doing some sort of fancy graphics effe...

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Nov 29, 2006
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A fork is an easy-to-find nonstandard USB device

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Remember the Ten Immutable Laws of Security. Today, we're going to talk about number three: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer any more. There was a bug which floated past my field of vision many months ago that went something like this: "I found a critical security bug in the USB stack. If some...

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Nov 27, 2006
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It's not surprising at all that people search for Yahoo

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Earlier this year, one columnist was baffled as to why "Yahoo" was the most searched-for term on Google. I wasn't baffled at all. Back in 2001, Alexa published the top ten most searched-for terms on their service, and four of the top ten were URLs: yahoo.com, hotmail.com, aol.com, and ebay.com. A lot of people simply don't care to learn the diffe...

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Nov 9, 2006
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Why can't you use the Tab key to select items from the auto-complete drop-down?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

An anonymous commenter asked why the Tab key doesn't select items from the auto-complete drop-down list. The answer: Because that key already has some other meaning. The Tab key is used to navigate among controls in a dialog box. Adding auto-complete behavior to an existing dialog would disturb the tab order, which would in turn frustrate people ...

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