The Old New Thing

Other - The Old New Thing

On the adult appeal of dodgeball

August 30, 2005 Aug 30, 2005 08/30/05
Raymond Chen
NPR's Only a Game recently covered the rise of adult dodgeball. At MSN's tenth birthday party last week, there was a wide variety of entertainment options, the highlight of which appeared to be an organized dodgeball tournament. It was very well attended and didn't have the ego-damaging overtones you got from elementary school. A good time...

If you squint you might be able to make out my name

August 26, 2005 Aug 26, 2005 08/26/05
Raymond Chen
Late Tuesday night, Jenny Lam, the creative director for this year's PDC, came by our hallway and asked for permission to rummage through our offices for "stuff". They were looking for props to use to decorate a developer's cubicle in a video they were filming for the conference. I was able to loan her a framed letter of appreciation and my ...

Why are icons multiples of 8 pixels in width?

August 23, 2005 Aug 23, 2005 08/23/05
Raymond Chen
Icons are all multiples of eight pixels in width. It's not just because computer people like powers of two. Back in the early days of Windows, video cards were monochrome or, if you were lucky, 16-color. These were all planar video modes, the mechanics of which were discussed earlier. Now imagine copying a bitmap to the screen where both ...

How do you convince developers to pay their “taxes”?

August 22, 2005 Aug 22, 2005 08/22/05
Raymond Chen
The Tablet PC team have a tough task ahead of them at this year's PDC: They have to get people to care about power management. The reason why this is tough is that power management is rarely a deal-maker. If a user is evaluating, say, personal finance software, how much weight are they going to place on which program consumes less ...

Justifiable assault with folding chair

August 19, 2005 Aug 19, 2005 08/19/05
Raymond Chen
Everybody's lunchtime conversation a few days ago was the riot at a used laptop sale in Richmond, VA. [Local coverage.] What got me was this fellow Jesse Sandler: "I took my chair here and I threw it over my shoulder and I went, 'Bam,'" the 20-year-old said nonchalantly, his eyes glued to the screen of his new iBook, as he tapped away on ...

Let’s just make up some dollar values and print them as fact

August 18, 2005 Aug 18, 2005 08/18/05
Raymond Chen
Everybody is going nuts over a patent decision regarding the iPod interface, but that's not what I'm writing about (so don't ask me for my opinion). Rather, I'm reacting to the claims being made by many people that Apple will have to pay Microsoft $10 for every iPod. What I want to know is where this amount "$10" came from. Multiple ...

What I’ll be doing at this year’s PDC

August 17, 2005 Aug 17, 2005 08/17/05
Raymond Chen
I will be heading down to Los Angeles the Friday before the PDC in order to visit friends and relatives and to check out the King Tut exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The last time Tutankhamun came to the United States was back in the late 1970's. I was an elementary school student and a few of my classmates were lucky enough...

How can a company get access to Windows Error Reporting data?

August 10, 2005 Aug 10, 2005 08/10/05
Raymond Chen
What happens to all the crashes in programs not written by Microsoft that are submitted via Windows Error Reporting? Microsoft still collects and indexes them, and vendors can sign up to gain access to the error reporting database to see the crashes in their programs. The service is free, although it does require a Verisign ID so that the ...

Have you made any assignments in this space?

August 5, 2005 Aug 5, 2005 08/5/05
Raymond Chen
Riffing on Larry's profound distaste for the use of the word 'ask' as a noun (a distaste I share)... It's been three years since I heard the question "Have you made any assignments in this space?" during a meeting and I still don't know what the person was trying to say...