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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 people a...

Changing the ownership of an object (typically a file) is not difficult in principle: You call the function with the new security descriptor. The hard part is getting to that point. (Thanks to John, a colleague in security, for correcting an earlier draft of this entry.) If you have access on an object, then you can change the owner of the...

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 to h...

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 Winqua...

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.

Often I see people asking why they can't create more than around 2000 threads in a process. The reason is not that there is any particular limit inherent in Windows. Rather, the programmer failed to take into account the amount of address space each thread uses. A thread consists of some memory in kernel mode (kernel stacks and object management),...

Robert Scoble's embarrassment over forgetting to pay a restaurant bill reminds me of an even more embarrassing incident experienced by a component team from the Windows 95 team. To celebrate something or other, their team went to lunch at The Salish Lodge, a fine dining establishment. At the end of the meal, everybody thought somebody else...

Let's see if I can get this straight. First, Chris Pirillo says (timecode 37:59) he's not entirely pleased with the word "podcast" in Episode 11 of This Week in Tech. The Seattle-PI then reports that the sentiment is shared with "several Microsoft employees" who have coined the word "blogcast" to replace it. Next, c|net picks up the story and ...

A few years ago, I told a story of how Marketing messed up a bunch of PDC slides by "helpfully" expanding acronyms... into the wrong phrases. Today I got to see Marketing's handiwork again, as they edited my talk description. (Oh, and psst, Marketing folks, you might want to link to the full list of PDC sessions from your Conference Tracks and S...

I was introduced to the glory that is the world of Mr. Bunny many years ago. Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveX is probably the best book on ActiveX programming ever written. If you haven't figured it out by now, it's a humor book, but it's the sort of madcap insane geek humor that has enough truth in it to make you laugh more. My favorite is the fi...