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Accuracy is how close you are to the correct answer; precision is how much resolution you have for that answer. Suppose you ask me, "What time is it?" I look up at the sun, consider for a moment, and reply, "It is 10:35am and 22.131 seconds." I gave you a very precise answer, but not a very accurate one. Meanwhile, you look at your watch...

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 was ...

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 pass t...

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 the bit...

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 battery ...

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 the ke...

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...