Showing results for Other - The Old New Thing

Dec 21, 2004
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Sometimes people don’t like it when you enforce a standard

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Your average computer user wouldn't recognize a standards document if they were hit in the face with it. I'm reminded of a beta bug report back in 1996 regarding how Outlook Express (then called "Microsoft Internet Mail and News") handled percent signs in email addresses (I think). The way Outlook Express did it was standards-conformant, and I s...

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Dec 17, 2004
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Excellent blog about Windows and Unicode

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Michael Kaplan has probably forgotten more about Unicode than most people know. He knows about the mysterious placement of the Won character in the Korean character set, and the same for the Japanese Yen character, what the invariant locale is, why Korean text sorts strangely if you pass the NORM_IGNORENONSPACE flag, and other strange and wond...

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Dec 16, 2004
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How to get more hits on Google than even Steve Ballmer

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Ein deutscher Blogger namens Tony schrieb dass Robert Scoble is gaining on Steve Ballmer. Mit anderen Worten, dass eine Google-Suche nach "Robert Scoble" ungefähr 172.000 Seiten findet, während eine Google-Suche nach "Steve Ballmer" ungefähr 302.000 Seiten zeigt. Er fragte, ob jemand einen anderen Microsoft-Angestellten finden kann...

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Dec 3, 2004
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Why are documents printed out of order when you multiselect and choose “Print”?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

If you select say five files and then right-click them and choose "Print", they tend to print in a random order. Why is that? The shell invokes the Print verb on each file in turn, and depending on how the program responsible for printing the document is registered, one of several things can happen. These three ways of registering print act...

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Nov 29, 2004
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Why doesn’t the RunAs program accept a password on the command line?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The RunAs program demands that you type the password manually. Why doesn't it accept a password on the command line? This was a conscious decision. If it were possible to pass the password on the command line, people would start embedding passwords into batch files and logon scripts, which is laughably insecure. In other words, the feature is ...

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Nov 24, 2004
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Why can’t you drop directly onto a taskbar button?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

If you drag a object and drop it onto a taskbar button, you get an error message that says, You cannot drop an item onto a button on the taskbar. However, if you drag the item over a button without releasing the mouse button, the window will open after a moment, allowing you to drop the item inside the window. Why doesn't the taskbar let y...

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Nov 15, 2004
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Asking questions where the answer is unreliable anyway

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Here are some questions and then explanations why you can't do anything meaningful with the answer anyway even if you could get an answer in the first place. "How can I find out how many outstanding references there are to a shared memory object?" Even if there were a way to find out, the answer you get would be instantly wrong anyway because th...

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Nov 10, 2004
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Why does Windows not recognize my USB device as the same device if I plug it into a different port?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

You may have noticed that if you take a USB device and plug it into your computer, Windows recognizes it and configures it. Then if you unplug it and replug it into a different USB port, Windows gets a bout of amnesia and thinks that it's a completely different device instead of using the settings that applied when you plugged it in last time. Why ...

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