Showing tag results for Other

Oct 13, 2004
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Dispatching items collected from the suggestion box

Raymond Chen

Okay, I got around to digging through the suggestion box, and today I'm going to dispatch the items that don't require much thought but seemed worthy of reply to some degree. You won't learn much of anything today. Other entries require more thought. Each non-code entry takes me a half hour or so, more if I have to do research (if somebody as...

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Oct 12, 2004
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People lie on surveys and focus groups, often unwittingly

Raymond Chen

Philip Su's discussion of early versions of Microsoft Money triggered a topic that had been sitting in the back of my mind for a while: That people lie on surveys and focus groups, often unwittingly. I can think of three types of lies offhand. (I'm not counting malicious lying; that is, intentional lying for the purpose of undermining the results...

Other
Sep 16, 2004
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A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Raymond Chen

I have kept every single piece of spam and virus email since mid-1997. Occasionally, it comes in handy, for example, to add naïve Bayesian spam filter to my custom-written email filter. And occasionally I use it to build a chart of spam and virus email. The following chart plots every single piece of spam and virus email that arrived at my...

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Sep 14, 2004
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The x86 architecture is the weirdo

Raymond Chen

So unlike all the others, yet people think it's the normal one.

Other
Sep 6, 2004
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The shift key overrides NumLock

Raymond Chen

Perhaps not as well-known today as it was in the days when the arrow keys and numeric keypad shared space is that the shift key overrides NumLock. If NumLock is on (as it usually is), then pressing a key on the numeric keypad while holding the shift key overrides NumLock and instead generates the arrow key (or other navigation key) printed in sm...

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Aug 22, 2004
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Summary of the recent spate of /3GB articles

Raymond Chen

A table of contents now that the whole thing is over. I hope. I'm not sure how successful this series has been, though, for it appears that even people who have read the articles continue to confuse virtual address space with physical address space. (Or maybe this person is merely mocking a faulty argument? I can't tell for sure.)

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Aug 20, 2004
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The curious interaction between PAE and NX

Raymond Chen

Carmen Crincoli covered the interaction between PAE and NX on his own blog, so I'll merely incorporate his remarks by reference. (And notice again the concession to backwards compatibility. Without the backwards compatibility work, XP SP2 would have shipped with NX support and an asterisk, "* and those of you who have device drivers that a...

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Aug 19, 2004
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Myth: In order to use AWE, you must enable PAE

Raymond Chen

Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) does not require PAE. I don't know why some people claim that it does, since it is so easy to demonstrate otherwise. Take a program that uses AWE. If you don't have one handy, you can use the one that comes in MSDN as a sample program that demonstrates how to use AWE. Grant yourself "Lock Pages in Memory" privi...

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Aug 18, 2004
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Myth: PAE increases the virtual address space beyond 4GB

Raymond Chen

This is another non sequitur. PAE increases the amount of physical memory that can be addressed by the processor, but that is unrelated to virtual address space. (Remember that PAE stands for Physical Address Extensions.) PAE increases the physical address space (the address space that the CPU can use to access the memory chips on your computer) ...

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