The Old New Thing

Other - The Old New Thing

A warning to people averse to code

November 10, 2003 Nov 10, 2003 11/10/03
Raymond Chen
This is going to be a code-heavy week. People who are averse to code may want to just lie low until next week. I'll try to make it up by having next week be more storytelling-focused...

Why are companies so worried about retraining costs?

November 6, 2003 Nov 6, 2003 11/6/03
Raymond Chen
Remember, most people do not view the computer as a world to be explored. It is merely a means to an end. So they learn the five steps they need to follow, and if they can't do them, they get stuck. "I hit Alt+Tab like I always do, to switch to another program, but instead of switching, this strange window...

An anecdote about improper capitalization

November 5, 2003 Nov 5, 2003 11/5/03
Raymond Chen
I've already discussed some of the strange consequences of case-sensitive comparisons. Joe Beda mentioned the Internet Explorer capitalization bug that transformed somebody's name into a dead body. Allow me to elaborate. You might learn something. This bug occurred ...

How much is that gigabyte in the window?

September 19, 2003 Sep 19, 2003 09/19/03
Raymond Chen
Slashdot is in an uproar over a lawsuit charging computer manufacturers for misleading consumers over hard drive capacity. The manufacturers use the ISO definition, wherein a "gigabyte" is one billion bytes, even though most people consider a gigabyte to be 1024 megabytes. This is a tricky one. The computer industry is itself inconsistent ...

Improving the world one bad analogy at a time

September 18, 2003 Sep 18, 2003 09/18/03
Raymond Chen
One thing I am known for at Microsoft is my frequent use of bad analogies. Everybody else at work has had to suffer; now it's your turn. Why are there so many copies of svchost.exe running? What is svchost.exe anyway? Traditionally, each service runs in its own process. When you are ...

Something about Microsoft employees and milk

September 14, 2003 Sep 14, 2003 09/14/03
Raymond Chen
Behold the power of milk. Or something. Here's another milk-related bug report from Paul Vick. Paul also has a bug report that challenges the philosophical underpinnings of the eventing model...

Whimsical bug reports

September 12, 2003 Sep 12, 2003 09/12/03
Raymond Chen
Whimsical bug reports, while not a common occurence, aren't exactly unheard of either. They are a popular way to vent a shared frustration and lighten the mood. Recently, we changed milk suppliers for our cafeterias. Well, more accurately, our previous milk supplier was bought by another milk ...

The default answer to every dialog box is "Cancel"

September 1, 2003 Sep 1, 2003 09/1/03
Raymond Chen
The problem with displaying UI is that people will take every opportunity to ignore it. This story of how people deal with virus warning dialogs (via Don Browning) is a template for how users treat any unexpected dialog: They try to get rid of it. We see this time and time again...

Lessons from the trenches

August 19, 2003 Aug 19, 2003 08/19/03
Raymond Chen
Lessons I learned from working in product support the past few days: If the husband is in the room, hope that he leaves. (He will second-guess everything you do.) If there's a 14-year-old in the room, hope the parents give the phone to him/her. (Teenagers ...