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Via the suggestion box, Aaron Lerch asks whether a non-administrator can retrieve/evaluate environment variables as they would appear for another user. This falls into the category of asking for a security hole as a feature, specifically an information disclosure security hole, because you are extracting information from a user's private data wh...

It's that time again: Sending some link love to my colleagues.

A survey.

As we all know, users don't read error messages. And, sad to say, this behavior extends to the group of people you would think pay the most attention to error messages, namely, programmers, who are the people who cause your computer to display the error messages! Today's example comes from an internal programmer's tool which I will call Program&...

You may have noticed that it takes longer to reject an invalid password than to accept a valid one. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, it simply takes longer to confirm that a password is invalid. Your local computer retains a password cache. This password cache improves performance of local authentication operations, such as unloc...

The customer is the victim, not the program.

At an informal gathering, my colleagues and I started talking about our experiences being interviewed at Microsoft. One of the people there remembered how one of the pieces of feedback on the interview lo these many years ago was that although my colleague was certainly smart enough and hardworking enough, there seemed to be insufficient enthusiasm...

kip asks why double-right-click isn't a shortcut for Properties. Recall the logical consequences of the way Windows converts single-clicks into double-clicks. The double-click action is an extension of the single-click action. In the case of context menus, the proposed double-right-click action is not an extension of the single-right-click, bec...

Why have a conversation when you can dialogue? I think this is minimal work, but do others care? If they don't, then this is one for the ideas that failed bin. If they do, well let's dialogue... No need to talk when you can dialogue.

As I noted some time ago, one of the most important lessons I learned from Systemantics is Le Chatelier's Principle for complex systems which states, "Every complex system resists its proper functioning." At Microsoft, there are processes galore. For example, when a server is taken down for planned maintenance, you can expect a series of messages...