Showing tag results for Other

Feb 9, 2010
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No matter what you do, someone will call you an idiot, part 2

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

There was quite a bit of reaction to what I thought was a simple "Hey, here's what's going on" article from last year, specifically on how the Adaptive Display Timeout means that Windows doesn't always start the screen saver exactly on time. As you may recall, this feature adjusts the time it takes for the screen saver to activate if the user keep...

Other
Feb 9, 2010
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Moving by staying put

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A few years ago, Michael Kaplan opined on his distaste for office moves, particular the ones for which there appears to be very little benefit. One of his options was "interview with whatever group moves into Building 24 and work for them instead." Many years ago, an organizational change to the project I was working on resulted in my group ceas...

Other
Feb 8, 2010
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For better performance, set all your monitors to the same color format

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Pplu wonders why programs run more slowly when the system is running with multiple monitors. Well, for one thing, of course, when you have more than one monitor, there's more stuff on the screen for the system to keep track of. It's the same reason that programs run more slowly on a large monitor than on a small monitor. And if there's only one ...

Other
Feb 4, 2010
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Why doesn't the shell animation control tell me the dimensions of the animation it is displaying?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

As we saw some time ago, the shell animation control suffers from many limitations because its job is to be a scaled-down animation control instead of one of its more full-featured counterparts. One customer wanted to know how to load an animation into the shell animation control and then query its dimensions. Well, there is no message that revea...

Other
Feb 2, 2010
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Microspeak: Future-proofing

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

It has been famously said that England and the United States are two countries separated by a common language. The same holds true for Microspeak. In the Redmond dialect of Microspeak, we talk about extensibility: Designing a system with specific points where features can be added in the future, often by outside parties. For example, an example ...

OtherMicrospeak
Feb 1, 2010
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It looks a little like CMD except there is white on the background

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Surely by now you've seen the video where NextGenHacker101 shows you how to use the "Tracer T" program to view "how many IP's are looking at Google", their name, and connection speed (to then to then to then). (And commenter squizz explains why it "worked" in spite of the http prefix.) But more awesome is the fact that some...

OtherExcursions into East Asian pop music
Jan 21, 2010
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Historically, Windows didn't tend to provide functions for things you can already do yourself

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Back in the old days, programmers were assumed to be smart and hardworking. Windows didn't provide functions for things that programs could already do on their own. Windows worried about providing functionality for thing that programs couldn't do. That was the traditional separation of responsibilities in operating systems of that era. If you want...

Other
Jan 14, 2010
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I could just use a picture of a regular-sized shopping cart from farther away

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Internet retailer woot! went to CES 2010 and covered it on their blog. (CES category.) But they don't cover what the media elite cover, the big announcements, the hot products. Nope, they cover the weird stuff. They have uncrating photos of CES itself, they infiltrate the The Consumer Breakfast Buffet Show, and they take super secret spy...

Other
Jan 14, 2010
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It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: If they can inject code, then they can run code

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

One category of the dubious security vulnerability is designing an insecure system, putting together an exploit, and then blaming one of the components of the exploit rather than the insecure system in the first place. I have found a critical security vulnerability in the XYZ scripting object which permits modifying files on the Web server itself...

Other
Jan 11, 2010
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Why aren't compatibility workarounds disabled when a debugger is attached?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Ken Hagan wonders why compatibility workarounds aren't simply disabled when a debugger is attached. As I noted earlier, many compatibility workarounds are actually quicker than the code that detects whether the workaround would be needed. Now suppose you find a compatibility problem with some applications that expect the function to return ...

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