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Some years ago, I went out to dinner with a group of friends to a Chinese restaurant, and when the check was delivered to the table, one of my friends looked at it and handed it to me. "It appears to be written in some sort of secret code." It was written in Chinese. I pointed out that they probably chose the worst possible code in the world, ...

TipTalk wrote some time ago about the urban legend of the Reading Pane. In the conclusion, the article mentions the "read all standard mail in plain text" setting. And that reminded me of a story. Some time ago, the IT department sent out a message to all users on the subject of email safety. The gist of the message was that for increased safet...

My friend ::Wendy:: asks why there is an American English version of Windows but not a British English version. I am not the expert on this subject (Michael Kaplan might be a bit closer), but I can speculate on the reasons for this. This is all conjecture, so who knows how accurate it is. (Actually, most of what I write is conjecture; I just don...

Last year, I wrote about a virus that is responsible for the top six Explorer crashes, by a wide margin. I learned later how the authors of this XYZ Virus operate, and it happens to answer a question posted by commenter SteveL as to why these virus writers are so incompetent that they crash so much. First, the virus authors infect your compu...

Commenter Gabe suggested that the shortcut file should contain a bit that indicates whether the target of the shortcut is a folder, so that shortcuts to folders can sort with real folders. "That would allow them to sort properly without doing any additional work beyond that required to see its icon." (Commenter Josh agreed that "The performance re...

When your component depends on another component in the project, and that other component is missing features you need, you have a few ways of resolving the situation. Most people would recommend working with the people responsible for the other component during the project planning phase and coming to some sort of understanding about what you req...

Why, the Inspector Gadget, of course. Computer geeks think they're so clever.

Get it before it's obsolete. The Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines document is available in PDF format.

Commenter Mihai wonders, "Why would I want to keep the original file and the link in the same folder?" Dragging a file, and in particular right-dragging a file, is not easy for all people. There are people with poor dexterity who have trouble with dragging; for them, right-dragging would be even worse. But even people with normal levels of dexte...

My faith in humanity goes up when I see an unattended self-service stand where customers are trusted to pay for what they take. It works because the system is open to public view, and any passer-by (or even just a poster of a pair of eyes) can spot the cheater. (Then again, it takes only a tiny percentage of cheaters to ruin it for everyone.) ...