Showing tag results for Other

Mar 27, 2009
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I drive a car the way most people use a computer

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

It was interesting to me reading the reactions to my adventures driving a manual transmission. People seemed to be spending a lot of time trying to convince me that if only I were to expend a bit more effort in learning the finer points of driving a manual transmission and log enough time behind the wheel, then the activity will become less taxing...

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Mar 26, 2009
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The inability to lock someone out of the registry is a feature, not a bug

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

There is no way to lock the registry. Whereas you can open a file with a deny all sharing mode to prevent anyone else from opening the file, the registry has no such provision. You can't lock a registry key and prevent others from reading from or writing to it. There is an internal lock on the registry, but that's just to ensure that registry opera...

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Mar 19, 2009
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Defense in depth means that you protect against exploits that don’t exist yet

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Defense in depth is about protecting against threats that are already being protected against, just in case the existing protection fails. This is why there is not merely a lock on your safety deposit box, but also a lock on the door to the safety deposit box room, and then a lock on the doors of the bank itself. This is why you wear your seat belt...

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Mar 18, 2009
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You can’t globally reserve screen space; you can put up signs, but if somebody ignores the sign you’ll have to decide how to respond

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A customer sent the following question with the rather unhelpful subject line Need Help. They're not just looking for help; they're looking for Help with a capital H. We want to make something like an appbar, but without some of the limitations of appbars. For example, like an appbar, we want applications to avoid using the edge of the screen. ...

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Mar 13, 2009
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The perilous quandary of including external drivers on the Windows CD

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

(Technically, it's probably more a dilemma than a quandary, but I like the phrase perilous quandary.) Driver coverage is always a sticking point for Windows deployments. If the Windows CD doesn't include a driver for your particular hardware, you're probably going to say, "Windows sucks. I installed the latest version on my machine and it di...

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Mar 12, 2009
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Engineering is about tradeoffs: How hard will you work to save 68KB of disk space?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

One of the recurring themes in the comments to my explanation of the historical reasons why there are two copies of Notepad was to use a hard link (or possibly a symbolic link) to save having to waste the disk space for two whole copies of Notepad. As I like to say, engineering is about tradeoffs. Let's look at the cost-benefit analysis. On the ...

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Mar 11, 2009
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Sometimes people don’t even read what they’re typing

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

As an even more extreme case of people seeing something, confirming that they see it, but not actually reading it is someone who sees something, types it into an email message, yet still doesn't read it. Subject: "Invoke or BeginInvoke cannot be called on a control until the window handle has been created." exception crashes our progra...

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Mar 6, 2009
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Why is the Win32 epoch January 1, 1601?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Public Service Announcement: This weekend marks the start of Daylight Saving Time in most parts of the United States. The structure records time in the form of 100-nanosecond intervals since January 1, 1601. Why was that date chosen? The Gregorian calendar operates on a 400-year cycle, and 1601 is the first year of the cycle that was active a...

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Mar 2, 2009
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The Suggestion Box is for suggestions, that’s why it’s called a Suggestion Box

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

As you may have noticed, Mondays are generally used for responding to suggestions posted to the Suggestion Box. But often people post things into the Suggestion Box that aren't actually topic suggestions. Commenter Ulric decided to take up a slot in the suggestion box by pointing me to a funny video because he "couldn't resist." Actually, I was w...

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Feb 26, 2009
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Pressing a registered hotkey gives you the foreground activation love

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

One category of application that people complained about is the application launcher which keys off a hotkey and doesn't get the foreground love. Well, except that windows with registered hotkeys do get the foreground love. After you call the function to register a hotkey, the window manager will send you a message when the user presses tha...

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