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On the linguistic productivity of the word spam
The word spam has spawned off its own corner of the English language. spamdexing inflating one's rank in a Web index sping Trackback spam splog A fake blog spim Spam instant messages spasms Spam SMS...
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No, not that M, the other M, the one called Max
Code names are rampant at Microsoft. One of the purposes of a code name is to impress upon the people who work with the project that the name is only temporary, and that the final name will come from...
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Although the x64 calling convention reserves spill space for parameters, you...
Although the x64 calling convention reserves space on the stack as spill locations for the first four parameters (passed in registers), there is no requirement that the spill locations actually be...
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Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: Whose line is it anyway?
I got seven out of ten right.
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If you're waiting for I/O to complete, it helps if you actually have an I/O...
We saw earlier the importance of waiting for I/O to complete before freeing the data structures associated with that I/O. On the other hand, before you start waiting, you have to make sure that you...
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The window manager needs a message pump in order to call you back unexpectedly
There are a bunch of different ways of asking the window manager to call you when something interesting happens. Some of them are are in response to things that you explicitly asked for right now. The...
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News flash: Companies change their product to appeal to their customers
There was some apparent uproar because there was an industry which "changed the flavoring of their product depending on which market segment they were trying to appeal to." Well duh, don't all...
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What's the difference between FreeResource and, say, DestroyAcceleratorTable
MaxMax asks a number of resource-related questions, starting with "How do you Unlock a LockÂResource?" and culminating in "What are the differences between FreeÂResource and DestroyÂAcceleratorÂTable,...
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Microspeak: Cadence
Originally, the term cadence meant the rate at which a regular event recurs, possibly with variations, but with an overall cycle that repeats. For example, the cadence for team meetings might be...
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How to rescue a broken stack trace: Recovering the EBP chain
When debugging, you may find that the stack trace falls apart: ChildEBP RetAddr 001af118 773806a0 ntdll!KiFastSystemCallRet 001af11c 7735b18c ntdll!ZwWaitForSingleObject+0xc 001af180 7735b071...
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How do I create a topmost window that is never covered by other topmost windows?
We already know that you can't create a window that is always on top, even in the presence of other windows marked always-on-top. An application of the What if two programs did this? rule demonstrates...
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Why does my TIME_ZONE_INFORMATION have the wrong DST cutover date?
Public Service Announcement: Daylight Saving Time begins in most parts of the United States this weekend. Other parts of the world may change on a different day from the United States. A customer...
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The old DEBUG program can load COM files bigger than 64KB, but that doesn't...
Some times ago, I described why a corrupted binary sometimes results in the error "Program too big to fit in memory". Commenter Neil was under the impression that nonrelocatable programs files could...
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Why can't Explorer decide what size a file is?
If you open Explorer and highlight a file whose size is a few kilobytes, you can find some file sizes where the Explorer Size column shows a size different from the value shown in the Details pane....
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Raymond's highly scientific predictions for the 2011 NCAA men's basketball...
Once again, it's time for Raymond to come up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This year, I look at the strength of the school's football team, on the theory that a...
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What's up with the mysterious inc bp in function prologues of 16-bit code?
A little while ago, we learned about the EBP chain. The EBP chain in 32-bit code is pretty straightforward because there is only one type of function call. But in 16-bit code there are two types of...
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What does the "l" in lstrcmp stand for?
If you ask Michael Kaplan, he'd probably say that it stands for lame. In his article, Michael presents a nice chart of the various L-functions and their sort-of counterparts. There are other...
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You can extend the PROPSHEETPAGE structure with your own bonus data
... for when regular strength lParam just isn't enough. A little-known and even less-used feature of the shell property sheet is that you can hang custom data off the end of the PROPSHEETPAGE...
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How does the C runtime know whether to use the static-linking or...
In response to a description of what happens when you get dllÂimport wrong, nksingh asks, "This seems like a problem for the CRT. As far as I know, VC gives you the option of statically or dynamically...
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Why is there the message '!Do not use this registry key' in the registry?
Under Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentÂVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders, there is a message to registry snoopers: The first value is called "!Do not use this registry key" and the associated data is...
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