The Old New Thing

>> I have not seen much that is useful there

Define "Useful"

I have not been a programmer in years, never did write much for windows. (DEC VAX, & Mainframes)

So in that context, there is not the much tha is useful here.

What I do is support computer networks, and help trouble shoot server issues. So any general knowledge of how systems work helps.

And I enjoy the no tech articals as well.

Billy

This "Star Trek IV" quote seems appropriate here.

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0092007/quotes

Kirk: Mr. Spock, have you accounted for the variable mass of whales and water in your time re-entry program?

Spock: Mr. Scott cannot give me exact figures, Admiral, so... I will make a guess.

Kirk: A guess? You, Spock? That's extraordinary.

Spock: [to McCoy] I don't think he understands.

McCoy: No, Spock. He means that he feels safer about your guesses than most other people's facts.

Spock: Then you're saying... it is a compliment?

McCoy: It is.

Spock: Ah. Then I will try to make the best guess I can.

My understanding was that he meant there wasn't a lot of information here that would be useful to solve the problem at hand.

So these are the people who write the bad code in your examples ...

Funny, that. I'm not coding win32. I'm not coding windows. I rarely have any direct involvement in /anything/ that this blog talks about. And yet I find it one of the most useful blogs on coding out there. Probably the most. Heck, I even often stop whatever I'm doing when I see it's time for an old new thing entry, and am somewhat disappointed if there is no tech entry for that day (I do enjoy the other entries, but not nearly as much as the insights I can get from the discussions around backwards compatibility, e.g.).

Anyways, to each is own. I, for one, find plenty of useful content here.

"Ur blog is really LOL but I don't know anything about that compoota thingy on my desk. Maybe u can help me in ur next blog. My desktop has 150 GB of dual code rams and an 8.8 litre n-video card with 320 horsepower, can that pull a trailer or do I need a 600 volt power box?"

Kidding. Actually, I'm interested in the creative uses of computers, not so much in the hard code and the history of Windows features is as close as I can get without actually having to deal with the scary internals.

For a moment I thought article was about my comment in a previous article :)

Intentional or not, this blog is definitely one of the most useful things on the Internet to read about Windows programming.

If Old New Thing comes up in some search results it's the first thing I'll read as the short articles usually get straight to the point and often deal with exactly the stuff that isn't obvious and that I find myself searching for help on.

Maybe they just meant they didn't see much useful for that very specific topic. Or they were unlucky in the posts they chose to browse.

Ofc., it's entertaining as well. :)

This blog taught me how to decipher API docs on MSDN.

I'm still not sure if that qualifies as "useful", but it certainly hasn't been entertaining...

Take heart Raymond, I find your blog the most useful one on the planet.

By the way, I've had the same insufficient-resources-please-reboot error in the past. Nothing but a reboot will fix it, not even resetting the 16-bit subsystem - I wonder why that is.

Darn, and there I was hoping to enrich my learns on facilitating and leveraging .NET-related activities most effectively

Did you notice the guy's SN was Simple Samples? Clearly Old New Thing is not about simple samples, so he'll have to look somewhere else.

BTW I don't think I ever added a blog to my feed on sight before I found the Old New Thing. And I do precious little with the Win32 API.

Reading this blog has put a little "Raymond" voice in my head that prompts me occasionally to do the right thing. It lives next to little "Ayn Rand" that got in there after reading Atlas Shrugged.

I'm trying to get ride of the latter but not the former.

Your blog is the first link in my "Blogs favourites" folder. I hope that says it all.

Lets be honest here ... I gotta believe readership here is high. Oldnewthing, do you have stats?

I am a .NET coder by trade, so I certainly enjoy .NET week.  I find the technical posts interesting and insightful.  Learning about the guts of the windows platform helps broaden my understanding of the system as a whole, and learning how to be a good Windows citizen helps prevent me from writing bad code when I p/invoke. If there is a blog more useful to Windows programmers, I have never read it!

I find this blog incredibly useful. Why, just last week, one of the tables in my database was a little wobbly. Put a copy of this blog under one of the legs, and presto, rock solid stability.

Our company just named a department "Onboarding something-or-other" (for bringing in associates of some kind).  I had to laugh, since Raymond recently talked about "onboarding".  What a weird word.

That person said it in the context of the problem they were discussing.

Man, what a touchy guy you are...

"If only more people would say that my Web site contained little to no useful information"

Well I'm a bad liar so I can't help you with that, sorry :(