The Old New Thing

Why is my starting directory ignored when I elevate a command prompt?

Take a shortcut to the command prompt or some other Windows component, right-click it, and select "Run as Administrator." The "Start in" directory from the shortcut is ignored and you are always dropped into the system directory. Why is the starting directory ignored? To avoid a category of attacks (current directory attacks). According to ...

What seems obvious today may have been impractical then

In the discussion of the environment variable problem, BryanK posits that the real mistake was allowing batch files to modify their parent environment in the first place. Instead, they should have run in a sub-process. Try saying that when your computer has only 16KB of memory, which is how much memory the original IBM PC came with. Heck, ...

The magical healing properties of safe mode – bonus content

Okay, so you already read The healing properties of safe mode in TechNet Magazine. Here's the bonus content that was cut for space. First, the original title was "The Magical Healing Powers of Safe Mode," but it got trimmed for space reasons. (Ich bin mit der deutschen Übersetzung des ersten Satzes ein bisschen enttäuscht. Die ...

Am I for real or just a robot? part 2

Some time ago, somebody clicked the "Contact me" link in the navigation bar, and despite the warnings, asked a technical question. I responded, "If you have a question you can post it to the suggestion box." The reply: Please, don't use a bot which pretends to be you to answer e-mails. Especially such a poorly-designed one. Maybe those ...

Welcome to the Microsoft email culture

For good or ill, email is the most heavily used communication system at Microsoft, so much so that most people at Microsoft are known by their email addresses, sometimes more so than by their legal names! For example, most everybody at Microsoft knows Stephen Toulouse by his email address, "stepto" (pronounced as if it were spelled "steptoe...

Would a team of midgets be the greatest offense in baseball history?

Todd Gallagher answers the weird sports questions you always wondered but knew were too stupid even to ask. Think of it as the sports version of Mythbusters. Well, he sort of gives away the answer to the last question in the title of his book, Andy Roddick Beat Me with a Frying Pan. The stories behind how he set about finding the ...

How long does it take to create a 16TB file?

Although the theoretical maximum file size on NTFS is 264−1 clusters, the current implementation of the NTFS driver supports files up to "only" 16TB minus 64KB. (In other words, the disk format supports files up to 264−1 clusters, but the current drivers won't go above 16TB−64KB.) Back in 2002, in order to verify that the ...