Undermining your own proclamation

Date:	January 27, 2004 / year-entry #36
Tags:	non-computer
Orig Link:	https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040127-00/?p=40863
Comments:	4
Summary:	I'm pulling for the Mars rovers as much as the next geek, but you still have to scratch your head at the following statement: Charles Elachi, the JPL director, said: "I am completely confident, without any hesitation, that I think we will get that rover back to full operation." So he's absolutely sure that he...

*DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN THIS CONTENT. If you are the owner and would like it removed, please contact me. The content herein is an archived reproduction of entries from Raymond Chen's "Old New Thing" Blog (most recent link is here). It may have slight formatting modifications for consistency and to improve readability.

WHY DID I DUPLICATE THIS CONTENT HERE? Let me first say this site has never had anything to sell and has never shown ads of any kind. I have nothing monetarily to gain by duplicating content here. Because I had made my own local copy of this content throughout the years, for ease of using tools like grep, I decided to put it online after I discovered some of the original content previously and publicly available, had disappeared approximately early to mid 2019. At the same time, I present the content in an easily accessible theme-agnostic way.

The information provided by Raymond's blog is, for all practical purposes, more authoritative on Windows Development than Microsoft's own MSDN documentation and should be considered supplemental reading to that documentation. The wealth of missing details provided by this blog that Microsoft could not or did not document about Windows over the years is vital enough, many would agree an online "backup" of these details is a necessary endeavor. Specifics include:

A "redesign" after 2019 erased thousands of user's comments from previous years. As many have stated, the comments are nearly as important as the postings themselves. The archived copies of the postings contained here retain the original comments.
The blog has changed domains many times and the urls have otherwise been under constant change since 2003. Even when proper redirection has been set up for those links, redirection only works for a limited period of time. For example, all of the internal blog links that were valid in early 2019, were broken by 2020 without proper redirection.
The blog has been under constant re-design and re-theming since its inception. It is downright irritating to deal with a bogged-down site experience as the result of the latest visual themes designed for cell-phone browsers. As of this writing, it is cumbersome to navigate titles with only 10 entries per page. While it is nice that the official site has a search feature, searching using this index (with all titles on a single page) is much quicker (CTRL-F in most browsers).

Duncan says:

January 27, 2004 at 7:38 am

Not only that, but the phrase "without any hesitation" is hesitation :-)

Tim Marman says:

January 27, 2004 at 8:59 am

No, I think it’s actually a correct statement. His confidence is applied to the fact that he thinks it will happen, not that it will happen :)

(Err ok, what I said isn’t that clear, but hopefully you understand what I mean).

Centaur says:

January 27, 2004 at 9:43 am

In Russia, we have an anecdote that goes like this:

==

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are flying a balloon. It’s misty. They lose their way.

Suddenly they see a skyscraper and a man in one of the windows. “Where are we?” they ask him. He thinks for a while and answers, “In the basket of a balloon.”

“Damn those mathematicians,” says Holmes, as the fly away from the skyscraper.

“Holmes, how did you know he was a mathematician?”

“Elementary, Watson. His answer was absolutely correct and absolutely irrelevant to us.”

==

Markus K says:

February 4, 2004 at 2:25 am

You get the same joke with a manager and an engineer. The manager asks where he is and the engineer’s answer is absolutely correct but completely useless. Then the manager says "I’m lost, get me out of here!" – ordering the engineer to do something impossible to fix the manager’s mistake. Oh well…