It is so funny that we spend such amount of time optimizing data structures, but we never think about training our own (natural) memory. At least, I haven't thought about this until I just stumbled on this article . Here is a list of techniques: ...

Let's assume that you want is to write some simple code that writes to a text file. A few assumptions: 1) You need avoid corruptions of any kind. 2) Either all of your writes have to make it to the disk, or none of them. 3) The file is updated serially...

Here is an interesting probability problem who recently generated long discussions in our team: Say that you have an array of N boolean values, with all values initially set to FALSE. At each iteration step, you arbitrary pick an element in the array...

Lenovo tries to understand whether we prefer titanium or black for the next ThinkPad. And set up a really nice flash-based questionnaire: http://www.whichsideareyouon.com So far, it looks like Titanium got most votes by large margin...

OK - here is an surprising experiment. Do you know what this does? 1) Open some UI that contains an edit box (like notepad, or even the Start\Run... dialog) 2) Type something 3) Press Ctrl + Right Shift 4) Type something 5) Press Ctrl + Left Shift etc...

An empirical report was recently published by Jim Gray and Catharine van Ingen. Here is the summary: The SATA advertised bit error rate of one error in 10 terabytes is frightening. We moved 2 PB through low-cost hardware and saw five disk read error...

If, by some strange and unexplained phenomenon, all blogs on blogs.msdn.com will dissapear, except one, then my preference would be for http://blogs.msdn.com/devdev/ Very interesting stuff. I am already waiting for the next post... :-)

Simply brilliant: http://www.signal15.com/articles/2005/12/06/how-to-stop-filesharers-from-stealing-hotel-bandwidth

It's interesting that the Cell Broadband Engine is reviving batch-based computing as one of their preffered development paradigms. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-fpfunleashing/?ca=dgr-lnxw01CellUnleash Maybe it makes sense...

Here it is: http://local.live.com Check out some cool bird's eye images: - Space Needle - Microsoft campus . [ Update - Dec 8, 11 PM ] It turns out that the service is not exposed to the public yet. Funny enough, it works fine from my dev box, but...

Something interesting happened in the last few years. Something that I haven't explicity realized until I read Ross Levinsohn's statement . (Maybe you already know - Ross Levinsohn is the president of Fox Interactive Media, a large company who owns the...

I am watching with a lot of interest the evolution of search technologies in China - everyone knows about baidu.com (which seems to be the fifth most visited site on the internet, according to Alexa , just behind MSN, Yahoo and Google). But one interesting...

I am amazed too about the eBay XBox 360 mania (as noted in my previous post ). But I didn't thought that I've just barely scratched the surface here. How about a XBox face plate made from pure gold ? It's yours for only $36,000.00 on eBay . (yes, I...

OK - this is getting out of hand... :-) "I never (actually) thought people would bid on this," wrote the seller, who goes by the eBay screen name "silentbarrel," in response to an e-mail inquiry Friday. "I thought most people that were spending...

I found this quote interesting: The Internet Information Services 6.0 Web server featured in the OS has been enhanced with 64-bit support. This provides access to more memory and scalability for applications, Goldfarb said. "In high-performance...

These are the good old days. Windows Server 2003 R2 is now released to manufacturing! R2 was a very interesting release. Very different from previous ones in terms of how it was developed. Think about it: it took around two years to develop (actually...

I just discovered digg.com a few days ago, and I am hooked. So far, it seems surprisingly good. IMHO, it is almost as good and even surpasses Slashdot in many aspects: traffic (although alexa.com might be misleading here), volume of posts, fresh news...