Philosophical Geek

(If the thought of reading more than 4,500 words makes you hyperventilate, please go instead to my summary)
Please also read my Clarification on Why Study for an Interview

My Microsoft Background
Before I go into the specifics of the interview experience, I want to explain my background with Microsoft.
When I was just starting college, I got into [...]

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Put them on any drive other than C:\ (actually, any drive that you don’t heavily use at the same time)
Don Roessler discusses how to reduce the size of your virtual hard disk (.vhd) files, and some other tips.
Scott Hanselman talks about disabling unneeded services
Consider Virtual Server instead (not for [...]

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Expanding upon one of the topics in my post about 5 Attributes of Highly Effective Developers, I’ve been thinking of various ways to kick-start learning opportunities in my career and hobbies.
1. Read books. There are tons of books about programming–probably most of them are useless, but there are many, many gems that can greatly influence [...]

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I installed Windows Vista Service Pack 1 this morning. It took about 45 minutes, two reboots, and afterward I had no problems. It never showed up in Windows Update for me so I used the standalone installer (linked to above), fully prepared to reinstall some drivers. But afterwards, no drivers seemed to have any problems–Device [...]

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Anybody who’s taken high school or college mathematics know how phenomenal exponential growth is. Even if the exponent is very, very small, it eventually adds up. With that in mind, look at this quick-and-dirty chart I made in Excel, plotting the growth in hard drive capacity over the years. [source: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/hist-c.html]

Ok. it’s ugly, but notice [...]

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Jeff Atwood had an interesting post about software spoilage, in which he quotes PC World’s list of no-longer-good-too-bloated applications which includes Windows Media Player 11.
Are they kidding? WMP11 is a LOT better than WMP 9 and 10. It has better organization, and the fact that I can do instant filtering on albums, genres, artists, songs, [...]

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And they really do have all power. Specifically, they can hide and unhide nation-states at will! Don’t believe me?
SPUtility.HideTaiwan
Proof!
Technorati Tags: Taiwan, Microsoft, API, Windows, SharePoint, humor, geopolitics
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Tags: borg, microsoft, sharepoint, taiwan

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I recently upgraded to Microsoft Money 2007, and decided to finally add in some treasury bonds that I have had for years. I couldn’t figure out, how to do it, however, until I came across this FAQ.
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Tags: microsoft, money, Tips

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Many have said it already, but let me just add my voice: ClearType technology is the most wonderful thing to hit Windows in a long time. I recently received a new computer at work (3.4Ghz hyperthreaded, 1 GB RAM, 80/200 GB disks–a screaming machine, at least compared to what I used to have). and during [...]

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Over at Slashdot, Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack responds to some frank question about the Fedora project.
He talks about a number of topics:

Unified package managers across distros
Propritetary drivers
Differences in Linux over time
Fedora’s biggest weakness
Threat of Vista
inclusion of NTFS driver in kernel
Wacky package dependencies
a few others…

What his article demontrates to me is that Linux is going [...]

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