Contents tagged with Microsoft
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My First Microsoft Interview
I'm happy in my present situation, but working at Microsoft has always been in the back of my mind. So, when a recruiter for the Business Solutions division tracked me down, I was certainly going to find out more. The project sounded interesting enough, so when he asked if he could take it to the next level and ask some technical questions I said, "why not?" The questions he asked basically ranged from basic stuff everyone should know to basic stuff anyone who got a CS degree should know. I've been writing code just about every day for the past 15 or so years, starting with ASM. When I started out, I had an 8086 Zenith laptop with a CGA monitor that couldn't really do much of anything else. I actually wrote programs for quite some time inside the command line debugger until I managed to find some cheap assembler program at a local computer swapmeet. As a kid, I spent so much time programming that my mom would ground me from the computer, not from going out. My first first fight was with my programming buddy that "stole" my code and changed my copyright with a hex editor (Yeah, I learned that software piracy was a bitch before I could drive). Later, I got a bigger machine and moved on to C and then C++ and did a ton of work with the STL since those were still the days when Windows was still a DOS program :). These days, I write code literally from the time I wake up at 5:30 AM till I sleep (which usually results in far less than 8 hours of sleep). It's not that I have to. I just really enjoy it. I'll hit the clubs or go out on the town every once and a while, but most nights I'd rather be coding. But... I didn't get a CS degree. To the dismay of my teachers who all had their own ideas of what I should do, I was actually going to get a Theology Degree... I never could kick the programming habit though and ended up dropping out after two years to start a consulting company.
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Flash Lite on Windows Mobile
Lots of people are pointing to the release of Flash "Light" on Windows Mobile by Microsoft and claiming that this is to "hold people over" until Silverlight gets here. That is just utter BS. Who the hell has ever used a Flash Light site on their phone? Hell, who really uses Windows Mobile to do any web surfing? Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever used a Flash "Light" site. Ever. From ANY device. This is certainly not something that is happening because users are demanding it and it sure isn't going to sell any more phones. More likely, this is a reflection of two things. First, Microsoft under Ozzie is making it a higher priority to support other people's products. Second, this could help limit the chances of another lawsuit over in EU land should Silverlight get big. By providing support for Flash "Light" well ahead of the Silverlight for mobile release, Microsoft is showing that it wants to win this fight fair and square.
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Silverlight vs. Flash: The Developer Story
First off, let me explain my background for those of you who may not know. Way back in the day, when Flash 4 was the latest and greatest, Macromedia decided to “open up” the Flash file format. They released documentation (which was poor at best) and an SDK (which was horrible at best). I saw the potential here. Finally, the format third party developers could unleash their creativity and usher in all kinds of amazing tools. Unfortunately, the documentation was full of errors and the SDK was so riddled with bugs that you spent more time debugging it than using it.
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Open Source: It Costs Too Much
Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-. We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock. Now behold: QT is $3300 per seat. We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700). Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3 seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless. The support was bad. We will go for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140. A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats. Windows Unix services are free. After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas. Except for that embedded Linux (slated for WinCE or VxWorks substitution), we are not OSS shop anymore. [1]
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Microsoft = Evil
Do you see the devil in this picture on MSDN?
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Live Services are in Trouble
Nial Kennedy is leaving Microsoft. His reason? He joined MS to work on the Live initiatives and after MS stock fell when they announced their Live goals, they scaled back everything. Sounds like Live won't be nearly as cool as it could have been.
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Rory > Joel
Seriously, not only does Rory provide 10x more insight than Joel Spolsky's "I'm 10x Smarter than Anyone at Microsoft but My Software Still Sucks" blog, but he is a million times more entertaining. Take, for instance, his recent article about the Ballmer criticisms:
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Ballmer Ain't Goin' Nowhere!
Contrary to a lot of talk lately, David Kirkpatrick--the Senior Editor of Fortune--thinks Ballmer is here to stay and that it is a good thing.
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More Calls for Ballmer to Step Down
Looks like Business 2.0 is in agreement [1] with Joel [2] that it's time for Ballmer to step down from Microsoft.
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Joel On Ballmer
"As of now, Microsoft stock is surprisingly quiet given the announcement that Bill Gates will step down. It should probably be going down. Ozzie is smart but not in the same class as Bill Gates. And it's really Ballmer that needs to go." [1]