Speaking of MSDN, here's an article on Profile-Guided Optimization, which they claim often delivers a 20% performance boost for the price of a couple instrumented runs.

Scott Mitchell's MSDN series on data structures is quite good. His latest, on graphs, is a must-read for those who lament the end of "design the data-structures first."

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I have a brand-new emachines M6805 laptop, perfectly stock, onto which I am trying to install Windows XP-64. I have spoken with colleagues who have the exact same model, exact same bios revision, for whom the install of the exact same build goes perfectly. For me, it freezes solid within …

This has to be one of the more interesting "help wanted" ads to surface of late -- Entertainment Liaison for the US Department of Homeland Security. Up to \$136K:

The Entertainment Liaison Office supports the Office of Public Affairs by influencing how the Department of Homeland Security is portrayed in mass …

Claris sez, "A collection of cool geeky companies located in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, from anime/manga publishers to videogame companies to special effects shops. Best of all? Direct links to the job opening pages of each site, whenever I can find 'em. Might as well work somewhere …

Code by Perry Lee. Useful.

This is a little odd thing for people who don't want to touch toilet seats. via [Boing Boing]

"Design the data structures first" is a practice that has dramatically faded over the past decade. Today, when structural design is done at all, it is done in an object-oriented manner, which has different goals than traditional data-structure design. In C++ code, you'll still see complex data structures, but most …

Dan Bricklin posts about the "Programmers at Work Reunion" that happened at SD. "Programmers at Work" is a classic book from the mid-80s that interviewed several of the most influential PC programmers of the time, from Bill Gates to Gary Kildall. Many of the profilees were on a panel the …