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MS products are great for building cut-and-paste business applications. They're business tools. They make for bad hacking tools. Right now, I'm trying to figure out how the CLR handles threading, specifically when calling a control that uses asynchronous method calls. Guess what, the documentation is incredibly vague, the newsgroup postings are worthless, and I'm having to take a best guess and hope for the best. Another question I had is how C++ .NET mixes managed and unmanaged code. What if I created a multithreaded C++ .NET application? How would it behave? For whatever reason, most hackers avoid MS products like the plague. When I search the web, I can find discussions about the most pedantic pieces of Perl, but the average C# discussion is about 'synergizing your GUI' or playing 'cool tricks with delegates'. The most prolific MS programmers seem to be architects who muck with design patterns. In short, .NET it's a business tool, not an engineering or hacking tool.

I've given a couple suggestions of good MS programmers. This list is by no means exhaustive. Frankly, outside of book authors, I don't know of any great MS programmers. There aren't many OSS projects for Windows and I don't have the foggiest idea who does what at Redmond. Some potential great programmers are:

Jeffrey Richter
He wrote 'Advanced Windows Programming' (the closest thing to a Steven's like opus on the NT kernel I've seen, and Richter still falls short).

Ken Henderson
He's a SQL Server guru. His book 'The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals' is the closest thing I've seen to a documented reverse engineering of any MS product.

Bruce McKinney
He's the author of 'Hardcore Visual Basic'. Did I mention he hates VB.NET?

Michael Abrash
He's obviously a ringer, but still... He wrote the 'Zen of Assembly Language', the 'Graphics Programming Black Book', but he also worked on the XBox, DirectX, MS Word (IIRC), and Quake. When John Carmack bows before your graphics programming voodoo, that says something.

Honorable Mention:
Charles Petzold

It's also worth noting that 3 of these men are known for trying to pick apart a black box of a MS product. I'm sure there are some real programming luminaries at the Redmond campus, I just don't know who they are.

http://clab.mystarband.net/Efficient_generator.htm

It looks like you have plenty of space for panels. Or were you using that grass for something important?

I suppose I can accept your arguments over better performance in cloudy conditions. But I think more efficient storage is *much* more important considering we'll never be able to do away with storage completely.

By the way, have you considered that grass might be a more economical way of meeting your energy needs than solar panels?

A counterexample

Mock me if you will, but there was once a book called Hardcore Visual Basic. It was one of the few intelligent books written on the subject. I'm not a big VB fan, but I can appreciate how it once was a great RAD tool. I wished all of Microsoft's VB-like documentation looked like this. It was rigorous and concise.

I remember all of the laughs I got when I went around the office asking if anyone had ever heard of a VB book written for C++ programmers. Of course, my smart-ass smirk probably didn't help. Ironically, I found out that a good dose of the Win32 API in C++ and a 20-minute tutorial from a fellow colleague would have probably been the best route. Still, half of VB's problem is Microsoft's overall tendency to suck the brain out of the developer's head. While this might be okay for an end-user, I can't recommend doing this to developers.

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."

Like everything else in life, there's nothing wrong with bragging if you can do it. Sure, we mock such cliché verbiage, like the line above. Dickens' can pull off such an overdramatic line. I can't. I can't make a 1000 page tome interesting. Tolstoy could. So, if a book is hardcore, let it be. If it isn't, it will make a mockery of itself.

The cruel irony

Apparently the author got so sick of Microsoft ruining a perfectly good thing, he decided to stop coding VB altogether. You can see a copy of his vented frustrations here. His fellow VB coders mocked him for trying to get a language to do more than it was supposed to. If that ain't hardcore, I don't know what is. I think he's writing Java code now.

When you download MP3s...etc

If you're having trouble finding the "suggested memo" on the RIAA's website, here's a mirror.

There have been a few slashdot articles about satelite internet access, mainly starband, which people are running Windows in a VM so they can use it from a linux machine. Although it appears one has to do some tuning with linux even if windows is sharing the connection.

When you Pirate MP3s You're Downloading COMMUNISM

:^)