performance
We've always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we're performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There's plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays,
hardware
It's been almost a year since I covered The State of Solid State Hard Drives. Not a heck of a lot has changed, but the topic is still worth revisiting, because if you care at all about how your computer performs, solid state hard drives remain a life
linq
While I may have mixed emotions toward LINQ to SQL, we've had great success with it on Stack Overflow. That's why I was surprised to read the following: If you are building an ASP.NET web application that's going to get thousands of hits
strings
I'll just come right out and say it: I love strings. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a problem that I can't solve with a string and perhaps a regular expression or two. But maybe that's just my lack
storage
In the last three years, I've gone from carrying a 512 MB USB memory stick to a 16 GB USB memory stick. That's pretty amazing. According to the storagereview.com archives, hard drives with 16 GB of storage were introduced sometime around the beginning of 1999.
file copy
If you've used Windows Vista, you've probably noticed that Vista's file copy performance is noticeably worse than Windows XP. I know it's one of the first things I noticed. Here's the irony-- Vista's file copy is based on
data structures
One of the most beloved of all data structures in computer science is the hash table [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table]. > A hash table is a data structure that associates keys with values. The primary operation it supports efficiently is a lookup: given a key (e.g.
performance
I first saw Yahoo's 13 Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site referenced in a post on Rich Skrenta's blog in May. It looks like there were originally 14 rules; one must have fallen off the list somewhere along the way. 1. Make Fewer HTTP
macos
I frequently hear apocryphal stories about Macs booting much faster than Windows boxes. There's a great set of Mac boot time benchmarks on the Silver Mac site that provide solid empirical data to back up those claims: Intel iMac G5 iMac G5 iMac Mac Mini 10.4.4
performance
From the "you can't make this stuff up department", this 2003 gem from blogging O.G. John Dvorak: IDLE-TIME PROCESS. Once in a while the system will go into an idle mode, requiring from five minutes to half an hour to unwind. It's weird,
hardware
I don't go out of my way to recommend building your own computer. I do it, but I'm an OCD-addled, pain-loving masochist. You're usually better off buying whatever cut-rate OEM box Dell is hawking at the moment, particularly now that Intel has finally abandoned
compression
In my previous post, I extolled the virtues of WinRAR and the RAR archive format. I disregarded 7-ZIP because it didn't do well in that particular compression study, and because my previous experiences with it had shown it to be efficient, but brutally slow. But that's