MrZipf

As an older self-taught engineer who went through interviews last year this is great advice. Other books I found particularly useful were:

Algorithms by Dasgupta, Papadimitriou and Vazirani:

http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Sanjoy-Dasgupta/dp/00735234...

And Elements of Programming Interviews by Aziz, Lee and Prakash:

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Interviews-Inside...

You'd like to think there are places in the world that this would make a lot of sense - your phone and tablet could get updates that your PC woke up to download overnight, and all your devices avoid bottlenecking on a slow edge network.

It's also 2015, and I'm not sure we should celebrate that MSFT has not progressed on this since the early 00's.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/p2p.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/antr/Pastry/pu...

In a big company, this will have had nothing to do with engineers as they are not employed to do business deals.

A business specialist will have made a deal with Superfish in the name of the company. In all likelihood they won't have an understanding exactly how Superfish works, but they are drawn to the revenue opportunity. They'll have put a request in to the imaging team and then it's job done.

They'll be team at Lenovo now reviewing how they got into this mess and trying to ensure it does not repeat in future.

This looks great. They also have the advantage that James Hamilton mentioned AMZ got from building their own hardware - the get to do a cleansheet s/w design and not have to support all the gazillion options that Cisco does.

The talk was on HN a little while ago, worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIQETrFC_SQ

The scale at FB means they're probably saving hundreds of millions doing this.

Intel's SGX is just a hardware generation away. This allows for encrypted code to run inside hardware protected regions called enclaves - the memory regions are encrypted and decrypted as they are pulled into the core.

In a curious design decision, SGX allows the code in the enclave to access all the memory of the process it's associated with so it can do whatever ugly stuff it wants.

Can we have proof carrying encrypted code? Or perhaps a trusted code verifier that's not encrypted that runs in an enclave too?

https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/09/26/protecting... http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/thoughts-on...

Like it or loathe it, MSFT has always been a learning corporation. Teams are continually exploring different approaches to software development and trying to figure out what works best for their team and org. To their credit, they also publish a fair amount of this research and it looks pretty interesting, e.g.

Transition from Centralized to Distributed VCS: A Microsoft Case Study on Reasons, Barriers, and Outcomes, via http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/nachin/

Have Agile Techniques been the Silver Bullet for Software Development at Microsoft? via http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/bmurphy/

[ $0.02, Scrum or no scrum, for my money having a private office is infinitely better than open plan for getting stuff done. Each to their own, getting harder to find jobs with your own space ]

Haskell has significant contributions by folks at Microsoft and is a beautiful functional language with state of the art concurrency, decent GC, and a hardcore fan base.

And here's some notes on bridging between Haskell and Unity http://lambdor.net/?p=321