Technical Devices

I attended the UK launch of Office 365 yesterday and found it a puzzling affair. The company chose to focus on small businesses, and what we got was several examples of customers who had discovered the advantages of storing documents online. We were even shown a live video conference with a jerky, embarrassing webcam stream adding zero business value and reminding me of NetMeeting back in 1995 – which by the way was a rather cool product. Most of what we saw could have been done equally well in Google Apps, except for a demo of the vile SharePoint Workspace for offline editing of a shared document, though if you were paying attention you could see that the presenter was not really offline at all.

There seems to be a large amount of point-missing going on. <

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Many of you are familiar with the packet capture tools Ethereal, Netscout’s Snifffer or Wireshark. All of these are very useful for debugging network-related problems. The problem is that you have to run one of these tools on a computer with special drivers to enable the capture, and sharing the reports isn’t always easy, especially on mobile devices. What if you could put the captures up in the cloud? Enter the idea behind CloudShark from QA Cafe.

QA has deep expertise in developing test software that is used by some of the largest ISPs around the world, and they have used this experience with CloudShark.

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The 11-minute long animation shows sequences such as the spacecraft separating from its launch vehicle near Earth and the mission’s rover, “Curiosity”, zapping rocks with a laser and examining samples of powdered rock on Mars, NASA said.

The animation provides detailed views of the spacecraft. Based on stereo images taken by earlier missions, the animation also provides scenes of real places on Mars.

“The animation also provides an exciting view of this mission for any fan of adventure and exploration”, said Mars Science Laboratory Project Manager Pete Theisinger at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

“Curiosity” will land on Mars in August next year for a two-year mission.

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• By Donald White
• Jun 24, 2011

California state Sen. Leland Yee, a candidate for mayor of San Franciso, recently came under fire from what seemed to be his own campaign’s Twitter feed. A string of tweets from the account @Yee4Mayor criticized his record in the state legislature and mentioned his 1992 arrest on suspicion of shoplifting. Of course, the account really had no connection to Yee’s campaign. It was the latest example of the new role social media is playing in electoral politics, the New York Times reports. As c Full Article…

A detailed benchmark posted on codeproject investigates the performance of basic operations including string handling, hash tables, math generics, simple arithmetic, sorting, file scanning and (for C#) platform invoke of native code. These are the conclusions:

• There is only a small performance penalty for C# on the desktop versus C++.
• Mono is generally slower than Microsoft .NET but still acceptable, and all the benchmarks ran without modification.
• The Compact Framework, an implementation of .NET for mobile devices, performs poorly.

My observations: this matches my own experiments. Why then do some .NET applications still perform badly?

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