A blend of opinions & news on tech topics like cloud, mobile, big data, app development and app performance from geniuses inside the technology industry.
More than two years ago we posted summary blogs on About:Performance of the Top Server-Side Performance Problems and the Top 10 Client-Side Performance Problems to give operations, architects, testers and developers easy to consume best practices. We feel that it is time to provide an update to these best practices as new problem patterns have since come into play. We also want to cover more than just problems that happen within your … [Read more...]
Many years ago, as I was starting out in this industry, I had a conversation with an AT&T network guru. He told me in no uncertain terms that for personal computers, 1Mb per second was the limit for broadband wireless networks. Anything more than that would require so much infrastructure, and consume so much power, that it would be totally impractical and uneconomic. But as I write this blog, I’m getting 5Mb/s plus on AT&T’s mobile … [Read more...]
It’s only been available for a few weeks, yet the pundits and technorati agree: MS Surface Pro has some miles to go in its quest to carve out significant market share in the brutally competitive tablet marketplace. The Surface Pro marketplace may be a little soft, too, in the form of numbers of developers actively writing applications for MS Surface Pro, and currently available applications For Surface RT and Surface Pro (about 50,000). … [Read more...]
When was the last time someone offered you $25 for that Pentium III laptop you’re keeping in the basement? (You were sure it would become a valuable antique). On a similar note, when was the last time you could buy a state-of-the-art, credit-card-sized single-board computer for under $35? You read that right. And, it comes to us from the UK, makers of other cutting-edge technology, like Triumph motorcycles and Jaguar … [Read more...]
I came across an interesting article last week entitled “Tassie retailer rejects cloud for mainframe.” It described how an Australian supermarket chain was bucking the “cloud computing” trend by upgrading to the latest Unisys mainframe technology to run its core business, including a 20+ year-old application suite. The article highlights the common perception among a surprising number of commentators that mainframes and cloud computing … [Read more...]
Touch interactions in the User Interface were new several years ago, with the advent of new portable devices. But in my sphere of development technology interest, it is Windows 8 that is introducing touch interaction to a much bigger audience of developers. Yes I know Windows 7 also had touch, but how many laptops, or 27 inch workstation monitors, were touch-enabled? If you still get junk mail catalogues from electronics discounters, you … [Read more...]
Big data fascinates me. It also frustrates me. First, the fascination: Some years ago, I read a book called “Freakonomics”, written by economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The book analyzes hidden socio-economic data to connect events and trends that conventional wisdom says aren’t connected. For instance, “What do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?”, and “Why do drug dealers … [Read more...]
We recently wrote about patient engagement and the leading role that technology, and mobile technology specifically, is playing in helping this approach to telehealth come to fruition. Patient engagement has been increasingly singled out as providing perhaps the best chance for improving patient care quality while controlling costs. While it’s easy to take the “bully pulpit” approach: dictating healthy habits through subscriber … [Read more...]
Much has already been written about how Cloud will level the IT playing field for SMBs who are trying to compete with larger Enterprises. It allows them to utilize enterprise-grade IT (salesforce automation, customer relationship management, supply chain management, disaster recovery etc) without the enterprise-grade price tags that used to go with it. The resulting increase in flexibility, agility, and time-to-market puts them on a par with … [Read more...]
SharePoint is a popular choice for intranet applications and therefore it is important that it performs well to ensure employee productivity. Waiting ten seconds just to load the initial dashboard doesn’t necessarily support that. At a recent customer engagement we identified an interesting source of a potential performance problem that impacts ALL SharePoint and .NET-based installations that use the ServicePointManager to access web services. … [Read more...]
