Monday 20th August, 2007
Old news, but interesting anyway. Tests by IT Week Labs had showed that Samba version was twice as fast as Windows 2000 Server when they tested it in 2002. The next year, Windows Server 2003 came out, and so did Samba 3, so they repeated the tests. This time Samba was 2.5 times faster.
In terms of scalability, the gains of upgrading to Samba 3 are even more striking. Last year we found that Samba could handle four times as many clients as Windows 2000 before performance began to drop off. This year we would need to upgrade our test network in order to identify the point where Samba performance begins to fall in earnest.
So, you can get something for free, which can handle many more clients, two and half times faster, or pay for something which can handle far fewer clients at a much slower rate. You would have thought it was a no-brainer, wouldn't you?
Monday 13th August, 2007
Amazingly, Windows Vista's content protection will protect it's users from seeing their own multimedia content.
"If there was any threat modeling at all, it was really badly done," Gutmann, from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, said while giving a talk on Vista content protection. "Once the enemy is the user and not the attacker, standard security thinking falls apart."
It's a strange world were people cannot play their HD-DVDs or listen to their own music:
While Microsoft's intent is to protect commercial content, home movies are increasingly being shot in high definition, Gutmann said. Many users are finding they can't play any content if it's considered "premium."
"This is not commercial HD content being blocked, this is the users' own content," Gutmann said. "The more premium content you have, the more output is disabled."
People actually pay money to be treated like this.
Thursday 28th June, 2007
According to WatchMouse, a Dutch firm that monitors server performance, Linux-based websites perform better. The ZDNet article states that WatchMouse surveyed over 1500 European websites.
... although the websites it surveyed were more frequently based on Microsoft's IIS web server platform running Windows than on Apache running Linux, the latter option performed better in terms of both uptime and load time.
No surprise to me, really. The comparative complexity of the two systems will affect performance as well as security.
"Even though the companies in our study seem to prefer Windows over Linux, our research shows they would be better off using Linux/Apache-based websites," said WatchMouse's chief technology officer, Mark Pors.
Thursday 24th May, 2007
There is a very interesting and useful review of Optical Character Recognition software over at the groundstate.ca website.
The quality of the packages tested varies, and the author recognises the usefulness of software having command-line capabilities (for running batches of conversions, for instance). Along with accuracy, ease of use is also tested, with many usage and build examples demonstrated. Well worth a read if you are interested in using OCR software on Linux.
Monday 23rd April, 2007
In this article, I show how I set up a recently purchased USB external hard disk drive as a backup drive for my Linux desktop PC. I'll delete the default FAT32 partition, create a new partition, make a reiserfs filesystem, and show how to use rsync to backup your important data.