Recently someone on the FreeBSD-Current mailing list (Poul-Henning Kamp) suggested some tips for precision benchmarking in FreeBSD. This was a veritable gold mine for me as I was gearing up to conduct a salvo of benchmarks on three different systems to compare performance in a variety of areas, but during my testing I found that most of these tips were useless or ill-advised for testing hardware. It occurred to me too late that the author of the post probably had software benchmarking in mind when he wrote it, and unfortunately that has little to do with performance testing of hardware. So, in the spirit of Bruce Lee, I took what was useful and worked from there; I read over the message thread, took into account all of the suggestions made by various people on the list and adapted them for my hardware benchmarking project.

There have been many reviews and articles about the AMD64 architecture, but thus far there have been no performance reviews that show the advantage of 64-bit. Likewise there have been no comparisons between AMD's new 64-bit processors and Intel's Pentium4 Prescott core processors when taking full advantage of their technologies. Why do people benchmark the Athlon 64 and Opteron in i386 mode? Why do people benchmark the P4 processor with Hyper-Threading turned off? When people buy or build systems with these technologies, they expect to use them -- and they want to know how they compare to one another. Today all of that will change; I have the world's first 32 and 64-bit performance comparison between the Athlon64 3200+ and the Pentium4 3.2E.

A few weeks ago in part 1 we examined five often misused or misunderstood terms in the computing world. Today we're going to take a look at five more industry terms that many people are confused about or use interchangeably in the wrong context.

Too often I hear people new to computers tossing around technical terms that they obviously do not understand. Using terms you aren't familiar with will confuse you even more, and if you're going to be spending big bucks on a new computer, you darn well better know what you're buying -- and that means understanding the terminology you're confronted with.

It's a rather difficult mission to shop for an operating system for a server. When most people think of server OSes they think of Unix, and when they think of Unix they think of SCO, the company that owns the Unix source code. But there are so many more choices out there, the least of which offers a bonanza of advantages over SCO's Unix products. Having said that, let's explore the Unix world and take a look at what it has to offer the server and workstation market.

If you're thinking of switching to GNU/Linux, BSD Unix, or proprietary UNIX from a Windows environment, the first obstacle you're going to encounter is language. The terminology is a bit different from what you're used to in Windows because the two operating systems... well, operate differently. Most people will probably be interested in switching from Windows to GNU/Linux rather than other proprietary or free Unix systems, so this article will deal mostly with GNU/Linux, although these terms will generally apply to other Unixes as well.

It's a hoop we've all been jumping through for years: agreeing to lengthy license agreements that we never read. Few people ever read them because they're long and difficult to understand. License agreements are generally written for lawyers, not regular people, and are meant to be "interpreted" rather than understood. It's time we started reading these licenses and determining if we really agree to them or not. Indeed if we do not agree to the terms, we should not be using the software. Read on for an in-depth explanation.