Less is more

It should be an easy concept to grasp:
LESS LINES OF CODE EXECUTE FASTER THAN MORE LINES OF CODE

Yet, some people still need to see proof:

0. Win7 5x slower than XP
http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/Test-shows-Windows-7-is-5x-slower-than-XP-in-UI-and-apps-load-slower-than-in-Vista

1. Vista: 25% slower than Windows XP
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/06/microsoft

" We did informal tests, booting both Vista and XP on the same hardware, and Vista was between 15% and 25% slower than XP in benchmarks"

2. Inforworld: WInXP slower than Windows 2000

"Waiting for Windows XP"
http://web.archive.org/web/20071012211343rn_1/www.infoworld.com/articles/tc/xml/01/10/29/011029tcwinxp.html


" as indicated by results of independent testing performed by CSA Research and confirmed by our work in the InfoWorld Test Center. Our tests of the multitasking capabilities of Windows XP and Windows 2000 demonstrated that under the same heavy load on identical hardware, Windows 2000 significantly outperformed Windows XP. In the most extreme scenario, our Windows XP system took nearly twice as long to complete a workload as did the Windows 2000 client"

3. Win2k slower than NT4...

Microsoft looks to bury test results that show NT is faster than Win2000
http://web.archive.org/web/20061022093046/www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/01/03/05/010305opcringely.html

"Microsoft recently threw around its weight -- and its fat wallet --
to squash an independent testing lab from publishing benchmark results
that the lab ran for InfoWorld's sister publication NetworkWorld. The test
demonstrated that SQL Server 7 runs nearly twice as fast on Windows NT
4.0 than it does on Windows 2000 ."

FC

Forget VNC, TurboVNC, TightVNC, UltraVNC, RealVNC... the good one is Tiger, TigerVNC

It seems like it was only yesterday that a team of very creative people at a joint research facility in Cambridge, UK -operated at the time by Italian firm Olivetti and US database giant Oracle (talk about strange bedfellows)- created "Virtual Network Computing" or VNC for short.

Then, over the years, the concept of a free software implementation of a "remote desktop" began to catch on (once upon a time people would buy propietary products to do this sort of thing, like "PC Anywhere" or IBM Desktop on Call, Win2You, etc, just to name a few).

Well, the problem with VNC was that while the underlying RFB protocol was very strong, some bean counter *ssholes at AT&T who first bought the reserach labs later decided they´d rather use the money more wisely and proceeded to shut down the ORL research labs in Cambridge. The Guardian lamented it here.

Over the years, people started making VNC stronger, faster, and forks of the original VNC started to appear: TightVNC, TurboVNC, UltraVNC, and finally... RealVNC.

So, fast forward to 2010... What of all flavours of VNC to use?.

My answer: none of the above.

My choice is TigerVNC.

TigerVNC is a fork of RealVNC, incorporating many of the improvements from TightVNC and better security (which on RealVNC are features in the paid/commercial version only).

See:
http://tigervnc.org

Windows and linux builds are available at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tigervnc/files/

From the site: “TigerVNC is an advanced VNC implementation. It is based on the fourth generation of VNC. TigerVNC also includes features from the TightVNC and TurboVNC projects.

This includes accelerated JPEG compression. TigerVNC supports the latest X.Org X server.”

Hope this helps...
FC

Every software program should include a reinstall script

It is my belief that every software program should include a "Re-install" script. Something that we can run from the command line and have all configuration values set up as new, without actually downloading and running the installer package again.

This allows moving apps from one system to another effortlessly, and recovering from a backup much easier than having to run a dozen installers and click a dozen times for each. Yes, I'm a command-line junkie.

IBM, back when it was a software firm with a clue, had the very bright idea to include a "rebuild.cmd" command line util with its IBM Works productivity suite included with OS/2 Warp 3.0 onwards.

Hence, the "reinstall.cmd Software Movement" is born, today, to replicate that kind of functionality as widely as possible for popular applications. Target systems are Windows mostly, but could also include OS/2 and Linux for closed source apps that might benefit from it.

I´ve created a redirector at [http://bit.ly/reinstall] that leads to this post, which will be updated to include new reinstall script developments.

My first target? Sun's Virtualbox. Find my re-install script here
https://sourceforge.net/projects/vbox-users/files/

I will release every one I code under a GPL license (they're just command line scripts anyway).

FC