Get the Facts on Microsoft Benchmarks
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Now that Steve Ballmer and company have given you all the facts you need to compare Windows and Linux, allow me to add just one little tidbit.
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Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday released new test versions of what company co-founder Bill Gates called its three most important products: Windows Vista for desktop computers, Windows for servers and the Office business software suite.
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Microsoft has some serious questions to answer....
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Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.   As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.   He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.   He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.
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Microsoft posted a record $16.4 billion in revenue during the company's second business quarter, shattering its previous record by $2 billion. The software giant also blew away Wall Street expectations by recording a 92 percent rise in quarterly earnings in comparison with the year-earlier period.
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Statistics released today by market research firm Net Applications show that Windows Vista hasn't even licked its nine-year old ancestor, Windows 98.
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Will Microsoft feel the heat from a tiny monster?
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New partners and products signal Redmond&#39;s intent to dominate online music and video. Apple, watch out! Long ago, Microsoft (MSFT ) conquered the office -- its Windows operating system is on an estimated 500 million computers around the world.
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Nearly three years have passed since Microsoft Corp. released the last full version of Windows, the Redmond company&#39;s most important and profitable product.
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(InfoWorld) - VMware is making a free benchmarking tool available to IT professionals Monday to evaluate the performance of virtualization technology in their datacenters. Meanwhile, it seeks to assure competitors that the benchmarking standards will be fair to all of them. VMmark is available for a free download and can be used to determine how well virtualization software works with any of six typical datacenter workloads: file server, e-mail server, Web server, a standby server, an online transaction processing (OLTP) database, and a Java order entry system. VMmark runs on either Linux or Windows. VMware shared a prototype of VMmark in October 2006 with members of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC), an industry group that establishes performance benchmarks so customers can evaluate products. At that time, SPEC had just formed a working group to develop benchmarks for virtualization software. It is still working on those benchmarks. Though helpful for comparing various products, benchmarks are controversial because of concerns that the results can be manipulated to make one vendor look better than another. SPEC and other industry benchmarking groups are organized to create fair benchmarks that will yield impartial results. VMware acknowledges the skepticism about its benchmarking tool being a fair way to compare VMware with other brands, so it strove to be impartial, said Andrea Eubanks, senior director of enterprise and technical marketing for VMware. VMware is represented on the 13-member SPEC work group that is developing the virtualization benchmark along with competitors such as SWsoft and Trigence. Major technology companies including Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Intel are also represented. "We have created VMmark to be an open standard," said Eubanks. "In order to prevent misconceptions of what our intentions are. ... we presented our technology preview to SPEC so they could use it as the basis of the open-standards benchmark. We want to improve our product, we don't want to cook our benchmarks." VMware is introducing VMmark while the SPEC panel is still developing its standards. "The process to becoming a standard is a quite long one," said Eubanks. But VMware has not always been as impartial as it claims to be, said John Bara, vice president of marketing for XenSource, a VMware competitor. Bara says VMware released a white paper earlier this year comparing VMware's ESX Server hypervisor to XenSource's Open Source Xen hypervisor on a Windows operating system and the results showed VMware performed better. Bara says the comparison was not fair because Open Source Xen is optimized to run best on Linux, not Windows. XenSource's Xen Enterprise product is optimized to run Windows and would be a more balanced comparison to VMware's ESX. "We cooperate with VMware in a lot of areas, but we went back to them and said 'foul,'" said Bara. To VMware's credit, he said, it redid the test and accepted the revised benchmark that showed VMware ESX and Xen Enterprise with nearly comparable performance. Also Monday, XenSource entered into an OEM agreement with Symantec Corp. to embed Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation virtualized storage management software into Xen Source's XenEnterprise virtualization hypervisor.
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Microsoft posted its first-quarter 2005 financial results last week, reporting revenue of US$9.19 billion and net income of $2.9 billion.
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By Brier Dudley, Seattle Times  Feb. 19--I saw some amazing data centers in Redmond last week.   They were reliable, powerful, resilient and fault-tolerant.
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Or at least neutralizes their hype The Storage Performance Council (SPC) has issued a second benchmark meant to save customers from vendor spin hell.â¦
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Get a sneak peak at many of the key aspects of Vista, as it looks today. Though not vastly changed, there are several new looks in Release Candidate 1.
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Microsoft have let the public use a beta of their tool for some months while testing continues. The last few days have seen a new release of the beta which seems to be getting closer to bringing back consistently sensible results.
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Births benchmark for AMD, Intel and the server crowd Not afraid to help itself while it helps others, VMware today rolled out a public version of its homegrown virtual server benchmarking tool.â¦
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Take that, Apple Microsoft reported fiscal second-quarter earnings that surpassed Wall Street's already lofty expectations, as sales of PCs and Xboxes soared. The company also forecast future results that met or beat analysts' outlook.â¦