PC Magazine in its glory days

You may have read the news. The PC Magazine is phasing out their printed edition. Here we present you an article from the very original PC Magazine, the first issue that started it all, publised 26 years ago. What you see is a scan of the Interview with Bill Gates. That's like a piece of historical article all geek should read...

Get the scan here:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/6emdw2 

Faster Internet does not come cheap

It has been a while since we last post here and the Internet landscape continues to change. Most importantly, a new generation of broadband Internet is now available for the States! 

We have always heard how crazy fast Internets is in Japan and other South East Asia countries. They can get like 100Mbps for as cheap as 50USD. The price-performance ratio is like 10 times better than the Comcast we have. But things are changing and we no longer have to be jealous. The new generation of broadband has arrived. 

With the introduction of Comcast Extreme 50 (DOCSIS 3.0), AT&T U-Verse and Verizon FiOS, Internet is faster than ever. These new generation of Internet services are quite expensive though, up to 140USD per month. It’s no good for home use. As business owners, you also have to think throughfully before getting one of these services, since there are other costs associated with this upgrade.

After you get one of these new broadband, you will still need a dual-wan router or multi-wan router. Why? This is because just like every new technology out there, they tend to fail more. Moreover, the Linksys or D-link you have may not be working for you anymore due to the new higher throughput requirement. You end up creating a bottleneck yourself using a cheap router for these services. You may as well update to the new Multi-WAN router with high throughput, such as the Peplink Balance 390. Another hidden cost is that you will have to upgrade your Wireless LAN too. The 802.11b/g Wi-Fi infrastructure has a theoretical limit of 54Mbps, which in real life, it never reaches that fast. You will therefore need to upgrade to 802.11n Wi-Fi too. 

Now that one massive network upgrade for a faster internet.

Firefox 3 Final Finally Out!

Firefox 3 final has finally landed.  It is used to compose this article.  Hurray!

You can download it directly above and/or wait to make the world record together in a few hours at the Download Day 2008 home page.

Either way, enjoy the BEST browser in history, and let's make history.

Update: Don't forget to get your certificate after downloading!

A 2nd look at pfSense, is it really FREE?

Got a number of users asking me if pfSense is any good as a "free" (as in beer) multi wan solution, rather than spending few hundred bucks for a ready-to-go, optimized, multi-wan appliance.

Guys, is it REALLY FREE?

We haven't tried pfSense ourselves so it would be unfair if I try to belittle it in any way.  But depending on how you do the math, it is NOT free as a COMPLETE solution.  Here is the cost structure:

• At the very least, you need a spare computer, see min hardware requirements.  (est. US$300)
• Studying, installation, testing, tuning, deploying, testing again.  From a few hours to a day or two of hard work (est. US$400 for a good IT professional)
• Obtaining commercial support (est. another few hundreds per year, maybe)

Obviously, I would not say this is a free solution.  If you don't agree, I beg to know why.

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Update (June 16): I had tried to make it clear that I was not pointing my fingers to the quality of pfSense at the original post above, but obviously I failed in this regard. ;)  People just thought I was attacking the open source model in general.  That's not my intention.  I tried to bring the cost structure to the table and let everyone rethink the cost of any solution in a big picture.

Reading Router Specification Carefully

As Internet bandwidth is ever increasing, routers are not performing fast enough to handle the increased load. Many router manufacturers are unable to catch-up with this and start playing numbers tricks. Having that said, buyer should be aware when choosing their next router, whether it’s a load balancing router or not.

System Performance/ Backplane Performance
These are more or less the capacity of the router hardware only. As an analogy, the Hard Disk Drive using SATA Interface has a performance capacity of 1.5Gbit/second. However, this number is just one of the many parameters that give you real performance. Writing file to your hard disk is also limited by, how fast the data is coming in, how fast the hard disk is spinning, etc. This is what happening with the router too. Router differs from the switch for its routing software inside, and the bandwidth after routing is usually slower than the backplane performance.

Throughput
This is the magic number you should be looking for. The faster a router throughput is, the more capable of this router in real world situation. Some router manufacturers call this utilization of routing performance, but they all imply the same thing. Throughput is the practical bandwidth after the routing software works.

The routing software will, for example, monitor TCP packets and applies the QoS feature. The more features a router has, the more resources it takes to process the traffic. This something you should consider when choosing your next router