02
Aug
Debian stable is known for its longterm release schedule. This can be a good thing for certain server applications if it’s more important to keep them running than having problems with cutting edge, but not well tested releases of software. But then, while email certainly is a critical server app, it is in head-head competition with spammers. And the spammers unfortunatelly do not wait for new ways around spam detection until Debian releases a new stable release. We were running Spamassassin with sa-exim on our mail server, the former only 9 months old from october last year. The stats say everything:
Tons of emails, especially in the peaks are said to be clean, although they are not. Switching to Spamassassin from unstable yesterday in the late evening changed the picture completely.
04
Jul
Vmware’s Fusion is not released yet, still the RC1 feels so much better than what Parallels is offering now with their 3.0 release. Here are some good reasons to switch:
- Fusion does not crash - I have been running it the whole day already without any crash, neither a kernel crash nor an application crash. With Parallels I have the latter every hour or so at least.
- When clicking on one of the Dock icons of Windows application, sometimes (often in fact) Parallels does not come into foreground anymore. You can suspend Parallels though and resume it as a workaround, but the next point relativizes this solution.
- Parallels Suspend/Resume in version 3.0 is not stable - sometimes it works, then other times it just stays there telling me it is resuming right now.
I really have no idea how the quality assurance team at Parallels was able to oversee any of these points. Any one of them would a good reason alone to do the switch.
And a small collection of less important differences:
- sound playback in Fusion is with less noise, i.e. less interruptions
- Coherence is smoother than Unity in Fusion
- Drag’n'drop works in both, but running OSX apps from Win and vice versa is Parallels only
- Resume/Suspend seems faster in Fusion (and stable in fact, compare above 3.)
- CPU consumption of an idle Windows XP gives >10% in Parallels, but only half in Fusion
