On many occasions, you might want to resize a PDF to send it by Email or put it on the web, today I had more than 50MB of PDF to be put as attachment of an article, and that was really too much. Using Linux you just need the program ghostscript to do everything and with a few commands you’ll have your resized documents.
For example my 50MB of documents become 15MB once I resized the PDF keeping a good quality, much better,
SATA is the most common bus interface on desktops and on many servers, so it’s important that you know some basic concepts about it, from the always informative Wikipedia:
Serial ATA (SATA) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives. Serial ATA replaces the older AT Attachment standard (ATA; later referred to as Parallel ATA or PATA), offering several advantages over the older interface: reduced cable size and cost (seven conductors instead of 40), native hot swapping, faster data transfer through higher signalling rates, and more efficient transfer through an (optional) I/O queuing protocol.
Revisions
Revision 1.0a was released on January 7, 2003. First-generation SATA interfaces, now known as SATA 1.5 Gbit/s, communicate at a rate of 1.5 Gbit/s, and do not support Native Command Queuing (NCQ).
Second generation SATA interfaces run with a native transfer rate of 3.0 Gbit/s, and taking 8b/10b encoding into account, the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 2.4 Gbit/s (300 MB/s). The theoretical burst throughput of SATA 3.0 Gbit/s is double that of SATA revision 1.0.
Serial ATA International Organization presented the draft specification of SATA 6 Gbit/s physical layer in July 2008 and ratified its physical layer specification on August 18, 2008. The full 3.0 standard was released on May 27, 2009. It runs with a native transfer rate of 6.0 Gbit/s, and taking 8b/10b encoding into account, the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 4.8 Gbit/s (600 MB/s).
In short they are usually referred as:
SATA revision 1.0 – 1.5 Gbit/s – 150 MB/s
SATA revision 2.0 – 3 Gbit/s – 300 MB/s
SATA revision 3.0 – 6 Gbit/s – 600 MB/s
So which revision are you using on your computer ?
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Like 1 year ago today I prefer to post a collection of the best April Fools that I’ve found around, some about Gnu/Linux and open source in general, but also on online service such as Twitter and youtube.
YouTube Contest Submissions Closing Tomorrow at Midnight
To our incredible YouTube community,
When we started out in 2005, we focused on rapidly increasing user engagement. We wanted an inventive way to draw people in and catalyze their creativity. The result? A contest for the best video on our site.
Nearly eight years later, with 72 hours of video being uploaded every minute, we finally have enough content to close the competition. We’ve started the process to select a winner and as of tomorrow at midnight, we will be closing the site to submissions.
This required more time if compared to Libreoffice versus Open Office, but it seem that the critical mass of users of another piece of open source software is moving away from Oracle, I’m talking about Mysql versus MariaDB.
Mysql is probably the most used open source database, it’s used in most of the more successful LAMP applications, such as WordPress, Drupal or Magento, after all the M of LAMP was an acronim for Mysql until today.
All started back in February 2013 when two large open source projects, Fedora and openSUSE, announced their intention to abandon the venerable MySQL database, now a property of Oracle, and adopt instead MariaDB.
In short MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL relational database management system, the impetus being the community maintenance of its free status under the GNU GPL, as opposed to any uncertainty of MySQL license status under its current ownership by Oracle. The contributors are required to share their copyright with Monty Program AB more information on this project on Wikipedia
The tool that usually I use to download from the command line is wget, it’s simple to use and it’s installed (or easily installable) on any system, but if you want something that can do the same job in a smarter and faster way you must really test Aria2
Aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source command-line download utility. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, BitTorrent and Metalink. aria2 can be manipulated via built-in JSON-RPC and XML-RPC interfaces, let’s see some practical use and examples.