Comparing two MS Office Word 2007 documents

Today I discovered the most useful feature of Microsoft Office Word 2007: Compare!

When tasked with the challenge of comparing two versions of a lengthy legal document, to determine what changed, I thought for sure I was doomed to read side by side print outs (or on screen displays), or install some tool that would require converting to ascii (and then I could use 'diff', for Unix's sake!).

But Microsoft bless, I found one reason to really like Microsoft today, and that feature is called Compare.

Enough blithering, here's how it works:
Open MS Word
Choose Review > Compare
compare two versions of a single document (legal blackline)
Select the original and revised documents.

And, as if by Microsoft Magic, you'll have a list of changes between the documents.



Open MS Word 2007,

Protocol & network speed

Greetings, Internet audience.

Out of idle curiosity, and a plaguing question from a client about why he wasn't getting as much throughput as he expected on super-sweet gigabit Catalyst 4948 switches as he expected, meaning he expected ~600Mbps throughput, and got about 130Mpbs.

I suspected two things:

1) bandwidth limitations on the servers, meaning that a 1Gbps NIC doesn't get 1Gbps speeds on the internal BUS, and thus, won't get near 1Gbps wire speed.
2) protocol. We were testing speed using scp, and I suspected encryption was reducing the speed.

Since #2 is a bit easier for me to prove, I staged a test on my home office network, at a time I was the only one on the network.

My plan:
copy a 706330624 byte file locally, using three protocols:
scp (tcp/22), tftp (udp/69), and ftp (tcp/21)
my home network is comprised of inexpensive 10/100Mbps Netgear switches, the kind you can buy at Fry's for $30, or could a few years back, you get the point.

Note the results are in Mega "bits" per second, not Mega "bytes" per second. For MBPS, divide by 1024, or check out this handy calculator-page:
http://www.matisse.net/bitcalc/

Results:
Protocol Mbps
scp ~20Mbps
tftp ~6Mbps
ftp ~89Mbps

As you may have already figured out, the cost of encryption on network speed, is pretty high, and if you are hearing complaints about your network speed, make sure and test with FTP for the lower-protocol-overhead results. My swag as to why tftp is so slow is udp retries, but this is slower than I expected. If anyone has an opinion to add, comment away.