It refers to the comparisons that Microsoft was always releasing back in what I call 'the Slashdot days', 1998-2002 or so. One of the better known was a report

It refers to the comparisons that Microsoft was always releasing back in what I call 'the Slashdot days', 1998-2002 or so. One of the better known was a report made by a company called Mindcraft in 1999. If I recall correctly, they were hired by Microsoft to produce these benchmarks, though they didn't make that clear. Or worse, actually. The report is here: http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/first-nts4rhlinux.html http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/first-nts4rhlinux.html A LinuxToday article discussing the paper, in which Linus points out that the benchmark seems to have been literally performed at Microsoft: http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-04-27-002-10-NW-LF http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-04-27-00... A LWN article: http://lwn.net/1999/features/MindCraft1.0.php3 http://lwn.net/1999/features/MindCraft1.0.php3 "Executive Summary Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 is 2.5 times faster than Linux as a File Server and 3.7 times faster as a Web Server"