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A picture tells a million numbers
It’s a tired old phrase that a picture tells a thousand words, but its endurance is a proud reflection of its ongoing significance. What’s less accepted though, is how important pictures are when it comes to communicating more technical information, from pure numbers (such as web-stats) to the makeup of complex computing processes.
I’ve long been fascinated by plots and graphs (in a former life I even lectured about them) and particularly in the majority of their authors’ misguided notions that they need to convey every last piece of information in the source data (as opposed to trends, important features and comparative values).
Google Analytics has recently redesigned to introduce (amongst many other things) Sparklines to quickly convey trends in data using small, information rich graphics:
These are great examples of discarding the dangerous notion that for a graphic to be valuable has to convey actual figures.
Anyway, I’m drifting from my original motivation for this post … hands up who thinks it’s possible to qualify the statement ‘Windows is less secure than Linux’ with two graphics that have no directly discernible information on them?
Well, Richard Stiennon recently presented two beautiful images that show system calls on Apache (Linux) and IIS (Windows) in response to a request for a simple HTML page. Time runs down the left, each dark blotch is process and the lines show the hierarchy of system calls. The more calls, the more connections, and the more effort is required to secure an application.
Apache (Linux):
IIS (Windows):
So which one do you think is more secure?