Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
It’s the safest operating system ever
Vista is taglined by Microsoft as being the safest version of Windows ever. Maybe it is, but nevertheless Linux is safer. Under Linux you don’t have to cripple your system by running anti-virus tools which intercept every single program startup and file download. You also don’t have to suffer your screen turning black and asking for permission to perform certain tasks. You don’t have to fear malicious software being able to corrupt the system.
Microsoft brought in user access control (UAC) in Vista to provide a safer experience, but it has proven to be intrusive due to the vast number of computer programs which insist on elevated access whether it is genuinely required or not.
To be honest, this is a problem of Microsoft’s own doing. From the very beginning Windows was flawed because it encouraged users to log in with full administrative rights. This invited trouble because rogue programs (or user mishaps) had no restrictions on the damage they could cause.
Yet, Linux had a different philosophy. It encouraged users to work under a regular user account which had no special rights or access. A user could temporarily elevate their privileges if required or log in as the super-user account temporarily, when performing systems administrative tasks like loading on new software.
As a result, Linux never experienced the same problems that Windows did. It was secure by design from the beginning while Microsoft has a battle to undo the bad habits their operating system has instilled in its users and developers.
Your PC can look after itself
There’s none of this defragmenting business to worry about under Linux. With Windows you can’t just sit back and enjoy your computer, you must exert effort to maintain it too. Any guide to Windows will instruct about the importance to routinely defragment the file system. Yet for Linux it is simply not an issue.
The reason for this is that Windows tries to locate files as close to the start of the hard drive as it can. When you remove or edit files you create small gaps. Newer files must then attempt to fit within the gaps. If they cannot fit completely they will become fragmented with portions stored in different locations. Over time as this goes on many files are located all over the disk and performance is degraded.
By contrast, Linux was designed from the beginning as a multi-user system and thus it was mindful that many people would be editing files at the same time. So, it approached this problem by, in essence, scattering files all over the disk. This means there’s generally plenty of empty space to save large files or to move files around if need be. Fragmentation only really becomes an issue when the disk is so full that there simply are no gaps sufficient enough to store a large file in completely.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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