Posts Tagged ‘operating-system’

Out of curiosity over a question I saw on Ask Different, I created a poll on web browsers for you. My main goal is to find out why people use one browser over another. Is it actually better, or do you just use it because it’s the default browser? The survey is for users of all OSes, including iOS and Android. We will come back in a couple of weeks to post the results from the survey.

Please feel free to take the survey multiple times if you regularly use multiple operating systems. You can visit my survey on Google Docs here.

You can take a look at the final results in this Google Docs spreadsheet.

After reading a review of the Drobo FS, I became obsessed with network attached storage (NAS). I realised that a NAS device would neatly solve a couple of long-standing problems I hadn’t got around to fixing: data backup and data organisation.

This post will explain how I picked the hardware and software for my NAS.

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Ultimate Fish Battle Royale

Is NTFS really secure?

I have Mac PC, in which I have created a Windows partition and have installed Windows using Boot Camp. If I log in to the Mac OS, I can read all the files from the Windows partition from Mac. If I compare the same scenario from within Windows, Windows claims to secure a user’s private files (stored in My Documents for instance) from other users with equal or less privilege. I was expecting to see the same protection from Mac as well. I was expecting an error message in Mac to show that these files are inaccessible, if I try to see or open them. Can someone explain if my perception is right or am I missing something?

While the question specifically mentions NTFS the answer applies to almost every file system that is able to be accessed by another operating system and has not had native support for that file system built in.

The same would apply to EXT2/3/4 (Linux) support on Windows, HFS (Mac) support on Linux or any combination of file systems that are standard for one system and just barely “supported” on another.

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Ask someone what operating system they’re using, and chances are they’ll reply with some version of Windows. It’s hard to find a PC for sale anywhere that doesn’t have some version of Windows pre-installed on it. However, with recent privacy and security threats, Windows has taken a lot of heat for vulnerabilities found within the operating system. For that reason and perhaps others, many are beginning to look at alternatives. One such alternative is Linux.

The decision to migrate to Linux might be based on a number of factors such as performance, security, or stability. Linux is widely known for its robust kernel and raw speed. Many web servers run Linux – in fact, according to Wikipedia, the majority of websites are powered by Linux. Despite its huge presence in the server market though, it does not enjoy the same widespread usage on typical desktop computers – probably the two biggest reasons for that are education and compatibility.

A lot of people are surprised to find out that the same software they use on Windows is either available for Linux or a program with equivalent functionality can be used. In some cases, it is even possible to run Windows applications in Linux using a compatibility layer (such as Wine or Mono). In order to understand Linux a little better, we’ll take a look at its history.

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