One factor when comparing operating systems is the cost itself and the cost of the programs that run within it. Windows software is on average very expensive. Programs that run within Windows often cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars, while Linux software is free for the most part. To understand this you must first understand that all programs run on source code, or sets of

The impact that Linux had on the industry was phenomenal. " Perhaps the most influential open source project to date has been and continues to be the Linux operating system. Linux is playing an increasingly significant role in the business plans of established computing companies, in university research labs, and in the development of new companies focused on Linux support and integration issues. According to an April 1999 survey conducted by Internet Operating System Counter, Linux was the operating system for at over 30% of Internet sites, and many sources have shown evidence of a rapidly growing worldwide user base for Linux." ( Dempsey) We all know that the Internet has tremendous amounts of users daily. Companies and services are starting to go with Linux based systems to maintain reliability ensure security and optimize system performance to handle all the hits that a site can take. Security is one of the biggest problems with windows. The way, in which it is coded, leaves a lot of room for "hackers" to sneak in and manipulate a sight. We have seen this with numerous big name businesses' that have been hit by hackers, who rely on the loose security of Windows. There is a kernal inside Linux that has been proven successful in fending off Service attacks by hackers. (Kargl) The technology behind Linux is very far ahead of Windows, and the benefits are growing daily.

It has an important feature that is not available for other operating systems. You can run Linux with other operating systems like MacOS, DOS, Windows 95, Windows NT, Novell, OS/2 on the same machine. It is an advantage of Linux that a user can easily compare Linux with other operating systems. A Linux system comes with a range of development tools (C/C++ Compiler, Perl, Tcl/Tk, Python, CORBA, Ada, Pascal, Lisp, REXX, Java, etc., as well as many text editors and integrated development environments), all of which are free. In order to create software under Linux, there is no expensive package to buy. Many NT users complain about system crashes or the dreaded "blue screen of death." NT systems face a lot of down times, which creates a problem for mission critical situations. It is very frustrating to be working on something for a couple of hours and see it vanish or crash. Unix based systems have experienced much less down times compared to Windows machines. Re-booting the server should not take place very often, and Linux outperforms NT in the category of reliability. The cost of the down times go to the administrators who must be there and the time lost to perform duties when the system is down. Very high regards go to the multitasking abilities and virtual memory usage that Linux provides. Although NT runs the same features, Linux provides the true meaning to running multiple programs without crashing the system. Although NT does support multiprocessing capabilities that just provides more terms for cost on hardware and doesn't necessarily mean the system will run faster. In Unix-like systems, user-level activities are implemented by running processes. Most Unix systems support a ``thread'' as a separate concept; threads share memory inside a process, and the system scheduler actually schedules threads. Linux does this differently there is no essential difference between a thread and a process. Instead, in Linux, when a process creates another process it can choose what resources are shared (e.g., memory can be shared). The Linux kernel then performs optimizations to get thread-level speeds; see clone(2) for more information. It's worth noting that the Linux kernel developers tend to use the word ``task'', not ``thread'' or ``process'', but the external documentation tends to use the word process. When programming a multi-threaded application, it's usually better to use one of the standard thread libraries that hide these differences. Not only does this make threading more portable, but some libraries provide an additional level of indirection, by implemen

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Approximate Word count = 2666
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page double spaced)