Security and what it means to you.

One of the things that Unix is know for is security. Most of you will remember Windows before Vista, is that you would never have those annoying pop-ups every 2 seconds asking if you want to do something. Every time that you tried to open something, or pretty much do ANYTHING. Well that was Microsoft trying to get there security up.

The problem with windows XP, although it may be nice, it would never ask if you wanted to do something. This let viruses run themselves without ever consulting you. They knew that they could. Think about it this way. That's like your neighbor just walking into your house and eating your food, like you never existed. Not too nice now is that?

In the Unix world, this is different. In order to change anything that affects your system, such as adding or removing a program, running a program for the first time, changing anything that was installed for your operating system to run, and many other things, you need to enter your password. This is initiated in the terminal, or the script by using the command "sudo" before anything that needs administrative privelages.

What this ultimately does, is it protects the user from anything that they don't want happening, because they are required to enter there password. This can be a good thing for those people who often forget passwords, because you will never forget this one. It's not to the point where it is annoying, but it is enough to keep you secure. This is implimented in Macintosh, Linux, and other Unix based operating systems too.