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Microsoft Designed UAC to Annoy Users
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "At the 2008 RSA security conference, Microsoft's David Cross was quoted as saying, 'The reason we put UAC into the platform was 'to annoy users. I'm serious.' The logic behind this statement is that it should encourage application vendors to eliminate as many unnecessary privilege escalations as possible by causing users to complain about all the UAC 'Cancel or Allow' prompts. Of course, they probably didn't expect that Microsoft would instead get most of the complaints for training users to ignore meaningless security warnings."
It is an idiotic approach. Vista is the one being annoying....how could someone predict that end users would blame the applications and not the os that's to blame? Not to mention the whole issue of purposely designing a ui to annoy paying customers, to pressure 3rd parties to change.
Bad idea all around if this was their intention at design.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
You can configure to be like that with group policy. The official reason for the current default was that no ordinary process should be able to interfere with user input or fake the UI (i.e. showing some other always-on-top window with a different text that moves away just before the click etc etc). If you can accept that, just turn UAC into "same-desktop" mode, while not turning it off completely.
This is incorrect. The registry key in question is protected by permissions and by default requires you to be running as Administrator in order to make changes. If UAC is on, then to get a command prompt, regedit, etc running with Admin rights requires UAC approval somewhere along the line.
UAC is not about confirming specific actions like changing registry keys. It is about giving Windows permissions to use admin-level privileges. For example, once you allow a command prompt to run with your admin token, it can then launch admin-level tasks without any new prompts.
The problem is that even MS hasn't gotten around to removing all the annoying UAC popups based on stuff in their own interface. If you want to rename something in your start menu, you get 3 prompts from UAC. Same goes for moving or deleting something. I get tons of UACs, and most of them are from Windows itself, not other apps.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It does - if you're on a limited account.
It's only if you're logged in as administrator that you don't have to provide a password - you already did when you logged on.
Think of it this way - with UAC, even root has to sudo.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Or did you manage to usefully run X11 on a 486 PC with 8 MB of RAM?
Yes. And before that it was a 386sx 16mhz. Worked fine. With X. And a web server running in the background, serving over dialup w/ static IP. Uphill. Both ways!
I'm serious about everything but the uphill both ways thing. I used that thing every day for at least a year. I don't remember it being slow, but I imagine it would seem so today.
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
Period PC hardware absolutely was capable of running X11. I bet quite a few idiots like myself did it at the time.
First, an 80486 was not really period hardware. The Pentium classic was on the market at the time that Windows 95 came out, clocked at 100MHz. It had been around for almost a year at that speed. This processor is a few percent as fast as modern CPUs.
Now, if you were to put Gnome or KDE on this hardware, it would be a pig. For me, I ran the Open Look Window Manager. It looks like this, which I think looks a little bit worse than Windows for Workgroups. But, man, is it lean.
All rolled up, that window manager, using colour depth common in the period, is probably more than ten times faster than a modern desktop. Through the mists of time, I'd say that Ubuntu, with modern hardware, seems a good three or four times faster than that old unix box, which fits.
For what it's worth, the experience was about as fast as the Sun boxes I had used at university a few years before. IIRC, they were running microSPARC I processors at 40Mhz. I don't remember the RAM, though. They ran OpenLook as well,which is why I used it a few years later. I was used to it.
You should know that X11 was released in 1987. It's not like they wrote and debugged it by desk checking, yeah? It ran on workstations available 20 years ago. Moore's law says there were five doublings of transistors per unit area between 1987 and 1995. To say that hardware in 1995 was too slow to handle security, protection, and a GUI is false on its face.
Posting anonymous because it's off-topic, but as someone that develops community sites, I'll tell you why using HTML sucks.
The first reason is output validation. Trying to strip out HTML you don't want users to use without mangling the output is very very hard. This happens on Slashdot all the time, when people use less-than and greater-than symbols in their text -- the parser thinks that they're writing HTML that shouldn't be allowed, and it gets stripped. (Preview, blah blah, whatever. It shouldn't happen.) Unless you're running an intelligent auto-correcting validator like Tidy, or you're parsing the document into a valid object model and then deleting nodes that way (both quite CPU expensive options, compared to running some regular expressions against a string), you're almost certainly going to end up with bad code coming out the other end (either because the parser strips something, or because the end user doesn't know how to write valid HTML), which sucks. With a BBCode, Markdown, or similar parser, you can skip over any invalid markup without breaking the output.
The second reason is convenience features -- instead of making the user write <p><a href="http://slashdot.org/~evanbd">evanbd</a> said:</p><blockquote><p>It's a web site. You use HTML.</p></blockquote>, you can just have them write [quote=evanbd]It's a web site. You use HTML.[/quote], and the parser will convert that intelligently into valid HTML. If you decide down the line that you want to change the code that's outputted for whatever reason, all you need to do is change the application logic and clear out the caches.
So, you see, there ARE good reasons. And to be fair to the poster, before this new comment system, Slashdot used to say below the post box what HTML could be used. Now, it's much less intuitive about what markup method to use.
Cheers,
HP driver annoyances (their shitty home(/SMB) devices are notorious for this and end up even in larger setups cause of ignorant buyers) can be usually quite easily fixed by searching the registry by device name or ID and giving users group more control over those subtrees. Be aware of security considerations and give only minimal level of extra rights that are neccessary.
Msconfig is your friend when disabling unneeded startup items. I especially loathe the auto-updaters that get installed by default if you don't know specific installer parameters. Sun java is class A example of that crap, it informs limited users about updates and recommends them to upgrade - only halfway through it throws error message.
"UNIX, being directly derived from Multics, benefitted from this lineage by having such robust security throughout it's design at the expense of not being able to run on commodity hardware."
Except of course Microsoft's Xenix, which Altos ported to the 8088 in 1982, and SCO offered for the IBM PC in 1983 (MS licensed Xenix source code OEMs and software companies rather than selling the finished product directly to end-users). A lot of people seem to forget that MS were UNIX licensees in 1979 and added several BSD elements to the V7 code they got from AT&T when designing Xenix. All of this happened quite a while before they bought QDOS to satisfy IBM's requirement for a CP/M-like system.
"Windows's legacy lies in DOS, which was designed to run on commodity hardware that completely lacked these capabilities."
Windows' legacy is actually the Lisa and Macintosh, which were what inspired MS to write it. It's a single user system because the Mac was a single user system, and MS chose to use DOS as a launcher because they were aiming it at users of machines that already had DOS and software for it on them. If they'd chosen to use a different OS with a different file structure that required different software, they'd have risked pissing off their potential customer base. Selling a graphical shell that ran on top of DOS but offered multi-user and and pre-emptive multitasking on the other hand would have pissed off IBM, whose contract with MS forbade them from offering those facilities in DOS or DOS-based software to ensure the PC didn't compete with their then lucrative minicomputer business. And as neither were necessary for a Mac-like experience, MS decided to take the route that rubbed the least people up the wrong way.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.