The problem is the art scene and elitist art professors forcing designers and web developers to do things the NEW way. That is make it like a stop sign in ALL CAPS, no features, all minimalism, flat, or these students get bad grades.
Guess what? When they graduate they work for companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Windows 8 and the horrible blinding white Office 2013/office 365 looks identical. All high contrast. Gradients ewww that is soo 2003. Borders? No distraction that is the old way. Features... eww CLUTTER.
Skuemorphism is where we need to go back to. It worked fine the way it way and
First they take my XP away with the best UI. Then take away my menus in office 2007 with ribbons. Then they cripple Youtube so I can't browse by category. Then take away the ok UI of Windows with Metro full screen and 70% of all the functionality. Then they change perfectly Gnome 2 with a half cell phone gnome 3/shell! Now office 365/office 2013 is all FREAKING WHITE IN ALL CAPS where I get a migraine looking at it. Then they change Hotmail.com to all blinding with blue.,.. now gmail is changing too. GOOD lord. I have had enough. Stand up folks and let those elitist art professors know we will not tolerate this minimalism and reduction of features. Art majors are being brainwashed by these guys who go on to design websites and operating system GUI's who do not tolerate dissent and have never worked in real jobs before.
They were assholes to post impressionist artists too back in the day because it wasn't the *new* thing. Now anything that doesn't look like it is 2 colors and non descriptive gets flunked out.
The link even has a demo you can run? The fact is Google does not want to port this as they want us to use proprietary dart and other technologies optimized for Android. But with Firefox OS you can do a lot with javascript iwth JIT and hardware acceleration.
That is where the market is heading. It is converging.
True Windows 8 did not get it right, but other MS which sucked like Windows, Windows NT, sql server, IE, VC++, were not overnight successes either. Also X Window managers blew goatballs too when they were new too. Then came XFCE, KDE, and Gnome developed years later. Gnome 3/shell is the first and it will mature too and is heading in the same direction. On the Apple side iOS is really MacOSX tuned for smaller devices, and Android is a mobile version of linux running a mobile stack of software on top in java (according to the courts even).
In 5 years they will all run the same OS and yes the same GUI too once it is more tuned to have desktops appear dynamically on the fly once a keyboard or mouse is detected. Windows 9 is going this route and so will later versions of gnome.
Also the high end Apple and Samsung phones already have these quadcore cpus you speak of and gigs of ram. IN developing countries computers are still mighty expensive and mobile low end phones and tablets running Firefox OS will be appealing when you only take in $500 a month pay.
In 2020 we will not be able to tell the difference of a mobile device or computer except by the screen size. Or the PC will be like the mainframe and die off just like it and be forever niche.
Apple had a far superior product. MS just got some cheap plastic and put XP on it with a digitizer and called it the day and wondered why they didn't take off? They did not really make a tablet like Steve Jobs did.
Love him or hate his guts I give the man credit for making sure the products are ready, sleek, work, well, and perfected. MS and Blackberry deserved to lose. They didn't even try to make a good product and thought marketing droids would sell them.
Apple made the whole thing mobile inside and out from the beginning. Both the iphone and ipad were years ahead of it's time. If Metro for tablets (not desktops) were out in 2008 we would not be discussing it. MS would have won hands down but Apple and then Android built consumer oriented devices actually made to run applets.
It feels like every few years, distros switch to a new way of doing things.
Why not just improve on whatever the current way is, and evolve it into the perfect init, rather than switch to an entirely new system so often? It annoys current sysadmins who have to learn new software for no good reason, it introduces bugs that make systems less stable, and it further breaks/fragments compatibility between distros.
Because things have changed since the early 1980s. Example lets say you have at work on a network. You close the lid and travel overseas and open it again on the hotels network when it wakes up. How do you write an inet to deal with dynamic changes like this?
Also in the early 80's you only had 25 text based utilities and apps on a unix server. It was not complicated to do things. A modern linux distro has how many apps, daemons, dependencies, etc. Now image the above scenario with a laptop waking up on a different network thinking of all the complexities of a modern distro?
An event driven system makes sense. You can program your system to make changes based on conditions and scenarios that pop up. Network trunk gets hit high? No problem I can setup the event driven systemd to page me and run some packet shaping. Hacking attempt? No problem send an alert and sandbox processes etc.
Sun and Apple have all moved away from inet to event based systems as well.
So in other words you do not like it because it looks and feels different than what you are used too with old inet.
How is this different than the 50 year old XP users who hate and hop up an down on how bad Windows 7 is because if looks too funny? It is not a bad program.
It is different because event driven is what is needed today. Yes unix users are hardcore and do not like changes to things, but this isn't 1982 anymore where you had maybe 35 shell utils and programs total and you could all neatly manage it all in/etc/init.d like clockwork. Computers did not fall asleep on one network and wake up in another? You did not have to think about usage scenarios where things happened based on a network intrustion or when disk space is near filled. You did not have bloated startup times due to everything trying to load at the same time or things running only sequentially.
Init 3 to run a console, and init 5 for a gui is archaic today, but thought it was cool in 1999. Init itself is very confusing and you needed to be a hacker in the 1980s to understand what was and why. Frankly the only reason it seems so easy to those reading this is because you are familiar with it.
Windows 9 is the answer. They had a peak of a unified platform but it was not finished at BUILD last month. MS made a mistake and should have made Windows 8 apps work across all.
I think next year we will find out but it maybe too late... like freaking 7 years late after ANDROID and IOS where METRO is the new OS/2. They became the old IBM for being behind the times and not quick and nimble like Apple and Google.
It is hard when you have many apis and libraries all changing all the time.
I think CentOS/Redhat offer something like this, but not for the average Slashdot geek. I like the idea of an equilivant of the SXS in Windows. You have dynamic loading of apis and.so's and the linker links the right one at run time. Today Linux requires each one to work and will segfault or crash otherwise if you have the wrong.so or dependency.
This will make storage larger but you wouldn't have issues like wanting to use the latest gimp, but still run Gnome 2. hmm problem here etc.
Yeah AD with 25 inherited GPOs and legacy IE crap was more expensive than desktop apps just to give these horrible sites to run. I am not talking about IE 6 era sites even.
Complexity is a killer.
However without a stable ABI and API I can not say Linux is better either. Drivers break way too much as a result of the extreme ideology of forcing opensource and killing blobs. This makes NVidia only support later kernels or ignore older hardare and screw users.
This is why myself and Hairfeet no longer support Linux for average users.
I do admit I was more of a FreeBSD bigot but after 5 and 6 were so bad and I stayed with 4.x all the way to 4.12 I kind of gave up:-(
I do not care about RMS extreme ideology about freaking drivers. I WANT THEM TO JUST WORK. Why can't apps just work between versions like MacOSX, Solaris, FreeBSD with the compat libs, and even Windows?
I can click on a setup.exe from the XP era and unless it is a horribly written business app requiring local admin (more like win98 style written) it will run on Windows 8 no problem.
Why do ATI drivers from 2 years ago not run on Linux? ABI and API compatibilities as Linux developers feel that is evil and encourages binary blobs! Funny no other platform has this problem with them.
Socialist ideology about everyone that is closed source is harmful I know lets purposedly not include a stable ABi so things break when I do an apt-get update to force ATI and NVidia will just work. That is the ticket.
These companies are still struggling to make win 7 compatible apps and only care about the latest versions. My ATI drivers from 2011 will not work on a modern distro., Therefore I am choosing Windows and sticking to Linux for a VM. I might piss some some Slashdot moderators but I speak the truth. Why can't a stable ABI and API exist so one thing can just work? It is freaking 2014?
Pasionate about teaching? How about passionate to pay your bills and own a home?
If someone with that kind of background can get a better job to better him or herself then why bother putting up with the hell students and parents and tax payers put them through? YOu can be passionate about cooking too. Does that mean you want to work as a fry cook? Hell no. People ahve kids and responsibilities.
There are more positions opened than those who are great at it because the pay isn't enough.
I can say software engineer 35k a year! MUST BE PASSIONATE. What kind of applicants will I get? Students in college who wrote a game once for fun is about it right? They will go elsewhere where 50k min+.
Still there is not a lot of money. Especially for someone with a CS degree can walk from the teacher job and land a 55k a year job the following week.
Teacher pay needs to be adjusted. Science and math teachers should be paid as much as they would with other professions with those said degrees. Of course the tax payers including hte TEA Party would scream SOCIALISM at such an outrageous waste of tax payer money but it says a lot. Why do it when you have the student loan company and landlord hassling you for cash each month while you struggle to make it through.
Broward county is very expensive so yes when you pay $1600 a month for a 1 room apartment that $41,000 does not go far. Especially if you owe student loans in the tens of thousands like all recent grads do today.
The issue were 1st generation crappy sandforce controllers and data compression. If the internal table got corrrupted they were bricked.
This has changed and there are websites (sorry my laptop was re-imaged a week ago and used to have hte link) which can back up my claims. Mid range SSD's (non pro or enterpise grade) last to about 75 TB for a 256 gig ssd before write failures. NO they do not just go PUFF either. That is a controller failing. They slow down and event logs report write failures and remappings gradually at this point and just slow down.
THe pro serious with 480 gigs and higher have ratings up to 1 PT! That easily exceeds a mechanical disk. I have a samsung pro which can probably get near the 150 - 300 TB range.
If PCs booted like phones and tablets perhaps the pc market would be in a better position? SSD is the answer.
The 1st generation crappy SSDs failed due to bad controllers and compression with sandforce. NOt because of write endurance.
I had a link (sorry this system I am typing on was re-imaged) where someone tested this out.
It took 75 tb before the mid range ssds started to have issues. The pro serious can go higher as they are designed with 4 million writes per cell vs the 1 million.
Intels, Samsungs, Sansdisks, and other brands (not munchkin) can run and have run for years and years with 5 - 15 gigs a day write endurance. Infact they are as reliable if not more than a mechanical disk.
Others can vouch too it takes awhile to kill a disk if it runs an OS with TRIM support (linux slowly getting this as it is semi TRIM in all but the recent kernels) and not fill it up to 99% filled.
That would be a waste. A mechanical disk is better for MP3s.
Booting, editing videos, running virtual machines, video game, compiling software, or doing any database or something that requires lots of disk will benefit many times fold from a ssd.
On my single SATA3 Samsung pro with rapid mode I get about 600 megs a second.
But that is nto the real speed bump. My 270 meg a second Sansdisk doesn't boot Windows any faster?! Why? It is about latency and IOPS interrupt and operations per second. I can do heavy heavy simultaneous things like run 5 virtual machines for my domain in my virtual network with VMware workstation in about 1.5 minutes. This took almost 20 minutes to start and shutdown before!
A 100 meg disk raid will not be as fast as single drive so for a file server and database it makes lots of sense for an SSD to be more than 6x as fast as a mechanical drive. It can mean 500x faster easily.
Not to mention XP is a dog on a modern i5 with a mechanical disk or ssd, with more than 4 gigs of ram.
It swaps like a mofo for no reason even with ram available. No trim support will slow your ssd to a crawl. It is not efficient for more than 2 cpus. It doesn't cache ram. DirectX11 is faster and more ram efficient than DirectX 9. The SATA driver does not support command que like EIDE does.
It is stupid and slower to run a 13 year old OS optimized for 256 meg 1 core Pentium III/IV's with eide drives.
No I am talking about services impersonatingADMIN (yes that is a real freaking service/api/redirect) believe it or not.
ACL and user accounts mean nothing for assembly code injected into something. Lets say you write a win32 app that is a text editor? To open a file it hooks into an api which then talks to the NT kernel and does the ACL then talks to the hardware to get the string of 101010's and returns it back to your program. A standard account won't allow this depending on what the NT kernel says yes/no based on your token from ACL.
A hacker with a buffer overflow written in flash find a way to crash it and when it does an exception handle the code is injected and run into your account. There is no acl checking. No NT kernel checking. It is simply bypassed and executed. Infected done.
You do not need to click on anything. YOu do not even get a UAC prompt. You go to a site and I own your computer in XP. DONE. That is a 2000's era hack. Not a password crack which is 1990's era stuff that XP is good at.
Windows 7 has ASLR and sandboxing. It prevents the injection from getting through. Lowrights mode make it hard for it to accidentely get executed by a service. Even if you do get through ASLR makes inserting it hard. Where do you put the code in the ram where some service or app can run it bypassing the ACL and user access controls?
It is not perfect but it adds many more steps. Linux with SELinux, MacOSX, and Windows 7 and higher all have these. XP does not. It is much less secure as a result. Patches to prevent work arounds no longer will be coming.
It is the point. Average Joe may run Corel CD creater or some ancient greeting card maker that came bundled with their 2005 era printer from office depot.
If the software is so poorly written it can't run even on Windows 7 without major hacks it probably can't run on wine either.
I am on topic as the issue is enterprise environments. My example above was large and small business. These are the guys heavily dependent on win32 software and the MS ecosystem to stay in business.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not just email.
The problem is the art scene and elitist art professors forcing designers and web developers to do things the NEW way. That is make it like a stop sign in ALL CAPS, no features, all minimalism, flat, or these students get bad grades.
Guess what? When they graduate they work for companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Windows 8 and the horrible blinding white Office 2013/office 365 looks identical. All high contrast. Gradients ewww that is soo 2003. Borders? No distraction that is the old way. Features... eww CLUTTER.
Skuemorphism is where we need to go back to. It worked fine the way it way and
WHAT THE HELL.
First they take my XP away with the best UI. Then take away my menus in office 2007 with ribbons. Then they cripple Youtube so I can't browse by category. Then take away the ok UI of Windows with Metro full screen and 70% of all the functionality. Then they change perfectly Gnome 2 with a half cell phone gnome 3/shell! Now office 365/office 2013 is all FREAKING WHITE IN ALL CAPS where I get a migraine looking at it. Then they change Hotmail.com to all blinding with blue. ,.. now gmail is changing too. GOOD lord. I have had enough. Stand up folks and let those elitist art professors know we will not tolerate this minimalism and reduction of features. Art majors are being brainwashed by these guys who go on to design websites and operating system GUI's who do not tolerate dissent and have never worked in real jobs before.
They were assholes to post impressionist artists too back in the day because it wasn't the *new* thing. Now anything that doesn't look like it is 2 colors and non descriptive gets flunked out.
We should not tolerate such things.
Look up asm.js?
If you have firefox installed check this out as Unreal 4 engine was ported to Firefox JS.
The link even has a demo you can run? The fact is Google does not want to port this as they want us to use proprietary dart and other technologies optimized for Android. But with Firefox OS you can do a lot with javascript iwth JIT and hardware acceleration.
That is where the market is heading. It is converging.
True Windows 8 did not get it right, but other MS which sucked like Windows, Windows NT, sql server, IE, VC++, were not overnight successes either. Also X Window managers blew goatballs too when they were new too. Then came XFCE, KDE, and Gnome developed years later. Gnome 3/shell is the first and it will mature too and is heading in the same direction. On the Apple side iOS is really MacOSX tuned for smaller devices, and Android is a mobile version of linux running a mobile stack of software on top in java (according to the courts even).
In 5 years they will all run the same OS and yes the same GUI too once it is more tuned to have desktops appear dynamically on the fly once a keyboard or mouse is detected. Windows 9 is going this route and so will later versions of gnome.
Also the high end Apple and Samsung phones already have these quadcore cpus you speak of and gigs of ram. IN developing countries computers are still mighty expensive and mobile low end phones and tablets running Firefox OS will be appealing when you only take in $500 a month pay.
In 2020 we will not be able to tell the difference of a mobile device or computer except by the screen size. Or the PC will be like the mainframe and die off just like it and be forever niche.
So did IBM.
Apple had a far superior product. MS just got some cheap plastic and put XP on it with a digitizer and called it the day and wondered why they didn't take off? They did not really make a tablet like Steve Jobs did.
Love him or hate his guts I give the man credit for making sure the products are ready, sleek, work, well, and perfected. MS and Blackberry deserved to lose. They didn't even try to make a good product and thought marketing droids would sell them.
Apple made the whole thing mobile inside and out from the beginning. Both the iphone and ipad were years ahead of it's time. If Metro for tablets (not desktops) were out in 2008 we would not be discussing it. MS would have won hands down but Apple and then Android built consumer oriented devices actually made to run applets.
It feels like every few years, distros switch to a new way of doing things.
Why not just improve on whatever the current way is, and evolve it into the perfect init, rather than switch to an entirely new system so often? It annoys current sysadmins who have to learn new software for no good reason, it introduces bugs that make systems less stable, and it further breaks/fragments compatibility between distros.
Because things have changed since the early 1980s. Example lets say you have at work on a network. You close the lid and travel overseas and open it again on the hotels network when it wakes up. How do you write an inet to deal with dynamic changes like this?
Also in the early 80's you only had 25 text based utilities and apps on a unix server. It was not complicated to do things. A modern linux distro has how many apps, daemons, dependencies, etc. Now image the above scenario with a laptop waking up on a different network thinking of all the complexities of a modern distro?
An event driven system makes sense. You can program your system to make changes based on conditions and scenarios that pop up. Network trunk gets hit high? No problem I can setup the event driven systemd to page me and run some packet shaping. Hacking attempt? No problem send an alert and sandbox processes etc.
Sun and Apple have all moved away from inet to event based systems as well.
So in other words you do not like it because it looks and feels different than what you are used too with old inet.
How is this different than the 50 year old XP users who hate and hop up an down on how bad Windows 7 is because if looks too funny? It is not a bad program.
It is different because event driven is what is needed today. Yes unix users are hardcore and do not like changes to things, but this isn't 1982 anymore where you had maybe 35 shell utils and programs total and you could all neatly manage it all in /etc/init.d like clockwork. Computers did not fall asleep on one network and wake up in another? You did not have to think about usage scenarios where things happened based on a network intrustion or when disk space is near filled. You did not have bloated startup times due to everything trying to load at the same time or things running only sequentially.
Init 3 to run a console, and init 5 for a gui is archaic today, but thought it was cool in 1999. Init itself is very confusing and you needed to be a hacker in the 1980s to understand what was and why. Frankly the only reason it seems so easy to those reading this is because you are familiar with it.
Windows 9 is the answer. They had a peak of a unified platform but it was not finished at BUILD last month. MS made a mistake and should have made Windows 8 apps work across all.
I think next year we will find out but it maybe too late ... like freaking 7 years late after ANDROID and IOS where METRO is the new OS/2. They became the old IBM for being behind the times and not quick and nimble like Apple and Google.
Windows Phone. ... now whether it is successful or not is another story.
But xbox live and Halo is on it for the few dozen users
It could be complexity too.
It is hard when you have many apis and libraries all changing all the time.
I think CentOS/Redhat offer something like this, but not for the average Slashdot geek. I like the idea of an equilivant of the SXS in Windows. You have dynamic loading of apis and .so's and the linker links the right one at run time. Today Linux requires each one to work and will segfault or crash otherwise if you have the wrong .so or dependency.
This will make storage larger but you wouldn't have issues like wanting to use the latest gimp, but still run Gnome 2. hmm problem here etc.
Yeah AD with 25 inherited GPOs and legacy IE crap was more expensive than desktop apps just to give these horrible sites to run. I am not talking about IE 6 era sites even.
Complexity is a killer.
However without a stable ABI and API I can not say Linux is better either. Drivers break way too much as a result of the extreme ideology of forcing opensource and killing blobs. This makes NVidia only support later kernels or ignore older hardare and screw users.
This is why myself and Hairfeet no longer support Linux for average users.
I do admit I was more of a FreeBSD bigot but after 5 and 6 were so bad and I stayed with 4.x all the way to 4.12 I kind of gave up :-(
I do not care about RMS extreme ideology about freaking drivers. I WANT THEM TO JUST WORK. Why can't apps just work between versions like MacOSX, Solaris, FreeBSD with the compat libs, and even Windows?
I can click on a setup.exe from the XP era and unless it is a horribly written business app requiring local admin (more like win98 style written) it will run on Windows 8 no problem.
Why do ATI drivers from 2 years ago not run on Linux? ABI and API compatibilities as Linux developers feel that is evil and encourages binary blobs! Funny no other platform has this problem with them.
Socialist ideology about everyone that is closed source is harmful I know lets purposedly not include a stable ABi so things break when I do an apt-get update to force ATI and NVidia will just work. That is the ticket.
These companies are still struggling to make win 7 compatible apps and only care about the latest versions. My ATI drivers from 2011 will not work on a modern distro., Therefore I am choosing Windows and sticking to Linux for a VM. I might piss some some Slashdot moderators but I speak the truth. Why can't a stable ABI and API exist so one thing can just work? It is freaking 2014?
Pasionate about teaching? How about passionate to pay your bills and own a home?
If someone with that kind of background can get a better job to better him or herself then why bother putting up with the hell students and parents and tax payers put them through? YOu can be passionate about cooking too. Does that mean you want to work as a fry cook? Hell no. People ahve kids and responsibilities.
There are more positions opened than those who are great at it because the pay isn't enough.
I can say software engineer 35k a year! MUST BE PASSIONATE. What kind of applicants will I get? Students in college who wrote a game once for fun is about it right? They will go elsewhere where 50k min+.
That is supply and demand.
Nope but new football stadiums take higher priority and of course job creators.
Still there is not a lot of money. Especially for someone with a CS degree can walk from the teacher job and land a 55k a year job the following week.
Teacher pay needs to be adjusted. Science and math teachers should be paid as much as they would with other professions with those said degrees. Of course the tax payers including hte TEA Party would scream SOCIALISM at such an outrageous waste of tax payer money but it says a lot. Why do it when you have the student loan company and landlord hassling you for cash each month while you struggle to make it through.
Broward county is very expensive so yes when you pay $1600 a month for a 1 room apartment that $41,000 does not go far. Especially if you owe student loans in the tens of thousands like all recent grads do today.
That my friend has changed.
The issue were 1st generation crappy sandforce controllers and data compression. If the internal table got corrrupted they were bricked.
This has changed and there are websites (sorry my laptop was re-imaged a week ago and used to have hte link) which can back up my claims. Mid range SSD's (non pro or enterpise grade) last to about 75 TB for a 256 gig ssd before write failures. NO they do not just go PUFF either. That is a controller failing. They slow down and event logs report write failures and remappings gradually at this point and just slow down.
THe pro serious with 480 gigs and higher have ratings up to 1 PT! That easily exceeds a mechanical disk. I have a samsung pro which can probably get near the 150 - 300 TB range.
If PCs booted like phones and tablets perhaps the pc market would be in a better position? SSD is the answer.
The 1st generation crappy SSDs failed due to bad controllers and compression with sandforce. NOt because of write endurance.
I had a link (sorry this system I am typing on was re-imaged) where someone tested this out.
It took 75 tb before the mid range ssds started to have issues. The pro serious can go higher as they are designed with 4 million writes per cell vs the 1 million.
Intels, Samsungs, Sansdisks, and other brands (not munchkin) can run and have run for years and years with 5 - 15 gigs a day write endurance. Infact they are as reliable if not more than a mechanical disk.
Others can vouch too it takes awhile to kill a disk if it runs an OS with TRIM support (linux slowly getting this as it is semi TRIM in all but the recent kernels) and not fill it up to 99% filled.
That would be a waste. A mechanical disk is better for MP3s.
Booting, editing videos, running virtual machines, video game, compiling software, or doing any database or something that requires lots of disk will benefit many times fold from a ssd.
And don't have to support it if it's against corporate policy for an XP machine to join. It will be disconnected.
It's not like you bought it in 2001. It's 2014 so too bad
Easy. Each edit makes a copy of the video file.
On my single SATA3 Samsung pro with rapid mode I get about 600 megs a second.
But that is nto the real speed bump. My 270 meg a second Sansdisk doesn't boot Windows any faster?! Why? It is about latency and IOPS interrupt and operations per second. I can do heavy heavy simultaneous things like run 5 virtual machines for my domain in my virtual network with VMware workstation in about 1.5 minutes. This took almost 20 minutes to start and shutdown before!
A 100 meg disk raid will not be as fast as single drive so for a file server and database it makes lots of sense for an SSD to be more than 6x as fast as a mechanical drive. It can mean 500x faster easily.
I still have a mechanical disk. It is for most of my programs and my profiles are stored there as I do not need acceleration to open a .docx file.
But with these coming out in 5 years it will be affordable to leave mechanical behind for just storage like tape archives are today.
Not to mention XP is a dog on a modern i5 with a mechanical disk or ssd, with more than 4 gigs of ram.
It swaps like a mofo for no reason even with ram available. No trim support will slow your ssd to a crawl. It is not efficient for more than 2 cpus. It doesn't cache ram. DirectX11 is faster and more ram efficient than DirectX 9. The SATA driver does not support command que like EIDE does.
It is stupid and slower to run a 13 year old OS optimized for 256 meg 1 core Pentium III/IV's with eide drives.
No I am talking about services impersonatingADMIN (yes that is a real freaking service/api/redirect) believe it or not.
ACL and user accounts mean nothing for assembly code injected into something. Lets say you write a win32 app that is a text editor? To open a file it hooks into an api which then talks to the NT kernel and does the ACL then talks to the hardware to get the string of 101010's and returns it back to your program. A standard account won't allow this depending on what the NT kernel says yes/no based on your token from ACL.
A hacker with a buffer overflow written in flash find a way to crash it and when it does an exception handle the code is injected and run into your account. There is no acl checking. No NT kernel checking. It is simply bypassed and executed. Infected done.
You do not need to click on anything. YOu do not even get a UAC prompt. You go to a site and I own your computer in XP. DONE. That is a 2000's era hack. Not a password crack which is 1990's era stuff that XP is good at.
Windows 7 has ASLR and sandboxing. It prevents the injection from getting through. Lowrights mode make it hard for it to accidentely get executed by a service. Even if you do get through ASLR makes inserting it hard. Where do you put the code in the ram where some service or app can run it bypassing the ACL and user access controls?
It is not perfect but it adds many more steps. Linux with SELinux, MacOSX, and Windows 7 and higher all have these. XP does not. It is much less secure as a result. Patches to prevent work arounds no longer will be coming.
It is the point. Average Joe may run Corel CD creater or some ancient greeting card maker that came bundled with their 2005 era printer from office depot.
If the software is so poorly written it can't run even on Windows 7 without major hacks it probably can't run on wine either.
I am on topic as the issue is enterprise environments. My example above was large and small business. These are the guys heavily dependent on win32 software and the MS ecosystem to stay in business.