It was a feature added to avoid negative publicity about security and software quality while contributing to neither. You clearly don't understand what UAC is about then.
In 2001, Microsoft set forth guidelines for ISVs to make their software work properly with their NT based operating systems. Part of these guidelines specified that the program should run properly without administrative privileges. The vast majority of ISVs ignored these guidelines. This is Microsoft's fault for making users of XP administrators by default.
UAC is about forcing ISVs to finally follow those six year old guidelines, and therefore it most certainly will contribute to security and software quality.
In regards to service dependencies in Windows, you are not stuck with what the vendor gives you. If the vendor doesn't do it right, it can be configured manually by the admin afterwards.
If the services don't have dependencies properly set, but (by luck) start up in the right order after a reboot, then all you have to do is find the order in which they start and write a script to restart them accordingly. This can be found easily with a little sysinternals utility called loadorder.
We actually have one of those "million dollar apps", that we recently moved from HPUX to Windows. This app requires the restarting of several services when certain configuration changes are made. Restarting the entire machine takes about five minutes whereas restarting the services takes only one. One of our websites uses this machine's services as a back-end, so that four extra minutes of downtime is not good.
"A USB2 flash drive is a USB2 flash drive is a USB2 flash drive. There's no great difference there, unless something is broken." Not true. There are huge differences in performance between various models of flash drives.
only the Linux-user was pure and untainted - a lesson for us all;-) Are you talking about the same Linux user that said, "For the novice user [Linux] is straightforward to use..."?
That would have had around 900 days uptime if my reboot-happy Windows-only-admin coworkers wouldn't have reset it in a panic on multiple occasions to "troubleshoot" (no it was never a problem with my OpenBSD box) mail problems.
I don't know what the hell it is with Windows-only admins and rebooting. The kind of instability that required reboots all the time was reduced drastically with Win2k and win2k3, yet that insatiable urge to reboot first and ask questions later still plauges my Windows-only counterparts.
Just till you consider the amount of work being made by such a "Linux tech" against your average "windows drone" and you find your "Linux tech" is as cheap as it can be. This is a valid point. The barrier to entry to unix is much higher than Windows. This causes there to be a much larger pool of techs who move towards Windows. As a result, the pool of Windows techs is heavily diluted with incompetence. This makes it much harder to hire a competent Windows administrator, because in the world of Windows, it's much easier to BS your way around.
On the other hand, I'd really want to know where Linux "needs" to go and why Linux "needs" to go there. Linux doesn't *need* to go anywhere. There will always be people who will want to run it, but as long as Linux remains a UNIX-type OS, there will always be people won't want to run it. For those people, there will be Windows and OSX, and whatever other offering comes along that presents a simple solution via underlying complexity. You could say, "linux needs to become easier", and it could be (and by some, has been) made easier by adding layers upon layers of complexity, but this would create the same thing Windows has; a large pool of "administrators" and users who are helpless subjects of their operating systems.
I put in Vista because the "Home Premium" and "Ultimate" editions of Vista actually do come with a mpeg2 decoder out of the box.
As for the DVD bit, I used that example because the one time I tried Ubuntu, I installed Ogle from the package repository and it was broken. I've always used Ogle in FreeBSD to play DVDs and never had a problem so I found it slightly ironic that it was broken on such an "easy to use" linux distribution.
Those who insist on using open source operating systems get to pay for them. Yes, that means they pay with their time.
If your copy of Ubuntu won't play DVDs, that's between you and Google, my friend:
* If you were using Windows Vista, you wouldn't have this problem in the first place, and,
* As much as I pity you, I can't help you. No, I'm not going to Google for 'Ogle crashing' for you.
* No, you can't "borrow" a Windows key from me. Go and buy your own.
* No, I *really* can't help you. If your OS doesn't work, there's nothing I can do. It's not just a matter of won't, but I can't.
* If you think open source software is so great, follow the open source model of RTFM and Googling.
Oh, and there's a Windows UG meeting this Thursday. If things between you and Tux don't work out, why don't you stop by and install an OS with ISV and OEM support on your machine?
But I do hate it for the gamers, man. What are they going to do?
Thanks. I live in the middle of nowhere, so to buy anything remotely obscure you have to drive 40 miles, so of course our local liquor store didn't have it. The store does have a selection of obscure imports that are there because of locals requests, so the guy there took down the name of the beer and my phone number and said he would see if he could order it.
At work we have several word-based forms that are filled out and passed around via email. Open Office corrupts these forms. They are unusable by Word 2003 after being modified and saved by OOo.
The only features I see in Vista are eyecandy Aero and DirectX10. To take that literally, of course those are the only things you "see".:)
One you don't see, but might come to appreciate in the future is that Vista takes the graphics drivers out of the kernel, and thus it can recover on the fly from GPU hardware/driver failures.
There is another general rule; People tend to see what they want to see.
Like you, the fist guy who replied to me obviously knew a bit about Windows and his criticism of it rises far above the level of the "IE is inside the kernel!" type crap seen all the time here. However, people seem compelled almost by human nature to take sides and tend to focus more on the shortcomings of "the other side". This is probably related to the concept of cognitive dissonance.
I myself (a sysadmin), grew up with Windows and only started getting into UNIX several years ago, so I find myself struggling to not nitpick and magnify the shortcomings of UNIX, while at the same time ignoring or rationalizing the problems with Windows. I particularly like FreeBSD, and also find myself getting dragged into the whole FreeBSD/Linux flamefests from time to time. In my head, I magnify the virtues of FreeBSD (the documentation is the best!) and my perceived shortcomings of Linux (Linux documentation? What documentation?).
I find it curious and a bit disconcerting when I see how much emphasis people place on the subject of malware detection in the realm of information security. What to do after malicious code finds it's way onto our systems, or into our networks is certainly something to consider, and any security plan would be incomplete without it, but this area takes up far too much of our time, given that other aspects of security bring a much more favorable cost/benefit ratio.
I can only surmise that there is certain "sexiness" to malware detection; much the same way that fancy home alarm systems are the first thing that many think of when contemplating home security.
In the home security market, advertisements depict evil prowlers dressed in sweat-suits busting through the back door of the house, while a frightened soccer mom with her five year old daughter cower upstairs. The alarm sounds, the prowler runs away, and a call comes in from the alarm provider, asking if they are ok. Quite dramatic. Quite unrealistic too.
In the information security market there are no soccer moms, and the prowlers don't run around in matching sweat-suits, but the theme is similar. "Buy our product - it will catch intruders when they enter and save you." Again - quite dramatic, and quite unrealistic.
In the real world, people forget to turn on their alarm systems, or they forget to change the batteries, or intruders know how to disable them without triggering them.
In the real world, people also forget to update their AV/IDS signatures, or turn their security product off for various reasons - usually convenience-related, or like the prowler in the home, malware simply disables the security solution on it's way in.
Just as in securing a home, we would be better off if we first focused on installing heavy doors and deadbolts on all outside entrances, in the virtual world, we would be better off focusing on the barriers that malware must overcome to gain entry to our systems and access to our information and resources.
This is far from an original thought, but I'll say it anyway as it deserved to be repeated. The security industry is a joke. It's is filled by people who either don't understand the basic pricipals of information security, or do but choose to to sell 'sexy' solutions anyway. I once ran into the author of a somewhat popular Windows security product on a messageboard and was shocked at his aparent lack of understanding of how his platform of choice, Windows, worked.
I supposed this is more of a Windows problem than anything else. Not a problem with Windows, the operating system, but a problem with WIndows, the culture.
There's no way that they can change now without breaking millions of profiles and really annoying a huge number of their users. They most certainly can change it, and it wouldn't be as impossible as you think. What they would do is create a new page layout schema but support old one at the same time. When the new schema goes live, all new users would automatically be assigned the new schema while existing users would stay on the old one. Existing users would then be coaxed into adopting the new layout via banner advertisements, or in-house "spam". It would take awhile to do the migration, and a cutoff might need to be implemented after a year or so to take care of orphaned pages, but impossible it would certainly not be.
There is a pretty sizable third-party software ecosystem around the Blackberry OS. I was able to download and install Google Maps and Opera on my Blackberry Pearl by just going to their respective websites, and in searching around I found tons of other third party software (some free, some commercial) available for my phone. My wife bought an application for her blackberry online for $14.99 after downloading a free trial. Our provider, T-Mobile, has nothing to do with what apps we put on our phone.
As for providers, I think there are several providers that offer blackberry phones - thus you could feasibly buy a Blackberry and switch between providers.
I imagine Windows Mobile based phones have plenty of third party software too, but I don't know for sure.
I think the best answer to your question would be, "the phone not made by Apple".
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In 2001, Microsoft set forth guidelines for ISVs to make their software work properly with their NT based operating systems. Part of these guidelines specified that the program should run properly without administrative privileges. The vast majority of ISVs ignored these guidelines. This is Microsoft's fault for making users of XP administrators by default.
UAC is about forcing ISVs to finally follow those six year old guidelines, and therefore it most certainly will contribute to security and software quality.
The author of TA sounds like a textbook case of burnout to me.
"The world needs more Legos."
Thanks.
In regards to service dependencies in Windows, you are not stuck with what the vendor gives you. If the vendor doesn't do it right, it can be configured manually by the admin afterwards.
If the services don't have dependencies properly set, but (by luck) start up in the right order after a reboot, then all you have to do is find the order in which they start and write a script to restart them accordingly. This can be found easily with a little sysinternals utility called loadorder.
We actually have one of those "million dollar apps", that we recently moved from HPUX to Windows. This app requires the restarting of several services when certain configuration changes are made. Restarting the entire machine takes about five minutes whereas restarting the services takes only one. One of our websites uses this machine's services as a back-end, so that four extra minutes of downtime is not good.
See this article...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=408
Is there a formal name for people who inexplicably cause computers to malfunction just by being in their presence? We have a couple of those here.
If you already know that restarting the services doesn't fix the problem, then you don't fall in the category of admin that I was complaining about.
That would have had around 900 days uptime if my reboot-happy Windows-only-admin coworkers wouldn't have reset it in a panic on multiple occasions to "troubleshoot" (no it was never a problem with my OpenBSD box) mail problems.
I don't know what the hell it is with Windows-only admins and rebooting. The kind of instability that required reboots all the time was reduced drastically with Win2k and win2k3, yet that insatiable urge to reboot first and ask questions later still plauges my Windows-only counterparts.
The problem in your former company was the incompetence, not Windows.
Obviously, you didn't "fit in" there.
I put in Vista because the "Home Premium" and "Ultimate" editions of Vista actually do come with a mpeg2 decoder out of the box.
As for the DVD bit, I used that example because the one time I tried Ubuntu, I installed Ogle from the package repository and it was broken. I've always used Ogle in FreeBSD to play DVDs and never had a problem so I found it slightly ironic that it was broken on such an "easy to use" linux distribution.
Those who insist on using open source operating systems get to pay for them. Yes, that means they pay with their time.
If your copy of Ubuntu won't play DVDs, that's between you and Google, my friend:
* If you were using Windows Vista, you wouldn't have this problem in the first place, and,
* As much as I pity you, I can't help you. No, I'm not going to Google for 'Ogle crashing' for you.
* No, you can't "borrow" a Windows key from me. Go and buy your own.
* No, I *really* can't help you. If your OS doesn't work, there's nothing I can do. It's not just a matter of won't, but I can't.
* If you think open source software is so great, follow the open source model of RTFM and Googling.
Oh, and there's a Windows UG meeting this Thursday. If things between you and Tux don't work out, why don't you stop by and install an OS with ISV and OEM support on your machine?
But I do hate it for the gamers, man. What are they going to do?
Thanks. I live in the middle of nowhere, so to buy anything remotely obscure you have to drive 40 miles, so of course our local liquor store didn't have it. The store does have a selection of obscure imports that are there because of locals requests, so the guy there took down the name of the beer and my phone number and said he would see if he could order it.
Is editing of your forms "locked" with passwords? I think that feature may have been what caused the problems.
I'll call your anecdote with one of my own.
At work we have several word-based forms that are filled out and passed around via email. Open Office corrupts these forms. They are unusable by Word 2003 after being modified and saved by OOo.
Na na naaa na. Na na naaa na.
Heyyyyyyy
Goodbye.
Oooh. I have to try that now.
How does Duvel compare taste-wise to beers like Guinness?
One you don't see, but might come to appreciate in the future is that Vista takes the graphics drivers out of the kernel, and thus it can recover on the fly from GPU hardware/driver failures.
There is another general rule; People tend to see what they want to see.
Like you, the fist guy who replied to me obviously knew a bit about Windows and his criticism of it rises far above the level of the "IE is inside the kernel!" type crap seen all the time here. However, people seem compelled almost by human nature to take sides and tend to focus more on the shortcomings of "the other side". This is probably related to the concept of cognitive dissonance.
I myself (a sysadmin), grew up with Windows and only started getting into UNIX several years ago, so I find myself struggling to not nitpick and magnify the shortcomings of UNIX, while at the same time ignoring or rationalizing the problems with Windows. I particularly like FreeBSD, and also find myself getting dragged into the whole FreeBSD/Linux flamefests from time to time. In my head, I magnify the virtues of FreeBSD (the documentation is the best!) and my perceived shortcomings of Linux (Linux documentation? What documentation?).
I said a general rule. Not a universal truth.
A general rule is that people who participate in OS bashing tend to know little about the OS they are bashing. This applies to all sides.
I find it curious and a bit disconcerting when I see how much emphasis people place on the subject of malware detection in the realm of information security. What to do after malicious code finds it's way onto our systems, or into our networks is certainly something to consider, and any security plan would be incomplete without it, but this area takes up far too much of our time, given that other aspects of security bring a much more favorable cost/benefit ratio.
I can only surmise that there is certain "sexiness" to malware detection; much the same way that fancy home alarm systems are the first thing that many think of when contemplating home security.
In the home security market, advertisements depict evil prowlers dressed in sweat-suits busting through the back door of the house, while a frightened soccer mom with her five year old daughter cower upstairs. The alarm sounds, the prowler runs away, and a call comes in from the alarm provider, asking if they are ok. Quite dramatic. Quite unrealistic too.
In the information security market there are no soccer moms, and the prowlers don't run around in matching sweat-suits, but the theme is similar. "Buy our product - it will catch intruders when they enter and save you." Again - quite dramatic, and quite unrealistic.
In the real world, people forget to turn on their alarm systems, or they forget to change the batteries, or intruders know how to disable them without triggering them.
In the real world, people also forget to update their AV/IDS signatures, or turn their security product off for various reasons - usually convenience-related, or like the prowler in the home, malware simply disables the security solution on it's way in.
Just as in securing a home, we would be better off if we first focused on installing heavy doors and deadbolts on all outside entrances, in the virtual world, we would be better off focusing on the barriers that malware must overcome to gain entry to our systems and access to our information and resources.
This is far from an original thought, but I'll say it anyway as it deserved to be repeated. The security industry is a joke. It's is filled by people who either don't understand the basic pricipals of information security, or do but choose to to sell 'sexy' solutions anyway. I once ran into the author of a somewhat popular Windows security product on a messageboard and was shocked at his aparent lack of understanding of how his platform of choice, Windows, worked.
I supposed this is more of a Windows problem than anything else. Not a problem with Windows, the operating system, but a problem with WIndows, the culture.
NEWS FLASH: There are open source licenses besides the GPL.
There is a pretty sizable third-party software ecosystem around the Blackberry OS. I was able to download and install Google Maps and Opera on my Blackberry Pearl by just going to their respective websites, and in searching around I found tons of other third party software (some free, some commercial) available for my phone. My wife bought an application for her blackberry online for $14.99 after downloading a free trial. Our provider, T-Mobile, has nothing to do with what apps we put on our phone.
As for providers, I think there are several providers that offer blackberry phones - thus you could feasibly buy a Blackberry and switch between providers.
I imagine Windows Mobile based phones have plenty of third party software too, but I don't know for sure.
I think the best answer to your question would be, "the phone not made by Apple".