Today, the official Church's position remains a focus of controversy and is fairly non-specific, stating only that faith and scientific findings regarding human evolution are not in conflict, though humans are regarded as a "special creation", and that the existence of God is required to explain the spiritual component of human origins.
The Catholics still haven't gotten over the Scopes Monkey Trial. They don't believe in Evolution any more than the other Creationists do. They just have a smaller window of science they choose to ignore.
You refuse to grasp that these are two different things.
That's because they're not. You cannot buy a Mac without also buying a MacOS license. If Apple ever starts selling hardware without an OS, or an OS that is licensed to run on any hardware, you'll have a point - but right now, you do not. Macs and MacOS licenses are synonymous.
If it were an upgrade, Apple would still be marketing it as an upgrade the way they did with Tiger.
*facepalm*
They are not. They could quickly and easily (and without any court battle) eliminate Psystar and all other would-be cloners by clearly labeling Leopard as an upgrade, as I recommended back in July [slashdot.org].
No, they could not. Psystar would just be selling their PCs with some old, second-hand Mac to provide the "original" copy of MacOS - and *that's* assuming they wouldn't just say that the upgrade-restricting EULA [0] is neither valid nor enforceable (like they are basically doing now).
That they aren't doing that should tell you something. (Hint -- It should tell you that it's not an upgrade.) Why they refuse to go that route, I don't understand, but they must have a reason.
Because when they pretend to hem and haw about whether or not OS X is a "full version" or an "upgrade" they can give the impression it's cheaper than Windows (since a full version of Vista is $lots). Particularly since the Mac faithful will repeat it for them (although it's amazing how this case has change *that* attitude overnight).
You *cannot* buy a Mac without also buying an OS X license. Apple will not sell it to you. You *cannot* legally (at this stage, hopefully it will change) install a a retail copy of OS X without a Mac. You must, therefore, have a previously existing license of OS X to install a retail copy, which in turns means it is licensed, priced, and sold, as an upgrade.
Consider this: if it *isn't* licensed, priced, and sold, as an upgrade, why does the "you can only install this on Apple hardware" clause exist at all ? Why did it exist even before MacOS was even ported to x86 ? Note that it is not "this software is only supported on Apple hardware", or "this software is only tested on Apple hardware", but an explicit statement that you can not install it on anything other than Apple hardware.
Everything about Apple, Macs and MacOS, from the markup on the original hardware, to the EULA restrictions on retail copies, to the basically-the-same-as-a-Windows-upgrade pricing structure, to the entire attitude of Apple that their OS and hardware are sold as a single "solution", points to Apple considering retail versions of MacOS as upgrades. The *only* thing that suggests even slightly otherwise is the lack of an explicit check for some existing OS binaries (which is, for reasons already made abundantly clear, utterly unnecessary).
You cannot make an argument that because the installer does not go "please install your existing MacOS CD", that you are not installing an upgrade, when everything else from attitude of the company selling it to mandatory presence of the giant hardware dongle you're installing it on indicate otherwise. It's just silly.
[0] This is actually the big news here. If the EULA that restricts where and how you can install OS X is found to be invalid, then it should follow that ALL such "upgrade version" EULAs will be similarly invalid.
Similarly, you can do wacky things like "1 gallon per hour in hogsheads per fortnight" which yields "1 (US gallon per hour) = 5.33333333 hogsheads per fortnight".
Sadly, it doesn't stick "and that's the way I like it!" on the end...
Darwin didn't have a true theory because the idea he had had no predictive power and little explanatory power, therefore was inherently untestable and not able to be used to answer questions. He wasn't aware of DNA, genes or chromosomes.
Arguably his hypotheseses were quite testable - just not by the science and technology of the time.
Also, not understanding the underlying mechanics of a system does not automatically invalidate a theory explaining them. Exhibit A: Gravity.
The only people who go on and on ad nauseum about "Darwinism", as if it were the be-all and end-all of Evolutionary Theory, are the Creationists.
The reason no-one talks about "Newtonism" or "Eisteinism" is because neither of those things threaten the basis behind the belief systems of a significant chunk of the planet (and therefore the power weilded by the people behind them). Why waste time attacking something you couldn't care less about ?
That's disingenous and you know it. Leopard installs on a completely wiped disk, it makes no checks for a previous install of OS X other than the "is this authorized hardware" check.
That is, it checks for hardware that can not be bought without paying for a previous version of the OS. Ie: my point.
A retail copy of OS X is just like an upgrade copy of Windows. The latter does its upgrade check by asking for a CD with a previous version. The former does its check by looking for hardware that came with a previous version. There is no conceptual difference between those two procedures.
Apple competes by creating products, Psystar is simply riding their coat tails.
Psystar are responding to a market demand that Apple refuses to.
If Apple sold a) a reasonable priced desktop PC that had half the specs of a Mac Pro, and b) a decently priced and specced low-end Mac, the bulk of Psystar's business (and potential business) would dry up overnight.
There is at least one gaping hole in Apple's hardware lineup (IMHO there are three, but the other two are laptops and servers). Psystar are filling it. In no way is that "riding their coat tails".
They are no selling OS X computers. They are selling computers with unauthorized distributed works of OS X, which is a clear violation of copyright law.
They're not distributing OS X (in the Copyright sense, that is - ie: making multiple copies of a single original and selling the copies), they're reselling it.
If you agree with this, then you agree with Microsoft using GPL code in Windows.
If you support the first sale doctrine, then you must agree that someone has the right to buy a single copy of OS X, modify it, and resell it. That one copy is theirs to do with as they wish, after all, as long as they don't "distribute" it (in the Copyright sense of the word).
I have, just today, changed some settings, installed a new program, applied three updates and done a bunch of other stuff. I was asked for my password once, for the updates. Yes, that means I can install a program without a password prompt, and change settings without one, either.
Wow. Just like I just did on a Vista machine.
Maybe you missed the part where I said *system* settings, and copying files to *system* areas, and the like. Obviously if you avoid these, on both platforms, then you will not have to elevate. (OS X does have somewhat lax file permissions on/Applications, though, which probably helps a bit in terms of how often you might need to elevate - at the expense, naturally, of some security).
Now given that experience, please explain to me how I could even remotely not be upset about the claim that one thing would be just like the other.
Holy crap, talk about non-sequiturs. You've not just moved the goalposts, you've completely changed games. After spending the last however many posts (just in this thread, probably more in others) asserting that UAC in Vista and its counterparts on other OSes aren't at all alike, you've now changed to talking about completely unrelated aspects of a different version of Windows.
The bigger issue seems to be that Pystar is buying OS X, modifying the code, then reselling it. This is very different from an EULA violation -- it's copyright violation.
Although quite arguably it should not be, by the same reasoning that supports the first sale doctrine.
You can call a full install an upgrade if you want, but that doesn't make it such.
The thing that makes retail OS X packages an upgrade is the same thing that makes certain versions of Windows an upgrade - the EULA. You are not licensed to use either without an already existing OS license (Apple states this in a roundabout way, for marketing reasons, but the ultimate meaning is clear).
How it installs is utterly irrelevant to how it is licensed, and OS X is licensed as an upgrade.
What's really hilarious about the Psystar case is how, practically overnight, it completely reversed the licensing rhetoric coming out of the Mac zealot camp.
Except if you bothered to do a fair comparison, Apple hardware isn't more expensive than a similarly-configured Dell.
Only if you attach outrageous levels of value to the form factor, or insist on *very specific* hardware configurations.
Dell sells a Core i7 machine for under a grand, that is as fast as (if not faster than) an 8-core Mac Pro costing more thsn twice as much.
On the low end, Dell have a machine that costs only a bit more than half the price of a Mac Mini, but has anywhere from half again to 4 times as many hardware resources.
In the mid-range, the gaping hole in Apple's lineup is where Dell does most of its business.
Yes, if you *must* have an all-in-one machine the size of a 20" LCD, or a desktop computer the size of a few CD cases, or a dual-CPU, 8-core machine, then Apple's hardware is for you. However, if all you want is a decent desktop PC, a cheap PC, or a powerful PC, then their hardware is embarassingly overpriced.
Firefox is better than any version of IE so far and has been available for over 4 years, so why haven't people flocked to it in that time frame?
Because IE4 was _dramatically_ better than Navigator. IE today is "good enough", and for most people Firefox just isn't better enough to be compelling.
You mean bundling IE did not kill Netscape, which at the time, was the dominant browser? Yes, it assuredly did.
No, it demonstrably did not. IE4 was the version that dethroned Navigator, it did it before Windows 98 was released, and continued to displace it at a far faster rate than Windows 98's uptake.
IE beat Navigator because it was better, and remained so into the 2000s. Firefox was well past its 1.0 release before it became anything close to a compelling alternative to IE for most people.
And if I understand the issue with Windows 7, your malicious app can simply turn UAC off before it tries to access the system area.
Yes, but the argument from Microsoft was that for the malicious app to be executing in the first place, the security of the system had already been breached somehow. I don't agree with this principle, because such critical aspects of a systems security configuration should be protected by defense in depth, but it is not unreasonable to assume that a user happy to run unknown and/or malicious binaries would also be happy to approve any UAC prompts that they might raise (eg: in the process of lowering the UAC level).
Like I keep saying - either the UAC warnings serve some purpose, in which case being able to silently turn them off is a bad thing, or they don't and UAC may as well be abandoned.
UAC warnings appear when something tries to access an area of the system that it does not have privileges for by default - the UAC prompt is there to elevate privileges to the necessary level. That is the "purpose" of UAC (and its equivalents on other systems) - to allow a low level of privilege to be used by default, then easily elevated when required. It is conceptually the same as sudo in UNIXish systems, and implemented in a nearly identical fashion (or at least as similarly as the different security models allow).
I accept that it's only a second level defence, but that's like saying a burglar alarm that has a simple off switch on the front is not broken because the front door must already have been compromised for the burglar to get to the switch.
Well, arguably it's not "broken" - merely somewhat less secure [0] - because if an intruder has already made it far enough in to disable the burglar alarm, then your "security" is breached.
[0] Note that even with an additional UAC prompt, it's still "somewhat less secure" that it possibly could be. For example, resetting the UAC mode could require booting the system into a special, restricted, single-user "security mode", where nothing else could be done except security-related configuration changes (eg: you wouldn't be able to run unsigned binaries, the network stack would be disabled, etc, etc). The fundamental problem is that security and convenience are inversely proportional, so you have to find a balance between the two.
I have, apparently you haven't or you would be aware that the windows they pop up are not "sudo", unless you're the one imprecise with words and what you're really trying to say is not "sudo" but "priviledge escalation".
The privilege escalation prompts in Ubuntu and OS X are done with sudo.
When I've usedd Ubuntu, I saw nothing like UAC. There is a GUI-based sudo on Ubuntu, but it is always triggered by user action.
Then you couldn't have used it much. Installing packages, applying updates, changing system settings, attempting to copy files into system areas. These are just a few things in both Ubuntu and OS X that will trigger a prompt just like they do in Windows.
I've never seen it pop up unexpectedly, say why I was reading mail. But it's been a year at least since I last used Ubuntu, so that might have changed.
I've never seen a UAC prompt appear unexpectedly either. Perhaps you can give an example of how it might be done ?
On OS X, which I use daily, there are two things. One is like Ubuntu, when you do something that requires super-user rights, it asks you for a password. Nothing to see here, definitely not UAC.
I'm sorry, but you'll never convince me that overriding what users with admin privileges can do to their system, silently, is in any way a good thing. It's not.
It probably wasn't "silent". Did you look in the Event Log ?
Also, users with admin privileges *can* write to %PROGRAMFILES%, so the the redirection doesn't kick in for them. The "Virtual Store" (I think it's called) is only activated when a user who doesn't have privileges to write to a protected area (like %PROGRAMFILES%) tries to. In other cases (ie: a read, or a write by someone who has privileges to do so) the "real" file is accessed (unless a user has previously tried to write and had a 'virtual' file created - in which case reads will continue to redirect).
The components may still be there, but their behavior and look have both changed significantly across Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.
If your measure of the change between 2000, XP and Vista is "significant", then the only way to describe the difference between XP and Ubuntu would be something like "mind-bending" or "Earth-shattering".
Are you kidding? Ubuntu's closer to XP than Vista is, and the new Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office suites are changing the user interface much more than each new iteration of Ubuntu does. Sit someone down in front of an Ubuntu desktop and they'll have a much easier time figuring that stuff out than the new version of Microsoft _____.
Rubbish. The fundamentals of the Windows UI haven't changed since Windows *95*. Widgets, the Start Menu, the Taskbar, dialogs, file selectors, etc. All have changed little in the last ~14 years.
The suggestion that Ubuntu is "closer to XP than Vista is", UI-wise, is simply laughable - and that's just looking at a relatively bare desktop with something that's nearly identical on all platforms, like Firefox, running.
If someone is having trouble transitioning from XP to Vista, they will be completely and utterly lost transition from XP to Ubuntu.
Well, the Apple computer you buy is the biggest dongle ever manufactured, but I didn't "pay dearly" for it by any means. It is totally comparable in cost to equivalent generic PC hardware.
That depends rather heavily on how you choose to define "equivalent". If things like the size of case, or whether the monitor is a separate piece of hardware, matter little to you, most Apple hardware is embarassingly overpriced.
The beauty of retail copies of OS X though, is that you can install them on a nuked-and-paved drive (no need to install OEM and then upgrade).
You don't need to do this with Windows, either (although you will need your OEM CD on hand).
Then why is this "feature" present on win 2k8 too?
I can see your point with Vista, but a server operating system?
Because there are plenty of broken server applications as well. NOTHING should be storing volatile data in %PROGRAMFILES%. Conceptually it's similar to/usr - it *should* be mountable read-only.
Its still broken and wrong,
No, it's an engineering decision. Annoy the vast, vast, vast majority of users very frequently, or a vanishingly small minority of users (who should know better anyway) extremely infrequently.
If your application is storing data there then it's doing the wrong thing. It's not Microsoft's responsibility to pander to every possible variation on "broken" - only the most common ones.
Slashdot Mirror
not the Catholics
Today, the official Church's position remains a focus of controversy and is fairly non-specific, stating only that faith and scientific findings regarding human evolution are not in conflict, though humans are regarded as a "special creation", and that the existence of God is required to explain the spiritual component of human origins.
The Catholics still haven't gotten over the Scopes Monkey Trial. They don't believe in Evolution any more than the other Creationists do. They just have a smaller window of science they choose to ignore.
You refuse to grasp that these are two different things.
That's because they're not. You cannot buy a Mac without also buying a MacOS license. If Apple ever starts selling hardware without an OS, or an OS that is licensed to run on any hardware, you'll have a point - but right now, you do not. Macs and MacOS licenses are synonymous.
If it were an upgrade, Apple would still be marketing it as an upgrade the way they did with Tiger.
*facepalm*
They are not. They could quickly and easily (and without any court battle) eliminate Psystar and all other would-be cloners by clearly labeling Leopard as an upgrade, as I recommended back in July [slashdot.org].
No, they could not. Psystar would just be selling their PCs with some old, second-hand Mac to provide the "original" copy of MacOS - and *that's* assuming they wouldn't just say that the upgrade-restricting EULA [0] is neither valid nor enforceable (like they are basically doing now).
That they aren't doing that should tell you something. (Hint -- It should tell you that it's not an upgrade.) Why they refuse to go that route, I don't understand, but they must have a reason.
Because when they pretend to hem and haw about whether or not OS X is a "full version" or an "upgrade" they can give the impression it's cheaper than Windows (since a full version of Vista is $lots). Particularly since the Mac faithful will repeat it for them (although it's amazing how this case has change *that* attitude overnight).
You *cannot* buy a Mac without also buying an OS X license. Apple will not sell it to you. You *cannot* legally (at this stage, hopefully it will change) install a a retail copy of OS X without a Mac. You must, therefore, have a previously existing license of OS X to install a retail copy, which in turns means it is licensed, priced, and sold, as an upgrade.
Consider this: if it *isn't* licensed, priced, and sold, as an upgrade, why does the "you can only install this on Apple hardware" clause exist at all ? Why did it exist even before MacOS was even ported to x86 ? Note that it is not "this software is only supported on Apple hardware", or "this software is only tested on Apple hardware", but an explicit statement that you can not install it on anything other than Apple hardware.
Everything about Apple, Macs and MacOS, from the markup on the original hardware, to the EULA restrictions on retail copies, to the basically-the-same-as-a-Windows-upgrade pricing structure, to the entire attitude of Apple that their OS and hardware are sold as a single "solution", points to Apple considering retail versions of MacOS as upgrades. The *only* thing that suggests even slightly otherwise is the lack of an explicit check for some existing OS binaries (which is, for reasons already made abundantly clear, utterly unnecessary).
You cannot make an argument that because the installer does not go "please install your existing MacOS CD", that you are not installing an upgrade, when everything else from attitude of the company selling it to mandatory presence of the giant hardware dongle you're installing it on indicate otherwise. It's just silly.
[0] This is actually the big news here. If the EULA that restricts where and how you can install OS X is found to be invalid, then it should follow that ALL such "upgrade version" EULAs will be similarly invalid.
Similarly, you can do wacky things like "1 gallon per hour in hogsheads per fortnight" which yields "1 (US gallon per hour) = 5.33333333 hogsheads per fortnight".
Sadly, it doesn't stick "and that's the way I like it!" on the end...
Darwin didn't have a true theory because the idea he had had no predictive power and little explanatory power, therefore was inherently untestable and not able to be used to answer questions. He wasn't aware of DNA, genes or chromosomes.
Arguably his hypotheseses were quite testable - just not by the science and technology of the time.
Also, not understanding the underlying mechanics of a system does not automatically invalidate a theory explaining them. Exhibit A: Gravity.
The only people who go on and on ad nauseum about "Darwinism", as if it were the be-all and end-all of Evolutionary Theory, are the Creationists.
The reason no-one talks about "Newtonism" or "Eisteinism" is because neither of those things threaten the basis behind the belief systems of a significant chunk of the planet (and therefore the power weilded by the people behind them). Why waste time attacking something you couldn't care less about ?
Show me where it says this. Oh, wait, you knew that it doesn't say this in any way, roundabout or not. It only requires Apple hardware.
Which you cannot own without also having an existing OS license.
That's disingenous and you know it. Leopard installs on a completely wiped disk, it makes no checks for a previous install of OS X other than the "is this authorized hardware" check.
That is, it checks for hardware that can not be bought without paying for a previous version of the OS. Ie: my point.
A retail copy of OS X is just like an upgrade copy of Windows. The latter does its upgrade check by asking for a CD with a previous version. The former does its check by looking for hardware that came with a previous version. There is no conceptual difference between those two procedures.
Apple competes by creating products, Psystar is simply riding their coat tails.
Psystar are responding to a market demand that Apple refuses to.
If Apple sold a) a reasonable priced desktop PC that had half the specs of a Mac Pro, and b) a decently priced and specced low-end Mac, the bulk of Psystar's business (and potential business) would dry up overnight.
There is at least one gaping hole in Apple's hardware lineup (IMHO there are three, but the other two are laptops and servers). Psystar are filling it. In no way is that "riding their coat tails".
They are no selling OS X computers. They are selling computers with unauthorized distributed works of OS X, which is a clear violation of copyright law.
They're not distributing OS X (in the Copyright sense, that is - ie: making multiple copies of a single original and selling the copies), they're reselling it.
If you agree with this, then you agree with Microsoft using GPL code in Windows.
If you support the first sale doctrine, then you must agree that someone has the right to buy a single copy of OS X, modify it, and resell it. That one copy is theirs to do with as they wish, after all, as long as they don't "distribute" it (in the Copyright sense of the word).
If it were an upgrade it would have required the previous version to install.
It did, just discreetly (you could only install it on the Mac that came with an earlier version of MacOS).
I have, just today, changed some settings, installed a new program, applied three updates and done a bunch of other stuff. I was asked for my password once, for the updates. Yes, that means I can install a program without a password prompt, and change settings without one, either.
Wow. Just like I just did on a Vista machine.
Maybe you missed the part where I said *system* settings, and copying files to *system* areas, and the like. Obviously if you avoid these, on both platforms, then you will not have to elevate. (OS X does have somewhat lax file permissions on /Applications, though, which probably helps a bit in terms of how often you might need to elevate - at the expense, naturally, of some security).
Now given that experience, please explain to me how I could even remotely not be upset about the claim that one thing would be just like the other.
Holy crap, talk about non-sequiturs. You've not just moved the goalposts, you've completely changed games. After spending the last however many posts (just in this thread, probably more in others) asserting that UAC in Vista and its counterparts on other OSes aren't at all alike, you've now changed to talking about completely unrelated aspects of a different version of Windows.
Technically all versions are full versions, because they'll install on bare hardware.
This has nothing to do with how it is licensed. It is an implementation semantic.
The bigger issue seems to be that Pystar is buying OS X, modifying the code, then reselling it. This is very different from an EULA violation -- it's copyright violation.
Although quite arguably it should not be, by the same reasoning that supports the first sale doctrine.
You can call a full install an upgrade if you want, but that doesn't make it such.
The thing that makes retail OS X packages an upgrade is the same thing that makes certain versions of Windows an upgrade - the EULA. You are not licensed to use either without an already existing OS license (Apple states this in a roundabout way, for marketing reasons, but the ultimate meaning is clear).
How it installs is utterly irrelevant to how it is licensed, and OS X is licensed as an upgrade.
What's really hilarious about the Psystar case is how, practically overnight, it completely reversed the licensing rhetoric coming out of the Mac zealot camp.
Except if you bothered to do a fair comparison, Apple hardware isn't more expensive than a similarly-configured Dell.
Only if you attach outrageous levels of value to the form factor, or insist on *very specific* hardware configurations.
Dell sells a Core i7 machine for under a grand, that is as fast as (if not faster than) an 8-core Mac Pro costing more thsn twice as much.
On the low end, Dell have a machine that costs only a bit more than half the price of a Mac Mini, but has anywhere from half again to 4 times as many hardware resources.
In the mid-range, the gaping hole in Apple's lineup is where Dell does most of its business.
Yes, if you *must* have an all-in-one machine the size of a 20" LCD, or a desktop computer the size of a few CD cases, or a dual-CPU, 8-core machine, then Apple's hardware is for you. However, if all you want is a decent desktop PC, a cheap PC, or a powerful PC, then their hardware is embarassingly overpriced.
Firefox is better than any version of IE so far and has been available for over 4 years, so why haven't people flocked to it in that time frame?
Because IE4 was _dramatically_ better than Navigator. IE today is "good enough", and for most people Firefox just isn't better enough to be compelling.
You mean bundling IE did not kill Netscape, which at the time, was the dominant browser? Yes, it assuredly did.
No, it demonstrably did not. IE4 was the version that dethroned Navigator, it did it before Windows 98 was released, and continued to displace it at a far faster rate than Windows 98's uptake.
IE beat Navigator because it was better, and remained so into the 2000s. Firefox was well past its 1.0 release before it became anything close to a compelling alternative to IE for most people.
Windows 3.1 had no built in network stack. Microsoft wanted their own propietary service at the time.
Windows 3.1 predates The Microsoft Network by more than 3 years. MSN was launched with Windows 95.
And if I understand the issue with Windows 7, your malicious app can simply turn UAC off before it tries to access the system area.
Yes, but the argument from Microsoft was that for the malicious app to be executing in the first place, the security of the system had already been breached somehow. I don't agree with this principle, because such critical aspects of a systems security configuration should be protected by defense in depth, but it is not unreasonable to assume that a user happy to run unknown and/or malicious binaries would also be happy to approve any UAC prompts that they might raise (eg: in the process of lowering the UAC level).
Like I keep saying - either the UAC warnings serve some purpose, in which case being able to silently turn them off is a bad thing, or they don't and UAC may as well be abandoned.
UAC warnings appear when something tries to access an area of the system that it does not have privileges for by default - the UAC prompt is there to elevate privileges to the necessary level. That is the "purpose" of UAC (and its equivalents on other systems) - to allow a low level of privilege to be used by default, then easily elevated when required. It is conceptually the same as sudo in UNIXish systems, and implemented in a nearly identical fashion (or at least as similarly as the different security models allow).
I accept that it's only a second level defence, but that's like saying a burglar alarm that has a simple off switch on the front is not broken because the front door must already have been compromised for the burglar to get to the switch.
Well, arguably it's not "broken" - merely somewhat less secure [0] - because if an intruder has already made it far enough in to disable the burglar alarm, then your "security" is breached.
[0] Note that even with an additional UAC prompt, it's still "somewhat less secure" that it possibly could be. For example, resetting the UAC mode could require booting the system into a special, restricted, single-user "security mode", where nothing else could be done except security-related configuration changes (eg: you wouldn't be able to run unsigned binaries, the network stack would be disabled, etc, etc). The fundamental problem is that security and convenience are inversely proportional, so you have to find a balance between the two.
I have, apparently you haven't or you would be aware that the windows they pop up are not "sudo", unless you're the one imprecise with words and what you're really trying to say is not "sudo" but "priviledge escalation".
The privilege escalation prompts in Ubuntu and OS X are done with sudo.
When I've usedd Ubuntu, I saw nothing like UAC. There is a GUI-based sudo on Ubuntu, but it is always triggered by user action.
Then you couldn't have used it much. Installing packages, applying updates, changing system settings, attempting to copy files into system areas. These are just a few things in both Ubuntu and OS X that will trigger a prompt just like they do in Windows.
I've never seen it pop up unexpectedly, say why I was reading mail. But it's been a year at least since I last used Ubuntu, so that might have changed.
I've never seen a UAC prompt appear unexpectedly either. Perhaps you can give an example of how it might be done ?
On OS X, which I use daily, there are two things. One is like Ubuntu, when you do something that requires super-user rights, it asks you for a password. Nothing to see here, definitely not UAC.
That is exactly the same as UAC.
I'm sorry, but you'll never convince me that overriding what users with admin privileges can do to their system, silently, is in any way a good thing. It's not.
It probably wasn't "silent". Did you look in the Event Log ?
Also, users with admin privileges *can* write to %PROGRAMFILES%, so the the redirection doesn't kick in for them. The "Virtual Store" (I think it's called) is only activated when a user who doesn't have privileges to write to a protected area (like %PROGRAMFILES%) tries to. In other cases (ie: a read, or a write by someone who has privileges to do so) the "real" file is accessed (unless a user has previously tried to write and had a 'virtual' file created - in which case reads will continue to redirect).
The components may still be there, but their behavior and look have both changed significantly across Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.
If your measure of the change between 2000, XP and Vista is "significant", then the only way to describe the difference between XP and Ubuntu would be something like "mind-bending" or "Earth-shattering".
Are you kidding? Ubuntu's closer to XP than Vista is, and the new Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office suites are changing the user interface much more than each new iteration of Ubuntu does. Sit someone down in front of an Ubuntu desktop and they'll have a much easier time figuring that stuff out than the new version of Microsoft _____.
Rubbish. The fundamentals of the Windows UI haven't changed since Windows *95*. Widgets, the Start Menu, the Taskbar, dialogs, file selectors, etc. All have changed little in the last ~14 years.
The suggestion that Ubuntu is "closer to XP than Vista is", UI-wise, is simply laughable - and that's just looking at a relatively bare desktop with something that's nearly identical on all platforms, like Firefox, running.
If someone is having trouble transitioning from XP to Vista, they will be completely and utterly lost transition from XP to Ubuntu.
Well, the Apple computer you buy is the biggest dongle ever manufactured, but I didn't "pay dearly" for it by any means. It is totally comparable in cost to equivalent generic PC hardware.
That depends rather heavily on how you choose to define "equivalent". If things like the size of case, or whether the monitor is a separate piece of hardware, matter little to you, most Apple hardware is embarassingly overpriced.
The beauty of retail copies of OS X though, is that you can install them on a nuked-and-paved drive (no need to install OEM and then upgrade).
You don't need to do this with Windows, either (although you will need your OEM CD on hand).
Then why is this "feature" present on win 2k8 too?
I can see your point with Vista, but a server operating system?
Because there are plenty of broken server applications as well. NOTHING should be storing volatile data in %PROGRAMFILES%. Conceptually it's similar to /usr - it *should* be mountable read-only.
Its still broken and wrong,
No, it's an engineering decision. Annoy the vast, vast, vast majority of users very frequently, or a vanishingly small minority of users (who should know better anyway) extremely infrequently.
If your application is storing data there then it's doing the wrong thing. It's not Microsoft's responsibility to pander to every possible variation on "broken" - only the most common ones.