Installing the game outside of that folder all buy bypasses UAC, rendering the so-called security useless.
For someone who claims to be a Windows sysadmin, you have a pretty poor understanding of both the point of UAC, what it does, and the security it offers.
In Vista, I have to click and drag on a scroll bar, click on a folder, lather, rinse, repeat. Navigating the menu takes considerably longer.
You don't have a mouse with a scroll wheel ?
Next take the explorer toolbar. The up button is removed. The interface looks cleaner, but the usability takes a hit for it.
The breadcrumb trail in Vista is *vastly* superior UI than the up button. It achieves everything the up button did and more besides. In no way, shape, or form is it a "regression".
The Start Menu is a huge regression. A scrollbar within the Start Menu? It takes me far more clicks, and far more time to get to what I'm looking for. The Vista menu is a usability nightmare. Adding search does not offset the poor design. It look pretty, but using it is a pain.
Anything you use frequently should be present in the top-level Start Menu, either because it's been automatically put in the frequently used section, or because you manually pinned it to the upper section.
If you have to go searching for something, the difference between a cascading menu and a scrolling one, is irrelevant.
Of course, you're probably one of these luddites who cursed XP's new Start Menu, despite it being superior in every measurable way, and immediately went back to the 'Classic' one muttering under your breath about "control".
I have not seen one business or serious user adopt Vista.
I'm a *UNIX* sysadmin and I use Vista both willingly and happily (on a 3 year old PC, no less). The ease with which it allows me to run as an unprivileged user, alone, is worth the price of entry IMHO (not that I've seen any 'price' thus far - works as well, and as fast, as Windows 2003 did).
You can run as a non-administrator in XP, and use "Run As" to elevate privileges. It isn't as much of a pain as UAC in Vista.
Vista isn't better in that regard.
Speaking as someone who has been running a regular user account and making use of "Run As" since about 1997, this is a load of utter shite. UAC in Vista is so much easier, more effective and "better" that it's not even funny.
I work for a very large company with a Microsoft site license that is presumably for Vista now, except that other than the team certifying it for enterprise use, no one uses it.
Site licenses are typically for "a workstation version of Windows NT". So it doesn't matter if people are using Windows 2000 Pro, XP Pro or Vista Business, a single license covers all possibilities (probably even down to NT 4 Worksation).
Which is why the anthems of people are saying "Break backwards compatibility and make something that works."
People say that right up until that one program their world revolves around stops working. Just look at all the hoo-ha around Vista, even though in the grand scheme of things it hardly breaks anything at all.
I long for the day that MS starts over.
It's been and gone 15 years ago. It was called Windows NT. There is _zero_ need to dump NT and start over again.
Why are we still dealing with disk defragmentation in 2009?
Because file systems still fragment. Yes, even the ones you think don't. I have seen ext3 and UFS filesystems with well over 50% fragmentation.
For *most* people [0] it doesn't make any difference whatsoever, but thanks to decades of 'IT lore', there is still an irrational belief that defragmenting is something you need to do regularly and frequently on PCs to maintain performance.
This tool is a placebo for those people.
[0] For a small minority out there (large files, mostly full filesystems, frequent writing, heavy use) fragmentation can actually get noticable. In which case this tool might actually do something useful for you - but it would have done it just as well without the picture window and disco ball.
This will be critical test. MS Vista failed largely because it did not work on hardware even a year old [...]
Rubbish. Vista was usable on hardware up to 7 years old with minor upgrades and at release dual-core boxes with 2G of RAM (more than enough for decent Vista performance) were $500. A year earlier they cost only a little more than that, albeit with slightly slower processors (which is mostly irrelevant, since - as with OS X - it's the RAM that matters most).
* New Taskbar: The taskbar now automatically hides icons as theyÃ(TM)re added, into what I call an icon corral which can be selected to show the icons.
The "New Taskbar" has the same UI misfeature that Windows XP's (in default configuration, once you have enough open windows with "group and collapse" turned on) and OS X's Dock (all the time) do:
Once all those buttons collapse into one, it makes moving directly from one arbitrary window to another annoying and slow. Although at least you can still disable it.
* UAC definition by program: You can also exempt specific programs from UAC prompts.
Oh, great, thus defeating the purpose of having it in the first place. You should have stayed the course, Microsoft, you were probably only 12 months away from the majority of developers actually releasing properly written software. Now they're all just going to leave it broken and have a (default ticked) "exclude from UAC" box as part of their installation.
* Sticky windows (my definition): You can now drag windows to the top of the screen, which will automatically maximize the window. Also by dragging the window to the side of the screen, it will size the window to take the half of that side of the screen
The former is mostly pointless (double-click in the titlebar has achieved this since Windows 3.x days). The latter sounds a bit more interesting.
* Preview Desktop: To the right of the taskbar, there is now a preview desktop button.
Meh. WinKey+D since Windows 95.
* Faster Boots: Parallel device initialization during boot Ã" faster boot times. Demo showed a 5-10 second faster cold boot over Vista.
For the life of me I have never been able to understand the obsession with boot times. Then again, I only reboot my PC maybe once a month.
The HTML rendering components should be made into a redistributable package, like the.NET framework. That way, anybody distributing software that needs HTML rendering capabilities can include the installer for the MS HTML engine. This arrangement would also encourage application developers to more carefully consider why and how they add HTML rendering to their app, and whether they should use some other platform, such as XULRunner or Webkit.
And the thousands of applications already in the marketplace ?
Anything that did not have a pre-existing market, like the graphical shell and many utilities.
Sorry, both graphical shells and pretty much every utility included with Windows already existed in independent form before Windows 95 (or even NT 3.1) was released.
Most of the included software applications, however, are violations.
From what I can tell, you basically want:
* Microsoft to only be allowed to sell what is essentially DOS 3.3 with a fancier kernel.
* Vendors like Dell and HP to have to create whole new departments to patch together "Windows" with various bits and pieces of third-party software to create something customers would actually be interested in, like Red Hat or Ubuntu do.
* That the resulting multiple and different versions of Windows end up with the polish, integration and interoperability of a mid-90s Linux distribution.
* That no-one at all should be able to buy a fully functional OS from Microsoft.
In the case of the monopoly, there are no other video card makers in the market, that is to say, while one computer company might make their own, they don't sell that to anyone else so everyone that buys them to include in a computer they sell has to go with Nvidia and has to buy the LCD as well. There are free "alternative" LCDs, but they are not suitable for the mainstream market because of incompatibilities with every software program and their use in commercial sales of real computers is basically 0%.
In which case your analogy falls apart because it is not accurate, as there are multiple vendors in today's marketplace (anywhere from two to more than half a dozen, depending on your definitions).
Further, you appear to be asserting that Windows is only a monopoly on Windows, not the market as a whole - "they are not suitable for the mainstream market because of incompatibilities with every software program and their use in commercial sales of real computers is basically 0%" - or, in other words, "Windows alternatives are not suitable because they cannot run Windows software". Someone as learned as yourself should know that is not a valid definition of a monopoly (or, if it is, Apple is in far deeper trouble than Microsoft).
To replace the abstract functionality of Windows (GUI, networking, run programs like word processors, web browsers, etc) then there are clear and easily obtained (and FREE) alternatives, the exact number of which, again, depends on your definitions.
Ahh, but it is substandard in a way that gives it an artificial advantage, like intentional violation of standards to subtly make it seem like it is all other browsers which are broken, as per the strategy MS laid out to do just that in the documents revealed last time they were convicted of this exact crime in the US.
So it's not really 'substandard' from an end user's perspective, only from someone who thinks the web should be run in their preferred, homogenous fashion ?
Please. Have you ever done Web development. We're still using halfway implemented versions of eight year old standards as the state of the art for commercial WEb development. Can you tell me one other software field where advancement has been so absurdly slow? Heck Windows APIs which require updating the whole OS instead of just one library advance like lightening in comparison.
Opinions and anecdotes are not data. You still haven't defined 'advancement', nor have you demonstrated how it is slower now than it has been in the past, taking into account a maturing field.
I remember what the web was like a decade ago, and I'd consider things like Google Docs, Facebook and Youtube to be pretty damn 'advanced' compared to that.
Just give it up. MS is breaking the law. They've already convicted of this action in the US and they never stopped the criminal act. The whole purpose of antitrust law is to prevent these abuses and keep competition and the advantages of low costs and rapid innovation intact. And do you know
It only applies to pre-existing separate markets. That is, someone has to be selling or in some way making money selling that component separately at the time MS starts bundling it.
So which features in Windows *aren't* an antitrust violation ?
MS doesn't sell computers. MS sells computer components and OEMs build complete systems. It's like if Nvidia managed to monopolize the graphics card market, then started making LCDs integrated with the video card and required all computer manufacturers to buy them as a bundle.
Some minor details you left out of your analogy: the bundled LCD is _free_, every other video card maker also includes one with their video cards, and all the LCD manufacturers are also happy to send you one of their LCDs for free if you ask them.
Right now they have a lot of incentives to include a substandard browser with every computer the sell [...]
Right. Because if there's one thing that's sure to score repeat customers, it's selling a substanard product when you could be selling a better one at no extra cost.
[...] and that has resulted in the Web advancing very, very slowly for a long time.
Evidence ? How are you measuring "advancement" ? What are the relative rates past vs present ? How are they normalised ?
IE and Windows Explorer are tightly linked (contrary to popular belief). Remove one and you may have functionality but not full functionality.
Yes. This is what happens when you componentise large pieces of software and try to re-use code where possible. Try deleting a few random files out of/lib and/usr/lib on a Linux machine one day and see what stops working.
The biggest reason why Windows sucks when it comes to security and stability: backward compatibility.
No. The biggest reasons it "sucks" with regards to "security" are the user demographic and prevalence. The biggest reason it "sucks" with regards to stability is poor hardware and worse drivers.
But the size of the WinSxS (the folder with multiple versions of each DLL which all happen to have the same name stupidly) is huge [...]
Most of the files in the winsxs directory are hard links to the "real" files in other parts of the filesystem. It might look "huge", but it's actual footprint is much smaller.
Netscape discovered that one, when Microsoft "knifed the baby" (in Microsoft's own words).
Of course, by the time Microsoft "knifed the baby", said "baby" had already been starved, beaten, left in an alley dumpster, and lain unclaimed in the morgue for a week.
Example: Opera. Opera, a small browser maker is not being able to compete with Microsoft in the browser market, because after bundling IE with windows, for the most majority of people (you know, the ones calling IE "the internet") a browser market ceased to exist.
And before that it was Netscape Navigator, and before that Mosaic.
Computers come with browsers - sometimes they are "native" (IE, Cyberdog, Safari, Konquerer, etc), sometimes they are "bundled" (Navigator, Firefox, Opera, etc). Before a browser came with your computer, it came with with your ISP subscription.
The point is that they've always been freely available, in one form or another, and this idea that there's an untapped goldmine of people ready to pony up $$$$ for a web browser, if only IE didn't come with Windows, is just stupid.
Make IE be truly uninstallable. Disintegrate it with windows explorer.
What about all the developers who want a consistent set of shared components to target ? These days, that sort of functionality is considered standard on all major platforms.
What about all the applications out that that already rely on the IE components ?
I'm surprised they haven't tried this trick with MS-office, making some kind of "core spreadsheet services" DLLs that are part of the "OS" and that other apps can make use of, and wind up making up 99% of Excel.
Pretty dumb move when there's clearly still a lot of people out there prepared to pay for an Office suite.
You really are ignoring the point - if a virus author can first own a web server, then he is now inserted in a position of trust with all the potentially thousands of end users who call on said server, which he can now exploit directly.
I'm not missing the point, I'm trying to highlight why your scenarios simply isn't as attractive as simply being able to send out a hundred million random spam emails with a 1% success rate.
"Owning" a web server is, generally speaking, quite difficult. Further, even once you have 'owned' it, your chances of being discovered are quite high because the people responsible for it (or the environment it runs in) are highly likely to notice aberrant behaviour (elevated network traffic, CPU usage, end users complaining, etc, etc) and discover your 'ownage'.
Contrast this to the typical desktop PC, where getting in is rarely any harder than some simple social engineering and the chances of being discovered (let along acted against) are relatively miniscule.
Do you run XP without an add on firewall or virus protection tool? No? Why not? Because it's inherently insecure.
Actually I run Vista on my Windows machine, these days, but even when I was running XP and 2003, I never bothered with AV software. I did, of course, protect any internet-exposed hosts with a firewal, but I do that regardless of what OS they're running (and I'd consider anyone not doing so to be negligent).
There is nothing 'inherently insecure' about Windows XP. You secure it exactly the same way you do any other platform - run a firewall, use a least-privileged user account, avoid software with known exploits, and - most importantly - don't execute software you don't know anything about.
That said, Windows is using the same security model as Apple, which is less secure than Linux, but more secure than a typical installation of Windows XP and before.
You need to define what you mean here by 'model'. Do you mean the fundamental security model of the OS (eg: ACLs, root user, etc), or do you mean the high-level model of unprivileged users who can elevate ?
I suspect it's the latter, in which case you're wrong, there is no difference between Vista, OS X and Linux+sudo (eg: as found in Ubuntu). They're all doing the same thing, although the Windows implementation is different because of its fundamental architectural differences.
The one flaw I've seen in these 'sudo' schemes is that they can be attacked using automation tools. For instance, on mac you could run a non-admin Applescript that signals to click in the dialog box and automate your attack that way. I'm not sure if Apple has any security in place to block such an attack.
In Windows, at least, the elevation dialogs run on a separate desktop that cannot be manipulated by any applications running on a different desktop. Or, more simply, you couldn't have an app "click the button" on the UAC dialog because it has no way of doing so.
Still, the likelihood of such an attack is lessened because it requires getting the malicious code on the system and executing it.
Getting code onto a [typical desktop] machine and executing it is trivially simple, as pretty much every 'click here for boobies' email virus has demonstrated.
The fact that MS killed that market, does not make the market inexistent.
No, the fact that no meaningful number of people could ever be expected to pay for a web browser is what makes the market non-existent.
If there is consumption, there is a market. Even if the prices are $0.(It's like saying there is no makrket for Linux since it's price is $0, but we all know there is a market for Linux.)
By your logic essentially every single feature of Windows is an anti-trust violation.
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Installing the game outside of that folder all buy bypasses UAC, rendering the so-called security useless.
For someone who claims to be a Windows sysadmin, you have a pretty poor understanding of both the point of UAC, what it does, and the security it offers.
In Vista, I have to click and drag on a scroll bar, click on a folder, lather, rinse, repeat. Navigating the menu takes considerably longer.
You don't have a mouse with a scroll wheel ?
Next take the explorer toolbar. The up button is removed. The interface looks cleaner, but the usability takes a hit for it.
The breadcrumb trail in Vista is *vastly* superior UI than the up button. It achieves everything the up button did and more besides. In no way, shape, or form is it a "regression".
The Start Menu is a huge regression. A scrollbar within the Start Menu? It takes me far more clicks, and far more time to get to what I'm looking for. The Vista menu is a usability nightmare. Adding search does not offset the poor design. It look pretty, but using it is a pain.
Anything you use frequently should be present in the top-level Start Menu, either because it's been automatically put in the frequently used section, or because you manually pinned it to the upper section.
If you have to go searching for something, the difference between a cascading menu and a scrolling one, is irrelevant.
Of course, you're probably one of these luddites who cursed XP's new Start Menu, despite it being superior in every measurable way, and immediately went back to the 'Classic' one muttering under your breath about "control".
I have not seen one business or serious user adopt Vista.
I'm a *UNIX* sysadmin and I use Vista both willingly and happily (on a 3 year old PC, no less). The ease with which it allows me to run as an unprivileged user, alone, is worth the price of entry IMHO (not that I've seen any 'price' thus far - works as well, and as fast, as Windows 2003 did).
You can run as a non-administrator in XP, and use "Run As" to elevate privileges. It isn't as much of a pain as UAC in Vista.
Vista isn't better in that regard.
Speaking as someone who has been running a regular user account and making use of "Run As" since about 1997, this is a load of utter shite. UAC in Vista is so much easier, more effective and "better" that it's not even funny.
I work for a very large company with a Microsoft site license that is presumably for Vista now, except that other than the team certifying it for enterprise use, no one uses it.
Site licenses are typically for "a workstation version of Windows NT". So it doesn't matter if people are using Windows 2000 Pro, XP Pro or Vista Business, a single license covers all possibilities (probably even down to NT 4 Worksation).
Which is why the anthems of people are saying "Break backwards compatibility and make something that works."
People say that right up until that one program their world revolves around stops working. Just look at all the hoo-ha around Vista, even though in the grand scheme of things it hardly breaks anything at all.
I long for the day that MS starts over.
It's been and gone 15 years ago. It was called Windows NT. There is _zero_ need to dump NT and start over again.
Why are we still dealing with disk defragmentation in 2009?
Because file systems still fragment. Yes, even the ones you think don't. I have seen ext3 and UFS filesystems with well over 50% fragmentation.
For *most* people [0] it doesn't make any difference whatsoever, but thanks to decades of 'IT lore', there is still an irrational belief that defragmenting is something you need to do regularly and frequently on PCs to maintain performance.
This tool is a placebo for those people.
[0] For a small minority out there (large files, mostly full filesystems, frequent writing, heavy use) fragmentation can actually get noticable. In which case this tool might actually do something useful for you - but it would have done it just as well without the picture window and disco ball.
This will be critical test. MS Vista failed largely because it did not work on hardware even a year old [...]
Rubbish. Vista was usable on hardware up to 7 years old with minor upgrades and at release dual-core boxes with 2G of RAM (more than enough for decent Vista performance) were $500. A year earlier they cost only a little more than that, albeit with slightly slower processors (which is mostly irrelevant, since - as with OS X - it's the RAM that matters most).
* New Taskbar: The taskbar now automatically hides icons as theyÃ(TM)re added, into what I call an icon corral which can be selected to show the icons.
The "New Taskbar" has the same UI misfeature that Windows XP's (in default configuration, once you have enough open windows with "group and collapse" turned on) and OS X's Dock (all the time) do:
Once all those buttons collapse into one, it makes moving directly from one arbitrary window to another annoying and slow. Although at least you can still disable it.
* UAC definition by program: You can also exempt specific programs from UAC prompts.
Oh, great, thus defeating the purpose of having it in the first place. You should have stayed the course, Microsoft, you were probably only 12 months away from the majority of developers actually releasing properly written software. Now they're all just going to leave it broken and have a (default ticked) "exclude from UAC" box as part of their installation.
* Sticky windows (my definition): You can now drag windows to the top of the screen, which will automatically maximize the window. Also by dragging the window to the side of the screen, it will size the window to take the half of that side of the screen
The former is mostly pointless (double-click in the titlebar has achieved this since Windows 3.x days). The latter sounds a bit more interesting.
* Preview Desktop: To the right of the taskbar, there is now a preview desktop button.
Meh. WinKey+D since Windows 95.
* Faster Boots: Parallel device initialization during boot Ã" faster boot times. Demo showed a 5-10 second faster cold boot over Vista.
For the life of me I have never been able to understand the obsession with boot times. Then again, I only reboot my PC maybe once a month.
The thing is, Seagate is considered Enterprise-class, [...]
Pretty sure the 1.5T drives being talked about here are "consumer class", not "enterprise class".
Its not, after all, illegal to report a crime..
How about when it's illegal to _witness_ a crime ?
The HTML rendering components should be made into a redistributable package, like the .NET framework. That way, anybody distributing software that needs HTML rendering capabilities can include the installer for the MS HTML engine. This arrangement would also encourage application developers to more carefully consider why and how they add HTML rendering to their app, and whether they should use some other platform, such as XULRunner or Webkit.
And the thousands of applications already in the marketplace ?
Anything that did not have a pre-existing market, like the graphical shell and many utilities.
Sorry, both graphical shells and pretty much every utility included with Windows already existed in independent form before Windows 95 (or even NT 3.1) was released.
Most of the included software applications, however, are violations.
From what I can tell, you basically want:
* Microsoft to only be allowed to sell what is essentially DOS 3.3 with a fancier kernel.
* Vendors like Dell and HP to have to create whole new departments to patch together "Windows" with various bits and pieces of third-party software to create something customers would actually be interested in, like Red Hat or Ubuntu do.
* That the resulting multiple and different versions of Windows end up with the polish, integration and interoperability of a mid-90s Linux distribution.
* That no-one at all should be able to buy a fully functional OS from Microsoft.
In the case of the monopoly, there are no other video card makers in the market, that is to say, while one computer company might make their own, they don't sell that to anyone else so everyone that buys them to include in a computer they sell has to go with Nvidia and has to buy the LCD as well. There are free "alternative" LCDs, but they are not suitable for the mainstream market because of incompatibilities with every software program and their use in commercial sales of real computers is basically 0%.
In which case your analogy falls apart because it is not accurate, as there are multiple vendors in today's marketplace (anywhere from two to more than half a dozen, depending on your definitions).
Further, you appear to be asserting that Windows is only a monopoly on Windows, not the market as a whole - "they are not suitable for the mainstream market because of incompatibilities with every software program and their use in commercial sales of real computers is basically 0%" - or, in other words, "Windows alternatives are not suitable because they cannot run Windows software". Someone as learned as yourself should know that is not a valid definition of a monopoly (or, if it is, Apple is in far deeper trouble than Microsoft).
To replace the abstract functionality of Windows (GUI, networking, run programs like word processors, web browsers, etc) then there are clear and easily obtained (and FREE) alternatives, the exact number of which, again, depends on your definitions.
Ahh, but it is substandard in a way that gives it an artificial advantage, like intentional violation of standards to subtly make it seem like it is all other browsers which are broken, as per the strategy MS laid out to do just that in the documents revealed last time they were convicted of this exact crime in the US.
So it's not really 'substandard' from an end user's perspective, only from someone who thinks the web should be run in their preferred, homogenous fashion ?
Please. Have you ever done Web development. We're still using halfway implemented versions of eight year old standards as the state of the art for commercial WEb development. Can you tell me one other software field where advancement has been so absurdly slow? Heck Windows APIs which require updating the whole OS instead of just one library advance like lightening in comparison.
Opinions and anecdotes are not data. You still haven't defined 'advancement', nor have you demonstrated how it is slower now than it has been in the past, taking into account a maturing field.
I remember what the web was like a decade ago, and I'd consider things like Google Docs, Facebook and Youtube to be pretty damn 'advanced' compared to that.
Just give it up. MS is breaking the law. They've already convicted of this action in the US and they never stopped the criminal act. The whole purpose of antitrust law is to prevent these abuses and keep competition and the advantages of low costs and rapid innovation intact. And do you know
It only applies to pre-existing separate markets. That is, someone has to be selling or in some way making money selling that component separately at the time MS starts bundling it.
So which features in Windows *aren't* an antitrust violation ?
MS doesn't sell computers. MS sells computer components and OEMs build complete systems. It's like if Nvidia managed to monopolize the graphics card market, then started making LCDs integrated with the video card and required all computer manufacturers to buy them as a bundle.
Some minor details you left out of your analogy: the bundled LCD is _free_, every other video card maker also includes one with their video cards, and all the LCD manufacturers are also happy to send you one of their LCDs for free if you ask them.
Right now they have a lot of incentives to include a substandard browser with every computer the sell [...]
Right. Because if there's one thing that's sure to score repeat customers, it's selling a substanard product when you could be selling a better one at no extra cost.
[...] and that has resulted in the Web advancing very, very slowly for a long time.
Evidence ? How are you measuring "advancement" ? What are the relative rates past vs present ? How are they normalised ?
IE and Windows Explorer are tightly linked (contrary to popular belief). Remove one and you may have functionality but not full functionality.
Yes. This is what happens when you componentise large pieces of software and try to re-use code where possible. Try deleting a few random files out of /lib and /usr/lib on a Linux machine one day and see what stops working.
The biggest reason why Windows sucks when it comes to security and stability: backward compatibility.
No. The biggest reasons it "sucks" with regards to "security" are the user demographic and prevalence. The biggest reason it "sucks" with regards to stability is poor hardware and worse drivers.
But the size of the WinSxS (the folder with multiple versions of each DLL which all happen to have the same name stupidly) is huge [...]
Most of the files in the winsxs directory are hard links to the "real" files in other parts of the filesystem. It might look "huge", but it's actual footprint is much smaller.
What they don't have the right to do is link it so closely to the system that you cannot remove it, no matter how hard you try.
That is to say, they do not have the right to follow good software engineering practices and employ code reuse ?
Netscape discovered that one, when Microsoft "knifed the baby" (in Microsoft's own words).
Of course, by the time Microsoft "knifed the baby", said "baby" had already been starved, beaten, left in an alley dumpster, and lain unclaimed in the morgue for a week.
Example: Opera. Opera, a small browser maker is not being able to compete with Microsoft in the browser market, because after bundling IE with windows, for the most majority of people (you know, the ones calling IE "the internet") a browser market ceased to exist.
And before that it was Netscape Navigator, and before that Mosaic.
Computers come with browsers - sometimes they are "native" (IE, Cyberdog, Safari, Konquerer, etc), sometimes they are "bundled" (Navigator, Firefox, Opera, etc). Before a browser came with your computer, it came with with your ISP subscription.
The point is that they've always been freely available, in one form or another, and this idea that there's an untapped goldmine of people ready to pony up $$$$ for a web browser, if only IE didn't come with Windows, is just stupid.
The whole point was that the OEMs decide the middleware.
What about the retail versions of Windows ?
Make IE be truly uninstallable. Disintegrate it with windows explorer.
What about all the developers who want a consistent set of shared components to target ? These days, that sort of functionality is considered standard on all major platforms.
What about all the applications out that that already rely on the IE components ?
I'm surprised they haven't tried this trick with MS-office, making some kind of "core spreadsheet services" DLLs that are part of the "OS" and that other apps can make use of, and wind up making up 99% of Excel.
Pretty dumb move when there's clearly still a lot of people out there prepared to pay for an Office suite.
Basic FTP clients aren't exactly a major source of income, so I don't think any sort of anti-trust suit would get anywhere.
I'd be willing to bet there are about as many people paying for FTP clients on Windows as there are Web Browsers.
You really are ignoring the point - if a virus author can first own a web server, then he is now inserted in a position of trust with all the potentially thousands of end users who call on said server, which he can now exploit directly.
I'm not missing the point, I'm trying to highlight why your scenarios simply isn't as attractive as simply being able to send out a hundred million random spam emails with a 1% success rate.
"Owning" a web server is, generally speaking, quite difficult. Further, even once you have 'owned' it, your chances of being discovered are quite high because the people responsible for it (or the environment it runs in) are highly likely to notice aberrant behaviour (elevated network traffic, CPU usage, end users complaining, etc, etc) and discover your 'ownage'.
Contrast this to the typical desktop PC, where getting in is rarely any harder than some simple social engineering and the chances of being discovered (let along acted against) are relatively miniscule.
Do you run XP without an add on firewall or virus protection tool? No? Why not? Because it's inherently insecure.
Actually I run Vista on my Windows machine, these days, but even when I was running XP and 2003, I never bothered with AV software. I did, of course, protect any internet-exposed hosts with a firewal, but I do that regardless of what OS they're running (and I'd consider anyone not doing so to be negligent).
There is nothing 'inherently insecure' about Windows XP. You secure it exactly the same way you do any other platform - run a firewall, use a least-privileged user account, avoid software with known exploits, and - most importantly - don't execute software you don't know anything about.
That said, Windows is using the same security model as Apple, which is less secure than Linux, but more secure than a typical installation of Windows XP and before.
You need to define what you mean here by 'model'. Do you mean the fundamental security model of the OS (eg: ACLs, root user, etc), or do you mean the high-level model of unprivileged users who can elevate ?
I suspect it's the latter, in which case you're wrong, there is no difference between Vista, OS X and Linux+sudo (eg: as found in Ubuntu). They're all doing the same thing, although the Windows implementation is different because of its fundamental architectural differences.
The one flaw I've seen in these 'sudo' schemes is that they can be attacked using automation tools. For instance, on mac you could run a non-admin Applescript that signals to click in the dialog box and automate your attack that way. I'm not sure if Apple has any security in place to block such an attack.
In Windows, at least, the elevation dialogs run on a separate desktop that cannot be manipulated by any applications running on a different desktop. Or, more simply, you couldn't have an app "click the button" on the UAC dialog because it has no way of doing so.
Still, the likelihood of such an attack is lessened because it requires getting the malicious code on the system and executing it.
Getting code onto a [typical desktop] machine and executing it is trivially simple, as pretty much every 'click here for boobies' email virus has demonstrated.
The fact that MS killed that market, does not make the market inexistent.
No, the fact that no meaningful number of people could ever be expected to pay for a web browser is what makes the market non-existent.
If there is consumption, there is a market. Even if the prices are $0.(It's like saying there is no makrket for Linux since it's price is $0, but we all know there is a market for Linux.)
By your logic essentially every single feature of Windows is an anti-trust violation.