Do you really believe that? At what point was Word ever better than Word Perfect? Bonus: why?
Word for Windows or Word for Mac ?
On the PC side, Word 6.0 was the version that really started to hurt Wordperfect (although even the earlier versions had won some praise). As to why, that would depend on the exact customer, but WYSIWYG, ease of use, integration with other applications (ie: Office) and being a Windows application would have been the major drawcards. Also, due to the _massive_ effort Microsoft put into file conversion abilities and a "WP Mode" for Word (same keystrokes, etc), the transition was relatively easy.
When was IE ever better than Netscape? again, why?
From version 4.0 (3.0 was merely "as good"). It was more standards compliant (relatively unimportant), faster and more stable (very important, especially since Navigator 4.0 was both horribly slow and horribly unstable). Which is why it _slaughtered_ Navigator's market share long before its integration into Windows 98 became a factor.
The whole DOS background printing, inDOS flag, and other undocumented features were used my multiplan and word. Windows 2.x has a section in the SDK called "Extensions to Windows for MS Word."
Which, clearly, had nothing to do with Word beating Wordperfect, because that didn't happen until Word 6.0 and Windows 3.x, ca. 1994, whereas the timeframe you're talking about was 5+ years earlier.
This blog post does a fairly good job of highlighting all the stuff Microsoft did right and all the stuff Wordperfect did wrong.
They were handed the monopoly for the PC operating system by IBM, who actually left control of the OS in Microsoft's hands while making it the official OS for what would become the official desktop hardware, because everybody who wanted a desktop repeated, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" and bought an IBM PC, or, if they were thrifty, a clone (which still had an MS operating system).
The IBM PC was available with 3 OS choices.
To say nothing of how it is - by definition - impossible to be a monopoly in a "market" you created.
Microsoft outright stole some products (Stac comes to mind)-- after they LOST in court, then they bought the company on the stock market.
What ? Microsoft v Stac was about patents (and software patents are bad, remember ?). Further, Stac went on for several years afterwards (and were eventually killed - like all the similarly fragile "whole disk in a compressed volume" products - by plummeting hard disk prices.
Not in the least. The Chicago GUI was a mentally retarded variant of the OS/2 Workplace Shell. It looked like OS/2 2.x/3.x, but had very little of its functionality, and was significantly less stable than either OS/2 or Win3.1.
What ? Windows 95 was streets ahead of Windows 3.1 in stability, especially if it was running 32 bit across the board (drivers and software).
OS/2 vs Windows 95 was basically even, because while OS/2 had less legacy crap to cause problems, it did have the infamous SIQ regularly causing problems.
Please. I won't argue how slowly things are progressing, but it sure isn't fast.
Without a base from which to measure "fast" and "slow", your comment is meaningless.
Nine years ago I used to use voice commands to check my e-mail and have it read to me. Since then, voice commands have not improved significantly.
This is because - outside of the movies - the idea of "voice commands" is dumb (a cube farm full of people yelling at their computers - what a great idea !). To say nothing of the the lack of underlying language recognition systems that would make them actually useful.
But there is an easy market where we can see stagnation.
No, there is an easy market where we can see a complete and utter lack of interest from most people. About the only people who would seriously benefit from good voice commands are the severely disabled, and they are - unfortuantely - a minority too small to have much influence.
"Voice commands" are like Minority Report-esque "holographic interfaces". They look cool in a movie, but in actual use they're crap.
How about Web technologies. IE partially supports 8 year old standards and fails to implement significantly anything since. For high-tech, that is extreme stagnation.
So TCP/IP is another example of "extreme stagnation" ? In many important ways the typical UNIX server looks the same today as it did thirty years ago. More stagnation ?
Disabling or degrading the quality of video output is an anti-feature because no user wants that to happen.
The alternative is not being able to view it at all. Between those two options, degraded output is not an "anti-feature".
The degradation of DRM-encumbered content has _nothing_ to do with Microsoft. It's dicated by the people who license the technology necessary for viewing said content. A cheap, made-in-China appliance that Microsoft has never even heard of will do *exactly* the same thing because that's what they have to do according to the people who own the copyrights.
MS has enough power to stop DRM from negatively effecting their customers, but they don't because they don't need to because they don't compete with anyone.
Microsoft is a bit player in the content delivery marketplace. *Apple* has more influence than them. Exactly what "leverage" do you think they can apply to big media when the vast, vast, majority of people consume content through standalone appliances like iPods and DVD players ? "Do what we say or you'll lose the 0.5% of people who only watch HD movies on their computers" ? I really bet that had the *AAs quaking in their boots.
Please. Pick up an economics text for a change. Monopolies always slow innovation.
Reality frequently disagrees with the pseudo-scientific religion of economics (at least until the economists change their theories to reflect reality).
There is plenty of evidence, but you'll never see it because you don't want to. You're the worst MS apologist I've ever heard. You don't seem interested in reason or evidence, just support for what you've already decided.
You haven't provided any evidence. Just vague accusations. For example:
You: Microsoft is a monopoly and has slowed innovation in the computing industry !
Me: No it hasn't. Examples A, B and C.
You: But it's happening slowly !
Me: Compared to what ?
You: I don't know ! It's just slower. It has to be, because my economics textbook says so !
There is only one mass market desktop OS. There are other major OS, just not in the OS market. The whole point is that innovation has slowed because investors are not motivated to put money into making better ones, because the market is monopolized.
Then why isn't any OS either vastly ahead or behind technologically ? Why did Microsoft continually improve their products both before (eg: Windows 95 vs MacOS Classic) - and in response to (Mac OS X vs Vista) - other vendor
No it hasn't. It slows innovation, rather than stops it completely. You'll note they've mostly integrated features from other markets and added anti-features like DRM.
No, I won't, because it simply isn't true.
There are numerous features that Windows has added before various "competitors" (which - realistically - include Linux, MacOS [X] and OS/2). Pre-emptive multitasking, SMP, an O(1) scheduler, a journalled filesystem, ACL-based security, to name but a few.
Indeed, one can quite reasonably argue that OSes like Linux and OS X have "copied" at least as many features from Windows, as Windows has from them.
Further, DRM isn't an "anti-feature". At worst, it's irrelevant (you have no DRM-encumbered content). At best, it's a distinctly useful feature because it allows you to access said DRM-encumbered content.
To be blunt, your assertion that Windows has "slowed innovation" has _zero_ supporting evidence, to the point of being laughably inaccurate. Especially given that, as of now, pretty much all the mainstream, mass-market OSes have arrived at essentially the same basic feature set, at around the same time (+/- a year or two).
They'd have no real grounds. MS has implemented dozens of integrations that are clear-cut antitrust abuse, but since there is no separate, existing market for a universally available spell checker that I know of, they don't have to worry about that. It is a real innovation they could add, one of many. But MS has done very little to actually advance the state of the art for operating systems.
There's as much a "market" for spell checkers (most word processors come with them, to say nothing of things like aspell) as there was a "market" for web browsers in the mid 90s.
I think his point is that if you have to beg someone else's permission to use it, it's not really your property.
No, my point was that software - like other forms of Imaginary Property - is _not_ your property, even when you "buy" it. This is because of the fundamental nature of copyright (and other forms of Imaginary Property).
At that point, generally, innovation slows to a slow crawl because it's cheaper to get sales by breaking compatibility with your competitors than doing real work.
Which explains why Windows has remained unchanged and unimproved since the early 1990s.
Oh, wait, it hasn't.
That's why 90% of users still don't have a single spell checker that can work in all their programs, even though such technology was for sale by a competitor a decade ago.
If Microsoft provided a spellchecker component with Windows, people like you would be screaming antitrust at the top of their lungs, just like they do about every other piece of functionality Windows provides.
can you PROVE that this 'protected path' is really a separate piece of code in vista, distinct from all the other driver paths the code could take?
Well that's what all the documentation about Vista's DRM says happens.
I have my doubts. I would not have a dual path. the dual-path sounds like marketing talk to me. if you want SECURE, you cannot have both a locked and an unlocked code path. I don't think that makes any real security sense to me.
So the fact telnet exists means that SSH can't be "SECURE" because they both use TCP/IP ?
since we can't inspect the code and there is a LOT of changes they made, its impossible to know for sure how deep the 'permit/deny' stuff is, but all indications are that its invasive and cannot be removed without killing the patient, so to speak.
There is no such evidence at all, outside of the typical ignorant and paranoid ramblings of Slashdot trolls.
thru and thru, its layers up and down checking and policing if you are 'allowed' to access your own hardware!
Linux breaks driver ABIs on purpose. Or at least without concern.
Indeed. And it is wrong to do so.
If you really think the kernel developers are incapable of maintaining a stable driver ABI, you are really a sad case.
But they clearly are. That this is due to politics rather than actual engineering constraints only makes statements like "let's see Microsoft match that" all the more ridiculous.
This is just another example of the hypocrisy of the Linux community. Linux breaks things like binary drivers frequently (basically, every kernel update). Even in userspace, binary compatibility past more than a few revisions is spotty (a contributor to "dependency hell"). Yet, when Microsoft break single-digit percentages of available software in OS releases with intervals measured in *years*, they get blasted as incompetent.
1. Windows NT only has the default user as Administrator in unmanaged (ie: not an Active Directory Domain) environments. I think it's fair to say that a majority - or at the very least a significant proportion - of Windows software developers will be working in managed environments. Therefore, they would have had to manually and deliberately been elevated to Administrator-level.
2. The default user configuration does not, in any way, shape, or form, excuse developers from not following basic best practices like "least privilege".
That a significant proportion of Windows software still requires Administrator privileges to run, is 100%, utterly and completely, the blame of software developers. This is even more evident when one fires up something like filemon or regmon and observes that the only reason elevated privileges are needed is because the software is doing boneheaded things like writing to files in its application directory, or to system areas of the Registry.
Which brings me to my ultimate point that - given the above - there is little reason to think that these same idiots won't do the same stupid things when they're writing software for Linux.
Insulting someone for a bad analogy and then adding in another one - oh well, it can't be helped due to the differences.
How is the analogy bad ?
Unfortunately Administrator in MS Windows is unlike any other user based security model even to the extent where users can lock Administrator out of things.
No, it's just not like UNIX. It is like other ACL-based permissions systems. Further, Administrator in Vista is different to Administrator in earlier releases of Windows NT.
This has easily been the #1 reason I have personally witnessed for project failure. I am in the process of witnessing it right now, even, with what seems like a relatively simple project. The suits and supervisors along the way are either not responding to requests for information, or change their request for features.
That's because if they do so, they then become potentially responsible for any fallout. Which is what's know as a "career limiting event".
This is the beauty of moving up the management tree. Officially, your responsibility (and hence "value") increases, but in reality it actually decreases. You are only "responsible" insofar as knowing who to point the finger at.
I think it's fair to include Wine in this. No, they aren't carrying their bad habits over from Windows.
Am I fascinated at the twisted logic you need to muster up to equate "works in WINE" with "writing code not to needlessly require Administrator privileges".
And there is zero reason for the default Windows install to make someone create a seperate, normal user account, and require passwords, which is the root cause of the problem.
If that were true, the default permission level would not be Administrator unless you go out of your way to reconfigure it.
You are conflating two very different things. The permissions in the system and privilege level of the user.
The default permission level for new users in Vista is still Administrator: Not sane.
This is simply confirming your ignorance. An "Administrator" in Vista is simply someone who is allowed to elevate their privilege level. It is loosely equivalent to the "admin" group in OS X or the "wheel" group in UNIX.
Fact not supported by any evidence in the field. If that were the case, games on Linux would be as notorious for it. YHL, HAND.
Linux games are notorious for not existing. The tiny handful of Windows games ported to Linux don't even come _close_ to conclusive "evidence in the field" that developers wouldn't carry their bad Windows habits over to Linux.
There hasn't been any justification for typical Windows software to require Administrator-level privileges for a decade, yet developers have continued to do release broken software. Your only argument against this historical record is, basically, "but none of the handful of Linux games have done so".
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Do you really believe that? At what point was Word ever better than Word Perfect? Bonus: why?
Word for Windows or Word for Mac ?
On the PC side, Word 6.0 was the version that really started to hurt Wordperfect (although even the earlier versions had won some praise). As to why, that would depend on the exact customer, but WYSIWYG, ease of use, integration with other applications (ie: Office) and being a Windows application would have been the major drawcards. Also, due to the _massive_ effort Microsoft put into file conversion abilities and a "WP Mode" for Word (same keystrokes, etc), the transition was relatively easy.
When was IE ever better than Netscape? again, why?
From version 4.0 (3.0 was merely "as good"). It was more standards compliant (relatively unimportant), faster and more stable (very important, especially since Navigator 4.0 was both horribly slow and horribly unstable). Which is why it _slaughtered_ Navigator's market share long before its integration into Windows 98 became a factor.
The whole DOS background printing, inDOS flag, and other undocumented features were used my multiplan and word. Windows 2.x has a section in the SDK called "Extensions to Windows for MS Word."
Which, clearly, had nothing to do with Word beating Wordperfect, because that didn't happen until Word 6.0 and Windows 3.x, ca. 1994, whereas the timeframe you're talking about was 5+ years earlier.
This blog post does a fairly good job of highlighting all the stuff Microsoft did right and all the stuff Wordperfect did wrong.
They were handed the monopoly for the PC operating system by IBM, who actually left control of the OS in Microsoft's hands while making it the official OS for what would become the official desktop hardware, because everybody who wanted a desktop repeated, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" and bought an IBM PC, or, if they were thrifty, a clone (which still had an MS operating system).
The IBM PC was available with 3 OS choices.
To say nothing of how it is - by definition - impossible to be a monopoly in a "market" you created.
Software OS monopoly over IBM's hardware monopoly. Thought it was pretty clear.
The IBM PC was sold with 3 different OS choices.
IBM PC compatible operating systems.
How can you have a monopoly over a market you create ?
Other companies tried to compete with far superior products, but had their contracts dry up when Microsoft enforced per-processor liscensing.
Clearly they weren't "far superior", or customers would have preferred them.
If a company did choose to go with DR-DOS, MS would dump MS-DOS on the market at below market prices to lock out the competition.
I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about the timeframe when "IBM handed Microsoft a monopoly", not 7 years after that when DR-DOS was released.
I can't think of one, that's right, not one product of theirs that won on its own merit.
Office and IE are the two most obvious examples.
Their whole office suite wouldn't be anything if they didn't create back doors in Windows and DOS for them.
What "back doors" ? What did these "back doors" do ?
Those they couldn't beat, they put out of business by dumping "free" versions on the market. Netscape anyone?
Netscape lost because they deserved to. Navigator 4 was crap, and stayed crap for a long time. IE4 - and later 5 and 6 - were simply better browsers.
Microsoft didn't "bring about" the GUI, they stole the most basic aspects of it and wedged it on top of DOS, which BTW they also stole.
Next time someone "steals" from me, I hope they also leave a big pile of money behind !
Microsoft outright stole some products (Stac comes to mind)-- after they LOST in court, then they bought the company on the stock market.
What ? Microsoft v Stac was about patents (and software patents are bad, remember ?). Further, Stac went on for several years afterwards (and were eventually killed - like all the similarly fragile "whole disk in a compressed volume" products - by plummeting hard disk prices.
Not in the least. The Chicago GUI was a mentally retarded variant of the OS/2 Workplace Shell. It looked like OS/2 2.x/3.x, but had very little of its functionality, and was significantly less stable than either OS/2 or Win3.1.
What ? Windows 95 was streets ahead of Windows 3.1 in stability, especially if it was running 32 bit across the board (drivers and software).
OS/2 vs Windows 95 was basically even, because while OS/2 had less legacy crap to cause problems, it did have the infamous SIQ regularly causing problems.
Round two was when IBM had a deal with MS with the OS/2 project, and Microsoft completely backstabbed them with Windows 95.
Microsoft "backstabbed" IBM half a decade before Windows 95 was even released.
Microsoft exists soley because of Bill Gates mom and IBM.
This is like saying Linux exists solely because of Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tanenbaum.
No but they can be handed a monopoly (by another near monopoly).
And what monopoly were they "handed" ?
it is in the best interest of the government to have a working population at maximum productivity.
If that were true, then alcohol - far more "productivity-damaging" drug than marijuana could ever hope to be - would be illegal.
Your premise fails.
Please. I won't argue how slowly things are progressing, but it sure isn't fast.
Without a base from which to measure "fast" and "slow", your comment is meaningless.
Nine years ago I used to use voice commands to check my e-mail and have it read to me. Since then, voice commands have not improved significantly.
This is because - outside of the movies - the idea of "voice commands" is dumb (a cube farm full of people yelling at their computers - what a great idea !). To say nothing of the the lack of underlying language recognition systems that would make them actually useful.
But there is an easy market where we can see stagnation.
No, there is an easy market where we can see a complete and utter lack of interest from most people. About the only people who would seriously benefit from good voice commands are the severely disabled, and they are - unfortuantely - a minority too small to have much influence.
"Voice commands" are like Minority Report-esque "holographic interfaces". They look cool in a movie, but in actual use they're crap.
How about Web technologies. IE partially supports 8 year old standards and fails to implement significantly anything since. For high-tech, that is extreme stagnation.
So TCP/IP is another example of "extreme stagnation" ? In many important ways the typical UNIX server looks the same today as it did thirty years ago. More stagnation ?
Disabling or degrading the quality of video output is an anti-feature because no user wants that to happen.
The alternative is not being able to view it at all. Between those two options, degraded output is not an "anti-feature".
The degradation of DRM-encumbered content has _nothing_ to do with Microsoft. It's dicated by the people who license the technology necessary for viewing said content. A cheap, made-in-China appliance that Microsoft has never even heard of will do *exactly* the same thing because that's what they have to do according to the people who own the copyrights.
MS has enough power to stop DRM from negatively effecting their customers, but they don't because they don't need to because they don't compete with anyone.
Microsoft is a bit player in the content delivery marketplace. *Apple* has more influence than them. Exactly what "leverage" do you think they can apply to big media when the vast, vast, majority of people consume content through standalone appliances like iPods and DVD players ? "Do what we say or you'll lose the 0.5% of people who only watch HD movies on their computers" ? I really bet that had the *AAs quaking in their boots.
Please. Pick up an economics text for a change. Monopolies always slow innovation.
Reality frequently disagrees with the pseudo-scientific religion of economics (at least until the economists change their theories to reflect reality).
There is plenty of evidence, but you'll never see it because you don't want to. You're the worst MS apologist I've ever heard. You don't seem interested in reason or evidence, just support for what you've already decided.
You haven't provided any evidence. Just vague accusations. For example:
You: Microsoft is a monopoly and has slowed innovation in the computing industry !
Me: No it hasn't. Examples A, B and C.
You: But it's happening slowly !
Me: Compared to what ?
You: I don't know ! It's just slower. It has to be, because my economics textbook says so !
There is only one mass market desktop OS. There are other major OS, just not in the OS market. The whole point is that innovation has slowed because investors are not motivated to put money into making better ones, because the market is monopolized.
Then why isn't any OS either vastly ahead or behind technologically ? Why did Microsoft continually improve their products both before (eg: Windows 95 vs MacOS Classic) - and in response to (Mac OS X vs Vista) - other vendor
No it hasn't. It slows innovation, rather than stops it completely. You'll note they've mostly integrated features from other markets and added anti-features like DRM.
No, I won't, because it simply isn't true.
There are numerous features that Windows has added before various "competitors" (which - realistically - include Linux, MacOS [X] and OS/2). Pre-emptive multitasking, SMP, an O(1) scheduler, a journalled filesystem, ACL-based security, to name but a few.
Indeed, one can quite reasonably argue that OSes like Linux and OS X have "copied" at least as many features from Windows, as Windows has from them.
Further, DRM isn't an "anti-feature". At worst, it's irrelevant (you have no DRM-encumbered content). At best, it's a distinctly useful feature because it allows you to access said DRM-encumbered content.
To be blunt, your assertion that Windows has "slowed innovation" has _zero_ supporting evidence, to the point of being laughably inaccurate. Especially given that, as of now, pretty much all the mainstream, mass-market OSes have arrived at essentially the same basic feature set, at around the same time (+/- a year or two).
They'd have no real grounds. MS has implemented dozens of integrations that are clear-cut antitrust abuse, but since there is no separate, existing market for a universally available spell checker that I know of, they don't have to worry about that. It is a real innovation they could add, one of many. But MS has done very little to actually advance the state of the art for operating systems.
There's as much a "market" for spell checkers (most word processors come with them, to say nothing of things like aspell) as there was a "market" for web browsers in the mid 90s.
I think his point is that if you have to beg someone else's permission to use it, it's not really your property.
No, my point was that software - like other forms of Imaginary Property - is _not_ your property, even when you "buy" it. This is because of the fundamental nature of copyright (and other forms of Imaginary Property).
At that point, generally, innovation slows to a slow crawl because it's cheaper to get sales by breaking compatibility with your competitors than doing real work.
Which explains why Windows has remained unchanged and unimproved since the early 1990s.
Oh, wait, it hasn't.
That's why 90% of users still don't have a single spell checker that can work in all their programs, even though such technology was for sale by a competitor a decade ago.
If Microsoft provided a spellchecker component with Windows, people like you would be screaming antitrust at the top of their lungs, just like they do about every other piece of functionality Windows provides.
can you PROVE that this 'protected path' is really a separate piece of code in vista, distinct from all the other driver paths the code could take?
Well that's what all the documentation about Vista's DRM says happens.
I have my doubts. I would not have a dual path. the dual-path sounds like marketing talk to me. if you want SECURE, you cannot have both a locked and an unlocked code path. I don't think that makes any real security sense to me.
So the fact telnet exists means that SSH can't be "SECURE" because they both use TCP/IP ?
since we can't inspect the code and there is a LOT of changes they made, its impossible to know for sure how deep the 'permit/deny' stuff is, but all indications are that its invasive and cannot be removed without killing the patient, so to speak.
There is no such evidence at all, outside of the typical ignorant and paranoid ramblings of Slashdot trolls.
thru and thru, its layers up and down checking and policing if you are 'allowed' to access your own hardware!
It does nothing of the sort.
"Activation." (I.e., having to beg somebody for permission to use your own property.)
A piece of software is in no way "your own property", just like every other piece of Imaginary Property.
Linux breaks driver ABIs on purpose. Or at least without concern.
Indeed. And it is wrong to do so.
If you really think the kernel developers are incapable of maintaining a stable driver ABI, you are really a sad case.
But they clearly are. That this is due to politics rather than actual engineering constraints only makes statements like "let's see Microsoft match that" all the more ridiculous.
This is just another example of the hypocrisy of the Linux community. Linux breaks things like binary drivers frequently (basically, every kernel update). Even in userspace, binary compatibility past more than a few revisions is spotty (a contributor to "dependency hell"). Yet, when Microsoft break single-digit percentages of available software in OS releases with intervals measured in *years*, they get blasted as incompetent.
1. Windows NT only has the default user as Administrator in unmanaged (ie: not an Active Directory Domain) environments. I think it's fair to say that a majority - or at the very least a significant proportion - of Windows software developers will be working in managed environments. Therefore, they would have had to manually and deliberately been elevated to Administrator-level.
2. The default user configuration does not, in any way, shape, or form, excuse developers from not following basic best practices like "least privilege".
That a significant proportion of Windows software still requires Administrator privileges to run, is 100%, utterly and completely, the blame of software developers. This is even more evident when one fires up something like filemon or regmon and observes that the only reason elevated privileges are needed is because the software is doing boneheaded things like writing to files in its application directory, or to system areas of the Registry.
Which brings me to my ultimate point that - given the above - there is little reason to think that these same idiots won't do the same stupid things when they're writing software for Linux.
Insulting someone for a bad analogy and then adding in another one - oh well, it can't be helped due to the differences.
How is the analogy bad ?
Unfortunately Administrator in MS Windows is unlike any other user based security model even to the extent where users can lock Administrator out of things.
No, it's just not like UNIX. It is like other ACL-based permissions systems. Further, Administrator in Vista is different to Administrator in earlier releases of Windows NT.
This has easily been the #1 reason I have personally witnessed for project failure. I am in the process of witnessing it right now, even, with what seems like a relatively simple project. The suits and supervisors along the way are either not responding to requests for information, or change their request for features.
That's because if they do so, they then become potentially responsible for any fallout. Which is what's know as a "career limiting event".
This is the beauty of moving up the management tree. Officially, your responsibility (and hence "value") increases, but in reality it actually decreases. You are only "responsible" insofar as knowing who to point the finger at.
I think it's fair to include Wine in this. No, they aren't carrying their bad habits over from Windows.
Am I fascinated at the twisted logic you need to muster up to equate "works in WINE" with "writing code not to needlessly require Administrator privileges".
And there is zero reason for the default Windows install to make someone create a seperate, normal user account, and require passwords, which is the root cause of the problem.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here.
If that were true, the default permission level would not be Administrator unless you go out of your way to reconfigure it.
You are conflating two very different things. The permissions in the system and privilege level of the user.
The default permission level for new users in Vista is still Administrator: Not sane.
This is simply confirming your ignorance. An "Administrator" in Vista is simply someone who is allowed to elevate their privilege level. It is loosely equivalent to the "admin" group in OS X or the "wheel" group in UNIX.
Fact not supported by any evidence in the field. If that were the case, games on Linux would be as notorious for it. YHL, HAND.
Linux games are notorious for not existing. The tiny handful of Windows games ported to Linux don't even come _close_ to conclusive "evidence in the field" that developers wouldn't carry their bad Windows habits over to Linux.
There hasn't been any justification for typical Windows software to require Administrator-level privileges for a decade, yet developers have continued to do release broken software. Your only argument against this historical record is, basically, "but none of the handful of Linux games have done so".