The only reason people support the death penalty is because the victim families get some kind of revenge.
Uh, no, I support the death penalty because it permanently removes a demonstrable threat to society.
OTOH, the corruption and flaws in the legal system make error-free implementation of capital punishment nearly impossible.
So on the balance of those two aspects, I have to say that we shouldn't use the death penalty - but it's not because I don't support it, it's because the flaws in the system result in too many mistakes.
Exactly. What gives you the right to own the land ? Did you create it ?
I can stop anyone else having it.
"Land" ownership is just as arbitrary as "intellectual property".
Untrue. "Land ownership" - indeed, the "ownership" of any piece of physical property - is based on the "might makes right" principle. If you can stop someone else having it, it's yours.
Modern property law is, of course, much more formalised and the government exercises the might on your behalf, but that's ultimately the basic principle - there's a limited amount of X and if you have an X then, by definition, that means no-one else can - so it's yours so long as you can prevent anyone else taking it.
Specially "ownership" of an IP one didn't create.
You can't stop someone "taking" your idea. Nor can you "take it back". These are the fundamental differences between actual pysical property and made-up "intellectual property" that mean the two concepts cannot be equated.
There is no such thing as physical property.
Yes, there is.
Communism dictates that is is not private property. Physical or not. Since you believe in "ownership", you can't claim something cannot be owner. The best you can do is to say it should be "owned by everyone", or "by the public", whatever.
You are conflating physical and "intellectual" property. Two things which are fundamentally different (ie: the whole point).
Also, you need to brush up on what Communism actually is. I'm guessing, like most Americans, you don't really know anything about it other that "communism == socialism == un-American == bad".
Btw, can you please give US your phone number, SSN, bank account data and PIN ? Those are just information and, by your definition, you can't own them.
I kinda don't understand what you were looking for, these are all pretty basic examples... I really don't see how you think other OSes put you in charge of every decision...
I am looking for a way UAC is meaningfully different to its equivalents in other OSes.
because on other OSes, every software interaction does not involve escalated priveledges that require you to approve them, but I'll try and be general...
"Every software interaction" in Vista doesn't involve escalated privileges either. Indeed, on the one Vista machine I have, I rarely see UAC dialogs - and never unexpectedly or unreasonably.
For one thing other OS's don't rely on bugs for backward compatibility, so they don't have to wrap everything in a sanity check that exploits can bypass and take advantage of.
What ? Windows doesn't "rely on" bugs for backwards compatibility.
If you don't think other OSes remain bug-compatible with previous releases, I'm afraid you're sadly mistaken.
Another reason is permissions between different user levels are not well defined, and most applications require deep permissions to be able to do everyday things... security is not as fine-grained in Windows. Check out all of the ActiveX exploits.
No, they dont "require deep permissions" to be able to do "everyday things". While many badly written apps do stupid things like, say, store runtime data in system areas, or try to open system files read/write rather than read-only, this is not in any way the fault of Windows or Microsoft, nor is it "required" to be able to run a Windows application.
You still need to be admin to run certain apps, certain apps need to be run with elevated priveledges...
This has nothing to do with Windows. It is caused by incompetent (and/or lazy) developers.
you can't just do everything as a guest user. In other OSes, you can easily download and install applications just for the user, and not have it affect the rest of the system at all. You can effectively sandbox the user. This is really difficult in Windows.
Because of the *applications*, not Windows. There's nothing in Windows - in terms of either architecture or recommended best practices - that stops the scenario you are describing - *nor has there been for a decade or more*.
Considering people "own" the land, I'm yet to see the point in this.
What ?
"Land" is a physical object. It is *fundamentally different* to information (or "data", or "ideas", or whatever else you want to call "intellectual property").
Also, it is possible to copyright a novel, or a business trade secret. How about that secret recipe for turning bullshit into aluminum ? All of those can be defined as "owning" information.
I'm not quite sure I see your point.
I agree they don't have a communist attitude toward copyright but you sir, certainly have.
How's that, exactly ? Communism dicates that physical property is not owned by the individual, but the collective. This is an intrinsically different position to take than "information cannot be owned".
Sir, I was talking in jest. My point was that Sweden's apparent relaxed attitude to copyright laws harks back to Marxist ideas of sharing and community-owned property.
Uh, no, a "relaxed" attitude towards copyright may merely indicate a recognition of the fact you can't "own" information like you can physical property.
[...] but I think it's interface blew away Mac OS 9's).
Ugh. In what way ? The Dock was a UI train wreck, the Finder is *still* atrocious (and it's improved significant since 10.0) - I was never a big fan of the Mac's application-centric UI, but OS X made it measurably worse by making "looking cool in product demos" a higher priority than usability.
I look at Windows Vista and realize how vastly different it looks from Windows XP. The same goes to my customers that I speak with, they are confused as well with all of the graphical and placement changes. Windows XP started a very solid trend on what the look of Windows is, but Vista shattered that.
All the basic and fundamental UI elements and interactions are the same. Start Menu, window widgets, window managemtn, task switching, etc - all essentially unchanged from XP.
Take a look at Mac OS X. The interface is pretty much the same for more than ten years. There have been improvements, but the basic functionality has stayed the same with some graphical upgrades.
OS X has only been out for 6 years. If you're referring to MacOS Classic by your "10 years" figure, then OS X is *at least* as different from MacOS Classic as Vista is from XP (more, really - OS X changed pretty much all of the fundamental UI elements and interactions, in Vista most of the fundamentals are the same as XP).
If you think OS X is "pretty much the same" as MacOS "Classic", then you didn't spend much time using MacOS.
Why should downloaded (i.e. tainted / potentially unsafe) code have any rights at all except to its own files by default?
The question is, does the end user get to decide whether or not to override those defaults ? Because if they can, all you do with the much more complex model is buy a few more "are you sure" dialog boxes.
Not by much... all it does is instead of solidifying their OS, they're putting you in charge of approving every interaction between user software/system software. They're putting up warnings in front of everything safe or not in order to make it your fault when something bad happens. The OS should be in charge of this, but MS is covering their ass by leaving it up to you because if you "allow" something that exploits the OS (even if it gave no indication of doing so prior), then it's your fault.
Which is different from other OSes.... how, exactly ?
AFAIK, one thing *nix does that Vista doesn't is demand passwords for everything that requires administrative privileges without exception. Linux and MacOS X have always demanded that I authenticate myself whenever I'm trying to do something restrictive, even though I'm always logged in as an administrator on both machines, and sometimes, I'm asked twice. I've read and heard that UAC merely asks those logged in as an administrator to accept/refuse a request without asking for a password for anything it thinks requires more attention. IMO, that's a significant difference.
You can configure Vista to do this (and it does so by default when in a domain/managed environment).
For a home/unmanaged user scenario, the difference between typing a password and clicking a button is zero. Indeed, if anything the former is worse as it is likely to encourage bad habits relating to passwords.
Because let's face it, Windows 2000/XP pretty well stinks. It's hard as hell to get a lot of programs running under a non-privileged account. They've at least begun to address that with Vista.
This is not the fault of Windows, or Microsoft. All Vista has done is put in a lot more shims so that the real culprits - the badly written applications - can be fooled into thinking they're not running in an unprivileged account.
Sure, there are still vulnerabilities, but it's also true that OSX and Linux have vulnerabilities too. The question is, are Microsoft's products inherently less secure than the competition because of poor security design. The answer is (IMHO) "Yes".
Why ? What poor design ? What about the security-related design problems in (classic) unix-like OSes ?
But at least they've shown they're trying to address those issues. Not going a spectacular job, but *trying* is better than not trying, and they didn't even try with previous versions of Windows.
How did they not try ? Windows NT has a vastly better design (from a security perspective) than OS X, Linux, et al (although in recent times SELinux is better, albeit unfortunately hardly ever used).
Remember, Windows 95/98/ME didn't really even have permissions in the filesystem-- I'm just trying to point out how much they were ignoring security in the past.
You are confusing engineering constraints with bad design.
"New technology" that no one really sees as worth the upgrade, with lots of extraneous restrictions (Windows Genuine Advantage, for example) that make it difficult to work with.
None of the additional restrictions in Vista are markedly greater than those in XP. Sorry, your MCA comparison just doesn't hold.
Dell had to back down and start offering machines with XP again because people didn't want Vista. ISA was inferior to Micro Channel but "good enough" and people stuck with it until there were open alternatives (PCI).
No, PCI's *substantial* superiority to ISA (and VLB) *plus* the fact that ISA was becoming limiting, was the driving force behind PCI adoption. The other thing that kept ISA around was (surprise, surprise) legacy support - EISA offered pretty much all of the advantages of MCA *and* was compatible with ISA cards. VLB existed for similar reasons.
Compare to Unix, where apps are written not to use elevated permissions unless they actually need it. Aside from installing software, I never run into a sudo prompt on my Ubuntu box because the apps behave themselves.
I very rarely see UAC prompts on the one Vista machine I have - and never unexpectedly. Admittedly I only use that for maybe a couple of hours a day, but I don't use it any differently to any of my other machines.
(Of course, I've also been using Windows with a non-Admin account since about 1996...)
Out of curiosity, how did you "promptly" re-image 700+ workstations? Is there some software that will net-boot them all and make it happen? If so, does it update the windows license key and everything when it does? The only thing i can think of that would do this would be netbooting them into a linux distro that grabs an img, pulls it down to each client, then writes and reboots.
At an old job they used to use a program called 'Rembo' to do this. It used multicast and could reimage labs with 100+ machines in ~15 minutes. Symantec's Ghost can do much the same thing, if I'm not mistaken.
By the same logic you have no way of knowing if your machine has been compromised by an unknown vulnerability at any given time. You must spend your whole time rebuilding.
Untrue. In that situation you have no reason to believe you have been compromised at all. It's like the difference between coming home to a normal looking house and coming home to an open front door and torn up living room.
I am happy with the assumption if malware is capable of undetectably rooting my box, and remaining undetectable once I know I am looking for it, then it is probably not going to tip off an average user using an unprivileged account. Conversely anything that dose tip-off unprivileged users can probably be removed by root.
That's not "conversely", at all. There's no logical reason to conclude that because malware has drawn the attention of "unprivileged" users, it hasn't burrowed further into the system (quite the opposite, if anything). Once a root escalation could *potentially* have happened, the only _responsible_ course of action is to assume it has, and act accordingly. I certainly wouldn't gamble my job or bank account on your reasoning. Heck, I wouldn't gamble a day's salary on it.
Anyone involved in professional IT support services not assuming a worst-case scenario for a compromised machine, no matter how benign they might consider the situation, is being negligent and deserves to be either sued, or fired.
I have to say... Vista brings up strong echoes in my mind. It's not an exact parallel but there are a lot of similarities.
For example ?
Not just the DRM stuff (which is bad enough) but their fixation on (harmful) backward compatibility (which is why UAC is so broken) and their development model being simply not sufficient for managing a codebase of 50+ million lines (they had to throw out features and start over to get Vista shipped at all - years late).
Details ? How is UAC "broken" ? Why is it the backwards compatibility that's responsible ?
if a normal user account gets hacked & you're sure root hasnt been compromised, you could just delete the user, fix the vulnerability & restore the files from backups. you still have the log files, which will help give clues to how & when you were hacked.
1. This is not an assessment most people are capable of making.
2. Even for those who are, it's not an *assumption* they can afford to make. Who knows what known vulnerability may have been exploited ?
Once a machine has been compromised in *any* way, it's rebuild time. No ifs, buts, or maybes (Assuming it's important enough for its compromising to matter - and if it's not, the whole discussion is moot).
The catch is this way is slower, so for performance reasons various exceptions have been made. The Graphics subsystem in NT4, IIS when it was getting spanked by Apache, SQL server and more, and now even parts of.NET. Any of these "privilidged" subsystems can now compromise the security of the OS.
Irrelevant. Most people aren't consuming content from their desktop PCs - and they sure as hell aren't consuming HD content (the stuff that will actually be DRMed, eventually) from their desktop PCs.
They could have told the studios what to go do with themselves.
And ended up with a lame duck platform that couldn't play HD media. I bet that was a short meeting.
Why is this so difficult for people to understand ? Media players are commodity items. If people couldn't play their HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray, or whatever on their Vista Media Centre, they'd just go out and buy a(nother) cheap box that did the same thing and imposed exactly the same restrictions playing DRM-encumbered media. Microsoft have little influence in this market space, because it's dominated by dirt-cheap, made-in-China, throw-it-away-when-it-breaks, commodity appliances.
Microsoft added this DRM crap because they want to. They want to use this crap for their own agenda. They want to abuse the end users the same way.
Conspiracy theories are marginally more interesting when an actual threat is outlined. You sound like one of those "watch out for the terrorists" or "think of the children" idiots - vague threats of bad things happening, but very little follow-through.
Actually most countries copyright laws give the consumers the right to do whatever they want with the content for personal use. DRM is violating that right.
No, "most countries copyright laws" allow for consumers to do things that would otherwise be breaking copyright law, for "personal use". Different situation.
Oh! So that means the userbase of Windows Vista consists entirely of stupids? I would imagine that atleast 20% of all PC users have some knowledge about Operating Systems, hardware, standards etc. Quite a sizable no. in fact - and I cannot imagine they will be easily brainwashed like you describe above.
Being generous, I'd say your estimate here is at least an order of magnitude too high.
Heck, even if you extended to the people who *think* they know about operating systems, but don't really - the kind of Slashdot posters who talk about how IE is part of the Windows kernel, or Vista magically applies DRM to all media, or any number of other examples - you'd still struggle to get into a meaningful single digit percentage of Vista users.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason people support the death penalty is because the victim families get some kind of revenge.
Uh, no, I support the death penalty because it permanently removes a demonstrable threat to society.
OTOH, the corruption and flaws in the legal system make error-free implementation of capital punishment nearly impossible.
So on the balance of those two aspects, I have to say that we shouldn't use the death penalty - but it's not because I don't support it, it's because the flaws in the system result in too many mistakes.
Exactly. What gives you the right to own the land ? Did you create it ?
I can stop anyone else having it.
"Land" ownership is just as arbitrary as "intellectual property".
Untrue. "Land ownership" - indeed, the "ownership" of any piece of physical property - is based on the "might makes right" principle. If you can stop someone else having it, it's yours.
Modern property law is, of course, much more formalised and the government exercises the might on your behalf, but that's ultimately the basic principle - there's a limited amount of X and if you have an X then, by definition, that means no-one else can - so it's yours so long as you can prevent anyone else taking it.
Specially "ownership" of an IP one didn't create.
You can't stop someone "taking" your idea. Nor can you "take it back". These are the fundamental differences between actual pysical property and made-up "intellectual property" that mean the two concepts cannot be equated.
There is no such thing as physical property.
Yes, there is.
Communism dictates that is is not private property. Physical or not. Since you believe in "ownership", you can't claim something cannot be owner. The best you can do is to say it should be "owned by everyone", or "by the public", whatever.
You are conflating physical and "intellectual" property. Two things which are fundamentally different (ie: the whole point).
Also, you need to brush up on what Communism actually is. I'm guessing, like most Americans, you don't really know anything about it other that "communism == socialism == un-American == bad".
Btw, can you please give US your phone number, SSN, bank account data and PIN ? Those are just information and, by your definition, you can't own them.
I'm not American.
I kinda don't understand what you were looking for, these are all pretty basic examples... I really don't see how you think other OSes put you in charge of every decision...
I am looking for a way UAC is meaningfully different to its equivalents in other OSes.
because on other OSes, every software interaction does not involve escalated priveledges that require you to approve them, but I'll try and be general...
"Every software interaction" in Vista doesn't involve escalated privileges either. Indeed, on the one Vista machine I have, I rarely see UAC dialogs - and never unexpectedly or unreasonably.
For one thing other OS's don't rely on bugs for backward compatibility, so they don't have to wrap everything in a sanity check that exploits can bypass and take advantage of.
What ? Windows doesn't "rely on" bugs for backwards compatibility.
If you don't think other OSes remain bug-compatible with previous releases, I'm afraid you're sadly mistaken.
Another reason is permissions between different user levels are not well defined, and most applications require deep permissions to be able to do everyday things... security is not as fine-grained in Windows. Check out all of the ActiveX exploits.
No, they dont "require deep permissions" to be able to do "everyday things". While many badly written apps do stupid things like, say, store runtime data in system areas, or try to open system files read/write rather than read-only, this is not in any way the fault of Windows or Microsoft, nor is it "required" to be able to run a Windows application.
You still need to be admin to run certain apps, certain apps need to be run with elevated priveledges...
This has nothing to do with Windows. It is caused by incompetent (and/or lazy) developers.
you can't just do everything as a guest user. In other OSes, you can easily download and install applications just for the user, and not have it affect the rest of the system at all. You can effectively sandbox the user. This is really difficult in Windows.
Because of the *applications*, not Windows. There's nothing in Windows - in terms of either architecture or recommended best practices - that stops the scenario you are describing - *nor has there been for a decade or more*.
Considering people "own" the land, I'm yet to see the point in this.
What ?
"Land" is a physical object. It is *fundamentally different* to information (or "data", or "ideas", or whatever else you want to call "intellectual property").
Also, it is possible to copyright a novel, or a business trade secret. How about that secret recipe for turning bullshit into aluminum ? All of those can be defined as "owning" information.
I'm not quite sure I see your point.
I agree they don't have a communist attitude toward copyright but you sir, certainly have.
How's that, exactly ? Communism dicates that physical property is not owned by the individual, but the collective. This is an intrinsically different position to take than "information cannot be owned".
Sir, I was talking in jest. My point was that Sweden's apparent relaxed attitude to copyright laws harks back to Marxist ideas of sharing and community-owned property.
Uh, no, a "relaxed" attitude towards copyright may merely indicate a recognition of the fact you can't "own" information like you can physical property.
[...] but I think it's interface blew away Mac OS 9's).
Ugh. In what way ? The Dock was a UI train wreck, the Finder is *still* atrocious (and it's improved significant since 10.0) - I was never a big fan of the Mac's application-centric UI, but OS X made it measurably worse by making "looking cool in product demos" a higher priority than usability.
I look at Windows Vista and realize how vastly different it looks from Windows XP. The same goes to my customers that I speak with, they are confused as well with all of the graphical and placement changes. Windows XP started a very solid trend on what the look of Windows is, but Vista shattered that.
All the basic and fundamental UI elements and interactions are the same. Start Menu, window widgets, window managemtn, task switching, etc - all essentially unchanged from XP.
Take a look at Mac OS X. The interface is pretty much the same for more than ten years. There have been improvements, but the basic functionality has stayed the same with some graphical upgrades.
OS X has only been out for 6 years. If you're referring to MacOS Classic by your "10 years" figure, then OS X is *at least* as different from MacOS Classic as Vista is from XP (more, really - OS X changed pretty much all of the fundamental UI elements and interactions, in Vista most of the fundamentals are the same as XP).
If you think OS X is "pretty much the same" as MacOS "Classic", then you didn't spend much time using MacOS.
Why should downloaded (i.e. tainted / potentially unsafe) code have any rights at all except to its own files by default?
The question is, does the end user get to decide whether or not to override those defaults ? Because if they can, all you do with the much more complex model is buy a few more "are you sure" dialog boxes.
Not by much... all it does is instead of solidifying their OS, they're putting you in charge of approving every interaction between user software/system software. They're putting up warnings in front of everything safe or not in order to make it your fault when something bad happens. The OS should be in charge of this, but MS is covering their ass by leaving it up to you because if you "allow" something that exploits the OS (even if it gave no indication of doing so prior), then it's your fault.
Which is different from other OSes.... how, exactly ?
AFAIK, one thing *nix does that Vista doesn't is demand passwords for everything that requires administrative privileges without exception. Linux and MacOS X have always demanded that I authenticate myself whenever I'm trying to do something restrictive, even though I'm always logged in as an administrator on both machines, and sometimes, I'm asked twice. I've read and heard that UAC merely asks those logged in as an administrator to accept/refuse a request without asking for a password for anything it thinks requires more attention. IMO, that's a significant difference.
You can configure Vista to do this (and it does so by default when in a domain/managed environment).
For a home/unmanaged user scenario, the difference between typing a password and clicking a button is zero. Indeed, if anything the former is worse as it is likely to encourage bad habits relating to passwords.
Because let's face it, Windows 2000/XP pretty well stinks. It's hard as hell to get a lot of programs running under a non-privileged account. They've at least begun to address that with Vista.
This is not the fault of Windows, or Microsoft. All Vista has done is put in a lot more shims so that the real culprits - the badly written applications - can be fooled into thinking they're not running in an unprivileged account.
Sure, there are still vulnerabilities, but it's also true that OSX and Linux have vulnerabilities too. The question is, are Microsoft's products inherently less secure than the competition because of poor security design. The answer is (IMHO) "Yes".
Why ? What poor design ? What about the security-related design problems in (classic) unix-like OSes ?
But at least they've shown they're trying to address those issues. Not going a spectacular job, but *trying* is better than not trying, and they didn't even try with previous versions of Windows.
How did they not try ? Windows NT has a vastly better design (from a security perspective) than OS X, Linux, et al (although in recent times SELinux is better, albeit unfortunately hardly ever used).
Remember, Windows 95/98/ME didn't really even have permissions in the filesystem-- I'm just trying to point out how much they were ignoring security in the past.
You are confusing engineering constraints with bad design.
We can see from the systems affected by vulnerabilities that the former has not happened, no redesign. Maybe it's the latter, better PR.
The design hasn't been the problem.
I would compare it more to coming home to find your garden vandalized, you double check all your locks, but rebuilding the house seems a bit extreme.
I was thinking more along the lines of you assume whoever broke in is still inside the house.
[...] Anyway a lot of people have put a lot of time into this problem, I hope they don't all get fired for being negligent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jail_(computer_security)
Bringing Jails into the discussion isn't just moving the goalposts, it's changing the whole game. Hardly relevant.
"New technology" that no one really sees as worth the upgrade, with lots of extraneous restrictions (Windows Genuine Advantage, for example) that make it difficult to work with.
None of the additional restrictions in Vista are markedly greater than those in XP. Sorry, your MCA comparison just doesn't hold.
Dell had to back down and start offering machines with XP again because people didn't want Vista. ISA was inferior to Micro Channel but "good enough" and people stuck with it until there were open alternatives (PCI).
No, PCI's *substantial* superiority to ISA (and VLB) *plus* the fact that ISA was becoming limiting, was the driving force behind PCI adoption. The other thing that kept ISA around was (surprise, surprise) legacy support - EISA offered pretty much all of the advantages of MCA *and* was compatible with ISA cards. VLB existed for similar reasons.
Compare to Unix, where apps are written not to use elevated permissions unless they actually need it. Aside from installing software, I never run into a sudo prompt on my Ubuntu box because the apps behave themselves.
I very rarely see UAC prompts on the one Vista machine I have - and never unexpectedly. Admittedly I only use that for maybe a couple of hours a day, but I don't use it any differently to any of my other machines.
(Of course, I've also been using Windows with a non-Admin account since about 1996...)
Out of curiosity, how did you "promptly" re-image 700+ workstations? Is there some software that will net-boot them all and make it happen? If so, does it update the windows license key and everything when it does? The only thing i can think of that would do this would be netbooting them into a linux distro that grabs an img, pulls it down to each client, then writes and reboots.
At an old job they used to use a program called 'Rembo' to do this. It used multicast and could reimage labs with 100+ machines in ~15 minutes. Symantec's Ghost can do much the same thing, if I'm not mistaken.
You can get DVD-R's cheap enough for it to not matter.
The cost of the 10+ person-hours it would take to do so, OTOH, is not so insignificant.
By the same logic you have no way of knowing if your machine has been compromised by an unknown vulnerability at any given time. You must spend your whole time rebuilding.
Untrue. In that situation you have no reason to believe you have been compromised at all. It's like the difference between coming home to a normal looking house and coming home to an open front door and torn up living room.
I am happy with the assumption if malware is capable of undetectably rooting my box, and remaining undetectable once I know I am looking for it, then it is probably not going to tip off an average user using an unprivileged account. Conversely anything that dose tip-off unprivileged users can probably be removed by root.
That's not "conversely", at all. There's no logical reason to conclude that because malware has drawn the attention of "unprivileged" users, it hasn't burrowed further into the system (quite the opposite, if anything). Once a root escalation could *potentially* have happened, the only _responsible_ course of action is to assume it has, and act accordingly. I certainly wouldn't gamble my job or bank account on your reasoning. Heck, I wouldn't gamble a day's salary on it.
Anyone involved in professional IT support services not assuming a worst-case scenario for a compromised machine, no matter how benign they might consider the situation, is being negligent and deserves to be either sued, or fired.
I have to say... Vista brings up strong echoes in my mind. It's not an exact parallel but there are a lot of similarities.
For example ?
Not just the DRM stuff (which is bad enough) but their fixation on (harmful) backward compatibility (which is why UAC is so broken) and their development model being simply not sufficient for managing a codebase of 50+ million lines (they had to throw out features and start over to get Vista shipped at all - years late).
Details ? How is UAC "broken" ? Why is it the backwards compatibility that's responsible ?
2. Even for those who are, it's not an *assumption* they can afford to make. Who knows what known vulnerability may have been exploited ?
Ugh. Unknown vulnerability.
if a normal user account gets hacked & you're sure root hasnt been compromised, you could just delete the user, fix the vulnerability & restore the files from backups. you still have the log files, which will help give clues to how & when you were hacked.
1. This is not an assessment most people are capable of making.
2. Even for those who are, it's not an *assumption* they can afford to make. Who knows what known vulnerability may have been exploited ?
Once a machine has been compromised in *any* way, it's rebuild time. No ifs, buts, or maybes (Assuming it's important enough for its compromising to matter - and if it's not, the whole discussion is moot).
The catch is this way is slower, so for performance reasons various exceptions have been made. The Graphics subsystem in NT4, IIS when it was getting spanked by Apache, SQL server and more, and now even parts of .NET. Any of these "privilidged" subsystems can now compromise the security of the OS.
You are clueless.
This is how all operating systems (even Windows, in theory, not in practice) works already.
How does it not work in practice ?
Microsoft has the clout.
No, they don't.
The "OWN" the desktop.
Irrelevant. Most people aren't consuming content from their desktop PCs - and they sure as hell aren't consuming HD content (the stuff that will actually be DRMed, eventually) from their desktop PCs.
They could have told the studios what to go do with themselves.
And ended up with a lame duck platform that couldn't play HD media. I bet that was a short meeting.
Why is this so difficult for people to understand ? Media players are commodity items. If people couldn't play their HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray, or whatever on their Vista Media Centre, they'd just go out and buy a(nother) cheap box that did the same thing and imposed exactly the same restrictions playing DRM-encumbered media. Microsoft have little influence in this market space, because it's dominated by dirt-cheap, made-in-China, throw-it-away-when-it-breaks, commodity appliances.
Microsoft added this DRM crap because they want to. They want to use this crap for their own agenda. They want to abuse the end users the same way.
Conspiracy theories are marginally more interesting when an actual threat is outlined. You sound like one of those "watch out for the terrorists" or "think of the children" idiots - vague threats of bad things happening, but very little follow-through.
Actually most countries copyright laws give the consumers the right to do whatever they want with the content for personal use. DRM is violating that right.
No, "most countries copyright laws" allow for consumers to do things that would otherwise be breaking copyright law, for "personal use". Different situation.
Oh! So that means the userbase of Windows Vista consists entirely of stupids? I would imagine that atleast 20% of all PC users have some knowledge about Operating Systems, hardware, standards etc. Quite a sizable no. in fact - and I cannot imagine they will be easily brainwashed like you describe above.
Being generous, I'd say your estimate here is at least an order of magnitude too high.
Heck, even if you extended to the people who *think* they know about operating systems, but don't really - the kind of Slashdot posters who talk about how IE is part of the Windows kernel, or Vista magically applies DRM to all media, or any number of other examples - you'd still struggle to get into a meaningful single digit percentage of Vista users.