Sorry, as far as MUSIC playing goes an iPOD does it all for a kid. Depending on what you got, $100 or $200 or $255 or $300. Lets say the $200.00 model.
The iPod does everything the laptop does, plus it is a) smaller b) better battery life c) costs another $200.00.
However, kids don't go. I have a laptop why do I need an iPod. I think the UMPC could end up the same way. It overlaps what a laptop does, but the kid does not go. Hmmmm, even if it is an exta $250.00 it just duplicates part of my laptop.
Microsoft is doing damage control right now on trying to stop the UMPC. I think it is to late.
What is interesting, is that in your book, better hardware is coming. Microsofts definition of UMPC is going to hurt that. There will be a period of time where the $400.00 will be more powerful than what MS will allow XP to go on, but still not powerful enough to run VISTA. As in, dual core, but not enough RAM at $400 or enough ram but to slow of a CPU.
Some company that does not sell PC's but does mass produce consumer electronics could come along. Make bunches (maybe for China) of low cost hardware with the 10 inch dipslay, more RAM but a sub 1ghz CPU. Drop a slightly customized Ubuntu on there and really try to sell it.
If they are not a PC maker. Microsoft has no way to hurt them. They cant "lose the ability to get XP or Vista at a reduced cost". They cant lose Microsoft Advertising money.
The real question is WHEN someone does that. If it happens sooner, I think the sub $300.00 market will be hot.
I think there is a sweetspot in the $200 to $300 range. As soon as someone hits it. It will be like printing money.
I switch to Widnows every month or so.
But I get fed up.
Then I promptly switch back to whatever Linux I feel like installing.
Then I get fed up again.
And I think 'All the marketing says that Windows is better than Linux! I should try it AGAIN!'...
then I switch to Windows.
Until I get fed up...
My point still stands. Is someone able to develop a workable exploit?
The possible answers are a) they already have b) someone will do it or c) no one is able to and the point is moot.
Yes, we don't know if (a) has happened, we don't know if (b) will happen. So there is no way to guarantee that (c) is the case and we are all safe.
So we have to act like it has been compromised and change all of our affected keys/certs...and leave the paranoid to comb though things looking for proof it has already happened.
Maybe there needs to be some form of extension that warns that a package has been modified from its original source code and that the modification was done by "K. Frog" so you can determine whether to trust that package or look back to the source.
It is already a feature of Slackware. No packages is ever modified. So you end up with all the binary goodness, or badness of the original source of the package.
Man all I have to say is we will see where things are in the next 16 months.
I don't expect that if computing power doubles that a system that was $600.00 would now be a $300.00 system. However, four years ago Dell pushed the low end on a PC from $600.00 to $500.00. It is now down to $350 (without a monitor). Which puts it in the $450-$475 range. The hold up on the price drop right now is flat panels are not moving below $125.00.
I think the UMPC market is not a fluke. More companies are coming on board making systems. I am looking forward to sub $300.00 systems.
An iPod does everything a laptop does. Yet people own both. If you don't have money for both, the iPod is cooler. I think the UMPC is heading that way. If you could have both you would, but if not, you would take the UMPC because of the price point.
I will either be right and sending my daughter off to college with a UMPC for under $300.00. Or she gets a $500 laptop and I swear to her that I will kick her butt if she breaks it.
I am just working it from the street level. I just want a PC with decent speed to do the things that I do. I am not doing CAD, video rendering or high performance gaming.
I just want to buy a PC. Usually about as cheap as I can, but with some degree of upgradibility.
I never really cared if it was Intel or AMD. I am starting to care. Since finding drivers for Intel based boards is easy to do in the Intel site.
I am glad AMD is out there. Or any decent CPU would be up in the $600 plus range.
Why do Intel zealots even care that someone would want to run AMD? Why are they bothered that AMD says their CPUs are cheaper and runs better? Even if it is not true what does it matter?
The only thing I have seen, is that AMD being out there has helped keep the price of Intel CPU's down. That is a good thing. Even if you would not touch an AMD with a 10 foot pole.
No chance. A non-x86 machine isn't going to run the software most people want to run.
Joe sixpack is not concerned what instruction set is in his DVD player or Microwave Oven. The UMPC is not a PC. It is a quick boot, pocket sized device that can view web pages and in a pinch edit documents. So end users don't expect to run PC Software on it.
The benchmark for good enough, is something that feels fairly snappy and is able to video cam, view web pages, play audio and full screen video with at least a resolution of 800x640. As long as people can stand the keyboard, touch pad and the quality/size of the display, it will sell.
There is one reason we did not have these things 5 years ago. The sub $400 hardware was not good enough. Now it is. The "good enough" mark is not moving any time soon. People are not expecting the speed to render video or do speech recognition. In this case to upper end of the limit being hardware performance continues to rise. The lower end. Which is what users are expecting as a computing experience. Is not moving upward any longer.
If good enough can be done for $300, then people will buy it. If good enough can be done for $250, then people will buy it. If good enough can be done for $100, people will buy it.
What people will not buy, is a sub $400.00 device where the Microsoft Tax is such a huge proportion of the cost it is not worth it. If there was a DVD player for $50.00 and one for $450 and the only difference is the one for $450 comes with a license for Windows Vista. Guess which one is going to sell?
This is going to become more pronounced as time goes on. Microsoft does not have a free or almost free option for the sub $400 market.
As for the dock. I agree with you 100% there. My daughter is going off to college in September of 2009. I figure a UMPC with a dock will do just fine. What more does she need? She keeps her music on her iPod. Even a November 2007 sub $400 UMPC will let her video cam, watch full motion video, view web pages and edit basic word documents.
I am expecting that by August 2009 that "good enough" hardware will be in the $250-$275 price range with 1024x768 resolution (1280x800 when docked). This way if she loses it or it gets broke, I can buy her another one. I want a cheap throw away appliance.
This trend is going to continue to drive prices down. I don't think x86 compatibility will matter. Linux fills this space just fine. For those that want a UMPC that does more. Heck just pay an extra $25. All of the Linux apps will run on ANY hardware the UMPC does, no matter the instruction set.
Micorosoft has chosen to limit themself to two instruction sets x86 x86-64. Microsoft has chosen to write such a tangle of code that maintains compatibility with legacy software. It expects that Moores Law will always be true and deliver more powerful hardware to compensate for the cruft.
Here is a scary thought for Microsoft. Besides being instruction set agnostic. Linux can continue to be optimized to give better performance on even more meager hardware.
A year from now these machines will happily run Vista, so Microsoft don't have anything to worry about there.
Yes they will have something to worry about. What you meant to say is "a $400 UMPC will be able to run Windows Vista."
As it turns out. That would also mean there will be a $250.00 or $300.00 machine with about the same specs as now.
Remember, people are snapping these things up right now with a $400.00 price tag. There are plenty of people who can not justify getting one of these at $400.00 but at $250.00 they will go for it.
Microsoft can't close that door. If someone can knock the price down and improve performance even more by moving to something that is NOT x86 compatible. Microsoft is about to feel a swift kick to their family jewels.
The Problem:
Microsoft is finding its core PC maker customers are bleeding away at the very low end ($300 PCs) where the Windows OEM license is just too expensive to justify. If it allows this to continue, progress made in Linux on those devices will trickle up into more and more complex and sophisticated devices, quickly making OEMs wonder why they're paying for a Windows license on full price desktop PCs and laptops.
You know. When us Linux fan boys when we were proclaiming 2005 "the year of the Linux desktop". We also predicted that eventually the falling cost of PC's would get to the point where the Microsoft tax would cause PC retailers to put Linux on low cost computers.
Just because we guessed 1998 through 2008 as the year of the Linux desktop wrong. We have to get a prediction right once in a while.
I don't need the year of the Linux desktop. I run a Linux desktop just fine. What I need, is for Microsoft to be whittled down to a 60% or less desktop market share. For them to accept their fate (much like IBM has) and for them to play nice with the other children.
As soon as we get over this embrace, extend, extinguish cycle. The better off we will all be.
As I said, I felt more comfortable starting from scratch and going that route
I install, patch, update, activate, etc. Then use something like the systemrescue CD or slax to run partimage and make a snapshot of the OS.
That way recovery is 1) Make note of any apps that may have been installed since I snapshoted the system. 2) backup documents 3) backup interesting titbits of my profile 4) reimage machine 5) Put my documents and profile back 6) Install missing software.
Since I snsapshot it the same day I did the install, driver update and installed all software. The system is clean enough to respond well to a service pack. Not that there has been the need for that for the last 4 years.
Yes, yes, I know that the hardware is different (12GB drive vs 20 GB) but does anyone really believe that the whole move is anything other than an attempt by MS to prevent Linux from gaining a foothold in the portable PC market?
Good for ASUS. Microsoft is putting pressure on ASUS so what do they do? Easy. In the North America the Linux model with more storage space is cheaper than the Microsoft Model. In Europe the Linux model with more storage space is cheaper than the Microsoft Model.
In Australia what does ASUS do? To get Microsoft off of their back in Europe and North America. They throw Microsoft a bone and run the price of the linux unit up in Australia.
I would say someone in Redmond got their pocket picked...
Nearly. Goodwill is the value placed on the company's reputation with customers, specifically customer loyalty and its expected influence on future sales.
That is Microsofts problem. They have "goodwill". And if Microsoft was ever sold, that goodwill has a dollar value.
It is not the courts job to go out of its way to protect Microsoft's goodwill. That is Microsoft's job. They were the ones who made the decision. "Hey, this would cost us goodwill IF OUR CUSTOMERS EVER FOUND OUT. But since they won't and it will help hold or further extend our monopoly. We are going to do it and keep our customers from finding out."
I don't see how the court has a duty to hide this information. Microsoft has balanced goodwill and furthering their monopoly all along. They made the decisions. They have reaped the rewards. They should also reap the repercussions.
Too bad more people don't have more music like this. The bigger and badder the burn. The sooner people will be in the know and avoid DRM. All music with DRM is a rental. And someday the rental office will close down. So even if you want to pay rent, there will be no one to take it.
Congress will either mandate that Apple keeps their servers going...or the Federal Government will take over the job.
Sure they can. In a year or so all these "UMPCs" will have dual-core ~1.2Ghz CPUs and 2G - 4G RAM (and actually be useful as more than toys), which is more than sufficient for Vista, let alone XP.
That is exactly the kind of thinking that got Microsoft in this pickle.
Sure, next year you could build a more powerful unit for the same $400. But you could build a unit with the same specs as this year with more memory for $300.00 or less.
It is a race to the bottom. If you can get the "good enough" performance with XP or Linux on a device that costs $300 or $250 or $200. There will be a market for the lower cost unit. From the way things look right now, Linux is poised to perform better on such devices.
Now if Adobe would port their flash player to a few more CPU families. It may even be possible to build a $200 unit based on something other than the x86 family. In which case the only question is Linux with Flash or without Flash. Because XP/Vista/7 is x86 only and Microsoft is working their butts off to go 64 bit only.
Why not just tell the application vendors to "eliminate as many unnecessary privilege escalations as possible"? Because a decade of experience starting with Windows 95 shows that application vendors don't listen. Because Microsoft does not eat their own dogfood. Take a look at the products Microsoft sells or acquires and market as their own.
Internet Explorer when Microsoft first purchased it, or any incarnation thereafter.
Microsoft Accounting software such as Dynamics AKA Solomon
Microsft Retail Management Software (Point of Sale)
Microsoft's own flagship products such as Office
Let's start with the smoking gun. Did Microsoft ever have an API for asking for admin privileges for a program to do something? Or an API for writing to HKCU and one for privilege escalation to write to HKLM? Did Microsoft ever write a piece of software that informed you that you must be an admin to run it?
Microsoft did not follow any sort of guidelines in producing their own software. So they did not set a good example for the industry. Who knows Windows better than Microsoft? Look at any programmers training material put out by Microsoft for the last 20 years. Did they make ANY effort at all to show that at install time a program could write files to \Program Files and in the registry at HKLM. Then after that only files inside of %user% or in the registry at HKLU?
Lets look at the major 3rd party vendors. Intuit, Adobe, Symantec (non antivirus) and AutoDesk. That is probably the top 50% of the food chain in the software world. Did any of them ever make an effort to make their software run in a low user privelage environment? Most of them have taken the shortcut of using embeded IE to handle parts of their user interface. Requiring user escalations, writing to program file folders, continued to use ini files in the Windows folder, etc.
Every one of these Major Vendors and dozens more, sell their software with the little logo on it that said it was made for 95 or 98 or ME or XP. That means they followed Microsoft guidelines for writing software, submitted the software to Microsoft for testing, and paid a few thousand dollars to get to use the logo. At no point did Microsoft EVER check or test to see if these program would run with restricted user privileges. Remember all these companies followed Microsofts Guidelines which had nothing about admin/non-admin privileges.
If Microsoft wanted to promote security and good user practices. By the time Windows 95 came out they should have bit the bullet and emulated Unix. Folders like \Users \Programs with no spaces in the name. At install time creating a root account with password and then a restricted privilege user account. All of their software after an install would work with restricted privileges. A set of admin tools for dealing with system icons on the desktop, for system menus, system defaults. Their own software running in "user" mode and "admin" mode for making changes.
In all the materials that came with Windows 95/98 on how to install and use it. They never even recommended creating standard non-admin user accounts. Thus most software was written and tested in an environment where the user had full admin rights.
No Microsoft has made their own bed. Now they want to whine and complain that users don't take any responsibility in administering their system (when for years they said windows systems were so easy, you did not have to know anything to run one). That 3rd party software companies do not write their software securely. That everyone else is responsible for slow running computers, spyware, viruses, bot-nets and anything else that is wrong.
After all, since Bill Gates had Microsoft spent a year doing no work but auditing their code for security problems. You know it could not be their fault.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Not even close.
No car, no cigar.
I have never seen a good car analogy that involved a cigarThe iPod does everything the laptop does, plus it is a) smaller b) better battery life c) costs another $200.00.
However, kids don't go. I have a laptop why do I need an iPod. I think the UMPC could end up the same way. It overlaps what a laptop does, but the kid does not go. Hmmmm, even if it is an exta $250.00 it just duplicates part of my laptop.
Microsoft is doing damage control right now on trying to stop the UMPC. I think it is to late.
What is interesting, is that in your book, better hardware is coming. Microsofts definition of UMPC is going to hurt that. There will be a period of time where the $400.00 will be more powerful than what MS will allow XP to go on, but still not powerful enough to run VISTA. As in, dual core, but not enough RAM at $400 or enough ram but to slow of a CPU.
Some company that does not sell PC's but does mass produce consumer electronics could come along. Make bunches (maybe for China) of low cost hardware with the 10 inch dipslay, more RAM but a sub 1ghz CPU. Drop a slightly customized Ubuntu on there and really try to sell it.
If they are not a PC maker. Microsoft has no way to hurt them. They cant "lose the ability to get XP or Vista at a reduced cost". They cant lose Microsoft Advertising money.
The real question is WHEN someone does that. If it happens sooner, I think the sub $300.00 market will be hot. I think there is a sweetspot in the $200 to $300 range. As soon as someone hits it. It will be like printing money.
I switch to Widnows every month or so.
But I get fed up.
Then I promptly switch back to whatever Linux I feel like installing.
Then I get fed up again.
And I think 'All the marketing says that Windows is better than Linux! I should try it AGAIN!'...
then I switch to Windows.
Until I get fed up...
It is good to see that he has come back to the collective. I am sure the assimilation will be painless.
The possible answers are a) they already have b) someone will do it or c) no one is able to and the point is moot.
Yes, we don't know if (a) has happened, we don't know if (b) will happen. So there is no way to guarantee that (c) is the case and we are all safe.
So we have to act like it has been compromised and change all of our affected keys/certs...and leave the paranoid to comb though things looking for proof it has already happened.
Now Amazon may have some work to do...
It is already a feature of Slackware. No packages is ever modified. So you end up with all the binary goodness, or badness of the original source of the package.
Most users do not generate nor use ssh/ssl keys or certificates.
The real questions are
On the other hand, I met, dated and got Married since 2006. My wifes ssh key is "Debian compromised". Looks like I have some work to do....
I don't expect that if computing power doubles that a system that was $600.00 would now be a $300.00 system. However, four years ago Dell pushed the low end on a PC from $600.00 to $500.00. It is now down to $350 (without a monitor). Which puts it in the $450-$475 range. The hold up on the price drop right now is flat panels are not moving below $125.00.
I think the UMPC market is not a fluke. More companies are coming on board making systems. I am looking forward to sub $300.00 systems.
An iPod does everything a laptop does. Yet people own both. If you don't have money for both, the iPod is cooler. I think the UMPC is heading that way. If you could have both you would, but if not, you would take the UMPC because of the price point.
I will either be right and sending my daughter off to college with a UMPC for under $300.00. Or she gets a $500 laptop and I swear to her that I will kick her butt if she breaks it.
I just want to buy a PC. Usually about as cheap as I can, but with some degree of upgradibility.
I never really cared if it was Intel or AMD. I am starting to care. Since finding drivers for Intel based boards is easy to do in the Intel site.
I am glad AMD is out there. Or any decent CPU would be up in the $600 plus range.
Why do Intel zealots even care that someone would want to run AMD? Why are they bothered that AMD says their CPUs are cheaper and runs better? Even if it is not true what does it matter?
The only thing I have seen, is that AMD being out there has helped keep the price of Intel CPU's down. That is a good thing. Even if you would not touch an AMD with a 10 foot pole.
Joe sixpack is not concerned what instruction set is in his DVD player or Microwave Oven. The UMPC is not a PC. It is a quick boot, pocket sized device that can view web pages and in a pinch edit documents. So end users don't expect to run PC Software on it.
The benchmark for good enough, is something that feels fairly snappy and is able to video cam, view web pages, play audio and full screen video with at least a resolution of 800x640. As long as people can stand the keyboard, touch pad and the quality/size of the display, it will sell.
There is one reason we did not have these things 5 years ago. The sub $400 hardware was not good enough. Now it is. The "good enough" mark is not moving any time soon. People are not expecting the speed to render video or do speech recognition. In this case to upper end of the limit being hardware performance continues to rise. The lower end. Which is what users are expecting as a computing experience. Is not moving upward any longer.
If good enough can be done for $300, then people will buy it. If good enough can be done for $250, then people will buy it. If good enough can be done for $100, people will buy it.
What people will not buy, is a sub $400.00 device where the Microsoft Tax is such a huge proportion of the cost it is not worth it. If there was a DVD player for $50.00 and one for $450 and the only difference is the one for $450 comes with a license for Windows Vista. Guess which one is going to sell?
This is going to become more pronounced as time goes on. Microsoft does not have a free or almost free option for the sub $400 market.
As for the dock. I agree with you 100% there. My daughter is going off to college in September of 2009. I figure a UMPC with a dock will do just fine. What more does she need? She keeps her music on her iPod. Even a November 2007 sub $400 UMPC will let her video cam, watch full motion video, view web pages and edit basic word documents.
I am expecting that by August 2009 that "good enough" hardware will be in the $250-$275 price range with 1024x768 resolution (1280x800 when docked). This way if she loses it or it gets broke, I can buy her another one. I want a cheap throw away appliance.
This trend is going to continue to drive prices down. I don't think x86 compatibility will matter. Linux fills this space just fine. For those that want a UMPC that does more. Heck just pay an extra $25. All of the Linux apps will run on ANY hardware the UMPC does, no matter the instruction set.
Micorosoft has chosen to limit themself to two instruction sets x86 x86-64. Microsoft has chosen to write such a tangle of code that maintains compatibility with legacy software. It expects that Moores Law will always be true and deliver more powerful hardware to compensate for the cruft.
Here is a scary thought for Microsoft. Besides being instruction set agnostic. Linux can continue to be optimized to give better performance on even more meager hardware.
Yes they will have something to worry about. What you meant to say is "a $400 UMPC will be able to run Windows Vista."
As it turns out. That would also mean there will be a $250.00 or $300.00 machine with about the same specs as now.
Remember, people are snapping these things up right now with a $400.00 price tag. There are plenty of people who can not justify getting one of these at $400.00 but at $250.00 they will go for it.
Microsoft can't close that door. If someone can knock the price down and improve performance even more by moving to something that is NOT x86 compatible. Microsoft is about to feel a swift kick to their family jewels.
Microsoft is finding its core PC maker customers are bleeding away at the very low end ($300 PCs) where the Windows OEM license is just too expensive to justify. If it allows this to continue, progress made in Linux on those devices will trickle up into more and more complex and sophisticated devices, quickly making OEMs wonder why they're paying for a Windows license on full price desktop PCs and laptops.
You know. When us Linux fan boys when we were proclaiming 2005 "the year of the Linux desktop". We also predicted that eventually the falling cost of PC's would get to the point where the Microsoft tax would cause PC retailers to put Linux on low cost computers.
Just because we guessed 1998 through 2008 as the year of the Linux desktop wrong. We have to get a prediction right once in a while.
I don't need the year of the Linux desktop. I run a Linux desktop just fine. What I need, is for Microsoft to be whittled down to a 60% or less desktop market share. For them to accept their fate (much like IBM has) and for them to play nice with the other children.
As soon as we get over this embrace, extend, extinguish cycle. The better off we will all be.
I install, patch, update, activate, etc. Then use something like the systemrescue CD or slax to run partimage and make a snapshot of the OS.
That way recovery is 1) Make note of any apps that may have been installed since I snapshoted the system. 2) backup documents 3) backup interesting titbits of my profile 4) reimage machine 5) Put my documents and profile back 6) Install missing software.
Since I snsapshot it the same day I did the install, driver update and installed all software. The system is clean enough to respond well to a service pack. Not that there has been the need for that for the last 4 years.
Good for ASUS. Microsoft is putting pressure on ASUS so what do they do? Easy. In the North America the Linux model with more storage space is cheaper than the Microsoft Model. In Europe the Linux model with more storage space is cheaper than the Microsoft Model.
In Australia what does ASUS do? To get Microsoft off of their back in Europe and North America. They throw Microsoft a bone and run the price of the linux unit up in Australia.
I would say someone in Redmond got their pocket picked...
No http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_MusicHome Taping is killing the music industry.
I purchase music two ways. One is from independent artists. In which case, the artist gets 100% of the proceeds.
The other, is at the Good Will or other used store. Where I "stick it to the man". No money goes to the record companies.
That is Microsofts problem. They have "goodwill". And if Microsoft was ever sold, that goodwill has a dollar value.
It is not the courts job to go out of its way to protect Microsoft's goodwill. That is Microsoft's job. They were the ones who made the decision. "Hey, this would cost us goodwill IF OUR CUSTOMERS EVER FOUND OUT. But since they won't and it will help hold or further extend our monopoly. We are going to do it and keep our customers from finding out."
I don't see how the court has a duty to hide this information. Microsoft has balanced goodwill and furthering their monopoly all along. They made the decisions. They have reaped the rewards. They should also reap the repercussions.
Too bad more people don't have more music like this. The bigger and badder the burn. The sooner people will be in the know and avoid DRM. All music with DRM is a rental. And someday the rental office will close down. So even if you want to pay rent, there will be no one to take it.
Congress will either mandate that Apple keeps their servers going...or the Federal Government will take over the job.
You had better check to make sure your disgrontificator is still in good working order.
That is exactly the kind of thinking that got Microsoft in this pickle.
Sure, next year you could build a more powerful unit for the same $400. But you could build a unit with the same specs as this year with more memory for $300.00 or less.
It is a race to the bottom. If you can get the "good enough" performance with XP or Linux on a device that costs $300 or $250 or $200. There will be a market for the lower cost unit. From the way things look right now, Linux is poised to perform better on such devices.
Now if Adobe would port their flash player to a few more CPU families. It may even be possible to build a $200 unit based on something other than the x86 family. In which case the only question is Linux with Flash or without Flash. Because XP/Vista/7 is x86 only and Microsoft is working their butts off to go 64 bit only.
What?
These things are selling like hotcakes. They can't keep them on the shelves. No matter the OS on it.
Let's start with the smoking gun. Did Microsoft ever have an API for asking for admin privileges for a program to do something? Or an API for writing to HKCU and one for privilege escalation to write to HKLM? Did Microsoft ever write a piece of software that informed you that you must be an admin to run it?
Microsoft did not follow any sort of guidelines in producing their own software. So they did not set a good example for the industry. Who knows Windows better than Microsoft? Look at any programmers training material put out by Microsoft for the last 20 years. Did they make ANY effort at all to show that at install time a program could write files to \Program Files and in the registry at HKLM. Then after that only files inside of %user% or in the registry at HKLU?
Lets look at the major 3rd party vendors. Intuit, Adobe, Symantec (non antivirus) and AutoDesk. That is probably the top 50% of the food chain in the software world. Did any of them ever make an effort to make their software run in a low user privelage environment? Most of them have taken the shortcut of using embeded IE to handle parts of their user interface. Requiring user escalations, writing to program file folders, continued to use ini files in the Windows folder, etc.
Every one of these Major Vendors and dozens more, sell their software with the little logo on it that said it was made for 95 or 98 or ME or XP. That means they followed Microsoft guidelines for writing software, submitted the software to Microsoft for testing, and paid a few thousand dollars to get to use the logo. At no point did Microsoft EVER check or test to see if these program would run with restricted user privileges. Remember all these companies followed Microsofts Guidelines which had nothing about admin/non-admin privileges.
If Microsoft wanted to promote security and good user practices. By the time Windows 95 came out they should have bit the bullet and emulated Unix. Folders like \Users \Programs with no spaces in the name. At install time creating a root account with password and then a restricted privilege user account. All of their software after an install would work with restricted privileges. A set of admin tools for dealing with system icons on the desktop, for system menus, system defaults. Their own software running in "user" mode and "admin" mode for making changes.
In all the materials that came with Windows 95/98 on how to install and use it. They never even recommended creating standard non-admin user accounts. Thus most software was written and tested in an environment where the user had full admin rights.
No Microsoft has made their own bed. Now they want to whine and complain that users don't take any responsibility in administering their system (when for years they said windows systems were so easy, you did not have to know anything to run one). That 3rd party software companies do not write their software securely. That everyone else is responsible for slow running computers, spyware, viruses, bot-nets and anything else that is wrong.
After all, since Bill Gates had Microsoft spent a year doing no work but auditing their code for security problems. You know it could not be their fault.