On 2006-08-24, Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>| Unfortunately, after many months of using Windows Vista, I conclude
>| that Microsoft has placed a thick security facade around the operating
>| system that impedes usability compared to Windows XP.
That's what you get when you try to bolt on security after-the-fact. If
they'd made a clean break in the NT days and not focused so much on
backward compatibility, they'd be better off today from a security
perspective. Of course, they needed backward compatibility then to get
NT off the ground.
It would have been awkward breaking backward compatibility for XP, but
given their dominant position they *might* have been able to pull it
off. But either way, they didn't try, and now the security situation is
too critical to ignore. I've discussed this before:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/3e0a5e12ed2ce96f
Now the competition is *much* stiffer, and has better (and *easier*)
security as a standard feature. It's possible to safely use a Linux
system without *ever* needing administrator privileges, and apps are
designed that way. Windows apps are *not* designed that way, and the OS
is so exposed that there's no reasonable way of isolating
security-critical operations from innocuous ones. So you get things like
the article Roy linked to:
"Absolutely, users should have to authorize every software
installation, and I believe this should require a user name and
password. But should people have to go through a security popup to
backup their Outlook data file to an external hard drive? No."
Linux and OSS applications don't have that problem. As he says:
>| For me, Internet Explorer 7 security warnings are so much a nuisance I
>| now mainly use Firefox, which is a dramatic change. For years, I continued
>| to use and defend IE to Firefox switchers. Firefox is safe enough without
>| all the security noise.
Vista will sell reasonably well, but nothing like Windows 95, and it
will be viewed as either too difficult for regular use or else (if you
turn off UAC or whatever they're calling it now) too easily subverted.
If users become too numb to the warnings and just click "yes" to
everything, possibly *both*.
--
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
"There is not a single state in the U.S. where medical malpractice
OR health insurance premiums have come down by $0.01 since the
introduction of any tort 'reform' measure." - Webhund
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