Archive: Opinions

EditorialAccording to a report in ZDNet Microsoft designed User Account Control (UAC) in the Vista version of windows to deliberately annoy users.  "The reason we put UAC into the (Vista) platform was to annoy users--I'm serious," Cross is reported as saying last April at the annual RSA security conference in San Francisco. "Most users had administrator privileges on previous Windows systems and most applications needed administrator privileges to install or run."

The article goes on to say, "Cross claimed it is a myth that users just turn UAC off, saying that Microsoft had collected opt-in information from users that showed that 88 percent were running UAC. Cross said it was also a myth that users blindly accept prompts without reading them."

This is what happens when a company gets too big and loses touch with real people.  My take is that 88% of Vista users do not know HOW to turn off UAC. 

Even those who do are in for a nasty shock as I learned when I tried turning it off on a friend's computer.  All of a sudden the Windows security center flashed threatening warnings that the computer was at grave risk without UAC, and I was left pretty much with two choices: turn off the security center or turn UAC back on.

This is what I hate about Vista: it is bad enough that it hounds you, interrupting your work constantly, but then when you make a choice that can only be conscious -- believe me, it is impossible to turn off UAC by mistake! -- it doesn't believe you.

Microsoft created this monstrosity after much criticism about poor security.  But rather than redesigning the operating system in a more secure way they simply added a draconian system to try to stop bad things before they hit the system.  It is like hiring fifteen moronic bodyguards instead of avoiding bad neighborhoods.

That is easier than rewriting the operating system to be more secure.  Just add more and more bloat, layers upon layers, and -- oh!  while you're at it, annoy your users on purpose so that third party companies will do what you want them to do.

I'm gonna tell you -- when we started the Lansing Star we made readers log in because we wanted to know how many readers we had.  We soon realized that logging in is a pain in the patootie, and we stopped doing it because we didn't want to annoy our readers.  Because the more readers we have, the more ads we can sell to support the whole thing.

But I dunno -- Microsoft makes billions in profits.  They must be doing something right.  Maybe I should do more to annoy readers...

Or maybe I should switch to the Mac.  I have a little Mac notebook that I love.  It's sparky and doesn't get in the way of my doing my work.  As it happens the hard drive on our PC died a spectacular death the other day.  At the moment we still need a PC, so I'm using a ten year old computer with Windows 2000 installed.  I may replace the dead hard drive, but we are slowly moving to the Mac because the thought of suffering Vista is too much.

Microsoft wants to annoy me.  Fine, I don't want Vista anyway.  I'll annoy them right back!

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