Vista: A bitter pill, but the right path?

• Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on Mar 13

Some of you may already have read my review of the latest UTC Peer to Peer.  That event really got me thinking about Vista, and I wanted to put down some of my thoughts, and open it up for discussion.  For those of you who don’t know, Vista has drastically changed (or perhaps a better word is enforced, since it had previously been “suggested”, but was not mandatory) how application interact with the OS.  Among other things it has forced users to log in as “users” as opposed to administrators, and then has the user perform something akin to what us linux geeks might refer to as an “su” in order to temporarily get a higher level of access to perform certain tasks.  It also has all sorts of safeguards (manifest files in binaries, abstration of the “real” file system and registry, etc) in place to protect you and your environment.  For those who have always coded to Microsoft’s suggested security model, this transition may not be too tough.  But for the other 99% of the world, get ready to roll your sleeves up. 

 I have to say though, that I am torn on this issue.  I think most of the steps Microsoft is taking are logical, and will lead to a more secure OS.  In the meantime however, since almost everything will throw security alerts, people will get so used to clicking “allow” that the security becomes almost moot.  This, combined with the fact that they are strong-arming new computer buyers into Vista, means that the world is goignt o be scrambling to rewrite applications quickly, and in the meantime everyone (providers and customers) are going to be very frustrated.

But what would have been a better approach?  If Microsoft made Vista merely an option would anoyone have bought it?  If not, abviously software writers would not have written to it.  In the short run this is really going to suck… but will we be better off for it in a year (or maybe two )?

• Posted in Techno Rambling