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madprocess posted:I do wonder why XP Media Center Edition was never sold at retail, when as far as I can tell it has all the features of XP Pro, and even identifies itself as such. Seems like it could have been sold as the Ultimate of XP. You have to remember computers in 2003 were barely in the 2ghz range. as such MCE was pretty stout in terms of hardware back then. They only sold OEM as they could enforce what type of hardware was sold along with it. At least around mce 2005's time frame they allowed consumer oem sales. Awesome Axe posted:The thing that pisses me off daily are people who berate Windows Vista and have no good reason to. Another I've recently run into are people who eat up with slashdot says about how uac is worthless because it can be "hacked around" I'm not a programmer, but I found in a quick search that 1. a program can ask for elevation from the jump, and once UAC is advised the program is ok it remembers it, so it won't prompt you every single time. 2. Splitting a program into user and system process is better because at least non administrators can run the program if it really needs system access. Its not a hack, its how Microsoft wants you do do it! UAC is actually making you make good security and usability decisions. Its not the devil, and if more and more programmers actually researched what triggered a prompt and why then most people would rarely see the prompt.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 16:22 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 07:58 |
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Ryokurin posted:You have to remember computers in 2003 were barely in the 2ghz range. as such MCE was pretty stout in terms of hardware back then. They only sold OEM as they could enforce what type of hardware was sold along with it. At least around mce 2005's time frame they allowed consumer oem sales. I gave Windows Vista a serious go when my wife got me a sweet 19" widescreen monitor for Christmas. Since then, I can't stand using anything but Vista. Yeah, it has it's flaws, and there a lot of them - but for what it does, it does it so well. The issues I have with it are not bugs or anything, they are mostly weird design choices. Security, functionality, and stability have been excellent with it, and it has so many nice features. I sometimes feel that being able to rename a file without the extension being highlighted is worth the price of admission alone. UAC is great in many ways as well.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 16:37 |
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AcridWhistle posted:No, that is what VirtualStore is for My mouse was angrily hovering over the quote button before I realized you were making a joke. Good one! Ryokurin posted:Another I've recently run into are people who eat up with slashdot says about how uac is worthless because it can be "hacked around" I'm not a programmer, but I found in a quick search that 1. a program can ask for elevation from the jump, and once UAC is advised the program is ok it remembers it, so it won't prompt you every single time. 2. Splitting a program into user and system process is better because at least non administrators can run the program if it really needs system access. Its not a hack, its how Microsoft wants you do do it! UAC is actually making you make good security and usability decisions. Its not the devil, and if more and more programmers actually researched what triggered a prompt and why then most people would rarely see the prompt.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 16:37 |
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Ryokurin posted:UAC is actually making you make good security and usability decisions. Its not the devil, and if more and more programmers actually researched what triggered a prompt and why then most people would rarely see the prompt. If so, what does this help? What is to stop malware authors from also adhering to this installation model? Is it simply that malware by nature needs to put stuff in system folders, while legitimate programs should not need to do so? Thanks. Related, does adherence to this idea prevent software from putting itself in startup, dicking around with the registry, and so forth? If so, that's awesome. If not, I feel some of the point is lost. nail fucked around with this message at May 21, 2008 around 16:56 |
| # ? May 21, 2008 16:54 |
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hyperborean posted:Not to say that UAC is bad, but this is something that I don't quite understand, maybe just cause I don't have Vista. Software authors should not require admin credentials to install, this is the purpose of UAC being 'annoying', is that correct? The problem is that users will start accepting UAC automatically without looking or reading, because the loving thing pops up for nearly EVERYTHING.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 16:59 |
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hyperborean posted:Not to say that UAC is bad, but this is something that I don't quite understand, maybe just cause I don't have Vista. Software authors should not require admin credentials to install, this is the purpose of UAC being 'annoying', is that correct? Its sort of a compromise. Before you could run someone as user, but if they had to do something as simple as change the time they couldn't and as I mentioned before they out right couldn't run some programs as they expected admin access. The problem with admin access is that you could download an email smiley program that turns your pc into a botnet. UAC is basically super user in how even admins have to confirm a task to do something sometimes. or at least you can catch a program doing something odd, like changing your wallpaper and opening a port when it should just talk to my email program for instance. It also enables file and registry Virtualization, and as I mentioned before force some programmers to think about security and setting usage. I'm not going to lie, sometimes its a pain, especially pre sp1 when you sometimes had to confirm file moves several times in a row, or if you are busy installing programs on a new install but at least the more popular companies are getting with the program eliminating many of the prompts. Unless you are constantly installing and uninstalling everything under the sun you'll rarely run into.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 17:19 |
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Jetsetlemming posted:The problem is that users will start accepting UAC automatically without looking or reading, because the loving thing pops up for nearly EVERYTHING. I don't have Vista either, but this idea is what I hear a lot from the people who bash on UAC. My question is, is UAC any worse than sudo? I use sudo all the time under my Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris boxes. If I still used an XP Pro box regularly, I'd probably try to implement sudowin. If so, I don't see the big deal with UAC (besides perhaps the fact that it's apparently a lot less configurable than sudo), and I don't understand the slashdot hate for it.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 17:34 |
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Ryouga Inverse posted:It's like the guys who designed the interface just went with "it's a secret, it must need to be masked" without actually thinking of what the cryptographical definition of "secret" was. This is basically an extension of my gripe of a few pages back. Lack of response when your wireless passkey isn't typed in properly + obscured key when typing = call industrialpope: "MY NETWORK ISN'T WORKING!". At least you can check "show key" in Vista, it solves a lot of the problems. DreamingApe fucked around with this message at May 21, 2008 around 17:57 |
| # ? May 21, 2008 17:50 |
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I got so pissed off by UAC I turned it off. There's a two problems- a) It comes up for a ton of poo poo that it really shouldn't be needed for such as changing the time b) It comes up whenever you try to do _anything_ in C:\Program Files. B is the problem. If I want to save a file into C:\Program Files in Firefox, I can't, because Firefox doesn't pop up the UAC box. There are a few games I had that save games in C:\Program Files but can't because I couldn't access C:\Program Files. Ugh.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 17:51 |
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TuxRacer69 posted:There are a few games I had that save games in C:\Program Files but can't because I couldn't access C:\Program Files. Ugh.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 17:54 |
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vlack posted:I don't have Vista either, but this idea is what I hear a lot from the people who bash on UAC.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 17:57 |
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vlack posted:I don't have Vista either, but this idea is what I hear a lot from the people who bash on UAC. Its about on the lines of sudo. Most of the people who say it comes up constantly haven't tried it since SP1 or is still using software that doesn't properly ask for elevations when launching (thus prompting for it on launch every time) I only see it now when I'm 1. installing or uninstalling a program. 2. copying or editing something in a protected area (except it only prompts once now, instead of four times like before) 3. When I'm doing a task that requires elevated permissions (you still need them if you run as admin) I'm sure there are a few more but I don't really run into them much. As a side note, if you know you need to to run something from the start menu elevated like a command prompt, type the name in the search box and hit enter pressing CTRL+Shift and it will start with the needed elevation.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 17:58 |
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vlack posted:I don't have Vista either, but this idea is what I hear a lot from the people who bash on UAC.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 17:59 |
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Jetsetlemming posted:The problem is that users will start accepting UAC automatically without looking or reading, because the loving thing pops up for nearly EVERYTHING. I think Vista got an overly bad rep because of it. MS had years of 3rd party applications written one way to contend with. The transition is going to be tough, but hopefully things will get much better in the future.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 18:01 |
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hyperborean posted:It seems to me like it would be. With sudo, you actively type the command. So you really have to be aware of what you're doing. With UAC, you can blindly click "yes" "OK" "next" all day long. Any? Why is that any harder? The problem isn't with people who know computers, it's with people who know how to do a specific thing. There are plenty of people who understand how to use ipconfig to release or renew their ip, but they have no clue what it's for. If they suddenly found out it wasn't working, a quick google would explain it and they'd be typing sudo in front of it without thinking about what it does.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 18:19 |
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hyperborean posted:It seems to me like it would be. With sudo, you actively type the command. So you really have to be aware of what you're doing. With UAC, you can blindly click "yes" "OK" "next" all day long. Jetsetlemming posted:Sudo is a conscious thing on the user's part. UAC is an automatic popup cleared just by clicking OK. You're not likely to type in the sudo command to install a spyware or virus unawares. You ARE likely, if you don't know or aren't paying attention, to click OK without looking to closely at the popup.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 18:22 |
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TuxRacer69 posted:I got so pissed off by UAC I turned it off. This isn't good reasoning. You'd have the same issue trying to save stuff to /bin with Firefox on a *nix machine. There's no reason to do this. If you really must, save to your desktop (or, more properly, your downloads folder) and copy from there. As for the games, it should go into the VirtualStore like Caged said. If it doesn't, run it in Windows XP compatibility mode (right-click the shortcut -> properties -> compatibility). If THAT doesn't work, set it to run as an administrator so that you only have to click a UAC prompt once. As for A, whatever you're referring to has probably been addressed in SP1. Jetsetlemming posted:Sudo is a conscious thing on the user's part. UAC is an automatic popup cleared just by clicking OK. You're not likely to type in the sudo command to install a spyware or virus unawares. You ARE likely, if you don't know or aren't paying attention, to click OK without looking to closely at the popup. If you think that asking for your password is at least a little better at making you think before you act (I do), then set yourself as a non-admin user and make an admin account on the machine. Now, instead of Allow/Cancel UAC asks for credentials to perform an administrative task. Type in the admin account credentials and it proceeds along just fine.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 18:25 |
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kapinga posted:Have either of you used Ubuntu much? Casao posted:Any? Why is that any harder? The problem isn't with people who know computers, it's with people who know how to do a specific thing. There are plenty of people who understand how to use ipconfig to release or renew their ip, but they have no clue what it's for. If they suddenly found out it wasn't working, a quick google would explain it and they'd be typing sudo in front of it without thinking about what it does.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 18:39 |
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While we're bitching about Vista, here's my recent gripe: It likes to crash a few times a week. It seems to be mostly related to Firefox; basically FF will lock the system up and I'll get stuck with the busy cursor while FF sits and turns grey. CTRL+ALT+DEL or CTRL+SHIFT+ESC fail to kill it, so I'm forced to hard reboot my computer. Then, I sit for the next 15-20 minutes while Vista runs chkdsk and takes an abnormally long amount of time to boot after chkdsk. It's almost like it wants to punish me for crashing it. XP ran chkdsk after a crash, but it would always boot normally once that was done. Vista tacks another 10 minutes or so onto my boot process after chkdsk. It does this 3-4 times a week, usually during the business day and it's really starting to piss me off.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 18:41 |
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kapinga posted:Have either of you used Ubuntu much? Sure, when you are in the command line, you have to enter sudo before each explicit command, but in the GUI, the sudo elevation prompt shows up unrequested just the same as in Vista. There's some difference as to what actions need elevation between the two OSes, but I have not found UAC to be any more annoying than sudo in a desktop linux environment. Actually, I find typing in my password all the time to be more cumbersome than the UAC prompts - not that either bothers me.  I tried Ubuntu about a year and a half to two years ago. I had it for about a month and a half without really doing anything with it, then I upgraded my video card to a Radeon 9250 and suddenly Ubuntu wouldn't load anymore- it dropped me in a DOS-looking screen when I tried. I ended up uninstalling it (poorly, with results that had me freaking out for a while before I learned what a master boot record was and how to fix it with the windows CD) after that.Also, at least when I used Vista, if you had a password on your windows login you'd need to enter it for UAC (I believe there was a setting to have it auto-fill in the password prompt, though, not exactly sure). Jetsetlemming fucked around with this message at May 21, 2008 around 18:58 |
| # ? May 21, 2008 18:56 |
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Found new hardware USB Mass Storage Device Found new hardware DataTraveler 2.0 Found new hardware Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 USB Device Found new hardware Disk drive Found new hardware Your new hardware is installed and ready for use.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 18:58 |
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Rock Tumbler posted:Found new hardware I seem to get that sometimes, trying another usb port fixes it.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 19:09 |
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Jetsetlemming posted:Also, at least when I used Vista, if you had a password on your windows login you'd need to enter it for UAC (I believe there was a setting to have it auto-fill in the password prompt, though, not exactly sure). No, this is not correct. It asks for a password when your account is not an administrator account (and at that point it's looking for a username too). UAC asks only for a mouse click regardless of your password if your account is administrative (as it is by default). Unless of course some flavor of Vista besides Business and Home Premium behaves as you are describing, but I doubt it. Something that pissed me off the other day is Windows being unfamiliar with the alphabet and stepping through it one letter at a time. I stick a usb drive in...nothing. Check disk management and it's set to drive F, which is already mapped. Thanks, rear end. Change it to G and the stupid WADDAYAWANNADOWITHTHISDRIVE window pops up (play slideshow, music, do nothing, open folder, etc). I'll show you what you can do with it.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 19:12 |
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sanchez posted:I seem to get that sometimes, trying another usb port fixes it. It only does it the first time you plug in the USB drive on that computer. I just wonder why it has to tell me four goddamn times (using those horrid little systray balloons) that it is most definitely a USB drive.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 19:16 |
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Rock Tumbler posted:It only does it the first time you plug in the USB drive on that computer. I just wonder why it has to tell me four goddamn times (using those horrid little systray balloons) that it is most definitely a USB drive. I used to wonder if the reason it sometimes seemed to go from most to least specific was because it actually took a fraction of the time it seemed to take and what I was really seeing was the most recent of the bubbles timing out and going away to reveal the one behind it.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 19:30 |
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Midelne posted:I used to wonder if the reason it sometimes seemed to go from most to least specific was because it actually took a fraction of the time it seemed to take and what I was really seeing was the most recent of the bubbles timing out and going away to reveal the one behind it. I dunno, sometimes there is a gap of several seconds between the disappearance of one bubble and the appearance of the next.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 19:37 |
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sanchez posted:I seem to get that sometimes, trying another usb port fixes it. Oh God that reminds me. In XP, if you insert a USB-device in a USB-port it has not ben used in yet, motherfucking Windows will install drivers one more time because it's a new loving port. poo poo.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 19:56 |
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revmoo posted:While we're bitching about Vista, here's my recent gripe:
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| # ? May 21, 2008 20:36 |
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-Dethstryk- posted:So really, it's less of a Vista gripe and more of a gripe about whatever software or hardware issues you are having? I'd try to find out what your issue is, because this isn't something that you can attribute to Vista. I've been using Vista since February and my computer never gets turned off or hardly restarted, and I don't think I've had one crash at all.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 21:25 |
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Erwin posted:This isn't good reasoning. You'd have the same issue trying to save stuff to /bin with Firefox on a *nix machine. There's no reason to do this. If you really must, save to your desktop (or, more properly, your downloads folder) and copy from there. What if it's, say, a program that has a zip instead of an installer? What if I want to download, say, a level for Skulltag into C:\Program Files\Skulltag\Levels in Firefox? I can't, because Firefox doesn't pop up the UAC box and instead says "cannot save here- would you like to save in your personal folder instead?" quote:As for the games, it should go into the VirtualStore like Caged said. If it doesn't, run it in Windows XP compatibility mode (right-click the shortcut -> properties -> compatibility). If THAT doesn't work, set it to run as an administrator so that you only have to click a UAC prompt once. quote:It's no different than Ubuntu's (Gnome's?) and OS X's elevation wherein it prompts you for your password when you try to do something that you would have to sudo at the terminal. Try to change hardware settings, it pops up a password prompt and you happily type it in. Download some (theoretical, of course) malware and it pops up a password prompt and you happily type it innowaitohcrap! But Linux is much better about not having to deal with folders that are not /home unless you are installing something.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 21:41 |
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This is why you install games in C:\Games, people.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 21:43 |
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Erwin posted:No, this is not correct. It asks for a password when your account is not an administrator account (and at that point it's looking for a username too). UAC asks only for a mouse click regardless of your password if your account is administrative (as it is by default). Unless of course some flavor of Vista besides Business and Home Premium behaves as you are describing, but I doubt it. True, but then again, the user account is actually usable now! Everyone complained about having to give normal people admin access at all times and UAC does fix that, so normal people will have to enter an admin password to install. Hopefully if you leave them as a admin account the cancel and allow options will make them think. and since not a ton of people know, the admin account isn't really the admin account, thus why it needs elevation to do some things. If you really want to use the admin account which is just like it was in XP with no UAC, start a command prompt with elevated privileges (right click on command prompt icon run as admin or type cmd in the search box along with CTRL+Shift) and type in the following. net user administrator /active:yes Log out and the hidden admin account will show. changing /active:no will put it back into hiding.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 21:50 |
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torjus posted:Oh God that reminds me. In XP, if you insert a USB-device in a USB-port it has not ben used in yet, motherfucking Windows will install drivers one more time because it's a new loving port. poo poo.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 21:50 |
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torjus posted:Oh God that reminds me. In XP, if you insert a USB-device in a USB-port it has not ben used in yet, motherfucking Windows will install drivers one more time because it's a new loving port. poo poo. Or the constant nagging that my USB ports were only 1.0 while 2.0 is so much faster and better and yummier and oh god did you hear about USB 2.0 it's aaaawesooooome!!!! 
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| # ? May 21, 2008 21:55 |
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Iblys posted:Been using XP on various machines for around 8 years now and I have never ever seen this issue. It happens ALL the time. If I unplug my keyboard and put it in a different slot, it has to reinstall drivers.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 22:00 |
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TuxRacer69 posted:I got so pissed off by UAC I turned it off. I'd disagree with this. Changing the time affects all users of a system. Shouldn't it require admin access? For the record, most/all Unix systems also require administrator access to change things like time settings. TuxRacer69 posted:b) It comes up whenever you try to do _anything_ in C:\Program Files. This could be annoying if by "anything" you mean "view and copy files and folders". Is that the case? That would be colossally stupid (for the vast majority of items, anyway). However, if you mean "change files or folders", I think this is correct again... Unix does the same thing here. You can't arbitrarily move stuff into / or /bin - those are for whole-system items, not things that belong to just one user (that's what the home directories are for), or things that just one user maintains (each user can share documents/whatever from their home directory by editing an item's permissions). Are there any problems with UAC that don't boil down to "I think I should have permission to do X"? Or even, are there any permissions that Windows doesn't grant a non-admin user be default that those users should have (maybe something like changing the screen resolution, I don't know, I just picked that one out of my rear end)? Permissions problems in the vein of "I used to be able to copy files to C:\" don't really offend me that much... if a user doesn't need the access, why should they get it? Jetsetlemming posted:Sudo is a conscious thing on the user's part. UAC is an automatic popup cleared just by clicking OK. You're not likely to type in the sudo command to install a spyware or virus unawares. You ARE likely, if you don't know or aren't paying attention, to click OK without looking to closely at the popup. Well, point taken. Users are definitely inundated with stupid pop-up boxes (which are naturally modal and full of unselectable text), which is IMO bad UI design because it teaches them to click the "Get the gently caress out of my way" button. However, as others have noted, it let's you click "OK" without a password only if the account is admin anyway. In other words, it seems that the blame lies with the fact that the default account is Admin, NOT with UAC's handling. It sounds like UAC is doing the correct thing here. (Although, I wonder how much sense that really makes. I mean, if you're going around running malware as admin anyway... well, there's no such thing as software to cure stupidity, after all. Or, the software can just infect an executable file that you DON'T need permission to run, or create a malicious executable and attach it to something more innocuous like a batch job. It doesn't seem to me that this can be of any pragmatic benefit.) Besides, my intent (probably not well stated) was to confirm that UAC would be annoying to me. sudo isn't annoying to me; it seems like the Right Thing. From what ya'll have said, UAC sounds pretty good too. Speaking of which, thanks for the helpful replies.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 22:01 |
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Iblys posted:Been using XP on various machines for around 8 years now This seems unlikely. Fake edit: unless you mean betas or something?
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| # ? May 21, 2008 22:04 |
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big mean giraffe posted:It happens ALL the time. If I unplug my keyboard and put it in a different slot, it has to reinstall drivers. Yep, happens all the time to me too. And at work, you need admin privileges to install drivers. So if you plug the device into a new port, you cannot use it. Plug it into the old port and it's fine.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 22:08 |
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God drat Stickykeys. I know you only have to deal with it once, but whenever I do a fresh install, I forget about it and then it invariably comes up when I'm playing a flash game that involves pressing "shift" 5 or more times. I don't even know what stickykeys does, because I am just so incensed when it appears that I can't focus on anything.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 22:44 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 07:58 |
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vlack posted:This could be annoying if by "anything" you mean "view and copy files and folders". Is that the case? That would be colossally stupid (for the vast majority of items, anyway). However, if you mean "change files or folders", I think this is correct again... Unix does the same thing here. You can't arbitrarily move stuff into / or /bin - those are for whole-system items, not things that belong to just one user (that's what the home directories are for), or things that just one user maintains (each user can share documents/whatever from their home directory by editing an item's permissions). You can view / copy stuff out of Program Files without a prompt, only modifying / copying things into Program Files pops up the UAC prompt. Like someone else said earlier (as well as some random site I'm gonna quote), it doesn't even break old badly written programs that try to write there / the registry: "If legacy applications attempt to access protected portions of the file system and registry without the proper permissions, UAC virtualization services silently redirect read and write operations from protected portions of the file system and registry to unprotected user-specific locations. This process is transparent to legacy software and occurs automatically." I think most complaints about UAC come from the first few days that someone is spending with Vista. It's the time you're the most alert for changes compared to XP, but it's also the time you'll see the most UAC prompts as you install all your software and drivers. Once their system is set up, the average person isn't going to be seeing UAC prompts frequently enough to be bothered.
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| # ? May 21, 2008 22:50 |
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