Comments on: Windows Vista and the great techie hate http://jameskahn.net/blog/2007/02/20/windows-vista-and-the-great-techie-hate/ IT, life, gym and ... whatever Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:03:17 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: Sanx http://jameskahn.net/blog/2007/02/20/windows-vista-and-the-great-techie-hate/#comment-5 Sanx Sun, 18 Mar 2007 12:02:14 +0000 http://jameskahn.net/blog/?p=24#comment-5 You can't just bracket all people as luddites or unable to understand improvement simply because they whine and moan about Vista. There are plenty of reasons to moan about Vista, and some of them are even somewhat valid. UAC probably does cause the most consternation. And UAC is a good idea for the majority of users who don't fully understand the consequences of their actions. Anything that adds another layer of user interaction to potentially damaging behaviour is a good thing. In my opinion though, it isn't quite clever enough to be truly acceptable, especially to techies bright enough to turn it off. With UAC enabled, try reordering the items in the All Users start menu, for instance. Create a new folder; enter your credentials. Move a shortcut; enter your credentials. Delete a spurious entry; enter your credentials. As you said, caching is probably a good thing that'll come out in some future service pack, but it should be a bit more clever than that. Look at the process ID of the process requesting privilege escalation and automatically grant it escalation rights for similar actions for the next x minutes. You can’t just bracket all people as luddites or unable to understand improvement simply because they whine and moan about Vista. There are plenty of reasons to moan about Vista, and some of them are even somewhat valid.

UAC probably does cause the most consternation. And UAC is a good idea for the majority of users who don’t fully understand the consequences of their actions. Anything that adds another layer of user interaction to potentially damaging behaviour is a good thing. In my opinion though, it isn’t quite clever enough to be truly acceptable, especially to techies bright enough to turn it off.

With UAC enabled, try reordering the items in the All Users start menu, for instance. Create a new folder; enter your credentials. Move a shortcut; enter your credentials. Delete a spurious entry; enter your credentials. As you said, caching is probably a good thing that’ll come out in some future service pack, but it should be a bit more clever than that. Look at the process ID of the process requesting privilege escalation and automatically grant it escalation rights for similar actions for the next x minutes.

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