Re: Vista - Be Sure UAC is On Before Installing JRE or JDK
 
Steve Sobol wrote:
On 2008-04-14, Mark Space <markspace@sbc.global.net> wrote:
A good point.  It's subtle nuances like this that are starting to kind 
of sour me on Vista.  Why make a distinction between running as 
administrator vs being logged in as one? 
I hate Vista, but there is a reason for this. You've been able to "run as"
another user since Win2000, and sometimes you need to, like at the client's
place where I'm working now; people are logged in and need stuff done, but 
it's a Win2003 Active Directory network and the default system policy has 
things locked down pretty tightly. In such cases it is *very* useful to be
able to run programs as an admin user, especially when logging off the 
current user is not practical.
But yes, in general, Vista's security measures go too far.
I think you misunderstood me.
Recently I was editing the config files of a local Apache install I use 
for testing.  It was a new install on this machine so I was starting over.
For some reason, I couldn't get it right.  I edited the http.config, 
checked the syntax and spelling, it all looked good.  Still no luck.
So I posted up on the Apache mailing list, asking if there were any 
known issues that may be causing some sort of incompatibility problem 
with my particular install.
What I got back was a suggestion to log in as a shell (I was editing 
from an Explorer window with GVIM) with administrator privileges and 
verify that the config file really had been changed.  Confused, I did 
that and lo and behold, Vista HAD NOT CHANGED THE FILE I HAD EDITED.
Even though I had Administrator privileges on this account, it neither 
changed the file, nor game me a permission error.  Instead Vista 
silently made a copy of the file, cached it, and gave the substitute 
file to me whenever I tried to view the file.  Only by logging on with a 
different account could I see that the file I was editing was in fact a 
bogus copy created by Vista to appear in the original's place.
That's when UAC went away.
It's one thing to prevent me from doing things based on its own 
perception of safety.  It's another to refuse to give me an error so I 
can diagnose the problem, but instead "silently fail" and pretend that 
the operation succeeded.  That's BS and that's why I'm suddenly down on 
Vista.  It's a horrendously bad idea.  Give me an error and let me fix 
it.  Don't go behind my back.
I have no words.  Total and utter BS.
(Well, I guess I had a lot of words, actually.)