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.)