Jim Henderson wrote:
> In general, I think the idea of UAC as the "fix" is the problem.  

I dunno. From what I know of it, it seems like a reasonable fix. I see Mac 
fans saying they never have to type in their password, and Windows users 
saying they have to answer UAC prompts several dozen times a day, and I'm 
thinking "WTF?"  What in the world are Windows users doing that make them 
have to answer UAC prompts dozens of times a day, when I do it maybe once a 
week when making offsite backups?

> Granted, it's really a first attempt at fixing the problem, but still - 
> MS is supposed to be hiring some of the smartest people out there.  I 
> know some of them (not who work on the core OS, but on other parts of 
> their product offerings) certainly are.

Yeah.

Actually, I was thinking that UAC might not be quite enough. Now every 
program that needs to upgrade itself (like firefox, for example, or a virus 
scanner, or whatever) needs a privileged service running just so it can 
write over files without prompting for a password. I can't think how you'd 
fix that, except perhaps letting a program get overwritten by a new version 
that is signed by the same public key.

On the other hand, UNIX and OSX seem to get along OK without it. Linux needs 
the password to do updates, unless it's using a background process of 
course, so that's kind of the same except that almost all your updates come 
from the same place. I don't know what OSX does in this regard.

> We do have a habit of that, don't we? ;-)

Seems like it.  It seems I sometimes make comments that are only 
tangentially related to the stuff I'm quoting, which confuses people sometimes.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   My fortune cookie said, "You will soon be
   unable to read this, even at arm's length."

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