And lo on Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:58:00 +0100, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom>  
did spake, saying:

> Phil Cook wrote:
>> Yeah worked well with XP; people are people. If you told someone they  
>> should run as a LUser, but some of their programmes might not  
>> work/install
>
> The real problem is the vast numbers of specialized crap programs out  
> there written by people who don't know what they're doing (i.e., experts  
> in what they're doing rather than experts in programming).
>
> Ten years later, it really should be normal for people to be writing  
> software that runs as a normal user even if it installs as administrator.

I completely agree and yet...

> I have a program that tracks real estate. It has a per-machine license  
> key that it stores in the per-user registry ("because it's a per-user  
> license. And it would break too much to fix it"[*]).
> ([*] Don't you love people who argue "It isn't broken. Besides, it's too  
> hard to fix."  Sorry I didn't call you back. I didn't get your voice  
> mail. And you didn't leave your phone number on the voice mail.)

'It's too hard to fix'
'So you admit it's broken'
'No'

Heh.

> Which means you cannot install it as administrator and then run it as a  
> normal user. You have to run it as the same user that installed it. This  
> is a multi-thousand-dollar program, too. But it was written by a goob  
> who doesn't understand even the basics of writing usable programs, let  
> alone advanced stuff like installers.

I'm sure I've mentioned someone getting a demo CD of a new game. Their kid  
tried to install it on XP (as a LUser) and wondered why after just  
clicking on the Next buttons, as he normally did, it wouldn't install.  
Default installation directory - c:\program files\company name\game name.  
IIRC even after changing that it didn't want to work because it couldn't  
write to the system registry.

>> The latest wonder is that Media Player won't start unless "run as"  
>> Administrator, doing a search reveals others with this problem and the  
>> curernt solution is to unistall any 'suspect' media players.
>
> So why blame Media Player?

Puts on User hat - "Because that's the programme that's stopped working,  
the other ones are fine"

> Why not blame the people who can't even write a codec that works without  
> admin privs? :-)

Yeah I am; I'm just wondering which one it is.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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