Why Vista?
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In a single user environment XP's security is fine - I have a firewall and antivirus and am fine. Search? Barely use it. Next!
Firewalls can themselves have vulnerabilities. When did you last patch your hardware firewall? Someone has to first catch a new virus, notice, and submit a sample to the antivirus vendors before they can produce an update that will detect it. This can take some time. You should strongly consider running as a low-privileged user. It stops many drive-by exploit attempts in their tracks because the developer of the attack code expected you to be running as administrator. A hypothetical zero-day exploit could still load itself into your user account's autorun locations and wreak havoc in your account, but would be unable to hack itself a hole in your software firewall, because that requires administrative privileges. I've not been an admin on XP for the last couple of years (I know the Administrator account password, but my regular account is not a member of the Administrators group). It can be painful at times, but only when you need to do admin work or have an application that is truly user-unfriendly. For example, right now I'm loading new firmware on a Symbol MC3000 device. The loader software, TCM, only supports USB if the user is an administrator - I assume this is because the driver itself has an ACL that only allows administrators to access it. I use either RunAs or Aaron Margosis' MakeMeAdmin[^] batch file to temporarily elevate my privileges. A particular annoyance is that the Network Connections control panel cannot easily be made to run as an administrator, so adding or changing IP addresses is out. I've got used to using
netshto work around this.Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
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Ah yes, I forgot about the driver changes; at least sound and video drivers are outside the kernel. And because of that, fewer blue screens (which are almost always due to bad drivers). :cool:
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: God-as-Judge, God-as-Forgiver The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
Sound drivers are in user mode, video drivers aren't. Video drivers change due to needing to virtualise the GPU in a way that wasn't necessary before, but they still run in kernel mode. IIRC when the Desktop Window Manager is on (accelerated desktop), GDI and GDI+ become software-rendered. You lose any 2D-acceleration capabilities. This can make legacy non-WPF apps (i.e. virtually all apps) render more slowly. I found that IE7 on Vista was noticeably slower at rendering CP than IE7 on XP.
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
want to reach for my wallet
Don't you own an MSDN subscription?
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -Brian Kernighan
Software obtained through an MSDN subscription is for development and testing only. It cannot be used for general business use (Office excepted). You must have an OEM or full retail product licence for your desktop operating system. Volume licence copies are only permitted for upgrades, not for the first OS on a system (you are not supposed to buy a bare system and install a volume licence copy on that).
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
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What scenarios are we talking about?
-- Verletzen zerfetzen zersetzen zerstören Doch es darf nicht mir gehören Ich muss zerstören
Thuings like attaching a debugger to services, I believe. If the IDE is running as a normal (i.e. non-elevated) user, the debugger may not have the required permissions. Running the IDE with admin permissions (which is in fact needed to register COM DLLs during a build anyway) should get around most (if not all) such issues. The changes proposed for VS2005 are more making it aware of UAC and the privileges it enforces than fixing anything fundamentally broken.
Anna :rose: Linting the day away :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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It may mostly work, but PSS won't take support calls on it. Yes, they're flaming idiots, and I've told them so, and told them that it blocks Vista adoption. They're not interested. This isn't really the Windows team's fault, moreover, it's DevDiv's.
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
I actually agree with you. It is daft, and they are being short sighted. Nevertheless, earlier versions of Visual Studio will still work on Vista if required. We are still using VS2003 ourselves (VS2005 is just not stable enough to be less than annoying, yet) and that is one of our test cases.
Anna :rose: Linting the day away :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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Thuings like attaching a debugger to services, I believe. If the IDE is running as a normal (i.e. non-elevated) user, the debugger may not have the required permissions. Running the IDE with admin permissions (which is in fact needed to register COM DLLs during a build anyway) should get around most (if not all) such issues. The changes proposed for VS2005 are more making it aware of UAC and the privileges it enforces than fixing anything fundamentally broken.
Anna :rose: Linting the day away :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
Thanks for the informative reply Anna!
-- Verletzen zerfetzen zersetzen zerstören Doch es darf nicht mir gehören Ich muss zerstören
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Thanks for the informative reply Anna!
-- Verletzen zerfetzen zersetzen zerstören Doch es darf nicht mir gehören Ich muss zerstören
No problem hun. Michael Lehman (head of the Vista Evangelism Team at MS) is almost certainly the guy to talk to about IDE issues with Vista, BTW. We met him at the weekend at ESWC 2006 in Cambridge and he's pretty approachable. :)
Anna :rose: Linting the day away :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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That's the whole point. Most home users don't and as a result the net is riddled with botnets. X| Vista could change that - although the change will cause us lots of pain as the tools we use need to do things most user apps don't. Remember Sony's rootkit trick? I doubt if that would even have been possible under Vista with UAC enabled.
Anna :rose: Linting the day away :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
Remember Sony's rootkit trick? I doubt if that would even have been possible under Vista with UAC enabled.
Precisely.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: God-as-Judge, God-as-Forgiver The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
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I take it you can still mute across all apps with one simple mouse-click or keystroke, right? (And to be honest I have never wanted to set different volumes for different apps.)
regards, Paul Watson Ireland FeedHenry needs you
eh, stop bugging me about it, give it a couple of days, see what happens.
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Paul Watson wrote:
(And to be honest I have never wanted to set different volumes for different apps.)
Never used VoIP while listening to music? Oh, right, iPod user... :rolleyes:
hmmm, I always switch music off before I VoIP.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland FeedHenry needs you
eh, stop bugging me about it, give it a couple of days, see what happens.
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hmmm, I always switch music off before I VoIP.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland FeedHenry needs you
eh, stop bugging me about it, give it a couple of days, see what happens.
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Kent Sharkey wrote:
I actually meant XP SP3
Which I was reading today has been pushed out to the first half of 2008. Any bets it will actually happen?
The evolution of the human genome is too important to be left to chance.
Tim Craig wrote:
Any bets it will actually happen?
Thus my scepticism. I'd bet that if Vista takes off, there's a 30% chance of that SP coming out. If Vista takeup is slow, especially by corporate customers, SP3 will be killed.
-------------- TTFN - Kent
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PSS? Product Support Services? :~
-- Verletzen zerfetzen zersetzen zerstören Doch es darf nicht mir gehören Ich muss zerstören
Yes, PSS = Product Support Services. Sorry for use of slightly obscure acronym.
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder