Lies! Lies! Lies!
George Ou of ZDNet is sick — sick! — of those commercials where John Hodgman, playing a PC with Vista, has to “Cancel or Allow” everything. He’s disgusted. In fact, Vista’s User Account Control is great and anyone who says any different doesn’t understand that Vista is great.
He has a valid point. He’s basically saying that Vista now has privilege escalation controls, something OS X has had for a few years now and Unix has had since Steve and Bill were still enfecalating their diapers. But wouldn’t that have been a good idea to implement UAC back during the Windows 3.11 days, just make things a bit safer?
Mac OS X actually requires you to do MORE work by having you type in the administrator password whereas Vista (for the primary user running as a limited admin) only prompts you to click “allow”. So if we
really wanted to make the Apple commercial accurate, there should be a second security guard that makes “Mac” recite a series of letters before he gives the OK to proceed. What we have is another case of deceptive advertising and Vista UAC really isn’t that bad.
Another case, friends. Remember the first case? Back when Steve Jobs took a dump on a picture of UAC, held it up at MacWorld, and said “UAC is poopy?” How quickly we all forget Apple’s smear tactics. Microsoft would never stoop to such FUD.
It’s not fair that Apple is making fun of Vista. Case closed. Vista is delicate. It’s like a flower and opens only with a gentle touch. We should respect that.
I was thinking about some of those same things recently. Blogged about it last nite on my blog. Ive heard plenty of people complain about Vista asking for permission, and I’m like isn’t that what Macs do, and have been doing?
Well I’ll tell you this: I’ve got two Macs, I’ve been a Mac user for a while, and last night I installed Vista on my MBP.
After 10, yes 10 minutes, I had turned off UAC. Why? Because it asks me to authorise EVERYTHING.
I dread clicking anything with that damn shield on for knowing my screen is about to flash black, then half transparent and beep at me just to click ‘allow’
My Macs have had their own security for years, and sure, typing in my password is a bit of a pain sometimes, but I don’t have to do it anywhere near as many times as I have to in Vista, which is like some sort of paranoid step mother.
I’m rather tired of people comparing Vista UAC with what OS X does. It’s really not the same. Yes, for the system critical stuff, OS X asks you to enter your password. Vista, on the other hand, asks you to “confirm” a lot more actions.
I just ran across this post over at the Security Curve Weblog which summarizes my feelings on the issue very nicely: http://www.securitycurve.com/blog/archives/000507.html
Funny enough, I just wrote about this yesterday on my blog!!! Yes, Vista’s UAC is very very annoying, I turned it off after 10 mins as well..seems to be the magic number.
Oh geez, George. Yup, he likes them MS products, thinks Firefox is a security risk and can’t understand why anyone would use web-based email. Now Macs aren’t very user-friendly. Expect the “moon is made of blue cheeze” article in the near future.