So I finally had the opportunity to order and start playing around with
Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system.  My first
impression: “Wow”…  I hate to say that, too, because I really
had started to get annoyed by Microsoft’s use of that word in their
marketing campaigns.  I was thinking to myself, “nothing can
really be THAT much better to evoke that kind of response.”  Well,
I was wrong.  But my experience has not all been sweet and rosey
smelling.

Obviously,
there are going to be usability issues in getting used to the new
environment.  There are also going to be some compabitibility
issues in running your favorite software.  There are even going to
be some of your handy “tricks” that just don’t work anymore because of
some new security feature or underlying design principle.  All of
these are good things, in general, if done for the right reasons. 
In my short experience, and in what is coming out of Microsoft these
days in terms of security, their heart seems to be in the right place.

The
one issue I have heard so much about (and I’m sure others have too) is
their User Access Controls mechanism.  Many people seem to really
hate this feature of Windows Vista.  I, being a seasoned
professional and having experience with Linux, Unix and their heavy use
of privilege systems, am not really that annoyed by it.  In fact,
I think it’s a great feature.  I do think it is very
misunderstood, however, and here is why.

One of the most
annoying user practices that I have seen over the years is that people
want to stick files wherever they want on the hard drive.  After
all, it’s their hard drive, is it not?  It’s their computer, their files… Why wouldn’t they be able to stick their files wherever they think they can best organize (or disorganize) them?

What
people don’t seem to understand is that an operating system, such as
Windows Vista, or HP-UX, or even Mac OS X, makes certain areas more
“protected” than others specifically so that it can keep itself
organized, stable and secure.  When we as users, engineers and
administrators don’t follow these guidelines and the best practices
associated with them, we cause our own headaches by going against the
design of the operating system and having to “hack around” it’s default
organizational layout.

You see, each of these operating systems
provides “playgrounds,” so to speak, for users to store their documents
and their settings.  These playgrounds are specifically put in
places that are designed not to interfere with the operating system,
but rather to work “with” the operating system and with other
well-behaving applications that are running on the system.  When
we venture outside of these “playgrounds” when we aren’t really
supposed to, whether by direct choice or by usage of a software package
that doesn’t follow the right procedures, we have to start doing things
to disable the very features that are designed to protect our
experience.

So, while many angry users are out there bashing UAC
and vowing to disable it on every machine they touch, I will be leaving
it on and considering carefully every time that prompt comes up,
whether I’m doing something that is working with the operating system or against it, and what the consequences of what I am about to do are.