Replies

I actually broke down and got a copy of Win 7 to load in a VM under vmware workstation. I did it as a default vanilla installation. I cannot believe that Windows 7 still defaults to administrative login for the primary username. Have they learned nothing?

That, and the really painful process of installing all the patches. Now, I have no problem with there being a bunch of patches. Hell, download a copy of Fedora 21. You'll find a crapload there. However, there is a big difference in how they are managed. With Fedora, you install the OS and whatever extra programs you want that aren't installed by default by the package manager. THen once it's done, you let the automatic updates apply. Once that's complete, you reboot, and you're good to go.

Not so with windows. I did the basic install, installed firefox and putty, and then let it go get its updates. Cool. Simple, and easy right? Wrong. Once all the updates had finally finished downloading and installing, it wanted to reboot. Fair enough, says I. So, after the reboot, it says, "hey by the way you have a bunch more critital updates". So I download and install them, then reboot. Then it says "Hey, there are still some critical updates". So you download, install, reboot. Then it tells you to install more updates, which you download, install, then reboot. Finally After hours of downloading, installing and reboot (I didn't baby-sit the thing. I went on to do other work, and checked back on it when I thought about it), it eventually said "you're up to date".

Incredible.

Yeah, layer upon layer of successive updates... that's pretty much the experience.

Wikipedia offers this explanation:

"The Siphonaptera" is a nursery rhyme, sometimes referred to as Fleas.
    Big bugs have little bugs,
    Upon their backs to bite 'em,
    And little bugs have lesser bugs,
    and so, ad infinitum.

Windows Updates are kinda like that. It's mainly because the updates themselves get patched, and you can't patch the update until it's installed and rebooted...

As far as administrative users, Windows doesn't have a TRUE "sudo" so the initial user has to be administrative. "Run-As-Administrator" is a false flag operation -- it's not really what it says, because there are system and application programs that in fact require you to log out and then log in as THE ADMINISTRATOR to make them operate correctly -- simply being a member of "Administrators" group doesn't do it, and doing "Run-As" with the Administrator password doesn't do it.

Windows is still, alas, a toy operating system in a few very fundamental ways. It can't escape its past, for reasons of back compatibility.