it’s unix, not eunuchs

Vista has a feature that bugs you every single time you ask for an escalated action to occur. It’s called User Access Control. Ars Technica revealed, in this article, that in fact Microsoft designed it specifically for two purposes a) to help prevent damage to the system and annoy the user and b) to urge developers to stop running all their code as a super-user.

If Vista wasn’t such a bloated disgusting piece of crap and XP wasn’t so damn stable, supportable, affordable, eminently usable and hackable then perhaps this would be a great thing. Because this could be the end of malware. It would take time, but developers will get tired of users complaining about all the stupid pop-ups, so they’d start developing in a more secure manner. Then the only things that would be popping up these UAC prompts would be serious geek tools and malware.

Gizmodo covered this feature here, but the commenter’s don’t seem very convinced.