[mdlug] Cracks in the Evil Empire

[Joseph Vartanian]

On 6/27/07, Ingles, Raymond <Raymond.Ingles at compuware.com> wrote:
>
> > From: Joseph Vartanian
>
> > A lot of people have been saying that Vista is just XP with a pretty
> > new interface.  I've even seen several IT folks at work saying that.
> > This is wrong.  There are many dramatic changes in Vista under the
> > hood, but most of them aren't obvious to your typical user.
>
>  Can you name some of them? I'm not aware of many beyond the user interface
> stuff.
>
>  1. Security changes. Consists almost entirely, from what I can see, of
> reinventing 'sudo', badly. ("Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned
> to reinvent it - badly." -- Henry Spencer.)
>
>  2. DRM 'enhancements', which we've already discussed:
> http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
>
>  3. Nerfing OpenGL. Apparently designed to interfere with cross-platform
> games.
>
>  4. "ReadyBoost". Basically a special swap partition that can be put on a
> flash drive that has certain characteristics. A mildly interesting hack,
> but their time would be better spent making the system less memory-hungry
> overall.
>
>  Anything else? I write this as someone with a Vista Home Basic computer
> at home. (My wife uses it because she insists on MS Office.) Note that
> Home Basic does *not* use Aero, so the *only* changes I would see would
> be non-GUI stuff. And the above is all I've seen, aside from the fact that
> XP is usable in 1GB of RAM and Vista is astonishingly sluggish.
>

Man...I can't believe you're going to make me defend Vista on a LUG
list.  You're going to get me killed.  Like I said, my point is not to
defend it, but rather to just say what is true about it.  If you're an
anti-Microsoft person, just think about how bad it is to underestimate
your enemy.  That's not something you want to do.

Now the changes you mention there are right.  Yes, Vista new User
Access Controls feature is basically a knockoff of sudo, but it's not
true that this is all they did for security.

You said to name some changes, so I will.  Like I said, I've had
little time to play with Vista, but I noticed quite a few new things.
Please keep in mind that I was looking at it from an IT perspective,
so I didn't really spend any time on finding out how Vista does things
like manage my photos, or what cool effect the UI has now.  These are
the changes I can think of right off the top of my head.

*  The software firewall is now bi-directional
*  IPSec and domain isolation are now integrated into the firewall
*  IE now runs in Protected mode (sandboxed)
*  Network Access Protection (NAP) allows admins check a machine's
software for compliance, and only allow access to resources for
compliant machines, or get non-compliant machine up to compliance.
*  New image format, WIM, allows for nondestructive and
hardware-agnostic image based OS deployment
*  WIM images can be maintained offline (no need to restore them,
modify them, and create new images like before)
*  Lot and lots of new Group Policies settings.  I think Microsoft
said they had over 700 new ones.  For those who don't know what Group
Policies are, just know that 700 new ones is a huge thing.
*  Powershell (yes, it's a Unix shell knockoff)
*  Most admin tasks that used to be don't with the GUI only can now
also be done via command like (yes, Unix again)
*  New or improved diagnostics tools
*  Improved auditing.  For example, Vista can forward critical audit
data to a central location

There are a few that I can think of right now.  There's a lot more
that I may not be remembering now, and I going to try because I really
don't want to write a 20 page list.  And I just used it for a short
time, just skimming the surface.

-Joseph