I just came across a huge, terrible nasty, bug feature in Windows Vista. I was attempting to download a program (.exe) file from an FTP link in my email.

Instead of just downloading the item, Windows requests to choose a program with which to open the .exe file with. It my case, it chooses to use Firefox to open it. Unfortunately, you cannot uncheck the setting “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file.”

If you click on the OK button, Firefox now becomes the application launcher on your system which means that your system is now borked.

The only fix that I found (actually a friend of mine found it for me) was a reg hack that puts everything back in place.

This kind of bug feature is completely egregious. Why oh why is this ever ok?

I was reading Bink the other day and I came across this article that’s titled “”http://bink.nu/Article4619.bink">Ballmer: High-end Windows, Office Coming" (the source article is on CNET though).

According to the article, my favorite corporate mouthpiece Steve
Ballmer, said that “Microsoft is planning new, higher-priced versions
of both Windows and Office in the coming years as part of its effort to
grow sales.” In his speech at the Microsoft Financial Analyst meeting,
he went on to say, “We have
plans in the Vista generation to introduce an Enterprise edition.”

Why oh why does Microsoft do this? Go back and read the first quote.
I’ll wait. Back? Good. Do you see anything in there about the new
versions of Windows or Office benefiting their customer base? I didn’t
think so. Nowhere does it say anything about doing this for the
consumers. It’s all about increasing Microsoft’s bottom line. Consumers
don’t want a higher priced version of Windows and Office, they are high
priced as it is.

Out of the 52 comments that appeared in response to CNET’s article none, absolutely none, were positive.

This reminds me of the comic hey-day of the early 1990s. During that
time, comic companies like Marvel, DC, Image and others would release a
comic with 2 or three cover variations in order to increase revenue. I
don’t think that any of the consumers actually wanted this crap and
it’s one of the reasons that I stopped collecting comics.

Maybe good ol’ Ballmer can release a version of Windows Vista with a
foil embossed, fold-out cover that’s been personally signed by him.
That way they can increase revenue because people will buy two copies,
one to install on their PCs and one as a collectors item. That’s what the customers want!

Days after being released on MSDN, reviews for IE 7 Beta and Windows Vista (formerly Longhorn) Beta are coming in.

Two reviews that I especially recommend are Paul Thurrott’s review of Windows Vista B1 and Andrew Rondeau’s review of IE 7 B1. At the end of Andrew’s review, he lists some suggestions for the upcoming versions of IE (B2, RC, and gold). I agree with almost all of his points especially the “new tab button” comment. It does look like a bug and it is confusing.

One of the items that made me raise my eyebrows in Paul Thurrott’s review was the section on the new security feature title User Account Protection (UAP – formerly known as Least Privileged User (LUA)).

According to his review, once UAP is enabled the user gets prompted any time they “try to do something dangerous.” He goes on to say, “The sheer number of actions that trigger this dialog, however, is alarming. Virtually every single Control Panel applet makes it come up, for example, as does installing an application. And so on. It gets kind of tiring after a while.”

Notice something here? First off, in Beta 1, UAP is disabled by default. I hope that this doesn’t carry on to other versions of Vista. Second thing is, I have mixed feelings about even being able to disable UAP in the first place.

In Linux and Mac OS X, root is root and the other users are just users. People seem to understand this limitation feature and use the system as it was intended. If Vista gives the user the ability to disable UAP (especially in the face of countless warning messages) the first thing that they will seek to do is to disable the source of the messages (which is of course UAP).

The other thing that concerns me about disabling UAP is, if a user can do it, it’s probably not that much of a stretch that malicious software can do it too. I wonder how long we’ll have to wait before we see privilege escalation vulnerability in Vista.