Reply to post: Re: Vista Stumbled so 7 could Run

Happy birthday, Windows Vista: Troubled teen hits 15

JimboSmith Silver badge

Re: Vista Stumbled so 7 could Run

A principle that the dumb developers within Microsoft often break. Install Windows from scratch, congratulations you must assign a user who will be given administrator access by default. Install Microsoft SQL server and where are the data files stored by default? In the Program Files tree of course, which by Microsoft's own guidance should only ever be written to by an account with software installation rights and definitely never used for data or configuration. It was this last point that often caught out incompetent developers and why they usually stated "must have administrator rights to local system" because data files, log files and so on were incorrectly written into an area of the file system that should only ever be read-only. After all, it's only been in the Windows API since about 1995 to ask for and be provided with a suitable data path (1995-ish, mangled by the horrors of Microsoft insisting that Internet Explorer as part of the Operating System to try and justify them abusing their monopoly position with it).

One program the company I worked for used was did exactly that. It required those of us who had to use it, to have more rights than everyone else. It was pointed out that this broke company rules but it also wasn’t negotiable as the company had picked that software vendor. This was the software that one of our senior programmers described as “warped”. He asked if mind altering substances were in regular use there, because nobody but nobody structures databases like that - for a good reason.

I used my extra privileges to (amongst other things) change the awful compulsory we corporate desktop wallpaper to something a bit more pleasing on the eye.

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