XKCD versus Hitler versus Vista

Today's XKCD comic is an hilarious, Godwin's-Law-compliant stab at Vista.

Windows 7

[#1 posted by Anonymous , January 10, 2009 12:28 AM]

it's either terrible nerd jokes or creepy stalker strips

[#2 posted by yurei , January 10, 2009 12:52 AM]

Heck, a proper-sized screenshot of the Tiger OS taped poorly onto an LCD display is better than Vista.

[#3 posted by SC_Wolf , January 10, 2009 1:00 AM]

And the comic directly previous to this one in the archive features a Cory Doctorow shout out in the title attribute hidden caption (Mouseover and hover to view in most modern browsers).

[#4 posted by bex , January 10, 2009 1:47 AM]

I think XKCD is usually very good but this Vista thing is so old and not how it is at all (apart from UAC which was designed by a monkey)

[#5 posted by Anonymous , January 10, 2009 2:14 AM]

I didn't quite get the use of Hitler in the comic. Could anyone please explain?

ACEA

[#6 posted by Shanjaq , January 10, 2009 2:57 AM]

As of this message, the search string "thank god for UAC" returns a total of 7 hits, all but one being hypothetical scenarios.

[#7 posted by Suburbancowboy , January 10, 2009 7:55 AM]

Without UAC Vista is a nice OS.
My only gripe is that the 64 bit issue has some compatibility problems with programs like PeerGuardian2.
I am really looking forward to 7.

[#8 posted by Anonymous , January 10, 2009 8:38 AM]

Hah! I set this as my desktop background the day it came out...Vista is indeed evil, it defies intuition.

[#9 posted by crashsystems , January 10, 2009 9:25 AM]

Vista was under development for five years and still was a piece of crap. Now "Windows 7" is already supposedly rather decent ("decent" being relative to Vista), and it has been in development for a rather short period of time. Has Microsoft done a complete overhaul of it's development process and methodologies in such a short period of time? I'm thinking not, so here is my theory on Windows 7:

Windows 7 == WinXP SP4. When Vista came out, a lot of people complained that they wanted XP back. Microsoft has decided to give it to them, but without actually letting anyone know they are re-selling XP. They've obviously put a new face on XP, and probably took the half-dozen actually useful (read decent) technologies out of Vista and incorporated them into XP SP4. To top it off, they decided to name it "7", hoping this number would give them more luck than Vista had.

The great thing about this theory is that none of us can see the source code, therefore my theory cannot be disproved (or proven, though I choose to ignore that bit).

[#10 posted by mightymouse1584 , January 10, 2009 9:30 AM]

i think the only real problem with vista is that microsoft wasn't forthcoming with the necessary hardware to run it. If you have a vista capable machine it really is quite nice. Id even go as far to say, brace yourself, stable. My system has been on for 19 days now without a hitch and before this id had it on for over 40 before a power outage. yah the uac is a pain, but doesnt linux do more or less the same thing? its not too much of a pain to turn off either.

[#11 posted by realyst , January 10, 2009 9:31 AM]

@#6

Actually, from within Microsoft, Windows 7 is closer to Vista SP2. They took all the underlying kernel stuff from Vista and overhauled the entire UI, which was mostly responsible for the bloat.

Not saying it's good, haven't tried it yet and I figure it still has the new DRM crap that made me so mad about Vista, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt in terms of normal performance since I'm sure a heckuva lot more focus was put into this this time.

[#12 posted by eustace , January 10, 2009 9:48 AM]

Not to be a retrogrouch, but the last honest OS MicroSoft sold was Windows 2000. Every product since then has been a demonstration of marketing over usability - distracting the user from his loss of control with attractive eye candy, moving all the while towards WGA-style interaction with Redmond; now you get to pay for, power, and use MicroSoft's computer in whatever ways they will permit you at any given time.
Okay, okay, so I'm a retrogrouch.
Insert grain of salt - I use an XP laptop all the time - gotta have it to run SolidWorks.

[#13 posted by crashsystems , January 10, 2009 10:04 AM]

@#6

"Actually, from within Microsoft, Windows 7 is closer to Vista SP2. They took all the underlying kernel stuff from Vista and overhauled the entire UI, which was mostly responsible for the bloat."

You may very well be right, and I'd be interested to hear what your source of information is. However, as I said in the last bit of my first comment, how can we truly know that Windows 7 is closer to Vista SP2 than XP SP4? I'm sure Microsoft won't publish any of their code, so even if they came out and confirmed your point, all we would have is their statements, with no proof to back it up.

(begin rant)
Perhaps Windows 7 will turn out to be a good OS. However, at the end of the day, Microsoft (and Apple for that matter) is just a large corporation, interested only in their bottom line. Such companies can be easily manipulated by national governments. The recent history of the US government shows that it has little regard for the rule of law, which is the essential foundation of our freedom. How can we trust that the feds are not somehow influencing Windows development to give the government more control over our computers?

The software that we use is the technological foundation for our freedom of expression. With that in mind, can we truly afford to use code that we cannot see for ourselves?
(end rant)

[#14 posted by ThreeFJeff , January 10, 2009 10:35 AM]

@7: "yah the uac is a pain, but doesnt linux do more or less the same thing? its not too much of a pain to turn off either."

No. Linux does not do "more or less the same thing". The useful security bit is having your normal user have limited permissions on the OS, and doing administrative tasks (read: modify system for every user) as a special user--the superuser. Linux does this by having a superuser user called 'root', having a software engineering culture that says that normal applications cannot need root privileges, and root can be reached via mechanisms such as 'su' and 'sudo' to run trusted applications (these re the direct analog of UAC under Linux). This is a good system that has a minimally obnoxious user interface.

After 30 years of bad practices in this realm, Vista is the first OS where they attempt to actually address this problem. UAC gives you the features and security model that Linux+sudo has, but it does so with the most obnoxious and badly thought out UI possible. To make the machine usable, you have to turn it off and lose the benefits of the system (This usually means the user goes back to the old, bad ways). EPIC FAIL. This problem was solved over ten years ago in the Un*x world (and probably quite a bit longer than that--I only go back ten years), and Microsoft cannot get it right.

[#15 posted by Adam Fields , January 10, 2009 11:41 AM]

The software that we use is the technological foundation for our freedom of expression. With that in mind, can we truly afford to use code that we cannot see for ourselves?

It may make you feel better to be able to see the source code, but

1) when was the last time you read through the entire linux or bsd source tree?

and

2) Even reading the source code isn't sufficient. See Reflections on trusting trust by Ken Thompson.

Open Source software is laudable and probably better in this respect, but it doesn't guarantee security.

[#16 posted by mightymouse1584 , January 10, 2009 12:28 PM]

@12 threefjeef
sorry but i fail to see how UAC and sudo are incredibly different. I jump back and forth between windows and linux once about every year (I just can get myself to learn how to use that damn terminal) and i think the two are fairly similar. Could you maybe go into a little more detail? I would consider myself to be computer literate but by no means am i a programmer or anything. I just see two systems that both restrict user access to some of the more important stuff.

[#17 posted by mightymouse1584 , January 10, 2009 12:30 PM]

i think after reading your second paragraph a couple more times i may get what your saying. On windows the uac does most of what sudo does, but then a bit more which is just annoying. The only way around it is to turn off the uac completely leaving the whole system vulnerable. am i right?

[#18 posted by eustace , January 10, 2009 12:52 PM]

If your system encourages you to allow any running programs (even in the browser) access to your system at the superuser level you are vulnerable. Windows encourages this by making the controls over access difficult to use and/or obnoxious in use. The obfuscation is arguably deliberate - if you had real control over access you wouldn't allow them to put malware like WGA on your machine.

[#19 posted by ThreeFJeff , January 10, 2009 12:57 PM]

@16: Right, the intended purpose is the same: they implement a method for jumping to superuser access from an account with normal user privileges. And turning UAC off requires that you just run as admin to do without it--due to how a lot of Windows software is written. So, yes, you got it. But I feel the need to wibble some more, and catch some deeper points.

The massive difference is in the UI, and how that is implemented. UI for security features and programs is an inherently difficult problem--heightened security is a direct trade-off with convenience (more security, less convenience). There is a lot of things that go into good UI, but one of them is convenience. So, security and UI are often at odds with each other. 'sudo' can be made rather convenient, these configurations invariably drastically reduce sudo's security benefit.

Microsoft has a reputation for writing mediocre UIs. They are not abjectly the worst thing out there (that prize is generally reserved for Motorola). I find MS UIs irritating. Others find them to be ok, or not-so-bad. Thus, MS averages at mediocre, despite my personal feelings. However, in the case of UAC, Microsoft admitted they designed the feature to "Annoy users". They wrote a deliberately bad UI on a feature with difficult UI requirements.

[#20 posted by ThreeFJeff , January 10, 2009 1:17 PM]

Also, Mightmouse, at your #15: "(I just can get myself to learn how to use that damn terminal)"

The terminal is the best part (but my dad taught me to use MSDOS when I was six, so I admit I might be a bit warped). The terminal has two levels of use to it. You can think of it as a tool for launching programs--which it is very good at. The main difficulty here, is that it requires memorizing a large number of commands with short, not-necessarily-obvious names, like 'ls'. Whether this is good UI or not is up to debate. It has a bad learning curve, but once the learning curve is surmounted, it is very convenient.

The other, higher mode is always present. The command line under Linux is a full programming environment which is geared toward launching programs. I think this important fact gets skipped because common wisdom says it would scare people off. Which is unfortunate. You don't need to learn how to program to use the terminal effectively--that just requires learning the commands. Knowing that it is capable of a lot more should explain some of the crazier commands you might see suggested out on the internet. You might look into a good book on shell scripting (try your Library!) next time you take a swing at Linux.

Also, the difference between the power user and the programmer is often a simple, but deep realization about what a computer does. The power user understands that the computer is there to run programs, and knows the programs inside and out. The programmer understands that the computer does exactly what it is programmed to do--and it will do whatever you, the programmer, tell it to. Computers become a much more interesting tool after that is internalized.

The rest of programming is details.

[#21 posted by Anonymous , January 10, 2009 5:02 PM]

@20 ThreeFJeff

Command line can be scary for normal users, but that doesn't mean even normal users can't learn how to use it. In the eighties I saw lots of secretaries using Wordstar with its terrible command keystrokes under DOS, and none of them were complaining.
What we see today, I mean everyone refusing to hit keys in favor of the mouse and simple tasks transformed into nightmares after their migration from the command line to the WIMP interface, is 15+ years of Microsoft telling people that the mouse is the right and only interface to send commands to a computer, and people believing to that lie.

[#22 posted by Anonymous , January 10, 2009 7:41 PM]

"However, as I said in the last bit of my first comment, how can we truly know that Windows 7 is closer to Vista SP2 than XP SP4?"

Windows 7 uses the Vista driver model. Only a Vista-based kernel is compatible with Vista drivers. XP-based kernels are not compatible with Vista drivers, and vice versa.

[#23 posted by Tom Hale , January 10, 2009 8:21 PM]

As long as MS continues to support Xp, I'll stick with it - at least until all the bugs are worked out of Windows 7.

[#24 posted by JimXugle , January 10, 2009 9:08 PM]

I can personally confirm that Windows 7 is the antichrist, as chronicled on Slashdot.

[#25 posted by Jack , January 10, 2009 11:16 PM]

I hear that Windows 7 is code-named: "Mac OS NEIN!"

[#26 posted by japroach , January 11, 2009 12:22 AM]

@Suburbancowboy

Peerguardian does not work because it does not have a signed driver. There are two viable solutions to this: Allow unsigned drivers to run in vista/7 by pressing F8 at boot (also can emulate this with readydriver plus), or get methlabs to pay a few hundred dollars to sign the driver.

I hope someone will cook up a decent hack for this (a simple bootswitch worked until they disabled it). As its definitely my biggest gripe with 7.

[#27 posted by Rezpect , January 11, 2009 7:24 AM]

Anything that makes fun of Microsoft is awesome.

[#28 posted by t3hmadhatter , January 11, 2009 8:59 AM]

I love this comic, even though half the panels are math/programming jokes.

[#29 posted by MacDude , January 11, 2009 10:39 AM]

sheesh. We are not supposed to be continuing this thread!

Get with the program!

[#30 posted by Anonymous , January 11, 2009 11:33 AM]

My gf has vista on her laptop and I fail to see why some people think it's so horrible. I personally use XP as a gamer because it's not a resource hog, but honestly I think it's the Mac cultists like the ones posting here that have spread the Vista hate.

[#31 posted by Anonymous , January 11, 2009 4:00 PM]

Hitler's hair went the other way.

[#32 posted by Takuan , January 11, 2009 4:24 PM]

this is Bizarro Hitler, posting from the Phantom Zone.

[#33 posted by Smorgasbord , January 11, 2009 11:07 PM]

The best "I'm a Mac" commercial explains why Vista is so bad. Go to ( http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/ ) and click on "Bean Counter." I don't know why they call it "Bean Counter," but I am still laughing about it each time I think of it.

[#34 posted by Jack , January 12, 2009 10:30 AM]

#30 POSTED BY ANONYMOUS , JANUARY 11, 2009 11:33 AM

I think it's the Mac cultists like the ones posting here that have spread the Vista hate.

Really? Is that the reason why Vista sales have been horrid, PC makers are offering XP as an option and even Microsoft has extended XPs product lifetime to accommodate for the fact that Vista was a disaster?

Sorry guy, but this isn't Mac vs. PC. This is simply a bad product that everyone admits was a disaster.

[#35 posted by Anonymous , January 14, 2009 5:07 PM]

People hate Vista because they compare it to XP.

People loved win95 because it was better than Win3. People loved win98 because it was stabler than win95. People loved XP because it replaced ME. XP doesn't have many major problems to fix, so people didn't have a reason to like Vista. Luckily for MS, Vista had a problem to fix so win7 will succeed if it fixes it.