On Tue, Mar 30, 1999 at 10:23:50PM +0100, Richard Letts wrote:
> funnily enough I have to login on my windowsNT machine as 'administrator'
> to install/remove a program. when I login as ais007 I can't ...
A big difference is in the application software, though. Most (nearly
all?) unix software can be installed as a regular user at this point.
Any office suite, that's fer sure.
I haven't heard of any major application software under NT that hasn't
required administrator privliges (needing to install components under
c:\winnt\system32, etc), which means that to not prevent users from
working many places grant local administrator privliges to their
desktop users. So programs that do malicious things to the system
have free run, and the good ideas in the privlige system in NT are
sitelined (I love being able to add groups to groups, and would like
that in unix). I presume that it would also make it more difficult to
create read-only copies of applications on a network share instead of
having it installed on each desktop. This makes those applications
more vulnerable to virii... The implications go on.
In contrast to this, a unix user can have their own everything in the
space they're allocated - they can even link their programs to their
own C library if they really want to.
-Peter
