On the Soapbox

Has anyone noticed the Bush Administration's fondness of the phrase, "mistakes were made," which was most recently used to describe the political firings of eight US attorneys. As a commentator on NPR pointed out this morning, instead of using the active "I made mistakes" or "we made mistakes," the Bush Administration habitually uses the passive "mistakes were made," to acknowledge the making of mistakes but never explicitly admitting to making them and thus never explicitly accepting the responsibility for making them. For an administration whose 2000 campaign war cry was responsibility and accountability, it certainly has a clever way of dodging it.

I recently read this column by Sam Harris* at the LA Times. The crux of what he has to say is neatly encapsulated in the 5th-to-last paragraph:

The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists--men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals--who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally--deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.

While I have never liked religious extremists and fundamentalists, religious moderates and liberals are those whose beliefs I do not agree with, but that I will happily respect and accept. Harris' argument that moderates serve as an enabler and shield for those who are more extreme is thus a troubling--though interesting--take on things. On one hand, I think it is intriguing. But for the most part, I have some doubts about how true it is in reality and to what extent those in the middle of the spectrum really do provide a favorable environment for those at the extreme, and this is certainly not helped by Harris being a poor articulator of ideas. I am curious what others think about this.

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* He is basically condensing what he wrote in his book, The End of Faith, into a much shorter form with this column, and quite frankly, I think it is much more lucid and well-articulated here (though still scatter-brained) than it ever was in his tediously long-winded book.

Read this recently at http://adblockplus.org/blog/speaking-of-ie-security

It could just as well read out your mail or change your mail password. It could also go into your banking account if you happen to be logged in. Information on this vulnerability has been published April last year and still unpatched in both Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0.

It's no secret that IE is a bad browser, but I honestly didn't know that it was this bad until just now. I had thought that with a fully-updated IE7, I'd only be vulnerable to relatively new zero-days, not something this old. With open exploits like this along with more and more computers being infected with trojans and keyloggers, it is no wonder that the official Gmail support forums are peppered with sob stories about people who lost everything when their mail accounts were "hacked".

After much prodding and insisting, I was finally convinced to install a trial copy of the new Windows Vista in a Virtual PC. After using it for about an hour, here are my impressions...

The Good:

• Nice aesthetics. The default look is definitely much better than the immature cartoony look of XP. Not that this is relevant since I never use the default look and instead prefer a custom-tweaked classic theme.
• Much better sounds; they're gentler and less jarring. However, it is very easy to copy the sounds from Vista back into XP, so this is my no means an exclusive feature.
• Nicer fonts. Once again, these can by easily copied back into XP, and in fact, I have been using Vista fonts in XP for some months now. The downside to this is that the new Vista fonts pretty much require ClearType, which I am still ambivalent about using.
• The new user directory structure rocks and is much more Unix-like. "Documents and Settings" was just too fucking cumbersome, if you ask me.
• User Account Control is a nice, much-needed security feature and should hopefully reduce the number of compromised machines joining botnets.

The Bad:

• User Account Control is moronically implemented. It doesn't always trigger when it should. There are numerous cases (such as using notepad to edit HOSTS or copying system files using batch files) where the system would just flatly deny access to something instead of popping up the UAC dialog. This is because the UAC dialog trigger is controlled by a set of APIs and the offending software has to request it. A more sensible approach would be to act more passively and pop up the UAC dialog any time UAC denies permission to anything. This makes UAC much more robust and means that software makers don't have to update their software to make UAC requests. Of course, this wouldn't be a problem if UAC wasn't even active for administrative accounts. Right now, as an administrator, there are some things that I simply cannot do because UAC is active even for administrative accounts and the non-passive implementation of the UAC dialog means that I am never even given a chance to approve an action and to override the permission denial. This forces me to disable UAC in order to just be able to perform certain administrative tasks. This, of course, poses additional problems since UAC is a system-wide setting and disabling it affects all users, not just my administrative account. How lovely. Microsoft could've solved this simply by making the UAC dialog pop up instead of denying permission. Or better yet, Microsoft could just disable UAC for all administrative accounts and make the default first account a standard user account instead of an administrator account. What is the point of making the first user an administrator if it is going to so severely cripple administrative accounts with UAC?
• This whole 3D graphics thing has been taken too far. How do I know this? When Minesweeper complains about the lack of 3D graphics acceleration. Excuse me, why in bloody hell does a simple 2D game like Minesweeper need 3D graphics? The end result? Minesweeper is excruciatingly slow and only marginally responsive. The tiles are also much bigger (and uglier, too); not good for a timed game where speed is essential.
• The bloat and the size. Clean install of Vista takes over 5GB of space.

The Ugly:

• Vista on the whole feels inconsistent and clobbered together. I suppose this is to be expected for such a large piece of software. For example, at one point in the wizard to set up Windows Mail, it asks me to press the back button to return to the previous page. But when I looked down in the lower right, there were the usual Next and Cancel buttons that one expects to see in a wizard dialog, but no back button. It took me a while to realize that the back button was nowhere near the next button and was instead in the upper left and instead of a text button, this was a graphical Internet Explorer back button. Sitting all by itself (the next button was still in the lower right). There are countless examples of these inexplicable inconsistencies all around and makes the OS just seem confusing at best and amateur at worst.
• I understand the need to make the desktop icons 48 pixels by default. It really helps the older folks reading on high-resolution screens. But did you know that you can set the icon size to 48 pixels in XP as well? In fact, you can set it to 16, 32 (the default in XP) or 48 pixels. But in Vista, regardless of whether the setting is on 16, 32, or 48 pixels, the desktop icons remain at 48 pixels, which wastes far too much space. Making the default at 48 is okay by me; making it the default and the removing the ability to set it back to 32 is just plain immoral. I have absolutely no respect for software that violate the First Rule of user interface design: the end-user is always right. Edit: Okay, so I finally found where to change this setting, but this brings up a new rant: why aren't these settings all grouped into one place (or at least accessible from one place?). Each new version of Windows seems to have increasingly scatterbrained controls, and Vista is certainly no exception! And if they are going to change the way the desktop icon sizes are controlled, then why did they not remove the old pixel-based icon size settings (which now do absolutely nothing)? Amateurs!
• While Microsoft has taken steps to make the control panel more sensible (for example, grouping once-disparate network settings together in one window), everything still feels scattered. The network controls now involve so many separate dialogs that could've been merged together that the network controls feels so much more confusing than ever before. And remember UAC? I tried looking for them in the Security Center, which explains UAC and which also displays the current UAC status. But it doesn't have anything to control UAC and doesn't indicate where UAC is. Ultimately, I had to search the help manual to find where the UAC controls actually were.
• The network status indicator in the system tray no longer opens the network status (like IP, connection time, packets in/out, etc.). In fact, even if you right-click on it, you don't get a menu item for the network status. That requires a trip to the control panel.

Conclusion:

I tend to be fairly conservative when it comes to software, but despite that, my initial reaction to Vista has so far been much more sour and unpleasant than my initial reaction to any other major new software to date. Perhaps I need to use it for more than just an hour. Also, while most people who criticize Vista then go and hug Mac OS X, I am not one of them. I am comparing Vista against XP, not against OS X, which, for the record, I dislike even more than Vista.

In any case, I actually had more rants than what is posted in this entry, but I've forgotten what some of them were (yes, I have a very bad memory); I'll update this post as I remember them.