SPEnthusiast said:
I don't think a company like Intel is restrained by any kind of budget that
would not allow an OS upgrade across the enterprise.
You're absolutely incorrect. Though Intel may have deep pockets, they will
not just throw money at upgrades unless there is a compelling reason to do
so. Nor would *any* sane business.
These "legacy applications that are crtical to the business" that you've
mentioned are engineered to spy on people and rob them, which is why these
businesses and government organizations can't deploy Vista. UAC would
break
those apps.
Bullcrap. There are plenty of applications that were developed for previous
versions of Windows that will run afoul of UAC simply because the developers
did not give much thought to security, permissions and where to store data.
While it is true that programs such as keystroke loggers may also run into
the same problems, many of these types of programs have been implemented as
device drivers thus allowing them to run in a higher security context than
user-mode programs which eliminates much of the protection that UAC would
provide.
There are many developer tools from MS that have difficulty running under
UAC as a standard user as well as many service applications. NONE of them
were designed to rob people or to spy on them, they were simply developed to
work properly on previous versions of Windows.
I'm using Vista with Windows Server 2003 as my domain controller, and
everything works fine. I'll soon deploy Windows Server 2008, but it's no
excuse to not deploy Vista.
I have a similar setup in my home network. I have server 2003 domain
controller, several Vista clients (32 & 64-bit) and 5 Windows XP Media
Center PCs. I'll upgrade to 2008 or possibly Home Server when I upgrade my
hardware. However, the fact that I don't have any problems upgrading is due
to the fact that I have few programs that won't run correctly on Vista. For
those programs with problems, I run them within a VM on one of my systems.
My experience is not typical of a large corporation because if my upgrades
fail, I don't lose millions of dollars. To me, it doesn't matter much if one
or more of my computers are down off the network or if one or two of the
programs that I use on a daily basis won't work natively on the system. For
a large company, such things could be showstoppers.
Like I said, Vista exposes a lot of thieves.
It exposes a lot of programs that weren't written with security in mind
IMHO. It *can* expose some types of malware.
-Pete