the new 'improvements'
Improvements used to be changes that made something better. But the innovators at microsoft have put in a lot of hard at work on improving improvements. A major intellectual breakthrough has allowed them to emulate improvements by unimproving something else.
This concept is somewhat confusing, so allow me to illustrate it. Take windows xp for instance. Microsoft apparently ran out of improvements to make to the operating system in order to distinguish the 'Professional' edition from the 'Home' edition. They had to do something to set the two versions apart and get people to pay more for 'Pro', so they went about unimproving windows xp home in order to make xp pro seem like an improvement over the cheaper** version.
It's common knowledge that xp home cannot join a domain. 'So what' you may say, but I think it is remarkable that this is the first windows operating system since windows 95 that cannot join a domain. What an unimprovement! Even if most home users don't need the feature, there is still no good reason for removing it.
Another one, this more significant I think, is the inability to access NTFS ACL's from xp home. What? Sorry, that would be 'file permissions' to the rest of us. Microsoft removed the graphical interface to set file permissions on xp home; a feature that has been around since NT4. Again, home users probably don't need this most of the time, but it sure would be useful the rest of the time when permissions get screwed up (and since most apps assume admin rights, this is not unusual when you try to use a limited user for everyday work). In their defense, microsoft did include a command-line utility to edit file permissions in xp home. Because we all know how much windows users LOVE command line interfaces.
I wanted to touch on these issues because I've bumped into them recently (or was it tripped over and broke something and said some dirty words?) and it got me thinking about just what microsoft is doing to IMPROVE their OS. I couldn't come up with much. Anyway. next time I am going to touch on some of the unimprovements in store for windows vista.
