Re: How do you wintrolls...

In article <g42dnSiPC8ArOFfUnZ2dnUVZ_gGdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Dan Johnson" <danieljohnson2@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"ZnU" <znu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:znu-6953DA.15483225032009@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <rt6dneE9hINvm1fUnZ2dnUVZ_oKWnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Dan Johnson" <danieljohnson2@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I suggest you let Vista be Vista. Forget the menu bar and the mapped
drives;
it'll serve you better if you do.

Here's the thing, though. Here's how this process would have gone in
Leopard:

1) Connect both computers to the same subnet.
2) Turn on file sharing on the machine with the files you want to copy.
3) Click that machine in the 'Shared Places' sidebar on the other
machine (where it will automatically appear)
4) The system will automatically connect as a guest. Choose 'Connect As'
and enter the remote user's name and password.

This is apparently what Mr. Baker expects to happen; he's not trying to make
Vista behave like DOS but like OS X, which is apparently kind of DOS-like in
this particular. It was perhaps unfair of me to accuse him of DOSiness.

Windows workgroups are like a cheesy active directory domain; you are who
you are, and that account gives you access to what you have access to. In a
workgroup, you have set up your user account on each computer. Unlike a real
domain, you have synchronize your passwords manually. But once you do that,
no more prompts; you are you. It's quite nice in its way.

A PC user exposed to a Mac will be annoyed that it logs in as 'guest'
automatically. That user will find he can't access his files, and will have
to figure out that he needs to *tell the computer* that he wants access as
himself, and *re-enter his password*. Which is obviously pretty lame.

In practice, you add the login info to your keychain the first time, and
the system will automatically log in with those credentials from then on.

This gets rid of the prompts even if the username and password on the
remote machine are different. (Which is probably a pretty common case on
home networks.)

The system shared the items the user probably wants shared by default.

I am quite astonished at this. Sharing the users personal files *by
default*?

To people with that user's credentials, yeah. I mean, if a user remotely
connects to a machine on which he has a user account and provides those
account credentials, exactly what files do you think he wants to access?

There are no silly counterintuitive permissions issues.

Oh? How the Mac different in this regard? I thought they had ACLs,
ownership, and all that jazz these days.

It does. But Alan appeared to have problems accessing files in a user's
own home directory after logging into the machine as that user. That
seems pretty silly.

There's an obvious one-click way to re-mount the volume with the
right credentials after the system automatically mounts it with
guest permissions.

That is to say, with the wrong credentials. This isn't a particularly
good thing.

Automatically trying to log into a remote machine with the local
username and password doesn't make a lot of sense on a home network. A
very common scenario on a home network is that you have several systems,
each with only one user account, belonging to the primary user of that
system.

Oh, and there's no file manager with both a menu bar and a pseudo menu
bar (the former of which is hidden by default). That's such classic
Microsoft that it borders on parody. Too timid to make things simpler
and more user friendly by actually *removing* complexity, they paper
over it instead.

Yeah, MS is always one for the greybeard switches. If they just dropped all
this stuff, a lot of people would be unhappy because the have to change
their ways. But they might be better off if they did change their ways.

OTOH, it does help to save their butts when they make a mistake. There was
much unhappiness when Apple introduced stacks and did *not* include any way
to get the old menus back. They eventually had to put one in, such was the
bitching and the moaning. MS puts those thing is from the start; think of it
as insurance.

I wouldn't quite say this is the same thing as designing a shiny new
user-friendly menu bar, but not actually managing to get all the
necessary functionality into it, such that you have to also keep the old
one.

--
"The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and over-exacting to
anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it
must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll." -- John Maynard Keynes
.