Monday, January 07, 2008

vista: in loco parentis

I had the opportunity to spend some time with a PC running Vista over the holiday break. For me, this was the first time I've had any appreciable stick-time with this new OS since its release.

With each instance of "Continue or Cancel" I encountered, and in the many ways Vista works Very Hard to prevent you from damaging yourself, a particular phrase came to mind:

In loco parentis

The term in loco parentis, Latin for "in the place of a parent", refers to the legal responsibility of a person or organization to take on some of the functions and responsibilities of a parent (source: Wikipedia).

For those of you who've been using Vista for a while, let me know if this analogy works for you.

Do you get the sense that Vista doesn't trust you to do the right thing? I sure did.

1 comment:

the Doctor said...

Vista definitely doesn't trust you as a user. And, if you do find a way to turn off the parenting function, it leaves the whole OS very exposed.

I gave up on Vista three months ago and I returned to XP. It's definitely the lesser of two evils; with respect to Vista, it's fast, it's secure and it's reliable.

How often do you get to say that about a Microsoft product?