[geeks] The illusion of Windows 7

[Mark Benson]

On 1 Nov 2009, at 09:17, Mike Meredith wrote:

> On Sun, 1 Nov 2009 02:17:51 +0200, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
>> I'm about to go to bed, but in a nutshell, do you know all about  
>> those
>> constant prompts from Windows Vista for your admin password to do  
>> just
>> about anything?
>>
>> Someone ported it to Linux, and everyone has adopted it.
>
> Ubuntu (and the sudo method of enabling access to privileged methods)
> predates Vista by over a year. If anything Vista borrowed the idea  
> from
> Ubuntu.

They actually all nicked it from OS X which has used that system since  
the Public Betas to authorise system changes, AFAIK. It's certainly  
been in every 10.x release version. Don't recall if it was ever in 1.x  
or OpenStep, I suspect not.

There may have been other UNIX systems that operated it before that  
but I'm not aware of them.

AFAIK the sudo authorise thing is a GNOME feature, and now also a KDE  
feature. It may have persisted in popping up in other Linux WMs since  
then.

-- 
Mark Benson

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