I have found most of the "Get a Mac" ads on television irritating and misleading, but two of the most recent ones were spot on: the one where the PC, played by the author and comedian John Hodgman, appears in a surgical gown, and the one where he is accompanied by a security guard in shades. The surgical gown is of course a take-off on the need to add RAM and a graphics card to old, cheap PCs if you wa I have found most of the “Get a Mac” ads on television irritating and misleading, but two of the most recent ones were spot on: the one where the PC, played by the author and comedian John Hodgman, appears in a surgical gown, and the one where he is accompanied by a security guard in shades. The surgical gown is of course a take-off on the need to add RAM and a graphics card to old, cheap PCs if you want them to run Windows Vista. It’s true, at least for old, cheap PCs: Vista won’t really run decently with less than 512 MB of RAM, and needs 1 GB of RAM and a GPU to display the Aero interface. I’ll go into Aero another time: today I want to talk about security.The security guard in shades who questions every decision is an apt metaphor for Windows Vista User Account Control , and I think it’s quite funny. An even funnier metaphor for Windows Vista is the “new wife” of this blog post by “Chalain.” The way that User Account Control dims the rest of the screen to get your attention for a permission question (see the image at left) is truly weird and drastic; I have to assume that the decision to do this was based on Microsoft’s user experience laboratory research.But let’s put it into context. As generally recommended, I run as a standard user on my Linux installations, and only invoke administrative privilege, become the superuser, and take root when necessary. At first, I was annoyed that I needed to supply the administrator password to change the screen resolution on Linux, because I was used to making this sort of global system change at will on my Windows installations. Eventually, I got used to elevating my privilege only at need: it’s the right thing to do if you care about security. So, when I was researching the way to determine the shadow storage size on Windows Vista for my February 23rd entry, I wasn’t too surprised when I got an error message about needing to elevate my privilege after I tried to run vssadmin from a standard command shell. What a Linux system would have done right there would be to ask me for the administrator password. What I would have done to avoid the question on a Linux system would be to use the su or sudo command to elevate privilege before running the system command that needed the privilege.What was the first thing I tried in my attempt to create an elevated privilege command shell on Windows Vista? su, of course. It didn’t work. I eventually discovered the two methods I told you about on the 23rd.Now I wonder, why isn’t there an su command on Windows Vista? What would it take to write one? Has somebody already done it? I know there was an su command in the old Hamilton C Shell, but it was written for Windows NT conventions. I would guess that it wouldn’t be very useful for Windows Vista, unless Nicki Hamilton has updated it in the last year.Do I have to write an su command for Windows Vista myself? I am the only one who thinks it would be a good thing to have? Software Development