I should let Jane tell you this one, because she knows all the technicals, but she’s recuperating in a warm tub.
The main computer of our housenet is about to die—any minute, it could stop working. It holds all the tax records, going back over a decade.
The new computer which is Jane’s older HP laptop, is now refurbed and ready to stand in. It is Win 7 Home. Our main desktop is Win 7 Pro. Our software is Quickbooks Pro. And its alternatives are not ready for prime time…I’ve tried.
They know they’re the only game in town and act the part.
We ran into a nice little business wherein we finally found this cryptic notice on the internet: “Those of you who had Vista will understand this…Win 7 has a feature called Ownership, which Win ME didn’t.” Why MS thought this was a good idea–who knows. But you only THINK you own your computer. When you get into the nitty gritty of ‘Permissions’ to add programs or to change things, there is a layer beneath Administration.
News item #2. Programs as attitudinal as Quickbooks can be INSTALLED by any admin person. BUT they simultaneously reach deep down into the Ownership layer and create a couple of NEW Admins they don’t tell you about, which even as the machine’s sole Admin you can’t get at, and if you don’t get INTO the Ownership layer, you can’t possibly root them out. Getting into that level is a poser. It can be done. But getting rid of those other admins? It’s easier to wipe your computer back to zero and completely reinstall. Why MS thought it would be cute to reinstall this little Vista feature is a question. It’s an even deeper one that Quickbooks can operate at that level without advising the owner of the computer or the software. This, at least, is what I understand that damned thing was doing.
Then—being the only game in town—QUickbooks people don’t like it that I’m on 2011. WE have a 32 bit machine (the dying one) and the new 64 bit. They won’t play nicely with each other’s programs unless you have some upgrades which, catch 22, you can’t get without the program on your disk, and if you can’t install the program because of the glitch, you can’t get the fix. I don’t do well at talking to software people about the situation when they’re launched on why you’re expired and need 2012. No. I shouted, alas, I did shout something like “What I want is what I’m entitled to as the owner of a 2011 disc, which is the patch you’ve got on your site, which I can’t download without your giving me the access link you promised me an hour ago!”
Turns out they not only hadn’t sent it, they’d wiped my addy from the computer, which I’m not sure was an accident, (this, from the company that buries links so deep even IT can’t find them) but I foxed them—the fools had sent me a ‘how’d we do?’ survey with the case number on it. So back we came. By this time I had called Jane out of the tub, and we had an administrator, who established yes, I should have an address, and did have an account, about 8 of them. So we sorted through that for a while (I’ve run this software since forever) —and we FINALLY got through all that to a download that would work. I mean, we have our disk, our serial numbers, all of that: give us the friggin’ file in its most patched form! Buy a new 2012? Not until you prove you fixed 2011 so it’ll run on a 64 as promised…
The air turned blue for a while, but after 3 days and as many wipes and TOTAL Win 7 reloads with all 300 updates—we now have a functioning copy of 2011 Quickbooks WITH our datafiles transferred over by flash drive.
ARRGH!
“”Win 7 has a feature called Ownership, which Win ME didn’t.” Why MS thought this was a good idea–who knows.”
It’s COPYRIGHT! Well, MS’s brain dead idea of what would be good copyright protection. Just another example of how these things are hard to do well.
The almost universal error Windows users make is believing they are Microsoft’s customer because they bought Microsoft Windows. Nope! Microsoft’s customer, the one they listen to–the one they build in certain capabilities for–is the “developer”, the person/company that will take their bare operating system and “add value” to it with their own products. That’s the reason you need to buy Norton to keep it safe. Microsoft could have made a secure operating system but in the ancient security vs freedom tradeoff, their developer customers demand freedom. They win. You lose. But as the punchline from an old movie goes, “There is another system.” 😉
Not quite for this situation, but still funny (for the Latin):
Non cibos troglodytae. (Don’t feed the trolls.)
So, for us semi-technical persons, how do we get to the Ownership Level? (Thinks of the line in ‘Ghostbusters’, ‘Hey, look at these stairs. I wonder where they go?’ ‘They go up!’ My GPS doesn’t tell me how to find the Ownership Level, and you know, just because Microsoft has an operating system on my computer, they don’t own the hard drive, nor the processor, nor the memory. They own the software, as bloated as it is…..and I agree with Paul, Microsoft left much of the development of applications to developers, rather than do it inhouse like Apple. As a business decision, I understand it completely. As a user position, I find it to be presumptuous for them to decide who “owns” my computer. This makes them one of Apple’s best friends, or at least, Linux’s best friend.
Here’s part of a discussion. http://techfleece.com/2011/05/15/how-to-take-ownership-of-files-or-folders-or-an-entire-hard-drive/
I’d suspect that this is a way to make sure that employees can’t get in at admin level and do things an employer wouldn’t want. While I’m furious at Quickbooks for doing this, I can see that in a big corporation, somebody could get into a snit and decide to do some things to the accounting software that you’d like to have one more layer of protections on…so if you’re a computer expert (or prior Vista user) for a big company you know these things; but your typical user on the accounting end might not know. And that might be protective.
I’ve had my share of headaches with QB Pro (I’m still on version 2009, though). It’s not a MS product, so they definitely do not always play nicely together, and have occasionally given my systems administrator real headaches. [I handle a lot of the computer-related tasks myself, but having an expert come in for a few hours each month is a source of great comfort.] I, too, have spent fruitless hours trying to communicate with QB helpdesk, which seemed to be more of an obstructionist desk, populated with earnest and polite, but unthinking and ignorant, individuals.
I’m sure you use at least one back-up system – I’m happy with the combination of Robocopy, Carbonite, and ShadowProtect. With several external HDs, one is always “live” (connected to my computer) and one always resides in my safe deposit box, so I can switch them every few weeks. The others are more for temporary backups, such as travel. In my business, losing a client’s data or drafts would not be good; hence the near-obsessive concern with multiple backups.
Good luck!
Kafryn
You could always switch to something like GnuCash. It’s free and has a huge range of features.
http://www.gnucash.org/features.phtml
If you use GnuCash Portable (at PortableApps), then you can move everything to another computer simply by copying the directory.
I looked at gnucash, amid our problems, but up front there was no discussion for payroll, federal forms, and state and federal tax tables…
Sorry! It was just a thought.
No, no, it’s a good suggestion. It would I think do fine, except the confounded federal forms. Quickbooks can generate those and fill them out, and that’s why we stay wedded to the damned thing.
The idea behind these ‘additional admins’ is actually a good one – there are a number of pieces of software that you want running on a PC (particularly in a business environment, but also for some home users) that need ‘admin’ type access to work.
An obvious example would be backup software, that saves the contents of the ‘My Documents’ folder of every user on a PC. To access these files, it needs to have admin rights – but you do not want every user to have admin rights, so it needs it’s own ‘secret login’.
It is something from long before Vista, I suspect it originated in NT4 (which was the basis for XP).
As an Admin user (at least on the Pro versions of XP & Win 7) you can access these logins, but they are NOT users, so you have to figure your way round the dark recesses of the OS to do so, which can be a tricky thing, even for those with a fair bit of experience with using Windows.
Anyway, public service notice aside, Quickbooks still should have sorted things out for you properly, rather than forced you into the merry dance to get the fix you needed.
Well done for persevering, and getting it sorted in the end!
There is a logic to Vista/Win7 permissions. For years Windows users ran as the system administrator (as ‘God’ in effect). That made the computers very usable because users had the right to do any maintennance that was required. Unfortunately it means that if someone else gained access to the computer they also had that power and could install things and muck about with your configuration without you knowing.
This became a real problem as the Web took off and Microsoft (sensibly) decided it was time to close the barn door. The system they came up with is an attempt to bridge both worlds but is inevitably complicated by trying to minimise the impact on users and legacy applications. There’s a lot of ugliness under the covers but I think they did a reasonable job over all. Unfortunately writing software to work with the security model and /especially/ legacy software being maintained/updated can be tricky.
In a way it’s like crash helmets for bikers and seat belts for drivers. Some people think they are an annoying inconvenience and an impediment. Others disagree 🙂
As an aside – one way to confuse applications is to run as a non-admin user (one who never has ‘God’ rights) then when prompted switch to a different user when the desktop darkens and you get the full log in dialog. What happens /then/ is that you install the software as a different user and that means changes to the registry may not appear when you’re back running as yourself.
You can tell if this is a risk by looking at the dialog that appears when the desktop darkens in Vista/Win7. If you only have ‘Yes’/’No’ buttons then you aren’t changing user – just putting on your superhero outfit. If the dialog is asking for name and password you’re being asked to log in as a different user.
They made these changes—but handbooks are no longer a feature of the packet, if you buy computers with the OS streamed on. If *I* were directing traffic at Windows, rather than the jungle of hanging fragments you have to wade through, I’d start with: “my error messages mention the word a. ‘driver’ b. ‘permissions’, etc, etc, etc, and shove people at least toward a section apt to explain the way things now work, rather than making them sort through the random scrap bins in the basement—bins which have not, I swear, been cleaned out since Windows began…or, Lord, even accompany an error message with: Would you like to search Microsoft for a solution to this error? so it remembers the number, AND goes after the problem. Or perhaps they could even red-highlight the buzzwords. We all have color, these days.
I say this, because it took us some doing (and about 15 hours of futzing) to find OUT that there was another layer to permissions. By this time we were not speaking kindly of either program.
CJ, you’re right, of course, but it’s a consequence of the process andruec described. Security wasn’t designed into Microsoft’s operating systems from the beginning. It became an “add-on” later, because their relationship with developers, and the marketing department’s insistance that everything be backward compatible, never allowed them to make a clean break and start over.
There have been operating systems with security concerns built in from the beginning, Multics is a classic example–achieving a B2 (very high) rating based on the National Computer Security Center’s “Orange Book”. Multics begat Unix. Unix begat GNU. Some Finnish kid’s kernel 😉 was driven under GNU’s user level code and it took off. (The NSA went through the code and offered-up Security Enhanced extensions, SELinux). The rest is history, as they say. But I digress.
Windows will never be secure, nor manageable, until the grip of the developers and the marketing department is broken. Well, include various people at different levels who say, “I don’t care about that security/manageability stuff, it’s got to do THIS!”, and the people who listen to them. There’s no hope! 🙁
If it’s any consolation I find that as time goes on and Windows evolves it becomes more and more a case of finding the right swear words. My current hope is that I can bluff it out for another ten years. I’ll be 55 then and allowed to claim my private pensions. Today’s ‘yoof’ had better work damn’ hard to pay for my life of leisure 🙂
Microsoft was sued (successfully) in the EU for bundling “too much functionality” into its operating systems and thus “diminishing the need for third-party applications.” So, MS now is constrained from bundling too much (useful) stuff into its OS. Thus Microsoft “Must” integrate ways for other software vendors to make a living and also protect the vast masses of Microsoft users from the few bad apples in every barrel of software developers. I personally don’t want every program I have on my computer to exercise the root level admin rights that some software developers seem to think is their due. I’m not making excuses for Microsoft; they treat all users as beta testers, but there is a pragmatic reason why operating systems work the way the do. I personally would rather have the input of entrepreneurs developing software that I need rather than Apple telling developers that they can’t integrate into the Apple OS (Too bad, so sad).
Briefly, Microsoft must do no such thing. Nothing in the EU judgement precludes them from developing a brand new system with security designed-in instead of added-on. That they do not do so is a business decision they have made. Apple’s OS is based on Unix, but they have chosen to remain a closed system; another business decision. Linux is based on Unix, but is an open system to a fault.
I do understand how and why operating systems work as they do, and that does not default to how Windows is designed! Nobody must suffer from it’s foibles, that too is a choice. 😉
Not to mention the Gawdawful browser selection stuff EU citizens have to put up with now. I suppose for most it’s a one time deal but in the course of my work I have to create a lot of virtual machines. I am sick and tired of being asked what browser I want to use.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/gadgetreviews/windows-7-european-browser-selection-screen-screenshot-revealed/12360
Generally speaking I approve of the EU but about the only thing more annoying than the above is the stupid cookie law.
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9990-the-bbc-unveils-its-eu-cookie-law-solution
So every site that uses cookies has to ask me if it’s okay for it to use them. Of course if I say ‘no’ (why?) it’ll keep asking me every time I visit because it can’t record my responses.
Anyway I’m not sure MS has much choice with Windows. Too many legacy apps, too many developers and users who don’t want to change the way they work. Then again with Metro and Office 2013 I’m beginning to think that MS are trying to let Windows wither and die.
Windows, complex without a doubt. Sounds like Quickbooks folks mis-used the tools and you guys had to suffer (EVERYTHING they do should be clearly documented somewhere). Multiple admin levels and “role based access control” – basically giving people only the privileges they MUST have, is very important in business and has good uses at home. For instance, never log in with a fully privileged “root” account unless you are doing system maintenance. Create a “user” account and make that you main login. That way anything (or most things) you get exposed to will be less able to cause harm to you system or data.
I can’t even imagine — especially given the level of knowledge that you and Jane both have regarding software and hardware issues. I’m be in a hopeless quandry.
ANYWAY, although this really isn’t the spot for this, I figure if I put it days back where it belongs, no one would ever know, and I think you should. Got a response to my comment to Smashwords.com about the enterprising Pakastani. Here’s a copy of everything, although I apparently messed up on the ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ — he was selling a cookbook and not a rerun of the Verne classic:
RE: COMMENT ON IBNUL JAIF FARABI
Hi, there.
Thanks for your email and for reporting this. I have forwarded this
information to our appropriate contact.
Best,
-Valerie M.
Smashwords Content Team
http://www.smashwords.com
For all future inquiries, please use the
**COMMENTS/QUESTIONS BOX**
But first, check these resources:
FAQ: https://www.smashwords.com/about/supportfaq
Style Guide: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52
Marketing Guide: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/305
The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/145431
On 7/15/2012 9:06 PM, ryanrick@yahoo.com wrote:
> Smashwords Site Comment
>
> From: ryanrick@yahoo.com
>
> Comment:
> This individual has recently tried to sell his ‘original works’ on Amazon.com — but these were actually pirated works by such Authors as C.J. Cherryh, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, among others. Many of the titles had been marginally changed, some had not — for instance his listed here “Around the World in 80 Days” which I read by Jules Verne. He was selling on Amazon.com for the same prices he has listed here. This man is a thief and a plagarist and should be prosecuted for outright theft.
>
Thank you, Ryanrick!
Off topic but note the 9th entry on the list here: http://rolanni.livejournal.com/784556.html
It’s in interesting company.
CUrious. I’m not sure what they’re doing…whether logging what they’ve read…or offering for sale.
They are logging what they read. These are the “Liaden universe” people, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller.
During the course of your “interaction” with the Quicken people, did you feel like John Cleese’s character in the famous Monty Python “Dead Parrot” sketch? ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIrBMt4eiRk )
Believe me, I feel your pain. Begin here: http://theowlunderground.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/fun-with-kitties-and-the-att-guy/
As a Mac user, I cringe.
Jane found one software that really, really makes life easier: LastPass. Holds your info, fills blanks for you, remembers passwords and your credit card info. It’ll autofill, but if you need to look something up, there’s the Vault.
I suppose it’s a phisher’s holiday. Just click on my site, pulleeeze!