...And the #1 Illogically-Sound Windows Dialog Box Award goes to....

[t4ki0n]

i'm saaaaying i knooooow. i've been on windows daily since windows 3.11 hehehe

i understand the inner workings. however, in plain english the ideology of that dialog box in itself is weasel-ish. it's architectural obstacles like these that separate the "well no **** sherlock!" interface of Mac OS X from windows. it's hard to "make things work" when that's the way they DO work and i know that. i'm just POINTING OUT how dumb that dialog sounds. u'd never see something like that in Mac OS X cause everything is designed differently.

so what i'm saaaying is for an average idiot end-user :D :D :D, they'll be like wtf?? i hate windows! lol cuz they dont understand the inner workings of things.

[fhpuqrgrpgvirzhpujbj]

The only change this dialog needs is an added warning. For example, if you try to access a XP partition and go to a users documents folder you will get this (if they have a password) and if you chose to "Gain Access" It will screw xp from accessing it and it causes a headache.

[Skyfrog]

I needed to access my Documents folder on my XP partition from Windows 7, and I got this dialog. I took control of it and got my files and now I'm back on XP and nothing bad happened. I can still access everything fine. I only have a password on my account though, I didn't choose the "Make my files private" option that encrypts everything and screws you over later when something goes wrong. I'm not sure what Windows 7 does in that situation.

[LTD]

FWIW, I changed the permissions on a folder in OS X and tried to add a file to it. This is what I got. Pressing "Authenticate" will bring up a box that asks for my password.

[zhangm Supervisor]

i'm saaaaying i knooooow. i've been on windows daily since windows 3.11 hehehe

i understand the inner workings. however, in plain english the ideology of that dialog box in itself is weasel-ish. it's architectural obstacles like these that separate the "well no **** sherlock!" interface of Mac OS X from windows. it's hard to "make things work" when that's the way they DO work and i know that. i'm just POINTING OUT how dumb that dialog sounds. u'd never see something like that in Mac OS X cause everything is designed differently.

so what i'm saaaying is for an average idiot end-user :D :D :D, they'll be like wtf?? i hate windows! lol cuz they dont understand the inner workings of things.

Ok. Imagine arguing with someone who keeps telling you that STOP signs sound really stupid.

That's how the rest of us feel right now.

[Guest xiphi]

Ok. Imagine arguing with someone who keeps telling you that STOP signs sound really stupid.

That's how the rest of us feel right now.

+1

The text in the dialog makes plenty of sense, but I think it's apparent that the OP has no idea about the inner workings of a Windows OS, much less Vista.

[random_n]

There's only one case I've seen this dialog (and had it work as expected*); it's when the folder has permissions to allow Administrators access, but not Users, and your account is an member of the Administrators group, but Explorer has its permissions dropped by UAC. It becomes a bit of a paradox where your account simultaneously has, and does not have access due to the differing integrity levels created by UAC.

The three ways around this are to spawn a new Explorer instance that has more permissions (bad for security), use a broker process like IE does to write outside its allowed areas (exceedingly complicated), or to add your user account to the folder's ACL in a single "sudo" command (simple, but potentially time consuming with many files). Vista and Windows 7, of course, use the latter method.

It is ultimately a problem created by UAC, but solved reasonably well. I'm sure there's a more elegant way of solving this, but it's enough of a fringe case that I don't think most are satisfied as it is. :)

*IIRC, the process of adding permissions will fail if the Administrators group doesn't have access or the owner isn't "Administrators". In this case, you have to do a little plumbing of the settings in the advanced dialogs (which have too many UAC escalation buttons, but that's another topic) to gain access, though this has always been the case through every version of NT worth using.